Like, you want janitors and McDonald fast food workers and cleaners.
You just don’t want them to make a liveable wage and have healthcare and be treated like proper human beings.
People who work in an air conditioned office all day sincerely do believe that those jobs are both less important and not as exhausting.
a job being ‘exhausting’ doesn’t make it important, janitors and fast food workers are paid less bc their job doesn’t take any real skill – like basically anyone can do it
not everyone can be a lawyer or a doctor or run a successful business, those people worked hard and learned new skills and gained useful knowledge so their end job would pay more and not be physically exhausting
stop shitting on people who earned a good life because you aren’t being given one for free
ugh
I work in a hospital. It’s also the worst flu season in recent years in my hospital. You know whose job is one of the most crucial for EVERYONE, doctors and medical staff included? Janitors. Go ahead and try to have a safe working environment, ESPECIALLY in the medical field, without them.
Tell me, do you know how to best create a medically safe work environment? Because I sure as fuck don’t, but the janitors do, and they know this while being on their feet and performing manually exhausting tasks for 8+ hours straight surrounded by caustic chemicals.
Same goes for fast food workers. Do you have any idea how much knowledge and physical work goes into working in a kitchen? Wanna tell me you put out grease fires, what temperatures different foods are stored in, and how to keep a safe working environment for both customers and workers in a job surrounded by hot oil, ovens and chemicals? Not to mention, again, being on your feet for 8+ hours in a hot kitchen being yelled at by customers constantly.
I promise you that these people do a more difficult and oftentimes more important job than a large portion of office jobs I’ve been in.
Fun fact: In my neck of the woods, hospital janitorial staff union wanted a pay raise. Their workers were struggling. The hospitals laughed at them, so they went on full strike.
The hospitals were in crisis mode within an HOUR.
Surgical rooms were not being cleaned, toilets and patient rooms were not cleaned, garbage was not picked up, instruments that get reused were not being cleaned (i.e. scalpels, patient beds), laundry wasn’t done, floors were not clean, biohazard waste wasn’t collected.
The hospitals folded the next day and the union got EVERYTHING they asked for.
Now, you may not work in a hospital @purest-rain but wherever you do work, just imagine what might happen if… suddenly no one cleaned. No one picks up the trash in that fancy office. No one vacuums or sweeps, or cleans anything. Nothing. Not the toilets, not the offices. It might take a little longer, but pretty soon, those fancy law-offices look pretty gross, don’t they? Especially the bathrooms. I’ve cleaned bathrooms, I know exactly how disgusting people are when they use a toilet they don’t have to clean.
Stop shitting on low-wage workers just because you don’t understand how important their job actually is. You cannot simultaneously demand a service, while dehumanizing the person who provides you with it, and demanding they not be compensated fairly.
I love people who think anyone can be a janitor or a fast food worker. I mean, I guess, sure, but would everyone do it? My father is an insufferable snob when it comes to people in minimum wage positions, so I can’t imagine him scrubbing floors if he lost his lofty job in his field. It would just be so below him, I think he’d rather go on unemployment.
Minimum and low paying manual jobs make the world go around. People who pretend they don’t and can be done by anyone should try working in one for a while and see if that changes their tune.
-VWorking as a cleaner was hands-down the hardest job I’ve ever done.
People love to tell me that the scientific job I was doing last must have been “so hard” because I was working 14+ hour days, because it required postgrad qualifications and so many technical skills, and because I was often in charge of making sure the most critical system in a multi-million euro experiment stayed working for the thousands of other scientists who relied on it 24 hours a day.
Compared with cleaning, it was a walk in the park.
I’d say I was about average fitness back when I took this cleaning job at 20 years old, but the gruelling pace they expected us to work at was beyond my abilities. I’d be so exhausted after just a 4 hour shift that I often didn’t have the energy left to walk home after, and I’d need to rest on a bench outside for an hour before my legs could support me enough to stand and waddle home like a zombie.
I was almost constantly ill – from the pressure my supervisors put on me, from the exposure to so many strong chemicals and germs in confined spaces, and from the exhaustion of fast-paced manual labour. But I couldn’t take time off because they valued my job so little. Anything less than perfect performance would get me replaced immediately.
In the end my supervisors decided to let me go because I was too slow.
I gave it my all, including my health, and I still failed at being a cleaner.
It’s one of the hardest jobs out there. It’s bullshit to think that anyone could do it, and I have a massive amount of respect for anyone who does, and contempt for anyone who says it’s easy.
I work an ‘educated’ impressive sounding office job and I am not afraid to admit that I absolutely could not do most of the worst paid jobs.
I have worked in a corner store, a restaurant and a cute local bakery and I was fired from each job because I couldn’t keep up with the pace and the physical demands of the job and the constant pressure of doing 5 jobs at the same time while doing complicated sums in my head while getting shouted at. That cute local bakery left me with scars from the ovens, wouldn’t let it its employees take more than a minute to treat burns and was incredibly abusive to its workers who were mostly teenagers. I was so so happy to get fired from each of those jobs because I was crying every damn day.
My office job? Still exploitative, still forced to sell my labor, but fucking paradise compared to those other jobs.
QueerAnarchism 