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March 10th, 2020 | Non-fiction |
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I'm not going to pretend that I know more than trained medical professionals or anything, because I don't. I'm a stupid boy. I know that. I love/hate it. Please follow whatever guidelines for the Coronavirus. I will however, always pretend/proclaim loudly and proudly that I know more than capitalist fucks running corporations, or at least the middle management crusty layer of shit that effectively runs the day to day for any wage worker. I have the benefit of seeing from the inside how a retail food store as well as a large goods producer are handling the Coronavirus issues from the standpoint of their employees. And quite frankly it looks like absolute shit. The number one take away is everyone agrees "stay home if you're sick." This is obvious, this should be the standard operating procedure at all times, forever. It's not, which sucks, but that's a whole other thing. Right now, many employers (not all, which, again, fucking sucks) are giving their employees paid leave for being sick. But companies saying "unlimited paid leave if you're sick" is them also saying "because this virus is contagious while being asymptomatic, please continue to come into work every day until you finally show some sort of symptom and go through testing, at which point you will have exposed everyone in the workplace to the disease, as again, it can be transferred to others with no symptoms in the carrier being exhibited. once you have successfully shown symptoms, you are free to claim your sick time. until then, business as usual." From the standpoint of keeping people healthy and safe, it's a disconnect, clear and concise, and it's simply because stores need labor to stay open. They can't be proactive and say "go home, fuck this place, whatever. your life is more important." Instead they say "oh you kept coming into the shop and interacted with hundreds, maybe thousands of customers during each shift and got sick, that stinks! we'll cover a week or two for you to take time off, that's basically nothing for us anyway." The business is the most important thing, must keep the business running. Must stay open, must sell more shit. Are you passing along a disease in the process? Who cares, we have numbers to hit. A lot of companies are also saying avoid events with 100 or more people. Sure. But it's kind of weird because if you work for a major corporation...their workforces or customer bases serve more than 100 people at a given time. A lot of corporate offices hold way more than 100 employees in the building. Any retail grocery store will have more than 100 customers in it during peak times, let alone staff. The people in charge are effectively saying "yeah there's no way that our people or our customers could have the disease without knowing it, obviously, so keep coming to work. we'll all be safe at work. however, because the rest of the world, the selfish assholes who don't work or shop here, they could have the disease without knowing it, avoid mixing with those people. the not-working-here or not-buying-here people, because even though the disease can be carried by a person for up to 2 weeks with no symptoms displaying, there's just no way any of our people or our guests could be in that bucket, but we can't make the same promise for the randos wherever the fuck you go besides work." It's...I don't know. Dystopic? Come in to work, you'll be fine. If you're sick, stay home! But otherwise come into work. But also avoid large crowds, even though you might technically work in a "large crowd." Also the disease can and has been passed with no symptoms in the carrier, so, I don't know, just hope you don't get it? Fuck. What a fucking awful shitty thing. I'm quitting my job this week, fuck this shit. |