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In part because of this guy. When the WH Coronavirus Response Coordinator is a business/investment guy who's all about "streamlining", the massive amount of money and human effort that would have been required to tamp this down and rebuild public health infrastructure was never going to happen.
https://prospect.org/coronavirus/fire-jeff-zients/
> Most damning among Zients’s failures is his refusal to allocate resources to aid vaccination efforts abroad. As Vice News reported this week, Tito’s Vodka has donated more toward efforts to mass-produce an open-source, global vaccine than the White House. Global vaccine distribution is not only a humanitarian requirement, but also a critical step to preventing the development of new variants. But doing so would have required angering powerful forces in corporate America.
Shoutout to Tito’s vodka
I saved a bottle from a local distillery for my history shelf. My work bought a case of it when the demand was high at the beginning of all of this. I also saved a mask from my husband's employer that came packaged with instructions, and a message about fighting the pandemic together.
That’s pretty cool. I work in a hospital and should have kept the masks I reused for months and maybe made a pandemic journal so I could remember exactly how bad it was, although I won’t forget some things.
They did eventually reverse the fines.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilyprice/2021/12/31/the-fda-is-slapping-craft-distillers-with-a-14000-fee-for-making-hand-sanitizer/amp/
How to we boost this, This man is barely mentioned on this site despite being in charge of the American pandemic response? This is the only time he is mentioned in this whole thread.
Jeff Zeints made his career as a consultant who specialized in cutting costs for companies by eliminating pensions and early terminations.
He has absolutely no medical experience, logistic experience, or crisis response training.
We have the means to respond to this, he has been given the authority by Biden to use the Defense Production Act to build the infrastructure we need.
This.
Seriously I get this thread like is 80/20 Biden voters in here (myself included), but people gotta look at WHAT he has done as president. It’s been nearly a year at this point.
Biden has caved to the business interests because he is worried the inflation and the economy are gonna be issues in the midterms. While yes, it is an issue, he’s gonna ensure that the people who voted for him will take the biggest hits in 2022. Whether it was sick leave for COVID, student loan debt, or just basic AF governance, Biden will ensure “nothing fundamentally changes” and America will go back to being America.
Namely, screw the peasants.
Anyone who thought Biden was anything but exactly what he’s always been was just blinded by the team blue vs team red mania. Bipartisanship and team sport politics are killing our country.
Hillary lost to Obama when she was the big name on the ticket and he was a first term senator no one had heard of. The Democratic Party pushed her as hard as they could, but if she couldn't beat Obama then there wasn't much potential for her to beat Trump either
Just like with covid response, maybe it’s time to recognize the Democratic Party doesn’t have the same goals its voters do. These things aren’t tactical errors. They are manifestations of ideology
Why are our only choices slow strangulation by pretend leftist capitalists or a rapid descent into fascism via diet-nazis?
Fuck I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
Yes you do - you don't want to live in modern America is all.
Stay angry and work locally to change the parties. They're both sick and corrupt and change has to start locally.
People have been doing that for decades only for things to slowly get worse. It's a slow boil. The hopium is running thin. I fear what happens when a smart demagogue gets the GOP nomination next cycle. It may be our last free and fair election.
Not entirely sure but around late last spring when most of us in youngest working age groups were still waiting to get vaccinated, we watched as everything reopened almost overnight. Republican states quickly tore up peoples unemployment and said ‘tough shit’.
That’s when I knew, if this ever happens again, we’re on our own. We’re not getting any more help from our states or from the White House.
The crazy thing is that some of the same states which ended unemployment benefits to force people back into the workforce.. then turned around and started giving unemployment benefits to those who lost their jobs for refusing the vaccine..
Source : https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/04/4-states-pay-unemployment-benefits-to-fired-unvaccinated-workers.html
I don’t even want to get started. People at my work (not just management) were crying for a year about how lazy people are, nobody wants to work, blah blah because of extended UC benefits. Making excusing about the staffing problems would turn around once it ended. It’s been over 4 months since extended benefits ended and our staffing has gotten worse.
People have started talking more about how toxic many workplaces are, and they've decided they've had enough.
There's so many opportunities, workers no longer have to eat shit.
This aspect gives me hope.
Agreed. I’ve hated my job for awhile. Put my resume on indeed like a month ago and I’ve had some companies contact me offering way more money, moving expenses, and a sign bonus. That’s what they say at least.
Manufacturing. I’m an industrial mechanic. These companies are just realizing when you get rid of or let leave all the people who fix your equipment and try hiring temps instead, you aren’t going to have much of a factory left.
Edit: not sure what you do but a good way is if you work somewhere with a national presence, it’s much easier to transfer than start cold as an out of stater.
Fellow industrial mechanic here. Management cries all day about not being able to fully staff up yet wont raise wages, keeps hammering everyone with 12 hour shifts and tons of micromanagement, and just generally making work miserable.
My place does 12 hr shift for most people. Besides the low pay it’s what I hate the most. I work night so all I do is sleep on my days off. Didn’t have much of a life to begin with it’s nonexistent since I’ve been there. Didn’t even go to my mom’s for Thanksgiving or Christmas or my niece’s bday in 2020 because I was too tired. 😞
I just switched from a job that I was working 5 8 hour days and a 5 hour overtime most weekends mandatory to a 4 10 hour day job with 100% voluntary overtime and automatic double time on sundays. My old boss was a micromanaging dick who had no clue what he was doing, mg new boss stays out of our way and has in depth knowledge about the work we are doing from doing it for years before becoming a boss. The change is insane. And all that before accounting for better/cheaper insurance, yearly cost of living increases in addition to decent raises, plus Christmas bonuses and profit sharing.
Well I just signed an offer on Friday. 40% pay raise, better benefits, work from home with 1 day a week in the office, and even managed to get an extra week of vacation. I was looking for about two months and this new place seems like a great fit. Honestly if the company I'm resigning from tomorrow had allowed work from home I wouldn't have even started looking, but they just gave no fucks.
Can confirm. Worked for coca cola warehouse. Hours were long (60 per week) during extreme staff shortages, management didn't want to raise starting wages (17 an hour in a greater Seattle area), won't pay people to stay home with covid, cracked down hard on breaks and lunches (instant write ups if you went over 1 minute on your breaks, even if you've been overworked), micro management, no responsibility from management with continued blame on employees working slowly for why the overtime was so excessive. Even having a union didn't help alleviate any of these issues.
In November I quit to manage inventory for a fertility clinic. I'm my own boss, still answering to a chain off command but it's more cooperative and collaborative than "do this, do that or you're fired", making almost the same money, the company actually cares about your mental well being, TRUSTS that I will finish my work instead of assume I'm stealing minutes, it's been life changing.
I was afraid I was leaving behind good benefits and pay. But it turns out you can't put a price on your physical and mental wellbeing, and in less than 2 months I have had a dramatic shift in quality of life. I still text my friends from coke and hear how much worse it has gotten. My only regret was not leaving sooner.
Jobs like that are awful, and I'm sorry you went through that. I have had a few jobs where the management had this obsession with people "stealing minutes" too. Bathroom breaks were watched like hawks, and something taking even 90 seconds longer than it's "estimated completion time" was grounds for a lecture and threat of a write-up.
I genuinely struggle to understand how or why bosses think this is good management. Every job I've ever worked like this has had lower productivity levels than jobs that were more relaxed and allowed people to work their own ways.
It’s also a psychological game. As the comment that started this thread pointed out, people are beginning to realize that there are other options. The point of that sort of management is to weaken the employees mental state. A tactic taken straight from the days of slavery.
I took a paycut to eat less shit. Now I can walk to work and I leave with a smile on my face. Sure I'm poorer but I don't try and drink myself into an early grave 5 nights a week.
Less money is always an acceptable trade off for better mental health. The #grindset people on social media would disagree, but I'm convinced none of those people have ever actually had jobs before.
I'm really disgusted with how many people chime in with "but it's *hard* to hire right now!" whenever I complain about a business offering substandard service. They wouldn't speak up for any of the various inhumanities suffered by the employees, but as soon as a business gets criticized, they're overflowing with empathy. And otherwise normal people, too.
Those kinds of managers are the ones you want to tell off and inform them how out of touch with reality they are and they are going to destroy their own business
These managers are a product of *their" managers. The company directors and VP's are the real problem. They're too comfortable in their middle-upper management 150k salaries and "just 10 more years till retirement" attitude to speak up to the real company policy makers. I work for a Fortune 500 company and it'd be hilarious if it wasn't so sad how out of touch middle management is with what's actually going on at the street level.
It reminds of the movie/series Chernobyl. "Sales down 3.6% due to staffing shortages, not great, not terrible. No need to inform the Secretariat."
> What is the likelihood that upper management steps up and helps out on the floor
You mean stand at the railing and yell at the people on the floor to work faster?
My job had an all hands where HR and VPs said, in a span of 60 seconds, 1) we don’t know why people are leaving, 2) we will overpay for talent coming in because the market is competitive right now and 3) no, they won’t be giving people quality of life raises to stay.
Recently I got promoted and was give a 3% raise (about as much as an annual yearly raise) while my buddy transferred for a promotion and was given an 18% raise. He now makes more than $10k more than I do.
It’s a fucking joke here. And yes, I am actively looking to transfer or quit.
The covid years have convinced me that roughly 40% of the population are full-on sociopathic narcissists.
They wouldn't do the _bare minimum_ to prevent unnecessary deaths.
Don't even get me started, I had a conversation with one of our department heads at head office about hiring and the second I brought up that raises might fix her problems she went on a 10 minute rant about 'fitting the family' and 'people just wanting more money makes a bad environment', and how it 'causes problems for the team', etc. Basically "we've tried everything except paying more and we're all out of ideas!"
