These people are struggling to get by on poverty wages, yes. But they're also fighting for change.
You ever notice how coverage of low-wage workers tends to focus
less on their efforts to change things than on the details of their poverty? Sarah Jaffe weighs in at the
Washington Post with an incisive piece about that phenomenon:
It’s a particular kind of emotional labor that we ask of these workers. In addition to the strength and courage to tell the boss, to his face, that you’re walking out because you’re sick of how you’re being treated, we demand that you perform the role of the poor person for us, and we squabble over the right things to do for you. Our discourse on poverty is fed by stories of misery; it gorges itself on tales of cracked ceilings and no heat and feeding the family on a few dollars a week. But this is just another way that the poor must prove themselves “deserving” and for the better-off to feel righteous for helping them. [...]
Rebuilding the social safety net is a good start, but something more powerful would be a real understanding that we’re all in this together.
I heard that understanding in the voice of Alex Shalom, another low-wage worker who stood up for himself and his co-workers against his boss — this time, his boss at Bank of America. “I think people need to know that tellers are just cashiers with ties on,” Shalom told me, placing himself squarely in the same movement as McDonald’s and Wal-Mart workers.
And more:
- Just to highlight that there's a gender wage gap everywhere, male babysitters charge more than female ones even though there are hardly any male babysitters.
- So Target has this awful anti-union video that its employees have to watch, and I keep trying to write about it and then starting to hyperventilate. A book could be written on it, basically. Here's part of what Hamilton Nolan had to say:
The video drones on for 15 minutes, as Dawn and Ricardo plod through various dire consequences of unionization. "You could come into work one day to find union protesters telling our guests not to shop at Target," Dawn says. "And how could that possibly be good for anyone on our team?"
I dunno... higher wages and better benefits and improved working conditions? Notably absent from this video is any discussion of the fact that the primary reason Target does not want any of its employees to unionize is not because it fears a loss of its precious "culture," but because it fears having to pay higher wages and provide better benefits and working conditions. I don't know how that bit was left out of the script. Quite an oversight.
- What's It Like To Raise 3 Kids On $9.49 Per Hour? Watch And See.
- J.C. Penney fired a worker for telling the truth about its fake "discounts." Even though their fakeness is a pretty open secret.
- As the financial industry moves to limit the hours its junior employees work so that they don't, like, die, Sarah Leonard explains what's behind this culture of overwork:
... these hellish on-call conditions do not exist because Wall Street’s work is so vital. They exist because financiers sustain their untouchable status by insisting that their work is vital and that they're the only ones who can do it, that the world might stop turning if they took time to eat, sleep or call their mothers. Long hours are a source of self-worth for banking employees, and that’s one reason why bankers themselves are set to resist the new policies. Wall Street's "masters of the universe" believe that they are, and employ, the smartest and hardest-working people on earth (thus the hauteur with which they address regulators and Senate committees).