People keep asking who would do all the menial jobs if they didn’t have the threat of starvation hanging over their heads, but in my experience there are plenty of people who would be overjoyed to spend all day running minor errands for folks if they were allowed to tell the rude ones to fuck off.
If money wasn’t a problem, I actually enjoy the physical labor of my job and the sense of fulfillment at having something concrete I can look at and accomplish—it’s the being treated like a vending machine/punching bag while also making barely liveable wages that make the whole thing suck, not the work itself
I really enjoyed the tetris like feel of bagging groceries and stocking shelves for years. What wore me down was the inconsistent hours, bad pay, poor treatment of workers overall (they treated the elderly employees especially horribly) and nasty customers who I couldn’t tell off.
For more pay, and more protection, I’d have happily stayed for a while longer.
I absolutely LOVE working early hours making coffee and tea and donuts and all that. I would fucking show up at 4am in the morning to work in a coffee shop that doesn’t have a manager constantly screaming at how long the line is and how many sales we need to make in an hour to reach our quota.
Like, I just really enjoy making food and mornings and people.
Yeah tbh I really like selling phones and helping people understand their technology, I love helping people in general, if malwart wasn’t such a hell hole it’d be perfect
“But who would do all the menial jobs if we didn’t threaten people with starvation?”
Have you considered making them not menial?
1.(of work) not requiring much skill and lacking prestige.“menial factory jobs"synonyms:unskilled, lowly, humble, low-status, inferior, degrading;
The degradation of these jobs and the workers who do them is artificial and deliberate, made to justify the low wages and help reinforce the system that keeps people doing them despite said degradation.
It is entirely possible to create workspaces where the people who do these jobs are treated well, valued, allowed comfort and boundaries. This is a thing we can do.
I loved being the front-desk receptionist for my company. I had lots of time to read and write. I wrote and published a novel a year as a receptionist; since leaving that job I’ve written three and published one in seven years. I enjoyed making sure everyone got the help they needed, and I even liked taking phone calls. I liked being in a union job. I was good at it and everyone in the company knew me and knew I could help them if they had a problem.
I just couldn’t live long-term on what they were paying me, especially since without the union-mandated cost of living raises I would never get a raise at all. If I earned then what I’m earning now, with the merit raises I now get, I never would have left it.
What a lot of people don’t understand is that the prison industrial complex goes far beyond just the fact that prisons exists.
It’s every single major corporation in the world benefitting from paying slave wages for prison labor
It’s private prisons enforcing quotas to incentivize the state to arrest and convict at higher rates
It’s the war on drugs treating (mostly black and latino) non-violent drug users as hardened criminals
It’s the school to prison pipeline
It’s a country where homelessness is criminalized
It’s mandatory minimum prison sentences
It’s imprisoning civilians for years without bail Before they get a trial
It’s prisoners leaving prison in debt because the slave wages they were forced to work for didn’t cover the cost of food and a bed
It’s former prisoners losing the right to vote
It’s employers discriminating against former prisoners
It’s abuse and substandard living conditions.
It’s a corrupt police state that falsifies evidence and unfairly targets minorities.
The problem is that a lot of y’all still just think of prison as a place where bad people go. It’s not. Most of the bad people are in board rooms, on the golf course, at the bank, in the white house. The truth is, prisons in America are just a business. The lie that they keep you safe is just an ad they can run.
Wait… Am I supposed to think that it’s bad that people are overcoming major hurdles in life to be successful?
No, you’re supposed to think it’s bad that cases of underprivileged people being forced to push themselves to extremely unhealthy extents due to the constraints of this terrible society are being celebrated and used against other underprivileged people as an excuse to call them lazy.
THATS NOT EFFICIENCY THATS THE OPPOSITE
There’s a certification called “Six Sigma” that certifies you to be able to go into any field with the knowledge and ability to increase productivity and efficiency, and NO ONE LISTENS TO THEM ANYMORE
Here’s a picture of a section that blew me away as I was not expecting for this to be explicitly said:
Money is a DEMOTIVATOR! The more your workers are worried about money the less productive they are. It’s been studied for year after year. ALL of these things are obvious, but rarely implemented.
If anyone is curious as to how Motorola survived the recession that hit us after Bush?
BY NOT REDUCING PAY, AND CONTINUING TO TREAT THEIR EMPLOYEES A CERTAIN WAY
Even though their financial advisors said they would lose millions of dollars for the next quarters, the CEO refused and pretty much said “I don’t care what we lose at this very second, or the next year. You’re trying to save the company 2 million dollars, and that’s nothing. We’d make that back quickly. But by continuing with the plan we’ve been doing, this company will still exist in 10 years. If not it won’t. I’m not cutting pay, or vacation time.” And it worked.
Capitalism has been fed to us for years through propaganda and misinformation and this is why we are where we are.
Homeless people are human beings with immense value. They are members of our families, communities, neighborhoods, cities, and, for a number of people reading this, they are themselves (or have been).
