Workers Of America... Never Mind...

The world is a very wicked place, all too often. Nowhere is this more visible than in the workplace. Each of us is expected to do useful work in our lifetimes. That's how our society works, and here in the United States and the West, it is an inherent part of our culture. Good works is part of our national consciousness.
That's the way it's supposed to work.
That's the way society wants us to believe.
However, do not think for a moment that hard, and even harder, work will get you ahead.
I've written that class structures exist because we allow them to, and those very structures are as immovable as mountains. Nor would they allow themselves to be moved.
Outside of many professions, the bulk of our workforce is now concentrated in what is called “service industry”. The work done in these industries is there to help others in some form or another. An interesting fact – this is a cycle of sorts, because the service industry often services itself.
Workers within this industry enjoy many levels of employment, but too often they are not viewed as people. Let me explain, and I’ll explain it based upon my own personal experience. For years, I worked as a support person within the customer service arena. Early on, it was drummed into my head that I was lucky to get the job; that for every employee there were perhaps as many as ten people who wanted that position. No doubt this was a scare tactic of sorts, because at least it had the effect of reminding you that you were replaceable. Whether or not it was true at the time is not the point. The point is it worked. You had to stay in line or you were replaced.
To my employer at the time, people were a commodity. Upper management never viewed anyone lower than middle management as people most of the time. This made it easier for them to make the tough choices, so I was told. If an entire project had to be shut down, and you had a few hundred people looking down the barrel at unemployment, it was best to not view them as “people”. They were “things”, numbers on a spreadsheet. They might as well have been office furniture; they were simply another cost.
Large service companies, in short, do not want “people”, all of their protestations aside. They want “automatons”, robots who simply understand commands.
What is the worker to do?
This is going to sound harsh; just deal with it, because this is the society we’ve allowed to come into being. We have been manipulated into believing that big business and government has our best interest in mind. Horse hockey. Who’s to blame? Well, who allowed this to happen? Don’t think too hard, America.
You see, that’s the problem to begin with. We just prefer not to think these days. We let our media decide for us, with flashy/trashy ads during election time and feel good programming the rest of the time. There is no such thing as a truly public forum to question our leaders, both governmental and business, at least one that isn’t managed; sorry, no tough questions for them. It’s all staged.
In the past, there was always an alternative in workers groups, such as unions. Nowadays, they are faltering as well as corrupt. They are both ineffective and scarce today.
This leaves it to the employees to do something on their own. If you think that will work, let me throw a figurative wrench into the works – it is called outsourcing. Today, the service industry knows that there’s not just ten people waiting to fill your shoes, but perhaps a hundred or more in Asia and Eastern Europe. If a company feels that they can save money (the usual excuse) by outsourcing, they will. Unabashedly. Usually brazenly.
All in all, this puts everyone in the service industry in a very uncomfortable position. You are, in short, being held a hostage of your own needs. You need the money, and they know it. Economic blackmail is such an effective tool, and it works both for government and big business.
And we allowed it to happen.
What can we do?
Just sit back and enjoy being taken for a ride.