Member-only story
In short answer? Probably not. But I was flipping along Ed Zitron’s newsletter from last night, and this part did pop:
America runs on the backs of poorly paid-and-treated workers, with several of the top 10 companies in America relying heavily on these kinds of poorly-paid customer-facing roles. And yet they seem incapable of accepting their hand in the deaths of these workers, or at least said acceptance doesn’t extend to paying them an actual living wage — $16.40 an hour, by the way, is not close to what a living wage is in most states.
This entire transaction of bad pay for awful work has worked for so long because these companies know that many of these workers don’t have a choice. Except the additional variable of crazed, violent customers and an invisible, murderous virus is enough to make these jobs untenable. It’s grotesque to say, but so many companies calculated pay and conditions for workers based on how little dignity their workers had, and now that calculation is going to bite them on the ass hard enough to make sitting impossible.
Now, how you feel about those two paragraphs is completely based on your ideological background and connection to money/finance. If you are a big “bootstraps” person, you probably think this is all horseshit, and maybe you’re right. If you’re a real woke progressive who thinks…