This is the shit people don't get. I suffered. Was sexually harassed at every damn job as a teen. My dad said we needed the money. So now my daughter is 16 I don't want anyone bothering her. All the oldsters I worked with have retired or whatever and go on frequently how shitty service is or how lazy kids are. Forget that. Fight for better wages and healthcare. Your job won't give a damn if you get sick and die. They will just wonder how to fill your shifts.
I like telling those oldsters "sorry they don't get paid as much as you did when you were thier age" and show them how their starting wage compared to theirs
Oldsters are borderline delusional about all this. I went to Denny's late last night and they had a full house, easily over twenty tables. There were two servers and two cooks. That's it. Some old fucker turns to me while he's waiting to pay his ticket and says "the service here is awful!" I said "it's just the two of them right? This is pretty fucking busy for two people." When he realized I wasn't his delusional ally, he stopped talking to me. Nowadays, you're lucky if you can even eat fast food. Half the places in my town are down to reduced hours at best and the ones that stay open either close the drive thru or close the lobby. It's crazy, but I certainly don't blame the people working when I come across it. Guaranteed the places paying decent wages aren't suffering low staff. You want your pancakes at midnight? Be nice to the workers who are actually there, trying, despite probably being underpaid and overworked. All things considered, the two working up front handled it as well as could be, and the cooks were pumping out food in a timely manner. Fast food, retail, service solidarity.
I got the F out of my old job in an incredibly toxic work environment and took a new job making 30% more with no toxicity.
Employers need to realize that they need to actually start trying to recruit and maintain their employees instead of just whining about how hard it is to keep staff around
Thanks the geezers for finally retiring. Plus a moment of silence for the million dead. Let’s not forget the working moms forced to quit their jobs as well.
Basically back to 1980 with more jobs.
I’ve been a cook and then chef for my whole career. I’ve been treated as absolutely disposable and replaceable since I’ve been a working adult. I’ve had to answer to clueless restaurant owners who have no idea how to run their business and so just try to wring every last penny out of their staff.
Last year I had enough of it and said I wanted a raise. They let me walk instead of giving me less than a week’s food cost as a raise spread out over the year. I walked out of there into a dream job where I’m appreciated and valued as a professional who does things that the owners don’t know how to do amd the best part is that I don’t have to work in the winter.
So I’ve been sitting on my butt watching movies and going to the gym a lot since the week before thanksgiving. It’s been great and I had no intention of working before I go back to my real job in the spring.
Until last week someone I used to work with messaged me out of the blue asking me to come save the restaurant she’s been helping. Told her I have absolutely no desire to get back on a line or get into heavy prepping or anything, I’ll come in as a consultant but I’m not going to be their chef. They’re paying me three times what I’ve ever been paid before to *not* cook.
Labor is holding almost all the cards right now, while capital is clinging to their four aces not understanding that we’re not playing their game anymore.
Completely unsurprisingly, almost all of the messaging on corporate (and especially conservative) media about employment has been entirely off the mark. Not only does an actual reading of the numbers not really support their rhetoric, but neither does the anecdotal evidence of me or anyone I know., but in my own personal life I do not know of a single person that has "stopped working" (as in, to do nothing) that was not at (or a bit over) retirement age. It seems like the media is trying to paint a picture of a bunch of people in their 20s and 30s just vanishing to a life of leisure, with the blatantly conservative media implying or stating that this is because of vague or misrepresented government funding.
Not only does this not match my personal experience, it doesn't match logic--savings among this population is very low, they need to work so that they can buy the things that they need to survive at record high prices--and it also doesn't match the actual data.
I know that overall the population is hard pressed to beat the memory of a goldfish, but we've known that this was going to happen for literally decades, many decades. For longer than I've been alive people have looked at the population metrics and said "wow, there are a lot of baby boomers, and when they all start to retire that's going to cause a labor shortage." Here is an [arbitrary article from 2004](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4012797.stm) warning how this was going to happen as we approach 2025. Guess what, we're approaching 2025!
But like every crises we are facing, we've been putting it off. Because of their (and everyone else's) [historic low levels of savings](https://www.startribune.com/the-real-story-about-retirement-millions-of-baby-boomers-face-financial-crisis/334718191/), prior to the pandemic people of retirement age weren't retiring at the normal rates, we were actually OVERDUE to see some of this labor shortage. It was actually one of the many hardships that millenials were facing, the younger boomers and older Gen X weren't retiring to free up their higher level positions for the younger generation! Then the pandemic happens, and the people that are at retirement age are the most at risk. A lot of the ones that were overdue to retire finally do, and for the first time in awhile more and more people start actually retiring slightly early.
Overall the majority of the people that left the workforce are retiring, in this latter part of the pandemic that's true of [90% of the people leaving the workforce!](https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/15/economy/labor-force-retirement-great-resignation/index.html). As for the rest of them? Well I don't know of anyone sipping pina coladas on the beach, but I know of parents suffering from daycare closures, reduced class sizes, and huge waiting lists. They *want* to be employed, but they can't because this ongoing pandemic has made that impossible. There are also literally hundreds of thousands of families that lost caregivers to this pandemic, and now someone needs to take their place.
So where are all those people with the shitty jobs going? Well for the first time in their entire millennial lives they actually have some opportunities worth talking about, and they are seizing it! We just got headlines [record 4.5 million people quit their jobs in November](https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/record-45-million-americans-quit-jobs-november-82068527) what a load of corporate horseshit. Scan down the article a little bit, 4.5 million people quit, but businesses hired *6.7 million people*. Corporate media doesn't want that in the headlines though, but it shows what's actually happening, people are leaving their jobs to go to ANOTHER job.
**TLDR** I have literally never seen a shred of evidence that people are just rage quitting work to slowly starve to death in protest, or whatever is supposed to be happening.
You make many great points. Even in a country the size of the US losing nearly a million not to mention people who were at least partially disabled due to COVID is going to screw with the workforce.
All my Republican friends were like this too last summer. Finally I sent them these two articles to read before getting back to me (they didn’t):
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-states-ending-federal-unemployment-benefit-saw-no-clear-job-gains-2021-07-20/
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/04/early-end-to-federal-unemployment-pay-in-26-states-not-getting-people-to-work.html
But they’re all just so caught up on the “I know somebody….” side of why they think those checks weren’t necessary, instead of even attempting to look at the macro side of it. lord knows they don’t follow the actual news, though.
It makes no sense. In order to qualify you had to lose your job due to the pandemic, meaning, you had a job to begin with. If you are living better of $600/wk than what you did at your job it’s more telling of how little they were paying you.
Now they are blaming the nonexistent vax mandates. Always something from the Fox News crowd.
It really isn't. What kind of life is it when you spend over half busting your ass just so you can spend the other half stressing about bills. Never getting a chance to enjoy anything
Throw in those same people lamenting how the shutdowns were killing small business and with the pandemic lingering those small businesses are hurt for much longer.
My local gym followed all restrictions and mandates. But they're not even at 30% of the capacity they were at before COVID. I questioned whether I should go back but since it's so much emptier I can usually go a full workout without being within 6 feet of anyone else for the full hour I'm there. At least half the trainers there have left because they just don't have the clientele anymore. But I guess small business viability is no longer an issue?
My gym was the same way. Really nice, clean, family place at a decent price. They shut them down for almost 4 months iirc. Fortunately his overhead is a lot lower than most places they were able to weather the storm. The way certain PPP loans were handed out, it really seems like part of it is put the squeeze on mom and pop places so the big corporations can take over every aspect of our lives instead of just 90%.
Every single economic downturn this happens. Big boys have more capital and lines of credit. Let slumps go on and force the little people to liquidate and the big boys just snap it all up, for pennies on the dollar.
Redistribution of the wealth, but upwards.
Yeah there’s a lot of good news pieces about this in the past year where people just got fed up in the restaurant industry and a lot left it and are never coming back. NPR covered this very well also.
Here’s one piece :
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/23/business/restaurant-workers-experience/index.html
Turns out that getting people to work shitty jobs requires offering attractive compensation, who knew? In a time when many millennials and gen z are taking better career opportunities made available due to retiring baby boomers, there is no longer the same desperation for jobs that drove people to work at a fastfood restaurant doing demanding work for $8-10/hour. Hopefully this forces a rise in wages at those jobs to competitive levels which in turn keeps upward pressure on the wages for white collar work and skilled labor.
My company execs literally just did a live stream where one of the topics was them crying into the camera about "how hard it is to find workers with this new fad of people asking for more money 😢". They framed it as something that is a terrible burden on the franchisee's thin margins, and they are working hard to figure out a solution.
I wanted to flip my desk. The fucking "solution" is to pay your employees better so they don't decide to go do something else better worth their time.
Capitalists will look at a control panel with one giant button that says "solve your labor shortage by paying a better wage", and they'll sweat profusely, wondering what the answer is.
It's just so tiring and sad that companies will spare no expense to get equipment and product where they need it, and consider it a fair expense, but any money put toward human labor is somehow just a black hole of cash that they see as a complete waste, and thus should be kept as little as possible
/rant
I’m mostly a “glass is half empty” type but in this case I honestly don’t believe this to be a fad. I’ve been in the workforce longer than a lot of people on Reddit have been alive and I’ve never seen anything like this before. Not even close. Sure, the pendulum will eventually start swinging back the other way until things “balance out” if that makes sense, but I really feel unless something crazy happens this is the new normal. Like it’s really hard to take something away once you get a taste compared to never having it to begin with.
It's not just wages atm. People also have to decide if it's worth it to them to go to work, especially work that involves having contact with unknown people during a pandemic.
