Take This Job And...5

Having a job is not a privilege.  It is a right.  But the way the market for employment is arranged it always seems like a privilege.  You have to perform throughout and if you make one little slip during the interview you're out.  We have an obligation as well as a right to work.  Try convincing a prospective employer who is going to pick whomever he bloody well pleases.  If he doesn't like balding men or women who wear glasses or faces with acne scars or assertive trans women who can force him to hire you?
Our very survival depends on work.

That is the problem.  In order to have food on the table today and tomorrow, in order to have a table and a home to put it in we have to trade off our time, energy, sweat and emotional wellbeing, in effect our very souls, working for not necessarily grateful bosses and all for the privilege of waking up in the same bed the next morning that we went to sleep in the night before.

A boss will pay you whatever they want and get away with it so long as it is no less than the legal minimum wage.  It doesn't have to be a living wage.  It often isn't.  If you can't survive on your earnings learn how to budget.  Move to a cheaper apartment.  If you can't afford an apartment share with a roommate.  If that isn't possible then go live on the sidewalk or in a low barriers shelter and get your food free at the food bank.  If your health suffers and you die prematurely think of it as a boon to lowering the global population.

If our elected governments are going to remain lackeys to global market capitalism then they are going to be reluctant to enact reforms that will guarantee an even distribution of goods and wealth to the people who elected them.  Wages will remain low and even artificially depressed as long as the market thrives.  Only, how much longer is the market going to thrive when there are going to be so few who can still afford to buy anything?

Several times a guaranteed annual income for all Canadians, of around $15,000 a year has been recommended. I love this idea.  For the first time in our lives we will no longer have to be entirely beholden to a fickle employer just to have a room to sleep in, much less a house with a yard.  Employers, often business owners, loathe this idea.  They imagine that they would never be able to find anyone who isn't a temporary foreign worker to work for the shit wages and humiliating treatment they have to offer. 

If we do manage to break out of the survival work prison we will also say goodbye to the notion that anyone has the power to blackmail us into lifetime servitude for the simple pleasure of living another day longer.

Chronic low pay causes so many problems: a poor quality of life, poor nutrition, poor health, low self-esteem and social isolation among them.  In my occupation of mental health peer support work we are chronically underpaid and for this reason we cannot really flourish in this kind of work.  Only subsist.

And this kind of chronic underpaid servitude can't be realistically expected to do much to enhance our experience of mental health recovery.