“Business owners around the country are offering up a lament: ‘no one wants to work.’ A McDonalds franchise said they had to close because no one wants to work; North Carolina congressman David Rouzer claimed that a too-generous welfare state has turned us all lazy as he circulated photos of a shuttered fast-food restaurant supposedly closed 'due to NO STAFF.’
Most of these complaints seem to be coming from franchised restaurants. Why? Well, it’s not complicated. Service workers didn’t decide one day to stop working — rather huge numbers of them cannot work anymore. Because they’ve died of coronavirus.
A recent study from the University of California–San Francisco looks at increased morbidity rates due to COVID, stratified by profession, from the height of the pandemic last year. They find that food and agricultural workers morbidity rates increased by the widest margins by far, much more so than medical professionals or other occupations generally considered to be on the 'front lines’ of the pandemic. Within the food industry, the morbidity rates of line cooks increased by 60 percent, making it the deadliest profession in America under coronavirus pandemic.
Line cooks are especially at risk because of notoriously bad ventilation systems in restaurant kitchens and preparation areas. Anyone who has ever worked a back-of-the-house job knows that it’s hot, smelly, and crowded back there, all of which indicate poor indoor air quality. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Environmental Protection Agency recommended increasing indoor ventilation to fight the virus, but such upgrades are costly and time consuming. There is no data available on how many restaurants chose not to upgrade their ventilation systems, but given how miserly franchise owners are with everything else, one could guess that many, if not most, made no upgrades at all.
Ventilation issues are deadliest for line cooks and other back-of-house jobs, but there are other reasons why food workers’ morbidity rates shot up. Food workers are much more likely to be poor and/or a racial or national minority, and poor people and black and Latino workers are much more likely to die of complications from the coronavirus.
Restaurants are often intentionally short staffed, making it difficult to take time off, so sick workers likely still came to work (and infected others in the process). Bars and restaurants are COVID-19 hotspots, and service workers and customers alike get sick after prolonged restaurant exposure. The difference is that many of those customers have health insurance and other safeguards to prevent them from dying of the illness; 69 percent of restaurants, on the other hand, offer their employees no health benefits at all.
When coronavirus is spread at restaurants, and restaurant workers make little money and rarely earn health benefits, it’s no wonder morbidity rates are so much higher for food service workers. But rather than collectively grieve the deaths of tens of thousands of the people who serve us and keep us fed, and keep such tragedies in mind when considering the state of the food-service industry labor market today, business owners and their political lackeys call these workers 'lazy.’
There are, of course, also living, breathing people who have decided they do not want to risk their lives for $7.25 per hour and no health benefits. That is a perfectly rational decision for the homo economicus to make. Given how dangerous restaurant work is during a viral pandemic, if restaurant owners really wanted more workers, they would offer living wages, health benefits, and adequate personal protective equipment. But all the wage increases in the world won’t bring back the dead.
There aren’t enough people working in the service industry, and service bosses have somehow turned that into our problem, into something we ought to be ashamed of. We shouldn’t fall for it. Profits accumulate because of labor — without workers to exploit, the owning class can’t get richer. Capitalists cannot exploit the labor of the dead, so when large swathes of the working class die, they turn their ire on the living.
This is a barbaric response to mass tragedy. Workers across the country and the globe are dead or grieving. We shouldn’t risk further tragedies for a paltry minimum wage.”
To be fair this is the story about art we’ve been sold, right? “Don’t take your meds, they’ll make you less creative,” “happy music is boring, pain is where it’s at” etc. We are told and taught that good art comes from pain and suffering so it makes sense that’s what we’d expect. Free time is one aspect of it but on top of it, the psychological pain should only make us more productive! - Turns out nah, you should actually prioritize your mental health.
This is my thing…COPS REALLY DONT NEED DEFENDING….they don’t need you protecting them by saying “their are some good cops” 😩
They are fine! They got their guns, they have their weapons, they have the justice system on their side, they have government protection and billions of dollars in funding.
They really don’t need you defending them, like at all.
We the people, are the helpless ones, we have none of those things.
I just wish people could see how fucking stupid they look sticking up for police. Baby they don’t need your help. At all. They’re good.
They don’t need to be defended they need to be defunded.
So you are saying 0% of the world should be billionaires?
Yes.
Why shouldn’t their be billionaires? That makes no sense.
