Essential Workers

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I happen to visit corporate social media on a regular basis, as I’m trying to build multiple platforms, because I’d like to traditionally publish a book, if I’m lucky enough, in a one out of a million chances I have at doing so. Either way, corporate social media (Threads) has an algorithm, and that algorithm has decided that on Christmas Eve (Happy holidays!), that I should be shown the scum of the Earth, who believe there are people who shouldn’t be able to afford to live if they’re working one of those jobs (italics, if you’re reading from Mastodon). We’re talking all of the jobs where people were called Essential in 2020 while they worked through what was called a deadly virus. A virus that is, for sure, still out there.

Jobs that absolutely should have been compensated with hazard pay.

I’m talking restaurant jobs, service jobs, big box store jobs. Basically, anything that aids in the procurement of food and water for the rest of the population … some of which, who take this for granted, because their world doesn’t expand beyond the tip of their noses.

Instead of amplifying the voices of people who don’t deserve to be able to say things online, I just want to point out that the 15 dollar an hour minimum wage debate has gone on for so long that the actual living wage is more like 30+ dollars an hour in 2024 (going on 2025). Corporations have hiked prices so high, and landlords are abusing the fact that there are zero consequences for their actions, so much, that 15 dollars an hour, now, would be like making 7 dollars an hour in 2015.

It’s no longer adequate.

The idea that some people should live in poverty, just because the lucky few had 100,000 dollars to spend on college, or were a trust-fund baby, is horrid, and outdated, and it’s about high-time we tie the living wage to the cost of living, and so-called inflation (see: greedflation).

But even if every single person on Earth, alive today, went to college, became doctors, engineers, astronauts, and so on and so forth, there would still need to be people serving the food you eat, and stocking the shelves. Hence, Essential Workers.

You take that away, and society collapses.

Some joke that these jobs will be replaced by robots, and I welcome that! Displace billions of people, and see what happens next.

I dare you.

Anyway, happy chrimas, and have a merry chrysler.