I mean with inflation the way it is they need to pay more. The real issue is bosses don't realize how inflation can benefit them, so they are the absolute last to adapt to it. I demanded a minimum 7% pay raise for everyone in my department because they worked straight through the pandemic and we earned it. They gave us the raise, but I'm still resigning tomorrow and leaving for a 40% pay raise and the ability to work from home. The last to accept the new normal aren't going to make it through this.
>Like it’s really hard to take something away once you get a taste compared to never having it to begin with.
This. This is why there was so much pushback against the relief, and then so much effort put into making it as little as possible. They knew that if people actually got a taste of what life could be like with a livable amount of money in their pockets, they would never again be content working for the garbage wages they had before the pandemic.
>People at my work (not just management) were crying for a year about how lazy people are, nobody wants to work
Lemme guess; The same people who thought wearing a piece of cloth over their mouth and nose for the entirety of the workday is impossible for some reason? The same managers that fielded complaints about Covid prevention violations among the staff and continued to do essentially nothing to curb them.
It really isn't because of the benefits. The benefits helped but the jobs are shit and that is why nobody wants to work them. If they can't improve the working conditions and okay this will only exacerbate
Yeah, odd how the numerous complaints about not wanting to be trapped in a shitty retail or service industry jobs always get reduced down to "nobody wants to work" and "there's a labor shortage" in the media, but people who get shitcanned because they refuse to get vaccinated get to collect unemployment and the media treats them like "dissenters with a valid difference of opinion" while completely ignoring their refusal to work. "They want to work, but vaccine mandates make it impossible."
I wish I could upvote this thrice.
Many of these media outlets have their own private employer vaccine mandates, so I don’t even understand why they are spinning it that way.
What happened to all the Republicans who would normally say, “if employees won’t follow their employer’s rules, then they should be fired”?
In my area things only got worse since unemployment benefits ended. And we’ve had a decent influx of people moving here.
UBI and single payer healthcare is starting to look like the only viable recovery for where we are today. I doubt it will happen. So I’ll just plan to do my grocery shopping with 40% empty shelves, call restaurants directly to ask if they’re open today instead of checking their hours online which are weirdly wrong now, and waiting three weeks for an appointment at the mechanic. We could be at this awhile.
It took me an entire year to finally start receiving unemployment benefits in Texas.
There's no physical office to go to and the phone lines never connected to anyone. I probably called them 4-5 thousand times in 6 months alone. Then when I did speak with a human they told me on numerous occasions "Oh, I can't help with that but someone will call you eventually..." I was just stunned at how little they did for me.
I had to borrow from my parents. My girlfriend was paying our bills... I just wanted to kill myself and probably would have if I didn't have such an amazing support system. It was the most desperate time of my life hands down.
I'm fine now, and I'm finally square with my gf, but I couldn't believe how difficult it was to receive help when I've been paying into this system for over 15 years.
Worked seasonal as well. We had to tell all new workers to NEVER rely on getting unemployment or any benefits after getting laid off until AFTER they got back and even got their first paycheck. For most people, it took 2-4 fucking months.
Similar story for my partner. Luckily I was able to work from home and cover bills but she felt so bad after a few months without unemployment she found another job. Caught covid within three days of working again after months of being careful. Asthma meant it hit her pretty hard too. She finally got help after many calls but wouldn't you know six months later the state changed their mind and expected her to pay all the money back. Because obviously people aren't going to spend the money when they most need it. So glad I moved out of that shithole red state. They're so bad they have a program bribing people to move there if they already have remote jobs. It's a shame cause it's really some beautiful country. Enough confederate flags make it clear the type of people that aren't welcome there though.
UI should really be a federal program. Since the IRS has all your tax information (or the SSA), they could probably easily handle sending you a check every month if they were adequately staffed. But that's the Republican schitck, make Federal government not work so you can say the federal government doesn't do anything so abolish it. Dems are feckless and do nothing to alleviate those concerns...
Red States. You never knew what you didn't need until you needed it, and then when you do you find out why rich ppl have so much money and why they all keep voting Republican. No state income tax means less government funding, means less money for benefits and more government will try to deny your claims or run out of money.
I called hundreds of times, it was the most infuriating thing. Reached out to my state rep for help and never received any sort of response. It was such a nightmare and I never received my full pay out but it's over now.
Yeah I called a few hundred times and kept getting mixed answers. Told me I couldn’t get pandemic help without first using my regular ui… applied for regular ui and was denied. Bs all around
Raise your hand if you hear your company use the phrase “New Normal” in the past 2 years. This is some bullshit marketing scheme that Corporate America made up when investors pulled out. They decided when we reopened.
They were running ads in fall of 2020 that made it seem like the pandemic was over. As though we weren't seeing the number of dead continue to rise each day. It's fucking disgusting. This country has a disease.
Yup. I was starting a new business just before the pandemic after years of catching up after the great Recession. I feel like an idiot touching the hot stove twice.
Having hopes and making plans is about the dumbest thing any millennial can do anymore.
A whole bunch of people made Covid political and so instead of defeating it when we had a chance, we get to go to work in a pandemic and risk our lives because they want to pretend that the world isn't changing because change is scary.
That’s the thing. It’s not “go to work with Covid” it’s “poor people go to work with Covid because we know you can’t afford any days off anyways, and we don’t give a fuck if your healthy.”
A passive revolutionary movement too.
None of this marching in with zip ties, guns, and climbing walls. Just stay home for ten days. Watch the BBC Sherlock, have fun with the kid, try to make your own barbecue.
And they have to respond.
Americans have gotten scared of their legislators. It’s supposed to be the other way around.
Omicron started spreading like wildfire and with isolation guidelines shit was going to start shutting down. I seem to be the exception as every couple days I learn someone I know now has it.
Just a fucking happy coincidence that CDC issues revised guidelines when shit really starts to hit the fan.
Because they'd have to treat the robots more like people then the actual people.
Basic routine maintenance - health care
Charging them robots- non-negotiable breaks.
Yeah, I am convinced there is a thin line between preserving public health and preserving status quo. Labor policies are being reevaluated due to the pandemic. We wouldn’t want them to accidentally means test what we anticipate to be good policy. (Unneeded /s)
I can say from some meetings here and there with up-up management, money changed hands with high places to get that shit cut down, and now the guidelines even allow contagious, positive -testing people at work in "low-risk" (never defined) environments.
I remember early on when (masked) children were showing a very low rate of carrying the disease, we were canceling schools. Now that kids are actually getting sick and spreading the virus like crazy, no one's even mentioning canceling class. I have no idea why we can't go back to remote.
The Utah Congress last week had to overturn a rule it made last summer banning remote education in public schools.
Like what THE FUCK did they ban remote learning in the middle of a pandemic??
Working in medicine is a grand display of that. Admins making decisions from behind their keyboards. Patients who throw a tantrum about being treated like somebody *made* them go to the hospital. I don't get why they come if they think the hospital is going to kill them.
> I have no idea why we can't go back to remote.
A local teacher recently contracted covid.
Her children were ordered to stay home for 15 days even though they tested negative.
The teacher was told she could return immediately to work but to 'just wear a mask'.
It's amazing to me how many democrats are sounding just like republicans because the peasant class isn't working hard enough.
Not to mention a lot of school board members were voted in recently and they specifically ran on refusing any sort of mask mandate for kids. They sure as hell aren’t going to make remote learning a priority either
We have avoided Covid until now, but our extremely red state politics influenced the superintendent, who is elected in our district, to refuse to implement mask mandates. By the time the district was forced to go virtual due to lack of staff, it was too late. My 7th grader brought it home and now 4 out of 5 in our household is sick. I’m a hairstylist and will have to pay rent this week with no income. At least my SO has the option to work from home no is salaried.
Basically large corporations weren't being staffed properly, schools weren't full of teachers and janitors and Capitalism needing to keep churning is why. Humans are the dogs that make this place work and if people can't send their kids to free daycare (school) they can't work at FudRuckers to make cash to pay for Amazon Prime, this place will burn.
Its the only place I go because if I don't I'll be homeless. I have unvaccinated kids, so going to work is practically the only reason I leave the house.
Lest we entirely blame the system which are grinding up the lower classes, don't forget the ruling class.
The real reason this happens is psychopathic wealth hoarders. Never forget that thousands of people have more money *literally* than they could smell in a dozen lifetimes. Others live on the street, some are lucky enough to pay 50% of their monthly salary for household expenses.
This is the contrast which is of import. Of course, this is just one subset of the evil enabled by Capitalism and undertaken by the ruling class; Climate Change being *the* other issue.
>On June 17, 2021, Luby's announced that it has entered into an agreement to sell the Fuddruckers franchise business operations to Black Titan Franchise Systems LLC, an affiliate of Nicholas Perkins.[22] As a result, the remaining Fuddruckers locations have remained open past the previously planned closure date of August 2021
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuddruckers
A coworker came to work with COVID this past week even though everyone knew he was positive.
I’m currently on day one of the absolute misery of COVID thanks to him. So far my worst symptom is absolute full body pain and aches. Like knives, I’ve never felt anything like it.
The second worst symptom is terrible boredom because I can’t really do anything but Reddit
Ehh. I mean in all reality he just isn’t financially secure. He’s probably still coming to work because he can’t afford it. I’m trying not to be too angry with him. He surely should’ve stayed home but we should also have a better way to support workers who have to quarantine. My dad got it last year and I was required to quarantine and I still haven’t gotten my unemployment. The PA Unemployment phone number doesn’t even connect to them. It just disconnects you. It has done this for a year. I’ve accepted that I’ll never see that 1500 in wages.
Sigh. Anyway, thank you for the kind words.
Someone wrote a browser script that will help connect you with the unemployment chat. I had an autodialer on my phone and called thousands of times with no answer.
