Shrinkage

It was almost a corporate mantra for the months of Covid – No one wants to work! Over and over you heard or read it, on the news, on podcasts, in blogs, on the radio, and from business owners themselves. 

People just didn’t want to work anymore. 

Them lazy people were just happy to suckle on the government teat and ride easy street. 

Easy Street, in this case, is a dark boulevard with no working lights, with deep potholes, with shuttered houses, and with a few shady characters that give you a hard look as you pass. 

Yeah, sure, OK, people ‘got rich’ off of aid from Covid…mainly cheating business owners who worked the system to get Covid payments. But sure, I will accept that some folks took a seat and cashed checks as they hid from the virus. 

See, here’s the thing though, I don’t think anyone really ‘got reach’ other than those business cheats. 

Did they survive, maybe do ‘ok’? 

Sure, I’ll grant that. 

But, having been on aid before, it’s not a huge check you can go live it up on. I refuse to hop on the ‘Welfare Is Evil’ train and claim that there are welfare mamas having babies to raise the money they get. 

I won’t get in those weeds. 

Sorry. 

Anyone that is ‘getting rich’ off of aid is working the system and they are a cheat, and saying those folks are the same as others who NEED that aid because of whatever legitimate reasons they have is like saying that Donald Trump is the same as every Republican…which is also not true. 

This cartoon about how people were living it up by not working was nonsense. It was a lifeline that, even if people clung too when they didn’t necessarily need to, helped keep people from getting a virus we are still learning about. I had it, it sucked, I get the fear and trepidation. 

If people don’t then they were either lucky enough not to get it, or not get it very bad because it was nothing to mess with. 

Let’s be REAL honest, NONE of us want to work. 

Not really. 

We want to do something, something that engages us, enriches us, and gives our lives meaning and purpose. 

Sure. 

Those rarely come from a job though. 

Being mad that folks didn’t want to put their health and very lives at stake to get us a hamburger, or a pot roast, or a beer is silly. Being surrounded by people who you have NO way of knowing if they even bother to wash their hands or wipe their butts isn’t great in the first place but during a global pandemic?

GIRL!

What Covid did was throw a big bucket of ice water on all of us and our society. 

We saw that our wages don’t match with inflation. 

We saw that the way we are treated as workers and how much the higher end of the spectrum makes and realized that oh, wow, this isn’t working anymore. 

We’re at a time when we realized that we’re worth more. 

And business doesn’t like it. 

At all. 

Prices went up and never came down. 

Most of us are back to work but nothing changed. 

Did the execs suddenly get pay cuts or demand them?

Nope. 

The rest of us worker bees were expected to put our health at risk, to take the pay they offered, and to shut up while the higher ups were in closed offices in virtual meetings, bemoaning how people don’t want to work. 

There was a moment where industry and business could have said, you’re right, we need to fix this, and everyone agrees to lower pay at the top, to distribute it to those beneath, and to work on finding ways to make both sides happy. 

The middle. 

I get that that’s not our economic standard here, but what if we tried it?

It’s not saying CEOs and the like won’t still be rich, but they’ll trim money off that means less to them than it will mean to those beneath them, and they’ll all look like heroes. 

Ya know who people like to work for?

Nice people and heroes. 

This didn’t happen though. 

Instead, jobs were cut, positions were cut, and now we get the creep of automation in other aspects of the world. 

Look, we all know that ‘the robots are coming’ because we can’t help ourselves. 

We want things quicker, cheaper, and with less interaction with one another. 

I am no better than anyone else on this. 

Maybe worse. 

We will do it because we can do it. 

As we see AI enter the arts and take jobs from journalists and force the question once more of What Is Art as automated art is created as well. 

Companies want no one working for them so they can keep all the money with the handful of execs and the board and shareholders. 

The idea of the American Dream and American Ingenuity is a farce. 

It’s a fairy tale we woke from. 

Greed is alive and it is everywhere. 

It’s as if people sense the end is nigh and they want to do whatever it takes to make whatever they can so they can, what, have more cars when the end comes?

Madness. 

All of it. 

We complain about people not wanting to work. 

About socialism and its evils. 

About how spending is down but inflation up. 

We rant and we rave but we won’t do the things to protect ourselves, our businesses, our way of life, and of each other. 

Instead we push one another down to get to whatever imagined finish line we think is out there. 

We have devolved so much of our humanity that we just don’t care about one another enough to care if the next person can eat or has a place to stay. 

We shrug. 

We tell them that that’s what aid is for as we talk about how everyone on aid is a crook. 

We tell them to get jobs when our daddy’s or family friend got us our jobs. 

We are a nation of hypocrites that are downsizing the workplace until no one will have jobs and we’ll all be homeless and looking to one another for some answer that no one has. 

Who did this?

Why?

Because. 

Because somewhere along the way we decided it was Us and Them and we divided into our groups and walled everyone else out until we felt we needed more categories, more enemies, and fewer allies. 

We’re a mess. 

We did this to ourselves. 

Because we’re greedy and afraid and that’s all there is to it. 

Greed and fear.

And there’s hope, always hope, because things can change. 

AI and robots are power tools and like any tools they can be used for good or they can be turned into weapons. They should be used to make jobs easier, not to take jobs away. 

To make creativity easier, or different, not to remove it entirely. 

They aren’t the villains, no, it’s the people that see them as a way to cut payroll and pad their own pockets. 

But maybe in other hands, wiser hands, maybe with wiser people we’ll see past this and see one another again and that maybe if we stop expecting everything on demand we can get what we want, how we want it, and it can keep someone else in a job.

We are literally all in this together and if we don’t stop cutting everything we’ll eventually find that we’re cut out too.  

…c…