Because the existence of billionaires is predicated on the exploitation of human labor and unsustainable environmental harm. That level of wealth hoarding is harmful to economies, as it reduces the amount of money in circulation. No one person, no family, could ever conceivably even SPEND a billion dollars anyway, and it is inherently immoral to accumulate wealth so narrowly while so much of the world lives in abject poverty.
Better then to create a wealth ceiling, a point at which all wealth over a certain point is taxed at or very near 100% to incentivize people to actually spend their money rather than hoard it, stimulating the economy and bettering the lives of far more people. Better even still to create and regulate economic systems that protect workers and the environment in a way that such extreme levels of wealth accumulation aren’t even feasible.
The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?
There is a very real difference between “reasonably wealthy” and A BILLIONAIRE
No one is saying you shouldn’t have a nice house, we are saying that having multiple really, really ridiculously nice houses while your employees are either homeless or at serious risk of becoming homeless is immoral.
I’ll never understand why this concept is hard for people. I think it’s because they can’t actually fathom how much $1 Billion is.
Seriously.
Let’s say you have a badass job. A great job. You make $100 AN HOUR. You work 10 hours a day ($1000 A DAY), 5 days a week ($5000 a week!!!), every week ($20,000 A MONTH), thats $240,000 Every Year.
It would take you 4,167 years to make a billion dollars.
Keep in mind then, that if you got paid $1000 an hour, 10 hours a day, five days a week, every week, all year, it would still take over 400 years to make a billion.
You want to make one billion in a human lifetime? If you made $10,000 an HOUR, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, every week, all year, it would take you 41 years to hit a billion.
(And that’s not counting, ya know, money you spend to stay alive on food or rent or anything. )
Jeff Bezos currently has 140 billion dollars.
$10,000 an HOUR while most of us barely making $12. Can y’all conceptualize now?
Will always reblog
Because this is still a difficult set of numbers for some folks to comprehend (legitimately–our brains have a hard time conceptualizing big numbers) a really good example I like to use is the difference between a million and a billion in time.
yeah, how have we not destroyed the gop on backlash yet?
Because Republicans have been effectively trying to destroy the government and replace it with a totalitarian regime for at least two decades.
Back in 2016 - before trump was even in power - North Carolina had effectively been reduced to an authoritarian state/pseudo democracy. On certain measurements of democracy integrity it ranked lower than any country in the world, and in fact lower than any entity ever measured. This was entirely deliberate on the part of the republican party and their authoritarian efforts have only gotten worse since then.
They are, and have been for decades, an authoritarian party intent on growing their own power at any cost. The core republican base knows this and so are not disturbed by their more extreme members attempting a coup. In fact, this is the major draw of the republican party for hard line conservatives and especially far right wing evangelical Christians who would force their religion on the whole world if they could. Authoritarianism in the name of god.
This isn’t all that out of place. Standard operating procedure, this was just a bit more public.
We didn’t get rid of the fascist/authoritarian core in the USA by voting out Trump. We just hurt their most prominent leader.
“You’re Asexual, so how could you possibly enjoy watching/reading/engaging with sexual content?!?!”
The same way I’m able to enjoy horror movies without having murdered an entire cabin full of teenagers before, Barbara you pedantic piece of pipe cleaner.
COVID is slowly becoming a “third world” disease. While first world countries are hoarding vaccines, having doses for populations many times their size, third world countries can’t get any because pharma companies want to sell to the first world countries first. Even then, first world countries will receive them first. While rich countries recover from COVID, they will forget about the pandemic while many other countries live the absolute worst moment of the pandemic without being able to vaccinate their population.
Watch also when some first world countries finish vaccinating their populations, they will turn to third world countries and “donate” or sell surplus vaccines. People in these countries will go “Oh how sweet! The government is donating vaccines to the poorer countries <3” when it was their hoarding that led to many, many third world citizens dying before they could even get vaccinated in the first place.
african and latin american countries are also pushed by pfizer to give up sovereign assets as part of their vaccine agreement
Yo europeans, sign the fucking petition, get the european commission to lift the patents
This is not a bullshit useless change dot org petition by the way this is an actual thing with legal consequences. If this petition gets to a million signatures, the european commission HAS to examine it.
Do you like enemies to lovers because it’s hot or do you like enemies to lovers because you think of yourself as unlovable & unworthy of love and therefore like the idea of someone seeing all the worst in you right away and still falling in love with you anyways