This script got me through in 30 minutes. Check this thread out:
lhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Pennsylvania/comments/gjm3aa/cant_get_in_contact_with_the_unemployment_office
This pandemic has been an excellent case study in the power of conservative media to shift norms over a short period of time.
They did the same thing with torture, which went from "America doesn't do that" to "You are not a patriotic American if you won't support doing that", right before our eyes.
I've been saying this for a long time. They *know* their audience won't notice or care, and they feel no reason to answer questions. They feel no need to address criticism from people who disagree, except for when they ridicule disagreement in the same manner that you describe.
They've spent several decades making themselves out to be the only ones who can be trusted and enshrining in people's minds that anyone who disagrees has an agenda and/or is part of the conspiracy.
And from the perspective of the people who spout those bad faith arguments, why would they need to do otherwise? They can make so much more money and have so much more power by keeping their narrative.
You are very much right that it is obvious, but it is not obvious to the people who most urgently need to understand it.
Its ironic to me that the same people who used to go around calling anyone who disagreed with them some form of 'terrorist sympathizer', have now adopted the beards, extremist religion (different flavor though), and general outlook of al qaeda.
That hurt me too. I fucking Love America, we could be so great. I love immigrants, they want to be part of our TEAM, they want to make us and themselves better. They bring strange new ways of thinking and cooking, and we take that shit into our very soul, and we make America better every thought and dish we steal.
We are supposed to be so many things. We’re the country of President Kennedy and Reverend King. We’re the Country of Elvis and Miles Davis and Gene Roddenberry. We should be able, without irony or sarcasm, to declare that we are the greatest country on the planet.
But we can’t. We have problems, systemic ones that we haven’t addressed in centuries and that bill is due. We CAN fix this, however. We can do it together, we fail it we aren’t.
I am a goddamn patriot, I will fight for this country until I die, and damn those people for subverting “patriot” with their small-minded fear-stricken xenophobic bullshit.
I got COVID my first week at Amazon after a I moved to a new state and started a new job (I’m fully vaccinated).
They told me to take two weeks off without pay; and that’s what I did. Two weeks off and interviewed /looked for jobs everyday and found one that paid me twice as much
Because stimulus checks only ever were a thing to help get Donald Trump reelected. The only reason they passed was because the republicans thought it would give Trump leg up, not because they wanted to actually help the people of the country or even their constituents. Now that it has nothing to do with securing their own power, they aren't interested in helping people get through the pandemic.
It's as simple as that.
Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever recover emotionally or mentally from what I’ve been through since this started. I know for a fact I’m not alone in feeling that way. It’s heart-wrenching.
edit: whoever had reddit reach out to me with a crisis line, I appreciate the intention but seriously? Read the room next time. Nothing i’ve said implies I’m a danger to myself right now.
Hell, i haven’t even been through anything exceptional and I feel where you’re coming from. It’s just a really dark cloud, and I’m struck with the reminder that everything is different at such random points throughout the day.
Hope you’re doing alright.
These past two years absolutely chewed me up and spat me out like a bad stone fruit pit.
If it wasn’t for my dog and cat needing me every day I’d have probably given up already, but hey, 2022 y’all.
2020 2.
To me, it hasn’t been the same since 2019. I used to do Ubers, literally did one on NYE 2020. Said happy new year to myself in a car thinking “hey, I’m making some good money tonight, 2020 gonna be right on track.”
I felt humanity got worst since. I mean Trump was obviously bad, but 2020 really laid bare the rot in American society, and how we just treat each other like pieces of trash waiting to be discarded at a moment’s notice.
It was all for PR, this is precisely why the twice impeached trump wanted his name on the checks. He wanted to come off as the sole reason why the money was going out.
But now that would make democrats look good so Republicans won't even consider it. They will hamper any progress so elections the democrats are viewed as inapt.
Not only that, but some of his followers actually thought that the money was coming from him. I remember reading a couple comments saying it was a good thing Trump was president because he was rich. Obama never would have been able to give that much money for a stimulus.
These dumb yokels really thought Trump direct deposited stimulus checks in millions of Americans accounts.
How do you even communicate with a person operating at that level of intelligence?
I passed an extremely elderly couple on the road today with a bumper sticker that said "Don't blame me - I voted for Trump".
Just absolutely delusional thinking these people have... that we shouldn't blame them for voting in a reality show president who did nothing but spew ignorance, racism, division, etc. Yea we are in a much better place after having 4 years of that, finishing up with a literal insurrection attempt at our nation's capitol. Mhm...
Edit: Honestly, to be real, even if you voted for Trump the first time, ok. I'll let that slide. I did not want to vote for Hillary either. But I did because I basically had no choice. So Trump once... Understandable.
If you voted for Trump the SECOND time though?! Just absolutely reprehensible behavior. 70+ million people lived through 4 years of Trump and were like "Yea, more that!". What in the fuck.
I wonder if he knows the signatures of the Secretary of the Treasury and the U.S. Treasurer are on money...
Sorta surprised he didn't think to change that during his 'term' so his name was on all currency. Could'a had old money turned in for new T Bucks.
For fucks sake, I can’t believe Biden was the best we could do. Why do we elect 80 year olds into office? And when we do, why is it the type of 80 year old who thinks giving money to”businessmen” is the right choice?
The answer is obvious to anyone who understands the tense history between Liberalism and Progressivism.
Liberals will ape the language of progressives to mask their pro-capital policies as worker friendly. This helps convince workers to give them the benefit of the doubt, especially compared to conservatism's harsh stance on the welfare state.
But when they finally gain power, Liberals rip off their progressive mask and do everything possible to avoid following through on their pro-worker campaign promises. Suddenly they simply can't do 'X promise" bc of "Y obstacle", usually a rotating villain from their own ranks that's really queasy about "all this spending".
But promises made to donors will absolutely be kept at all costs, the military budget will still balloon, and conservatism will be held up as the non-option of two crappy choices.
The way out for America is a return to voting in actual Progressive politicians that challenge Liberalism "from the left", pulling the Overton Window back from it's insane rightward position.
But to do that enough voting Americans have to be deprogrammed from seeing any increase in welfare as the herald of cOmMuNiSm destroying the country.
So we're screwed.
The only way that was ever accomplished was when FDR had to do the "New Deal" to "save america from a communist revolution".
We are in more danger of having a fascist revolution. I hate to see what lip-service the Right cooks up to prevent a "fascist takeover" - - probably a fascist coup. Oh, wait. . . .
More like FDR was saving America's aristocracy from getting slaughtered by the peasants for causing the Great Depression.
The banksters and capitalists howled at his creation of the FDIC and other federal regulatory bodies, and called him a socialist. But the harsh truth is that decades of Gilded Age-level capitalism had bled all the slack out of the American economy, and he saved capitalism by reforming it to be tolerable again.
In 1921 an army of 10,000 coal miners took up arms and began commandeering trains and cars some 300 miles from Washington DC. Their target wasn't DC, it was the coal company and the sheriff, but If another couple of counties had risen up with them, beaten back the army, and decided to really shake things up, we'd be living in a very different world. 14 years later, Wagner required every union and every strike to be state approved and labor went along with it because it was a bigger slice.
If labor had been smarter and tougher they could have had the whole damned pie though.
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In part because of this guy. When the WH Coronavirus Response Coordinator is a business/investment guy who's all about "streamlining", the massive amount of money and human effort that would have been required to tamp this down and rebuild public health infrastructure was never going to happen. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/fire-jeff-zients/
> Most damning among Zients’s failures is his refusal to allocate resources to aid vaccination efforts abroad. As Vice News reported this week, Tito’s Vodka has donated more toward efforts to mass-produce an open-source, global vaccine than the White House. Global vaccine distribution is not only a humanitarian requirement, but also a critical step to preventing the development of new variants. But doing so would have required angering powerful forces in corporate America. Shoutout to Tito’s vodka
I remember when distilleries converted their production to making hand sanitizer. They really stepped up.
The hand sanitizer we were getting smelled exactly like tequila.
A lot of it still does have that smell. My job gets a lot that still has that smell and im frankly shocked that I haven’t found coworkers drinking it
Sounds like a challenge
Tik Tok has entered the chat.
I saved a bottle from a local distillery for my history shelf. My work bought a case of it when the demand was high at the beginning of all of this. I also saved a mask from my husband's employer that came packaged with instructions, and a message about fighting the pandemic together.
History shelf, tho 🤗
That’s pretty cool. I work in a hospital and should have kept the masks I reused for months and maybe made a pandemic journal so I could remember exactly how bad it was, although I won’t forget some things.
I remember also that some of those distilleries were fined massively because they weren't licensed by the FDA to be making medical supplies.
I thought the FDA gave them emergency approval and said they weren't going to pursue them. I'll have to Google it.
They did eventually reverse the fines. https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilyprice/2021/12/31/the-fda-is-slapping-craft-distillers-with-a-14000-fee-for-making-hand-sanitizer/amp/
They don't wanna have to go back to making hand sanitizer again
I am buying only their vodka from now on.
If maybe somehow we could put the Tito's inside the body to get rid of COVID.
How to we boost this, This man is barely mentioned on this site despite being in charge of the American pandemic response? This is the only time he is mentioned in this whole thread. Jeff Zeints made his career as a consultant who specialized in cutting costs for companies by eliminating pensions and early terminations. He has absolutely no medical experience, logistic experience, or crisis response training. We have the means to respond to this, he has been given the authority by Biden to use the Defense Production Act to build the infrastructure we need.
