Noticing Work (hat tip: TJ)

I try not to shop on holidays because I don’t think stores should open on those days and force their employees to come in, unless we’re talking about some absolute necessity—like movie theatres, for example. Yes, people like the convenience, and employees may like the extra holiday pay if that even still exists. We’re so used to being able to walk into supermarkets and chain stores at all hours that we tend not to think about the requirement that someone be standing there at all hours to serve us.

But in the atmosphere of open disdain for work and workers that has built up over recent decades and is about to be grostesquely exaggerated by the incoming regime, what might once have looked like an idiosyncracy now becomes a political act. The parade of squillionaires about to seize the reins of government promises to further impoverish average people who have no savings, no stock portfolios, no pension guarantees, and nothing but their labor to keep them afloat. Trump, who built a business empire by cheating banks and stiffing workers out of their pay, will usher in a glorification of stinginess and egocentrism and inaugurate a mass nose-rubbing of people of modest means by the delighted finance octupi with which he has surrounded himself.

Throughout the Clinton-Bush-Obama years, whole swaths of the populace saw their lives systematically destroyed by business-friendly “free trade” deals and were told basically to suck it up, that “the economy” was doing better than ever and if they weren’t, they should just get retrained—perhaps as an “associate” at Walmart. Disdain for the yacht-less didn’t originate with Trump, but it’s about to get a lot worse.

As an antidote, I plan to make a daily effort to express appreciation and respect for the everyday tasks by workers who are being put in the crosshairs of the GOP parasites who are determined to take away what little they have left and transfer it to their own and their cronies’ pockets. It’s a small thing, but not an insignificant one as we usher in the next Gilded Age.