for major repair

A post by @/alyssa_merc, showing a screenshot of a text conversation with Mike Mercante.

Mike shared a picture of the LGBTQ+ pride flag, with the caption, "Think of me as the pole. I'm not part of the flag, but I am straight and I will support you."

The response to this meme was "Hell yeah dad".

Alyssa's comment above the screenshot was, "Based dad".

"We'll fire you if you tell others how much you're making" The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 specifically protects employees who discuss their own wages with each other (you can't reveal someone else's wages if you were given that information in the course of work, but you can always discuss your own or any that were revealed to you outside of work duties)

"If we can't fire you for [discussing wages/seeking reasonable accommodation/filing a discrimination complaint/etc], we'll just fire you for something else the next day." This is called pretextual termination, and it offers your employer almost no protection; if you are terminated shortly after taking a protected action such as wage discussion, complaints to regulatory agencies, or seeking a reasonable accommodation, you can force the burden onto your employer to prove that the termination wasn't retaliatory.

"Disparaging the company on social media is grounds for termination" Your right to discuss workplace conditions, compensation, and collective action carries over to online spaces, even public ones. If your employer says you aren't allowed to disparage the company online or discuss it at all, their social media policy is illegal. However, they can forbid releasing information that they're obligated to keep confidential such as personnel records, business plans, and customer information, so exercise care.

"If you unionize, we'll just shut this branch down and lay everyone off" Threatening to take action against a group that unionizes is illegal, full stop. If a company were to actually shut down a branch for unionizing, they would be fined very heavily by the NLRB and be opening themselves up to a class-action lawsuit by the former employees.

"We can have any rule we want, it's only illegal if we actually enforce it" Any workplace policy or rule that has a "chilling effect" on employees' willingness to exercise their rights is illegal, even if the employer never follows through on any of their threats.

"If you [protected action], we'll make sure you never work in this industry/city/etc again." Blacklisting of any kind is illegal in half the states in the US, and deliberately sabotaging someone's job search in retaliation for a protected action is illegal everywhere in the US.

"Step out of line and you can kiss your retirement fund/last paycheck goodbye." Your employer can never refuse to give you your paycheck, even if you've been fired. Nor can they keep money that you invested in a retirement savings account, and they can only claw back the money they invested in the retirement account under very specific circumstances.

seated tickets at concerts are not:

- tickets for people who didn't get standing tickets in time

- standing tickets with the option of having a little rest when you're tired of standing

seated tickets at concerts are:

- for people who aren't physically able to stand for a whole show

- for families who don't want to get separated

- for fucking sitting

if you wanted to standing and got sitting, grow up and sit down

... yeah.

Not quite as annoying as the bouncer at a comedy show who told me "We don't do that for sold-out shows*" about the ADA request for a booth that I'd been told by email months prior was totally fine and going to happen, but very close.

Nigerian Pride 🏳️‍🌈🇳🇬

Originally, I went in worried the opposite would happen. Growing up, I've been taught that Nigeria, the country, is homophobic. (I was born in America.) But over time, I learned that there's tons of other queer Nigerians; some are out, and some are in the closet 😭.

I'm also not used to this much attention, lol

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

Men are not inherently Evil

Everyone has the capacity for evil

Transgender Men are men

Transgender Women are women

Excluding Cisgender Men from your spaces requires Transgender Men to out themselves if they want to engage (Same for Women)

Anyone can be Non-Binary, there is no "look" or requirement

Non-binary masculine presenting people should be welcome in queer spaces, many are just treated as men and predators

Non-binary feminine presenting people should be welcome in queer spaces without being seen as "Woman-Lite"

Ideally I'd make a post like "It is pride month! Yay! :D" ...But it is getting increasingly hard to exist as a trans person, let alone celebrate it.

We should still celebrate it. That celebration doesn't need to be loud. It doesn't need to be noticed by anyone except yourself.

They want us to feel shame at who we are. They want others to fear what we are. Pride in yourself is the antithesis of shame. So please, now more than ever, make sure you celebrate pride. Celebrate you.

children are not your property that you can do whatever you like with.

giving birth or impregnating someone or adopting doesn't give you some inherent wisdom that means you can never fuck up.

and you shouldn't have the right to abuse or neglect or misinform a child just because you have legal guardianship of them.

a staggering amount of parents view their children as their property and see advice as someone trying to take away their "deserved" control.

If someone gives advice that's worded as "when no better options are available, [solution] is the best option", it means that doing that particular solution is better than not doing anything. It does not mean that this solution is better than all other options, best choice at all times. All the better options that you can think of that a person should do instead are already implied to be unavailable in the "when no better options are available"-part.

When something is stated in past tense, that implies that this thing is no longer this way at the current moment. "Past tense" means that it happens in the past, which implies that it has stopped happening. If someone says "I thought myself well-educated on the subject", the past tense implies that they are now aware that they were not, in fact, well-educated on the subject. You do not need to tell them this.

A person saying something in passive tense is not stating that they personally do or believe whatever the statement is. Saying "at one point, it was thought", means that there has been, at some point, unnamed other people, who thought this thing, and therefore this has a distinct nuance difference to "I think", which means that the person saying this is also the one thinking it.

The words "common", "most" and "the average" refer to a majority of a population, but not the whole population. That is a different thing than "all" and "everything". If someone says "most dogs have four legs", but you know two dogs who have three legs each, saying so does not disprove the previous person's point, as "most" is a different word than "all". It's a different word that changes what the sentence means.

When someone says a sentence, you should always assume that every word in it is important for the context. If you don't know what a word means, you should look it up to find out what it means, instead of skipping over it and assuming that it isn't important. "Strict and irreconcilable parenting styles are inherently traumatic" means a different thing than "strict parenting styles are inherently traumatic". Adding or removing one word can sometimes change the whole sentence, and you can't just skip the ones that you don't know.