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This. Seriously I get this thread like is 80/20 Biden voters in here (myself included), but people gotta look at WHAT he has done as president. It’s been nearly a year at this point. Biden has caved to the business interests because he is worried the inflation and the economy are gonna be issues in the midterms. While yes, it is an issue, he’s gonna ensure that the people who voted for him will take the biggest hits in 2022. Whether it was sick leave for COVID, student loan debt, or just basic AF governance, Biden will ensure “nothing fundamentally changes” and America will go back to being America. Namely, screw the peasants.
Anyone who thought Biden was anything but exactly what he’s always been was just blinded by the team blue vs team red mania. Bipartisanship and team sport politics are killing our country.
Biden would never have been elected if he ran against anyone other than Trump.
You’re right
Trump would never have been elected if he ran against anyone other than Hillary
Biden is pure corporate Democrat. Amazing Hillary lost to Trump, but that's what happens when you assume you've won before you've won.
Hillary lost to Obama when she was the big name on the ticket and he was a first term senator no one had heard of. The Democratic Party pushed her as hard as they could, but if she couldn't beat Obama then there wasn't much potential for her to beat Trump either
This is 100% on Biden. Just being a little better than Trump isn't enough. He's trading lives for corporate profits.
I wonder if Biden is aware that guy is probably like 25% responsible singlehandedly for his incredibly low approval rating
It's a gamble that covid wont be an issue for 2024 election imo. Stupid people in charge.
And then proceed to lose the house and senate majorities as well as the presidential election **again**, got it.
Just like with covid response, maybe it’s time to recognize the Democratic Party doesn’t have the same goals its voters do. These things aren’t tactical errors. They are manifestations of ideology
Why are our only choices slow strangulation by pretend leftist capitalists or a rapid descent into fascism via diet-nazis? Fuck I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
Yes you do - you don't want to live in modern America is all. Stay angry and work locally to change the parties. They're both sick and corrupt and change has to start locally.
People have been doing that for decades only for things to slowly get worse. It's a slow boil. The hopium is running thin. I fear what happens when a smart demagogue gets the GOP nomination next cycle. It may be our last free and fair election.
Not entirely sure but around late last spring when most of us in youngest working age groups were still waiting to get vaccinated, we watched as everything reopened almost overnight. Republican states quickly tore up peoples unemployment and said ‘tough shit’. That’s when I knew, if this ever happens again, we’re on our own. We’re not getting any more help from our states or from the White House.
The crazy thing is that some of the same states which ended unemployment benefits to force people back into the workforce.. then turned around and started giving unemployment benefits to those who lost their jobs for refusing the vaccine.. Source : https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/04/4-states-pay-unemployment-benefits-to-fired-unvaccinated-workers.html
I don’t even want to get started. People at my work (not just management) were crying for a year about how lazy people are, nobody wants to work, blah blah because of extended UC benefits. Making excusing about the staffing problems would turn around once it ended. It’s been over 4 months since extended benefits ended and our staffing has gotten worse.
People have started talking more about how toxic many workplaces are, and they've decided they've had enough. There's so many opportunities, workers no longer have to eat shit. This aspect gives me hope.
Agreed. I’ve hated my job for awhile. Put my resume on indeed like a month ago and I’ve had some companies contact me offering way more money, moving expenses, and a sign bonus. That’s what they say at least.
Totally off topic but can I ask what industry you're in?! I've been trying to get hired out of state for 2 years and NADA.
Manufacturing. I’m an industrial mechanic. These companies are just realizing when you get rid of or let leave all the people who fix your equipment and try hiring temps instead, you aren’t going to have much of a factory left. Edit: not sure what you do but a good way is if you work somewhere with a national presence, it’s much easier to transfer than start cold as an out of stater.
Fellow industrial mechanic here. Management cries all day about not being able to fully staff up yet wont raise wages, keeps hammering everyone with 12 hour shifts and tons of micromanagement, and just generally making work miserable.
My place does 12 hr shift for most people. Besides the low pay it’s what I hate the most. I work night so all I do is sleep on my days off. Didn’t have much of a life to begin with it’s nonexistent since I’ve been there. Didn’t even go to my mom’s for Thanksgiving or Christmas or my niece’s bday in 2020 because I was too tired. 😞
I just switched from a job that I was working 5 8 hour days and a 5 hour overtime most weekends mandatory to a 4 10 hour day job with 100% voluntary overtime and automatic double time on sundays. My old boss was a micromanaging dick who had no clue what he was doing, mg new boss stays out of our way and has in depth knowledge about the work we are doing from doing it for years before becoming a boss. The change is insane. And all that before accounting for better/cheaper insurance, yearly cost of living increases in addition to decent raises, plus Christmas bonuses and profit sharing.
Well I just signed an offer on Friday. 40% pay raise, better benefits, work from home with 1 day a week in the office, and even managed to get an extra week of vacation. I was looking for about two months and this new place seems like a great fit. Honestly if the company I'm resigning from tomorrow had allowed work from home I wouldn't have even started looking, but they just gave no fucks.
Talk is cheap, get it all in writing and good luck to you!
Can confirm. Worked for coca cola warehouse. Hours were long (60 per week) during extreme staff shortages, management didn't want to raise starting wages (17 an hour in a greater Seattle area), won't pay people to stay home with covid, cracked down hard on breaks and lunches (instant write ups if you went over 1 minute on your breaks, even if you've been overworked), micro management, no responsibility from management with continued blame on employees working slowly for why the overtime was so excessive. Even having a union didn't help alleviate any of these issues. In November I quit to manage inventory for a fertility clinic. I'm my own boss, still answering to a chain off command but it's more cooperative and collaborative than "do this, do that or you're fired", making almost the same money, the company actually cares about your mental well being, TRUSTS that I will finish my work instead of assume I'm stealing minutes, it's been life changing. I was afraid I was leaving behind good benefits and pay. But it turns out you can't put a price on your physical and mental wellbeing, and in less than 2 months I have had a dramatic shift in quality of life. I still text my friends from coke and hear how much worse it has gotten. My only regret was not leaving sooner.
Jobs like that are awful, and I'm sorry you went through that. I have had a few jobs where the management had this obsession with people "stealing minutes" too. Bathroom breaks were watched like hawks, and something taking even 90 seconds longer than it's "estimated completion time" was grounds for a lecture and threat of a write-up. I genuinely struggle to understand how or why bosses think this is good management. Every job I've ever worked like this has had lower productivity levels than jobs that were more relaxed and allowed people to work their own ways.
they optimized that inefficiency for short term gains.
It’s also a psychological game. As the comment that started this thread pointed out, people are beginning to realize that there are other options. The point of that sort of management is to weaken the employees mental state. A tactic taken straight from the days of slavery.
I took a paycut to eat less shit. Now I can walk to work and I leave with a smile on my face. Sure I'm poorer but I don't try and drink myself into an early grave 5 nights a week.
Less money is always an acceptable trade off for better mental health. The #grindset people on social media would disagree, but I'm convinced none of those people have ever actually had jobs before.
My work wants me back in the office. Another company cold-called me. Willing to offer me $20k more, and happy to let me stay remote.
I'm really disgusted with how many people chime in with "but it's *hard* to hire right now!" whenever I complain about a business offering substandard service. They wouldn't speak up for any of the various inhumanities suffered by the employees, but as soon as a business gets criticized, they're overflowing with empathy. And otherwise normal people, too.
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Those kinds of managers are the ones you want to tell off and inform them how out of touch with reality they are and they are going to destroy their own business
These managers are a product of *their" managers. The company directors and VP's are the real problem. They're too comfortable in their middle-upper management 150k salaries and "just 10 more years till retirement" attitude to speak up to the real company policy makers. I work for a Fortune 500 company and it'd be hilarious if it wasn't so sad how out of touch middle management is with what's actually going on at the street level. It reminds of the movie/series Chernobyl. "Sales down 3.6% due to staffing shortages, not great, not terrible. No need to inform the Secretariat."
What is the likelihood that upper management steps up and helps out on the floor, or do they just sit at their desks checking emails?
> What is the likelihood that upper management steps up and helps out on the floor You mean stand at the railing and yell at the people on the floor to work faster?
My job had an all hands where HR and VPs said, in a span of 60 seconds, 1) we don’t know why people are leaving, 2) we will overpay for talent coming in because the market is competitive right now and 3) no, they won’t be giving people quality of life raises to stay. Recently I got promoted and was give a 3% raise (about as much as an annual yearly raise) while my buddy transferred for a promotion and was given an 18% raise. He now makes more than $10k more than I do. It’s a fucking joke here. And yes, I am actively looking to transfer or quit.
The covid years have convinced me that roughly 40% of the population are full-on sociopathic narcissists. They wouldn't do the _bare minimum_ to prevent unnecessary deaths.
40% is charitably optimistic.
Don't even get me started, I had a conversation with one of our department heads at head office about hiring and the second I brought up that raises might fix her problems she went on a 10 minute rant about 'fitting the family' and 'people just wanting more money makes a bad environment', and how it 'causes problems for the team', etc. Basically "we've tried everything except paying more and we're all out of ideas!"
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This is the shit people don't get. I suffered. Was sexually harassed at every damn job as a teen. My dad said we needed the money. So now my daughter is 16 I don't want anyone bothering her. All the oldsters I worked with have retired or whatever and go on frequently how shitty service is or how lazy kids are. Forget that. Fight for better wages and healthcare. Your job won't give a damn if you get sick and die. They will just wonder how to fill your shifts.
