Amerika

People do not necessarily attain a happy life through the process of work. This verity holds for people who have a reasonably pleasant group of coworkers. It even works out this way if the worker gets some pleasure out of the type of task they work on. Not every job is Hell, but no job exists that is an ascension to Heaven. The entire COVID Theatre, with the attendant lockdown/lockout charade, has revealed all of this to a bunch of people who did not know that work was not the primary purpose of existence.

A large group of previously malleable workers is now a lot more brittle. The workers no longer want to adapt themselves to their work. They now want their work to adapt to their needs and desires. Corporations such as Wells Fargo and Exxon lack experience in dealing with a motivated resistance to work requirements they have grown accustomed to levying. The Great COVID Debacle made this obvious because these corporate behemoths made employees work remotely.

Meanwhile, schools, daycare centers, and other places where working parents sent their children closed their doors and returned the children home. Families that sent both parents to work now had to feed and care for children. Parents often had to stand in as educators as well. Americans now had to learn many facets of how humanity existed for maybe 6 centuries prior to the widespread emergence of public education and two-worker families.

This altered the subtle web of social ecosystems that exist in Crowdist Amerika. Parents discovered that they actually could take care of their children and manage the places in which they lived. These parents realized how little they were actually gaining by having their children taught by the incompetent and unmotivated education bureaucracy. Some families unplugged from The System and decided things were both more manageable and more pleasant on the wrong side of Hadrian’s Wall.

The workers sent home from incarceration developed the desire to escape the modern workplace. We all have many desires. The workers also needed both agency and means to make this independence happen. Karl Marx’s Reserve Army of The Underemployed could lay siege to the jobs and living standards of anyone recalcitrant towards their beneficent and generous employer.

Here the Welfare State accidentally sabotaged the equilibrium it existed to buttress. Welfare bribes the poor not to burn Chicago or Los Angeles. Take the Manna away and the incapable and unmotivated get hungry and angry on a compressed timeline. Simmering resentments burst into flame. The cities burn soon afterwards. #BLM and Antifa are just excuses. The hatred of the outsider towards the legacy culture is forever present. Those not in the club will grasp at any opportunity to indulge violent desires.

COVID-19 had all of these people stuck at home with free time and unquenchable hatreds. The government took out the swag bag and bribed all of these people to such an extent that the benefit levels outstripped any actual value an employer could realize from having these people at work. The COVID-19 relief package has put an artificial floor under wages. Any employer still willing to hire has to offer 1 cent more than the benefits plus the transactional costs in time, money and materials a worker incurs from going to work.

These foolish policies have forced the United States into a paradoxical state. Amerika’s economy suffers because declining unemployment is still high, inflation runs rampant, and vast numbers of jobs remain unfilled.

Since people are being paid a decent wage to stay at home and not work, a lot of them just say “Thanks, Dude!” and call it a day. They can also take the baksheesh not to riot and then double-dip. They go to the employer and ask for a reduced cash wage at the level they negotiate at their real worth. Finally, the employee can leverage this advantage by asking for additional benefits or conditions that are more favorable rather than demanding more money.

It is at that point where they can tell a formerly powerful boss “Remote or Resign.” This will lead to at least a temporary renegotiation of how employees and employers interact. The real hope consists of everyone actually rethinking the entire value of work and careers. COVID-19 and short-sighted and desperate governmental policy have combined to give the average worker far more leverage than I have ever remembered having as just some resume in a big, tall stack.

The next leg down needs to be aggregate demand. We have all lived with just a little bit less since the COVID-19 LARP became official policy. Maybe less can equate with good. People have time to decompress, people have less crap to keep track of, and parents and children are actually around one another enough to decide whether they want their families to work out well.

A person who needs less also experiences a lesser requirement to work and earn. A person, who possesses less, also has less to protect and insure. If less is still comfortable and sufficient, it can become vastly preferable to more. The content individual with less is the individual with a certain stoic’s might. This is the right to tell some hard-blowing management meatball “Remote or Resign.”

Tags: economy, jobs, work