🌼 Daisy 🌼

chicken tramp outfit doodles!

ten years of letting the world come at you, love

ten years of your veins being empty of dust

ten years of knowing you bought your shoes from Oxfam

ten years of your hair looking better black

ten years of crying to that painted sky

ten years of a broken pot can still hold water

ten years of staring at the moon

ten years of it starting off like a pinprick, a trick of the light oil slick

ten years of showing the world we exist

I can't believe she's turning 10.

Keeper of my tears and fears and occasional tomfoolery...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LOVE RUN!!!

I entered the working world in 2005. I had a few odd jobs for a few years and then finally just bit the bullet in 2009, got a job at a grocery storeas an inventory clerk. My job was to count surplus items in the backroom and update the counts. Additional responsibilities included helping stock the front end. I left that job in less than a year.

A friend of mine now works at the same chain, different location, same job title, in 2022. But where I shared that title with two other people, he's the only one with that job title. Additionally, there are less stockpersons, and he is often called out to the floor to help them, which impedes his primary job function. He is also expected to clean bathrooms and some other maintenance things that I cant imagine doing as an inventory clerk.

And I thought maybe it was just that his location is understaffed, but looking back on the past few years where I was expected to do everything (be the front end, the dispatcher, the manufacturer, the teacher, trainer, janitor, delivery driver, account handler... christ, how did I do all this?) I'm looking at the issue with fresh eyes.

I hear sometimes about the 'slim down,' where a lot of companies took on a trend of hiring less people than they need to cut down on the cost of labor, and I look at how fast a person can burn out at a job. And how many jobs are considered 'high pressure sales' when they dont need to be.

Like I'm looking at the possibility of starting a business and I'm looking at the jobs I've had that burned me out and why. And it's almost always been 'I was always juggling responsibilities because we needed more staff'.

Like it seemed like I was doing everything, but getting paid the same.

And I think about that backroom job, where occasionally i would have to help out the stockers on big days, but mostly my job was one function.

I feel like we should be able to do something about this. Like we should be able to say 'no' to lean staffing and we should have a say in what our responsibilities are.

I'm thinking about all the times i should have just straight up said something. Like I think I had it in my head that if I took on all the responsibilities in the shop, eventually I would be rewarded with higher pay. But it doesnt work like that anymore. The reward for digging the best hole is a bigger shovel.

That's no way to live, though. And I just put up with it like it was normal to be so tired at the end of the day that I couldnt move. Maybe I should have just said 'no, you do it' when they started making me work outside my title.

It was actually very easy to join iww and I wish I had done that at my old job sooner. But a lot of the negative rep that unions get really does sink into you and there are times when asking for help seems hopeless.

It's scary. Theres the threat of losing your job. And theres a sense that 'it's like this everywhere.'

And it's scary to stand up for yourself! And for others! And where to start, like... what did you even do in your situation?

I tried to organize the flower shop. I wish I had been bolder about it. A colleague would say something like 'what if we went on strike?' And I'd be like 'yes we absolutely should.' But when it feels like a real possibility, they'd get real shy about bringing it up.

There are more ways to unionize than strike, I know. Methods that are less dramatic. But I can never remember them when I need to.

I just wish I'd known more about them a year ago.

JOIN THE IWW

Or you can look up what your local healthcare worker union chapter is. For the US and Canada, healthcare workers are part of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)