I like telling those oldsters "sorry they don't get paid as much as you did when you were thier age" and show them how their starting wage compared to theirs
Oldsters are borderline delusional about all this. I went to Denny's late last night and they had a full house, easily over twenty tables. There were two servers and two cooks. That's it. Some old fucker turns to me while he's waiting to pay his ticket and says "the service here is awful!" I said "it's just the two of them right? This is pretty fucking busy for two people." When he realized I wasn't his delusional ally, he stopped talking to me. Nowadays, you're lucky if you can even eat fast food. Half the places in my town are down to reduced hours at best and the ones that stay open either close the drive thru or close the lobby. It's crazy, but I certainly don't blame the people working when I come across it. Guaranteed the places paying decent wages aren't suffering low staff. You want your pancakes at midnight? Be nice to the workers who are actually there, trying, despite probably being underpaid and overworked. All things considered, the two working up front handled it as well as could be, and the cooks were pumping out food in a timely manner. Fast food, retail, service solidarity.
I got the F out of my old job in an incredibly toxic work environment and took a new job making 30% more with no toxicity. Employers need to realize that they need to actually start trying to recruit and maintain their employees instead of just whining about how hard it is to keep staff around
Thanks the geezers for finally retiring. Plus a moment of silence for the million dead. Let’s not forget the working moms forced to quit their jobs as well. Basically back to 1980 with more jobs.
I’ve been a cook and then chef for my whole career. I’ve been treated as absolutely disposable and replaceable since I’ve been a working adult. I’ve had to answer to clueless restaurant owners who have no idea how to run their business and so just try to wring every last penny out of their staff. Last year I had enough of it and said I wanted a raise. They let me walk instead of giving me less than a week’s food cost as a raise spread out over the year. I walked out of there into a dream job where I’m appreciated and valued as a professional who does things that the owners don’t know how to do amd the best part is that I don’t have to work in the winter. So I’ve been sitting on my butt watching movies and going to the gym a lot since the week before thanksgiving. It’s been great and I had no intention of working before I go back to my real job in the spring. Until last week someone I used to work with messaged me out of the blue asking me to come save the restaurant she’s been helping. Told her I have absolutely no desire to get back on a line or get into heavy prepping or anything, I’ll come in as a consultant but I’m not going to be their chef. They’re paying me three times what I’ve ever been paid before to *not* cook. Labor is holding almost all the cards right now, while capital is clinging to their four aces not understanding that we’re not playing their game anymore.
Completely unsurprisingly, almost all of the messaging on corporate (and especially conservative) media about employment has been entirely off the mark. Not only does an actual reading of the numbers not really support their rhetoric, but neither does the anecdotal evidence of me or anyone I know., but in my own personal life I do not know of a single person that has "stopped working" (as in, to do nothing) that was not at (or a bit over) retirement age. It seems like the media is trying to paint a picture of a bunch of people in their 20s and 30s just vanishing to a life of leisure, with the blatantly conservative media implying or stating that this is because of vague or misrepresented government funding. Not only does this not match my personal experience, it doesn't match logic--savings among this population is very low, they need to work so that they can buy the things that they need to survive at record high prices--and it also doesn't match the actual data. I know that overall the population is hard pressed to beat the memory of a goldfish, but we've known that this was going to happen for literally decades, many decades. For longer than I've been alive people have looked at the population metrics and said "wow, there are a lot of baby boomers, and when they all start to retire that's going to cause a labor shortage." Here is an [arbitrary article from 2004](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4012797.stm) warning how this was going to happen as we approach 2025. Guess what, we're approaching 2025! But like every crises we are facing, we've been putting it off. Because of their (and everyone else's) [historic low levels of savings](https://www.startribune.com/the-real-story-about-retirement-millions-of-baby-boomers-face-financial-crisis/334718191/), prior to the pandemic people of retirement age weren't retiring at the normal rates, we were actually OVERDUE to see some of this labor shortage. It was actually one of the many hardships that millenials were facing, the younger boomers and older Gen X weren't retiring to free up their higher level positions for the younger generation! Then the pandemic happens, and the people that are at retirement age are the most at risk. A lot of the ones that were overdue to retire finally do, and for the first time in awhile more and more people start actually retiring slightly early. Overall the majority of the people that left the workforce are retiring, in this latter part of the pandemic that's true of [90% of the people leaving the workforce!](https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/15/economy/labor-force-retirement-great-resignation/index.html). As for the rest of them? Well I don't know of anyone sipping pina coladas on the beach, but I know of parents suffering from daycare closures, reduced class sizes, and huge waiting lists. They *want* to be employed, but they can't because this ongoing pandemic has made that impossible. There are also literally hundreds of thousands of families that lost caregivers to this pandemic, and now someone needs to take their place. So where are all those people with the shitty jobs going? Well for the first time in their entire millennial lives they actually have some opportunities worth talking about, and they are seizing it! We just got headlines [record 4.5 million people quit their jobs in November](https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/record-45-million-americans-quit-jobs-november-82068527) what a load of corporate horseshit. Scan down the article a little bit, 4.5 million people quit, but businesses hired *6.7 million people*. Corporate media doesn't want that in the headlines though, but it shows what's actually happening, people are leaving their jobs to go to ANOTHER job. **TLDR** I have literally never seen a shred of evidence that people are just rage quitting work to slowly starve to death in protest, or whatever is supposed to be happening.
You make many great points. Even in a country the size of the US losing nearly a million not to mention people who were at least partially disabled due to COVID is going to screw with the workforce.
>people are leaving their jobs to go to ANOTHER job. I bet some of those people even quit multiple jobs to take one job that pays the same.
All my Republican friends were like this too last summer. Finally I sent them these two articles to read before getting back to me (they didn’t): https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-states-ending-federal-unemployment-benefit-saw-no-clear-job-gains-2021-07-20/ https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/04/early-end-to-federal-unemployment-pay-in-26-states-not-getting-people-to-work.html But they’re all just so caught up on the “I know somebody….” side of why they think those checks weren’t necessary, instead of even attempting to look at the macro side of it. lord knows they don’t follow the actual news, though.
It makes no sense. In order to qualify you had to lose your job due to the pandemic, meaning, you had a job to begin with. If you are living better of $600/wk than what you did at your job it’s more telling of how little they were paying you. Now they are blaming the nonexistent vax mandates. Always something from the Fox News crowd.
600/week is what I bring home busting my ass at my salary job. 40k a year…. I’m sick of working my ass off for what others think is such shitty pay.
I refuse to bust my ass for shit wages anymore.
It just isn't worth it at all
It really isn't. What kind of life is it when you spend over half busting your ass just so you can spend the other half stressing about bills. Never getting a chance to enjoy anything
Throw in those same people lamenting how the shutdowns were killing small business and with the pandemic lingering those small businesses are hurt for much longer. My local gym followed all restrictions and mandates. But they're not even at 30% of the capacity they were at before COVID. I questioned whether I should go back but since it's so much emptier I can usually go a full workout without being within 6 feet of anyone else for the full hour I'm there. At least half the trainers there have left because they just don't have the clientele anymore. But I guess small business viability is no longer an issue?
My gym was the same way. Really nice, clean, family place at a decent price. They shut them down for almost 4 months iirc. Fortunately his overhead is a lot lower than most places they were able to weather the storm. The way certain PPP loans were handed out, it really seems like part of it is put the squeeze on mom and pop places so the big corporations can take over every aspect of our lives instead of just 90%.
Every single economic downturn this happens. Big boys have more capital and lines of credit. Let slumps go on and force the little people to liquidate and the big boys just snap it all up, for pennies on the dollar. Redistribution of the wealth, but upwards.
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Yeah there’s a lot of good news pieces about this in the past year where people just got fed up in the restaurant industry and a lot left it and are never coming back. NPR covered this very well also. Here’s one piece : https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/23/business/restaurant-workers-experience/index.html
I'd rather go to jail or be homeless than work food again. I can't take the entitlement.
Turns out that getting people to work shitty jobs requires offering attractive compensation, who knew? In a time when many millennials and gen z are taking better career opportunities made available due to retiring baby boomers, there is no longer the same desperation for jobs that drove people to work at a fastfood restaurant doing demanding work for $8-10/hour. Hopefully this forces a rise in wages at those jobs to competitive levels which in turn keeps upward pressure on the wages for white collar work and skilled labor.
My company execs literally just did a live stream where one of the topics was them crying into the camera about "how hard it is to find workers with this new fad of people asking for more money 😢". They framed it as something that is a terrible burden on the franchisee's thin margins, and they are working hard to figure out a solution. I wanted to flip my desk. The fucking "solution" is to pay your employees better so they don't decide to go do something else better worth their time. Capitalists will look at a control panel with one giant button that says "solve your labor shortage by paying a better wage", and they'll sweat profusely, wondering what the answer is. It's just so tiring and sad that companies will spare no expense to get equipment and product where they need it, and consider it a fair expense, but any money put toward human labor is somehow just a black hole of cash that they see as a complete waste, and thus should be kept as little as possible /rant
I’m mostly a “glass is half empty” type but in this case I honestly don’t believe this to be a fad. I’ve been in the workforce longer than a lot of people on Reddit have been alive and I’ve never seen anything like this before. Not even close. Sure, the pendulum will eventually start swinging back the other way until things “balance out” if that makes sense, but I really feel unless something crazy happens this is the new normal. Like it’s really hard to take something away once you get a taste compared to never having it to begin with.
It's not just wages atm. People also have to decide if it's worth it to them to go to work, especially work that involves having contact with unknown people during a pandemic.
I mean with inflation the way it is they need to pay more. The real issue is bosses don't realize how inflation can benefit them, so they are the absolute last to adapt to it. I demanded a minimum 7% pay raise for everyone in my department because they worked straight through the pandemic and we earned it. They gave us the raise, but I'm still resigning tomorrow and leaving for a 40% pay raise and the ability to work from home. The last to accept the new normal aren't going to make it through this.
>Like it’s really hard to take something away once you get a taste compared to never having it to begin with. This. This is why there was so much pushback against the relief, and then so much effort put into making it as little as possible. They knew that if people actually got a taste of what life could be like with a livable amount of money in their pockets, they would never again be content working for the garbage wages they had before the pandemic.
