last night i had an epiphany about the labor crisis in America that i think is pretty insightful, so i'm gonna post pictures of the pages here and then translate my chicken scratch in the image descriptions (with some modifications, especially at the end, since i was rushing to get this thought down before bed).
that comparison might sound hyperbolic, but set aside all the propaganda about protestant work ethic and the "dignity" of a hard job you've been inundated with your whole life and just lay out the facts.
very very few jobs afford workers flexibility. if you get sick, if you get pregnant, if family dies, or if you just want to take a few months off to live your own life, chances are you've either gotta suck it up, make it quick, or get fired.
yes, you can choose where you work, but every "entry level" job is run by the same inhuman algorithms, treats their workers with the same flippant disregard for their wellbeing. jobs above "entry level" may be more flexible, but they are often gated to those classes which can afford the necessary education and require of the worker to give up on their ethical convictions.
there is no place for a person who just wants to live inside their means. either you sell your body, or you sell your soul.
biden et al's approach to covid reveals a truth long understood in this post-90s neoliberal era but rarely spoken aloud: the working class of this country are entirely disposable and functionally infinite. the more i think about it, that's really the only conclusion that makes sense to me. they've taken this path because it was the path we were already on. to them the working class are a statistic, a disengaged polity, a limitless supply of pre-cognitive idiots just happy to have work at all.
from a labor perspective, we are in the worst of all possible worlds. we cannot opt out of this system as there no longer exists any commons of any kind whatsoever. they've all been pilfered by corporations. even our stories are locked behind copyright, the exclusive domain of those deemed worthy by the ones who own culture. owning land, owning a house, having an escape-- these are privileges of the rich. we are not allowed escape.
there just is no reward for living in society anymore.
oops, forgot to public one of the trills in this thread before replying to it:
@cryptid nalthusian economics baybeyyyyyyy
been thinking a lot about this graph of the generational wealth gap between the silent gen, boomers, gen x, and millennials. what's happened here is the transformation of the entire working class labor market into what functionally amounts to a company town. what few benefits we're given are tied to employment. to the extent that low cost housing, food, education, etc exist, they are means tested and extremely competitive.
we are, quite frankly, a generation of slaves
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charting-the-growing-generational-wealth-gap/