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it’s so weird to see businesses try nonsense to stay open amid a pandemic, ex gamestop arguing they are “essential”, because otherwise they will cease to exist. what if — hear me out — labor was not held hostage by wages, and this entire scenario endangered no enterprise?
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there is an alternate socialist present in which non-essential workers just get time off during the pandemic, or are incentivized to retrain for essential work to expand critical capacity, but that time off doesn’t force businesses to shutter because rent doesn’t exist. after the pandemic, imagine just going back to work. the restaurant is a little dusty, but with a flick of the switch and a few hours cleaning, you’re serving food like nothing changed.
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@garbados some German politician suggested something similar:
now that people in the hospitality industry are out of a job, how about they go harvest vegetables, now that we can't have seasonal workers from Poland come in
my suggestion is that we make all politicians with racist policies do that.
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@garbados Where can I sign up?
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that's exactly what happened after WWII. Exactly.
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@garbados once we've done healthcare we need to do real estate.
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@garbados In the current capitalist present, the incentive to retrain into essential work is survival.
Don't know what more y'all would need.
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@emsenn what
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@garbados Today, in the real world, every "non-essential" worker is actively being "incentivized" to "retrain for essential work" because their food, shelter, clothing, all of it, is currently threatened.
If "death" isn't incentive to do something, I don't know what would be, unless you are continuing to adhere to prioritizing white imperial values over the real world.
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@emsenn maybe i am just too sleepy to parse this. we are always under threat to commit our labor or die. it’s not that we need a better incentive than death but that there’s no reason a more humane way of it couldn’t exist, where the incentive wasn’t death.
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@garbados it's hard trying to speak up about this because people are so used to the status quo that they can only view things from a perspective of the current state of affairs. Like, yeah, restaurants are probably going out of business over this and people need to pull stunts to stay afloat.
But that's because we built the system like this. We can build it a different way. This is not ordained by nature, we're free to choose differently!