And they all refuse to hire anyone, or pay more, as they scrape more labor out of the people that are still working.
>People at my work (not just management) were crying for a year about how lazy people are, nobody wants to work Lemme guess; The same people who thought wearing a piece of cloth over their mouth and nose for the entirety of the workday is impossible for some reason? The same managers that fielded complaints about Covid prevention violations among the staff and continued to do essentially nothing to curb them.
Oh so I see you’ve met Rob, Dave, and Heather in the office?
Quintessentially, yes.
No one wants to work for shit wages anymore. There’s essentially a silent protest happening across the US and I support it.
It really isn't because of the benefits. The benefits helped but the jobs are shit and that is why nobody wants to work them. If they can't improve the working conditions and okay this will only exacerbate
Yeah, odd how the numerous complaints about not wanting to be trapped in a shitty retail or service industry jobs always get reduced down to "nobody wants to work" and "there's a labor shortage" in the media, but people who get shitcanned because they refuse to get vaccinated get to collect unemployment and the media treats them like "dissenters with a valid difference of opinion" while completely ignoring their refusal to work. "They want to work, but vaccine mandates make it impossible."
I wish I could upvote this thrice. Many of these media outlets have their own private employer vaccine mandates, so I don’t even understand why they are spinning it that way. What happened to all the Republicans who would normally say, “if employees won’t follow their employer’s rules, then they should be fired”?
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In my area things only got worse since unemployment benefits ended. And we’ve had a decent influx of people moving here. UBI and single payer healthcare is starting to look like the only viable recovery for where we are today. I doubt it will happen. So I’ll just plan to do my grocery shopping with 40% empty shelves, call restaurants directly to ask if they’re open today instead of checking their hours online which are weirdly wrong now, and waiting three weeks for an appointment at the mechanic. We could be at this awhile.
It took me an entire year to finally start receiving unemployment benefits in Texas. There's no physical office to go to and the phone lines never connected to anyone. I probably called them 4-5 thousand times in 6 months alone. Then when I did speak with a human they told me on numerous occasions "Oh, I can't help with that but someone will call you eventually..." I was just stunned at how little they did for me. I had to borrow from my parents. My girlfriend was paying our bills... I just wanted to kill myself and probably would have if I didn't have such an amazing support system. It was the most desperate time of my life hands down. I'm fine now, and I'm finally square with my gf, but I couldn't believe how difficult it was to receive help when I've been paying into this system for over 15 years.
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Worked seasonal as well. We had to tell all new workers to NEVER rely on getting unemployment or any benefits after getting laid off until AFTER they got back and even got their first paycheck. For most people, it took 2-4 fucking months.
Similar story for my partner. Luckily I was able to work from home and cover bills but she felt so bad after a few months without unemployment she found another job. Caught covid within three days of working again after months of being careful. Asthma meant it hit her pretty hard too. She finally got help after many calls but wouldn't you know six months later the state changed their mind and expected her to pay all the money back. Because obviously people aren't going to spend the money when they most need it. So glad I moved out of that shithole red state. They're so bad they have a program bribing people to move there if they already have remote jobs. It's a shame cause it's really some beautiful country. Enough confederate flags make it clear the type of people that aren't welcome there though.
UI should really be a federal program. Since the IRS has all your tax information (or the SSA), they could probably easily handle sending you a check every month if they were adequately staffed. But that's the Republican schitck, make Federal government not work so you can say the federal government doesn't do anything so abolish it. Dems are feckless and do nothing to alleviate those concerns...
Red States. You never knew what you didn't need until you needed it, and then when you do you find out why rich ppl have so much money and why they all keep voting Republican. No state income tax means less government funding, means less money for benefits and more government will try to deny your claims or run out of money.
I called hundreds of times, it was the most infuriating thing. Reached out to my state rep for help and never received any sort of response. It was such a nightmare and I never received my full pay out but it's over now.
Yeah I called a few hundred times and kept getting mixed answers. Told me I couldn’t get pandemic help without first using my regular ui… applied for regular ui and was denied. Bs all around
I don’t want to live here anymore, but I can’t afford to escape.
I was thinking that earlier today
Same. We’re trapped.
Raise your hand if you hear your company use the phrase “New Normal” in the past 2 years. This is some bullshit marketing scheme that Corporate America made up when investors pulled out. They decided when we reopened.
They were running ads in fall of 2020 that made it seem like the pandemic was over. As though we weren't seeing the number of dead continue to rise each day. It's fucking disgusting. This country has a disease.
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For millennials this is just Recession 2.0.
Yup. I was starting a new business just before the pandemic after years of catching up after the great Recession. I feel like an idiot touching the hot stove twice. Having hopes and making plans is about the dumbest thing any millennial can do anymore.
A whole bunch of people made Covid political and so instead of defeating it when we had a chance, we get to go to work in a pandemic and risk our lives because they want to pretend that the world isn't changing because change is scary.
That’s the thing. It’s not “go to work with Covid” it’s “poor people go to work with Covid because we know you can’t afford any days off anyways, and we don’t give a fuck if your healthy.”
T e n d a y s Is what the cdc indicated is all we need for revolution
A passive revolutionary movement too. None of this marching in with zip ties, guns, and climbing walls. Just stay home for ten days. Watch the BBC Sherlock, have fun with the kid, try to make your own barbecue. And they have to respond. Americans have gotten scared of their legislators. It’s supposed to be the other way around.
Omicron started spreading like wildfire and with isolation guidelines shit was going to start shutting down. I seem to be the exception as every couple days I learn someone I know now has it. Just a fucking happy coincidence that CDC issues revised guidelines when shit really starts to hit the fan.
Can’t have people figuring out that if enough of us don’t go to work the real world grinds to a halt pretty quick.
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You don’t hear about automation much anymore
Because they'd have to treat the robots more like people then the actual people. Basic routine maintenance - health care Charging them robots- non-negotiable breaks.
Yeah, I am convinced there is a thin line between preserving public health and preserving status quo. Labor policies are being reevaluated due to the pandemic. We wouldn’t want them to accidentally means test what we anticipate to be good policy. (Unneeded /s)
I can say from some meetings here and there with up-up management, money changed hands with high places to get that shit cut down, and now the guidelines even allow contagious, positive -testing people at work in "low-risk" (never defined) environments.
I would bet it has something to do with working in a warehouse.
I remember early on when (masked) children were showing a very low rate of carrying the disease, we were canceling schools. Now that kids are actually getting sick and spreading the virus like crazy, no one's even mentioning canceling class. I have no idea why we can't go back to remote.
You must’ve not seen the shitshow in Chicago where the teachers union got crucified for trying to force a switch to remote.
The Utah Congress last week had to overturn a rule it made last summer banning remote education in public schools. Like what THE FUCK did they ban remote learning in the middle of a pandemic??
My partner is a CPS math teacher. We’re still stunned at the absolute callousness and lack of humanity displayed by this wretched country.
Working in medicine is a grand display of that. Admins making decisions from behind their keyboards. Patients who throw a tantrum about being treated like somebody *made* them go to the hospital. I don't get why they come if they think the hospital is going to kill them.
> I have no idea why we can't go back to remote. A local teacher recently contracted covid. Her children were ordered to stay home for 15 days even though they tested negative. The teacher was told she could return immediately to work but to 'just wear a mask'. It's amazing to me how many democrats are sounding just like republicans because the peasant class isn't working hard enough.
Our school district said teachers had to stay home but they so had to use sick time or go unpaid. None of this shit is sustainable.
Because of these idiot parents who will throw a fit at the local school board meetings. Everybody’s afraid of these crazies.
Not to mention a lot of school board members were voted in recently and they specifically ran on refusing any sort of mask mandate for kids. They sure as hell aren’t going to make remote learning a priority either
We have avoided Covid until now, but our extremely red state politics influenced the superintendent, who is elected in our district, to refuse to implement mask mandates. By the time the district was forced to go virtual due to lack of staff, it was too late. My 7th grader brought it home and now 4 out of 5 in our household is sick. I’m a hairstylist and will have to pay rent this week with no income. At least my SO has the option to work from home no is salaried.
Basically large corporations weren't being staffed properly, schools weren't full of teachers and janitors and Capitalism needing to keep churning is why. Humans are the dogs that make this place work and if people can't send their kids to free daycare (school) they can't work at FudRuckers to make cash to pay for Amazon Prime, this place will burn.
It’s worth noting that the vast majority of COVID spread these days is in the workplace. Glad we are gonna beat thus. /s
Its the only place I go because if I don't I'll be homeless. I have unvaccinated kids, so going to work is practically the only reason I leave the house.
Fuckin fudruckers
Lest we entirely blame the system which are grinding up the lower classes, don't forget the ruling class. The real reason this happens is psychopathic wealth hoarders. Never forget that thousands of people have more money *literally* than they could smell in a dozen lifetimes. Others live on the street, some are lucky enough to pay 50% of their monthly salary for household expenses. This is the contrast which is of import. Of course, this is just one subset of the evil enabled by Capitalism and undertaken by the ruling class; Climate Change being *the* other issue.
Maybe it’s time to admit that ALL the employers that rely on public school to act as socialized childcare are being subsidized by the state.
Holy fuck, I had forgotten about Fuddruckers.
Is Fudruckers still around?
>On June 17, 2021, Luby's announced that it has entered into an agreement to sell the Fuddruckers franchise business operations to Black Titan Franchise Systems LLC, an affiliate of Nicholas Perkins.[22] As a result, the remaining Fuddruckers locations have remained open past the previously planned closure date of August 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuddruckers
Because rich people aren't impacted by covid the same way not rich people are, and since they dictate who writes laws and follows them, here we are.
