cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29037456
I feel like this is relevant to the sub. If not, feel free to remove.
These people live in the delusion of the 1950’s being a Golden Utopia of America. Minorities knew their place, gays stayed in Narnia, women kept their mouths shut and stayed in the kitchen, kids were mindless obedient extensions of their fathers, and everything was just… Perfect.
Except for the high income taxes. Fuck that.
It’s been clear from the start that they only want to make things ‘great’ for greedy cunts.
I see these MAGA morons getting excited about the return of high-paying manufacturing jobs, because they have absolutely no Critical Thinking Skills, and they haven’t asked themselves the most basic question - if corporations have the opportunity to rebuild the manufacturing base in America, why would they recreate the model that sent manufacturing overseas in the first place? Wouldn’t they use this unique opportunity to create an entirely new model? And would that model benefit the workers, or the corporation?
The simple facts are, there will be two models in the new American manufacturing environment. The first will be factories that will rely heavily on automation/ robotics, and need very few humans. The second will be modeled after Asian sweatshops, with low pay, no benefits, forced overtime with no OT pay, child/teen labor, no health/safety/environmental regulations, etc.
The MAGA Nazis know this, but they are still selling the fantasy of high-paying factory jobs that even a stupid MAGA can do. I get that, they are disengenuous to the core, but why aren’t Dems or the media screaming about this, and asking MAGA Nazis in every interview?
So they’re saying they want us to die on the job. That might be okay for some but I still want to at least pretend to retire before I croak
The worst job I ever had had was right after I got out of the military and went home. I needed a job and a buddy of mine worked in a place that made custom logo hats and jackets for various businesses. His job was to ship the finished products out. The job I got was on the floor sewing the little cardboard backing that the hat bill is sewn onto. I did this for a summer in an unair-conditioned room full of mostly older Asian women that were quite demanding about quality control. The repetitiveness of it was truly maddening.
And “rest of your life” means you dying from work related health issues at fifty, of course.
If you make it there; you won’t have a union and labor protections will be struck down in kangaroo courts, OSHA safety requirements being insufficient or insufficiently enforced were already a main driver of people not wanting to work these kobs–and that was before the current and future dismantling of OSHA related rules.
Also, how are you going to get 90k when federal minimum wage is what is was in 2009? Many of the southern states have even passed “counter-wage” laws forbidding the state from passing it’s own improved min wage law–truly hateful of the average person.
Is OSHA really enforced? My only dealing with them was 20-years ago somewhere in Chicagoland. We were new there and I went to the office to ask what job safety requirements looked like for us cable guys. They stared at me like I was an alien. (And BTW, encounters like that are why conservatives are all, “hell yeah! slash them jobs! fuck the gubermint!” The older you get, the most BS stories ya got. I have some positive ones from my local redneck city!)
The main safety driver, from my experience and current POV, is worker’s comp insurance. Employers do not fuck around with rising insurance rates, or getting sued. A worker’s comp investigation can be expensive, then come the higher rates. Employers want to show every way they’ve trained you, given you safety gear and trained you some more.
If you blatantly ignore the training and procedures, and get hurt, no comp for you. Perfect example is Lowe’s “safety knife”. Nope, can’t possibly hurt yourself with it, but you can barely do your job. They turn a blind eye to those of use who bring our own box cutters, but insurance ain’t paying if I split my finger open. (Well, they might, but if it came to litigation, they wouldn’t have to. And shouldn’t have to.)
tl:dr; Worked in the payroll industry. Worker’s comp insurance is a way bigger deal than most know.
My hometown is famous for stonework. Gravestones, mausoleums, etc. Slabs of granite weighing tons are moved around on cranes, over the heads of workers, suspended by thick nylon straps that fray over time. Straps that are not replaced until they are much too close to snapping.
Whenever someone would get inevitably injured, or killed, the town “Powers That Be” industry agency would scramble to inform the owners of businesses to prepare of OSHA’s arrival. And most times, OSHA wouldn’t show up at all, due to “under staffing.”
I worked in this industry briefly in my mid 20’s. I saw live wires in puddles of water, no hard hats, no steel toed boots, or respirators to avoid silicosis. My high school girlfriend’s father died from being crushed by a stack of slabs tipping over, and crushing him, from the waist down. No one knows how long it took for him to die, they found him a few hours after he didn’t come home.
10 years after I left that nightmare, I saw a guy I worked with then missing a hand. It had to have been crushed between 2 slabs.
