“Business owners around the country are offering up a lament: ‘no one wants to work.’ A McDonalds franchise said they had to close because no one wants to work; North Carolina congressman David Rouzer claimed that a too-generous welfare state has turned us all lazy as he circulated photos of a shuttered fast-food restaurant supposedly closed 'due to NO STAFF.’
Most of these complaints seem to be coming from franchised restaurants. Why? Well, it’s not complicated. Service workers didn’t decide one day to stop working — rather huge numbers of them cannot work anymore. Because they’ve died of coronavirus.
A recent study from the University of California–San Francisco looks at increased morbidity rates due to COVID, stratified by profession, from the height of the pandemic last year. They find that food and agricultural workers morbidity rates increased by the widest margins by far, much more so than medical professionals or other occupations generally considered to be on the 'front lines’ of the pandemic. Within the food industry, the morbidity rates of line cooks increased by 60 percent, making it the deadliest profession in America under coronavirus pandemic.
Line cooks are especially at risk because of notoriously bad ventilation systems in restaurant kitchens and preparation areas. Anyone who has ever worked a back-of-the-house job knows that it’s hot, smelly, and crowded back there, all of which indicate poor indoor air quality. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Environmental Protection Agency recommended increasing indoor ventilation to fight the virus, but such upgrades are costly and time consuming. There is no data available on how many restaurants chose not to upgrade their ventilation systems, but given how miserly franchise owners are with everything else, one could guess that many, if not most, made no upgrades at all.
Ventilation issues are deadliest for line cooks and other back-of-house jobs, but there are other reasons why food workers’ morbidity rates shot up. Food workers are much more likely to be poor and/or a racial or national minority, and poor people and black and Latino workers are much more likely to die of complications from the coronavirus.
Restaurants are often intentionally short staffed, making it difficult to take time off, so sick workers likely still came to work (and infected others in the process). Bars and restaurants are COVID-19 hotspots, and service workers and customers alike get sick after prolonged restaurant exposure. The difference is that many of those customers have health insurance and other safeguards to prevent them from dying of the illness; 69 percent of restaurants, on the other hand, offer their employees no health benefits at all.
When coronavirus is spread at restaurants, and restaurant workers make little money and rarely earn health benefits, it’s no wonder morbidity rates are so much higher for food service workers. But rather than collectively grieve the deaths of tens of thousands of the people who serve us and keep us fed, and keep such tragedies in mind when considering the state of the food-service industry labor market today, business owners and their political lackeys call these workers 'lazy.’
There are, of course, also living, breathing people who have decided they do not want to risk their lives for $7.25 per hour and no health benefits. That is a perfectly rational decision for the homo economicus to make. Given how dangerous restaurant work is during a viral pandemic, if restaurant owners really wanted more workers, they would offer living wages, health benefits, and adequate personal protective equipment. But all the wage increases in the world won’t bring back the dead.
There aren’t enough people working in the service industry, and service bosses have somehow turned that into our problem, into something we ought to be ashamed of. We shouldn’t fall for it. Profits accumulate because of labor — without workers to exploit, the owning class can’t get richer. Capitalists cannot exploit the labor of the dead, so when large swathes of the working class die, they turn their ire on the living.
This is a barbaric response to mass tragedy. Workers across the country and the globe are dead or grieving. We shouldn’t risk further tragedies for a paltry minimum wage.”
The police caught and arrested him.
But despite the heinous and violent crimes he was credibly accused of, he was released without bail. He was free for three months AFTER police discovered that he was abusing 12 underage black girls.
Chrystul Kizer was raped and trafficked by this man for years.
this isn’t an old post; the screenshot has a typo: her hearing is scheduled for february of 2020 and if she is convicted as charged she will spend life in prison. she will likely never be granted clemency. her case and the court are far more stacked against her than they were for cyntoia brown, who regardless still spent 15 years in prison.
im gonna build a decoy sephora and whenever someone walks in all the doors and windows lock and they have to listen to my hour long crash course on spotting fraudulent “skincare”
ok heres a SNEAK PREVIEW of my crash course consisting of the most common kinds of bullshit i see people falling for
-gold and pearl do NOTHING for your skin. they just sit on top being useless and at most provide some cosmetic shimmer. a product with gold/pearl has a higher price for no reason. not only that but companies Know these ingredients are useless so if a company is purposefully misleading the public with bogus advertising that means that everything else about their product should also be regarded with suspicion
-dont take the marketing teams word for what an ingredient does!! example: ive seen companies add extracts from “desert plants” to moisturizers and claim that since desert plants dont dry out, theyll keep ur skin from drying out too. this doesnt make any sense if u think about it for more than 10 seconds, but it sure makes for a pretty ad!
-topical collagen is useless! collagen isnt absorbed through the skin, its an enormous molecule, it just sits on ur face doing nothing. like gold and pearl, its a useless ingredient that serves only to hike prices up
-beware of vague promises! if something says it will “rejuvenate” or “revitalize” or “wake up” your skin its bullshit. those words dont mean anything! some decent products may use those words in marketing, but if a product exclusively uses vague terms, or provides “data” like “80% of women saw more invigorated skin” thats a warning sign for bullshittery
-check the ingredients list. a product may prominently advertise that it includes [CURRENT FAD INGREDIENT] but where is the ingredient? once you get near the end of the ingredients list, the quantities of those components are so miniscule that the feature ingredient probably wont provide any benefits at all
-get some ph strips and test ur products. average healthy skin ph is around 4-5 (slightly acidic) and maintaining that ph is important for everything from protection against infection to maintaining moisture. most of ur products should be neutral (7) or slightly acidic. chemical exfoliants might have ph as low as 3. chemical exfoliants have different optimal phs so do some research on yours.
-for the love of god PLEASE dont use scratchy physical exfoliators !!!!! if you want physical exfoliation use something gentle like a konjac sponge. i also had a scrub that used rounded grains of rice as the exfoliating element and that worked well. dont scrub your face super hard and try not to exfoliate every day. be nice to your skin please !!!
thats all for now stop by your local strange, slightly unnerving, brand-new sephora for more info