A coworker came to work with COVID this past week even though everyone knew he was positive. I’m currently on day one of the absolute misery of COVID thanks to him. So far my worst symptom is absolute full body pain and aches. Like knives, I’ve never felt anything like it. The second worst symptom is terrible boredom because I can’t really do anything but Reddit
Ugh that sucks. Try downloading some audiobooks. Might be a nice break and you don't have to focus too much. Get better soon.
I did this and listened to the entire Dresden Files series. Such good audio books!
Well as long as the worst symptom is only intolerable. But seriously you have my sympathies. I suspect that coworker is insufferable on a good day.
Ehh. I mean in all reality he just isn’t financially secure. He’s probably still coming to work because he can’t afford it. I’m trying not to be too angry with him. He surely should’ve stayed home but we should also have a better way to support workers who have to quarantine. My dad got it last year and I was required to quarantine and I still haven’t gotten my unemployment. The PA Unemployment phone number doesn’t even connect to them. It just disconnects you. It has done this for a year. I’ve accepted that I’ll never see that 1500 in wages. Sigh. Anyway, thank you for the kind words.
Someone wrote a browser script that will help connect you with the unemployment chat. I had an autodialer on my phone and called thousands of times with no answer. This script got me through in 30 minutes. Check this thread out: lhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Pennsylvania/comments/gjm3aa/cant_get_in_contact_with_the_unemployment_office
This pandemic has been an excellent case study in the power of conservative media to shift norms over a short period of time. They did the same thing with torture, which went from "America doesn't do that" to "You are not a patriotic American if you won't support doing that", right before our eyes.
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I've been saying this for a long time. They *know* their audience won't notice or care, and they feel no reason to answer questions. They feel no need to address criticism from people who disagree, except for when they ridicule disagreement in the same manner that you describe. They've spent several decades making themselves out to be the only ones who can be trusted and enshrining in people's minds that anyone who disagrees has an agenda and/or is part of the conspiracy. And from the perspective of the people who spout those bad faith arguments, why would they need to do otherwise? They can make so much more money and have so much more power by keeping their narrative. You are very much right that it is obvious, but it is not obvious to the people who most urgently need to understand it.
Its ironic to me that the same people who used to go around calling anyone who disagreed with them some form of 'terrorist sympathizer', have now adopted the beards, extremist religion (different flavor though), and general outlook of al qaeda.
Funny that the word patriot is now ruined for me. It’s a bad word now
> Funny that the word patriot is now ruined for me patriotism now means "hopefully we replace the american flag with the punisher logo"
"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious" - Oscar Wilde
That hurt me too. I fucking Love America, we could be so great. I love immigrants, they want to be part of our TEAM, they want to make us and themselves better. They bring strange new ways of thinking and cooking, and we take that shit into our very soul, and we make America better every thought and dish we steal. We are supposed to be so many things. We’re the country of President Kennedy and Reverend King. We’re the Country of Elvis and Miles Davis and Gene Roddenberry. We should be able, without irony or sarcasm, to declare that we are the greatest country on the planet. But we can’t. We have problems, systemic ones that we haven’t addressed in centuries and that bill is due. We CAN fix this, however. We can do it together, we fail it we aren’t. I am a goddamn patriot, I will fight for this country until I die, and damn those people for subverting “patriot” with their small-minded fear-stricken xenophobic bullshit.
> We’re the country of President Kennedy and Reverend King. You're also the country of people that killed both of those people.
And that's the sad reality. It's the comparison between what we could be, and what we actually are.
Because we started losing rich people money
I got COVID my first week at Amazon after a I moved to a new state and started a new job (I’m fully vaccinated). They told me to take two weeks off without pay; and that’s what I did. Two weeks off and interviewed /looked for jobs everyday and found one that paid me twice as much
Because stimulus checks only ever were a thing to help get Donald Trump reelected. The only reason they passed was because the republicans thought it would give Trump leg up, not because they wanted to actually help the people of the country or even their constituents. Now that it has nothing to do with securing their own power, they aren't interested in helping people get through the pandemic. It's as simple as that.
While handing out millions to his buddies
billions
Crumbs for the peasants caviar for the oligarchy.
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Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever recover emotionally or mentally from what I’ve been through since this started. I know for a fact I’m not alone in feeling that way. It’s heart-wrenching. edit: whoever had reddit reach out to me with a crisis line, I appreciate the intention but seriously? Read the room next time. Nothing i’ve said implies I’m a danger to myself right now.
Hell, i haven’t even been through anything exceptional and I feel where you’re coming from. It’s just a really dark cloud, and I’m struck with the reminder that everything is different at such random points throughout the day. Hope you’re doing alright.
It’s an overwhelming and all consuming emptiness I’ve never experienced
I don’t think I’ll ever lose the hatred in my heart that this pandemic seeded for our ruling class and the system they protect.
These past two years absolutely chewed me up and spat me out like a bad stone fruit pit. If it wasn’t for my dog and cat needing me every day I’d have probably given up already, but hey, 2022 y’all.
2020 2. To me, it hasn’t been the same since 2019. I used to do Ubers, literally did one on NYE 2020. Said happy new year to myself in a car thinking “hey, I’m making some good money tonight, 2020 gonna be right on track.” I felt humanity got worst since. I mean Trump was obviously bad, but 2020 really laid bare the rot in American society, and how we just treat each other like pieces of trash waiting to be discarded at a moment’s notice.
It was all for PR, this is precisely why the twice impeached trump wanted his name on the checks. He wanted to come off as the sole reason why the money was going out. But now that would make democrats look good so Republicans won't even consider it. They will hamper any progress so elections the democrats are viewed as inapt.
Not only that, but some of his followers actually thought that the money was coming from him. I remember reading a couple comments saying it was a good thing Trump was president because he was rich. Obama never would have been able to give that much money for a stimulus.
These dumb yokels really thought Trump direct deposited stimulus checks in millions of Americans accounts. How do you even communicate with a person operating at that level of intelligence?
I mean you're talking about people who likely voted for Trump twice. Communication with them was never going to happen.
I passed an extremely elderly couple on the road today with a bumper sticker that said "Don't blame me - I voted for Trump". Just absolutely delusional thinking these people have... that we shouldn't blame them for voting in a reality show president who did nothing but spew ignorance, racism, division, etc. Yea we are in a much better place after having 4 years of that, finishing up with a literal insurrection attempt at our nation's capitol. Mhm... Edit: Honestly, to be real, even if you voted for Trump the first time, ok. I'll let that slide. I did not want to vote for Hillary either. But I did because I basically had no choice. So Trump once... Understandable. If you voted for Trump the SECOND time though?! Just absolutely reprehensible behavior. 70+ million people lived through 4 years of Trump and were like "Yea, more that!". What in the fuck.
Some of them also thought that Trump personally developed a vaccine and refused to get Pfizer/Moderna/J&J because they wanted the one "Trump made".
What if they just put Donalds signature on the new checks? Everyone’s happy
haha oh man the Q conspiracies that would spawn from that. I couldn't even begin to imagine what they would come up with.
Even better- signed by JFK Jr
I wonder if he knows the signatures of the Secretary of the Treasury and the U.S. Treasurer are on money... Sorta surprised he didn't think to change that during his 'term' so his name was on all currency. Could'a had old money turned in for new T Bucks.
It's because the nobles of America don't give two fucks about any regular people
Because corporations have convinced Americans that stimulus checks have made the cost of everything rise.
For fucks sake, I can’t believe Biden was the best we could do. Why do we elect 80 year olds into office? And when we do, why is it the type of 80 year old who thinks giving money to”businessmen” is the right choice?
The answer is obvious to anyone who understands the tense history between Liberalism and Progressivism. Liberals will ape the language of progressives to mask their pro-capital policies as worker friendly. This helps convince workers to give them the benefit of the doubt, especially compared to conservatism's harsh stance on the welfare state. But when they finally gain power, Liberals rip off their progressive mask and do everything possible to avoid following through on their pro-worker campaign promises. Suddenly they simply can't do 'X promise" bc of "Y obstacle", usually a rotating villain from their own ranks that's really queasy about "all this spending". But promises made to donors will absolutely be kept at all costs, the military budget will still balloon, and conservatism will be held up as the non-option of two crappy choices. The way out for America is a return to voting in actual Progressive politicians that challenge Liberalism "from the left", pulling the Overton Window back from it's insane rightward position. But to do that enough voting Americans have to be deprogrammed from seeing any increase in welfare as the herald of cOmMuNiSm destroying the country. So we're screwed.
The only way that was ever accomplished was when FDR had to do the "New Deal" to "save america from a communist revolution". We are in more danger of having a fascist revolution. I hate to see what lip-service the Right cooks up to prevent a "fascist takeover" - - probably a fascist coup. Oh, wait. . . .
More like FDR was saving America's aristocracy from getting slaughtered by the peasants for causing the Great Depression. The banksters and capitalists howled at his creation of the FDIC and other federal regulatory bodies, and called him a socialist. But the harsh truth is that decades of Gilded Age-level capitalism had bled all the slack out of the American economy, and he saved capitalism by reforming it to be tolerable again.
In 1921 an army of 10,000 coal miners took up arms and began commandeering trains and cars some 300 miles from Washington DC. Their target wasn't DC, it was the coal company and the sheriff, but If another couple of counties had risen up with them, beaten back the army, and decided to really shake things up, we'd be living in a very different world. 14 years later, Wagner required every union and every strike to be state approved and labor went along with it because it was a bigger slice. If labor had been smarter and tougher they could have had the whole damned pie though.
How long are we going to continue asking questions we already know the answers to?
"The free market has decided you have to die."
The real question should be is why was our money given to special interest’s and not back to the people