If you don't like your boss or your work or think you're discriminated against (or think that everyone above you is there just because of "privilege" - stop whining about it and form your own company. What, that's too hard? Don't think you can do it? Well, there's only one way to find out. Do it. And if you fail, try again. If discrimination is so all pervasive, you ought to be able to find thousands of others who want to go with you at this new venture. Because presumably none of them want to keep on being discriminated against, either.
You want to blame me for all of your problems because I'm a white male and so make a convenient scape goat, despite my having nothing to do with your problems - well, fine, I'll take FULL blame. It is ALL MY FAULT. Now what? You going to just sit there and whine about it or are you going to do something about it?
So get out there. Found your company. Look into others who have done so. Do business with them. Support each other. Make discrimination by others irrelevant. Be your own boss. Just be prepared. It isn't easy, but the rewards are great. And eventually, you'll know you've made it when you find that YOU are the one others are complaining about as being discriminatory. "Oh, she didn't promote me because blah blah blah."
If I could have one wish right now, I'd wish for women to be the one's in charge of everything. Let's have a matriarchy. With minorities in charge at the top. See how well they do. I somehow doubt the world will be all that much different. But at least someone else will then have to watch everything they work hard for dismissed as just the product of "privilege." And someone else will get to take all of the blame for the world's problems. Maybe then someone will idealize the day when the white men were in charge.
Either way, I'm going to put in my 40 hours, go home, and spend some nice quiet time with my family and enjoy what really matters in life.
Now excuse me while I go ferally chew up some pillows.
Reminder
12 years ago
5 comments:
But, back on topic...
I was one of those peons who had the experience and tenure in a job, so everyone came to me for help before going to a supervisor. The main reason for that was because our supervisor was an asshole. And because I DID know what I was doing. It was frustrating for me having to tell people the same things over and over again. Either they didn't want to learn, or weren't capable of it, I don't know.
As for me, I never wanted to be management, so I remained as high a level of peon as possible ;)
dood, what the heck are you reading lately? Whatever it is, it can't be good for your blood pressure.
I just, like 10 minutes ago, finished reading Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Erenreich. Have you read it? So great. She really gets into these issues, of how low-wage workers are opressed - not by individual white guys, but by limited mobility, lack of affordable housing, chlid care & health care, certain management techniques, etc.
And while I agree that self-employment and entepreneurship are great, they are not going to be within everyone's reach. And just because someone is not able to work for herself or found his own company, doesn't mean that they should be exploited. It would be nice if we could count on individual business owners and large corporations to do the right thing and pay their employees a living wage and not work them into the ground - but history has shown that not to be the case. So there should be protections, and part of figuring that out is doing an analysis of where worker opression & explotation stems from.
But yeah, I do see your point that it's fruitless to just take the analysis and use it to say "Wah!" Personally, I'd like to see us wage slaves revolt by just staying home for a week or two. Since 60% of employed people earn less than a "living wage" (as determined by the Economic Policy Institute), if we all stayed the hell home from work, I think it would attract some serious attention to the problem.
How to motivate that is beyond me though.
I read that book - Nickeled and Dimed - I liked it, though I thought there were a few problems with her technique - she deliberately opted out of work she could have made more money on.
I liked better how it was done by the guy who did 'Supersize me' - he had a series on TV called '30 days' where people would do something for 30 days, a fish out of water, to learn something - one episode had a guy who was pretty hard on muslims after 9/11 (and who was a white christian man who looked like a marine) move in and live with a young muslim family AS a muslim, doing the services, learning about islam. It was pretty interesting. Another episode had an atheist mother go live with a Christianist family that belonged to a megachurch.
But I digress. The first episode had the guy who did the series himself (I'm too lazy to look up his name now) go with his fiance to live for 30 days on minimum wage - much like Barb, except that they didn't limit themselves to pure minimum wage - his fiance got a job in a coffee shop for better than that and he got work doing yard work that also paid better. The net result still wasn't great - he injured his wrist and in some ways that was the biggest lesson - they would have done ok - not great, but at least scraped by, if not for that - the ER visit ate up all of that and then some - being uninsured sucks. Essentially he was charged $50 for a 50 cent ace bandage and then later he got a bill for over $500 for xrays.
I don't much like employers who exploit workers - I think a living wage would be wonderful - I think people need to learn the big lesson from Henry Ford - the assembly line was only half of his story - the other half was that he paid his workers far more than others because he recognized that for cars to sell, you needed to have people out there who could actually afford to buy them...
There are so many things you can do to get out of low wage work - get an education, form your own company, move to a different area where there is more work, retrain, etc. Not all of those options are easy, some are particularly hard for some people. But the point is, the options are available. Some people just need a kick in the tail and the realization that it IS possible to get out of poverty if you work hard at it. If you are able bodied, relatively young, and of at least average intelligence, there's no excuse for you not to be making more than minimum wage. I'm sorry, there just isn't. Even if there are strong biases against you, you just need to deal with it. The world does not owe you a living - it would be nice if it did, but it doesn't.
I think half the battle is just believing in yourself enough to really try, and to not give up if things get difficult.
I know it can be hard to retrain - I switched careers - it was hard -working, going to school - but I recognized my old career had no chance because of outsourcing - so I left it for a new one. I'm happy I did it.
And ok, as I said in the other comment, I was grumpy when I wrote this post and the other one. It is one thing to recognize that there are obstacles out there, such as racism, sexism, etc. that are unfair. It is quite another to simply whine about them all the time instead of doing something about it. So if there's racism and your race is the target, well, that sucks, but that's no excuse for you not to try to do better anyway. If anything, that ought to motivate you to do so just to prove the racists wrong.
There are enough non-racist, non-sexist people out there now that it should not be too hard to find a good job somewhere, regardless of race or sex. The main ism most people have anyway is money-ism - that transcends racial and sexual boundaries. (And is why I take all the claims that women earn so much less than men with a grain of salt - if Women truly did only get paid 70% of what men did for the exact same work, greedy corporate types would have fired all the men and hired only women a long time ago just to increase profits.)
Ok, I'm all over the place in this reply. Suffice it to say that life isn't fair, it is not fair in different ways for different people, and if you want to have a better life for you and your family, there are paths to do it. It sucks that more people don't take them (or that some can't). But complaining about it won't fix anything. Getting up and making your own fortune, however, can make a difference. Every one person who does that can hire 100 more who didn't (or more), but who went looking. Not everyone is an entrepreunuer, but then maybe you just need to know one and help one and you can succeed that way (Like Wozniak with Jobs).
A lot of what I get reading all of these sites on racism and sexism is the impression there are a bunch of people sitting down and bitching about horrible things are, about how pervasive all the isms are and how nothing really can change it - so why bother doing anything except complain about it. If you really want to stick it to the patriarchy or whatever, why not go out, found a company, make billions, and run your new 120,000 employee corporation the way YOU think it should be run? Sure, not everyone can do that, but if even just ONE of them does it, think of the difference that would make to them, to those 120,000 workers, and to everyone that follows.
Maybe it is just venting, and I know that can be healthy, but I don't think it is healthy to vent all the time about the same damn thing. I mean, sometimes I just want to say to the monitor "yes, I get it, all white men are evil scum. Now can we please move to another topic? This one is getting boring fast." Of course, then I realized that I can do that myself - just stopping reading those sites that do nothing but the above and then wash, rinse, repeat. And then I went to my daugther's second birthday party.
What i found amusing was in discussions with feminists about male access to domestic violence shelters and rape counselling its all "why don't you build your own". When it comes to wage gap suddenly that logic doesn't apply?
When China dominates the world, then the complainers will have to come up with something different.
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