The fact that homeless people do not have housing is a wrong done against them, not a sign they did something wrong. To then try and ban them from public spaces and existing in public (including doing things we all have to do, like sleep or eat), is yet another grievous wrong.
An attack on homeless people is not “protecting the community”, it is an attack on the community. Homeless people aren’t my enemy, those who would ban them from things like sleeping in public are my enemy.
Make them sit in their rooms in silent and do their homework alone
Side with the teacher and not get your child’s side of the story
Tell them that their grades are the most important thing they should worry about
INSTEAD:
Ask if they’re having trouble with other students or teachers
Sit down with them and help them with what they don’t understand
Speak calmly instead of yelling
Don’t invade their privacy by looking through their devices
Don’t take away their hobbies as punishment
Never make them feel unsafe or unable to trust you
This has been a message from a struggling high school junior that wishes their own parents actually did this stuff.
Bonus: Don’t look through their freaking backpacks. Chances are they know damn well they have loads of unfinished papers and the stress of knowing is so overwhelming they don’t even wanna look at it.
Don’t: Ask them over and over why they aren’t doing their work when they tell you they “don’t know.” They really, actually do not know. It is your job as a parent to help them figure that out, not to simply repeat that they should know, and that they’re very smart because when they do the work they get good grades. They know that. Odds are they’re as frustrated as you about it.
Instead: Ask what they would do if they no longer had to worry about school or schoolwork. If someone had asked me this when I was in high school I probably would have burst into tears. Your kid will try to tell you for probably years what they’re thinking and feeling, until they realize that you don’t care and aren’t going to help them figure it out. Don’t let it get to that point.
Earlier this month, European right-to-repair activists sounded the alarm,
warning that the model right-to-repair legislation that had been
proceeding through the EU legislative process had been hijacked by
lobbyists who had gutted its core protections and were poised to make
repairs even harder in the EU.
But Europeans rallied, and now they seem to have the upper hand.
Pressure groups like Germany’s Schraube locker!? (Screwloose!?) have
organised mass write-in campaigns and other ways of lobbying EU
officials, to good effect. This week, they scored a victory over
refrigerator design, securing an amendment to the EU’s pending Eco
Design and Energy Label Directives (where the right-to-repair rules are
enshrined) that will require refrigerator manufacturers to design their
appliances to be repairable with everyday tools, and to supply their
customers with spare parts and manuals so they can keep their property
in good working order.
It could be a model for many kinds of devices, a return to the Maker
Manifesto’s call for “screws not glue” and “user-replaceable parts.”
At the vanguard of the movement are people from ex-Soviet states, where
deprivation was the mother of innovation, so that thrifty, ingenious
home repairs were the key to human thriving. This ethic is also key
today, if we are to reduce our material consumption, carbon footprint,
and complicity in the human rights abuses committed in the name of
securing the conflict minerals in our devices.
The activist who founded the Me Too movement talked about her exhaustion and how the movement she created over a decade ago has taken a different trajectory, during a riveting TED Talk at TEDWomen on Thursday in Palm Springs, California. Burke, a youth activist from New York City, discussed how she has seen her work take off this past year since the Me Too hashtag went viral, sparking a global movement to end sexual violence.
“The reality is,” Burke began her 16-minute talk, “after soldiering through the Supreme Court nomination process and attacks from the White House, gross mischaracterizations, internet trolls and the rallies and marches and heart-wrenching testimonies, I’m faced with my own hard truth: I am numb.”
The Me Too movement has made great strides, taking down Hollywood executives and uncovering systemic sexual abuse in different communities around the world. Still, Burke said, it’s hard to really feel the movement is progressing.
“To be clear, this is a movement about the 1 in 4 girls and the 1 in 6 boys who are sexually assaulted every year and who carry those wounds into adulthood. It’s about the 84 percent of trans women who will be sexually assaulted this year. And the indigenous women who are three and a half times more likely to be sexually assaulted than any other group. Or people with disabilities who are seven times more likely to be sexually abused. It’s about the 60 percent of black girls like me who will be experiencing sexual violence before they turn 18. And the thousands and thousands of low-wage workers who are being sexually harassed right now on jobs that they can’t afford to quit”
One of the huge cultural problems we have is we don’t delineate between sexuality, which is normal and healthy and unfolds over the life cycles, and sexualization, or the hypersexualization of our girls.
Oh my fucking god. Do you ever just have one of those moments where you read something that concisely explains in one sentence something you’ve been mulling about for years?
“I don’t care if you’re gay or brown or a woman, but I’ll gladly walk over your corpse to get my cut.”
i used to say i was financially conservative. then i found out it didn’t mean pouring money into proven investments like education, infrastructure, job education, and preventative medicine.
You just thought they meant conserving money (sensible and reasonable, also what the words mean and what a decent person would assume), not conserving power structures, the status quo, and systemic oppression (evil in a bucket). There’s no shame in it.
I’m pretty sure that when my parents were kids, that was a fairly common form of conservatism within the GOP. But everyone who believed that has now been ostracised from the GOP, so now it’s the Democrats who preach what used to be moderate right instead of painted as far left.
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