Like I Was Someone Else

if pokémon were ghost types.

Politicians refuse to do so.

Countless of us die every day.

The reason is capitalism. End ID]

cinematic parallels in:

You know what I am gonna add on to this. Facts that make Minecraft scary The villagers look nothing like you, yet the zombies do. What are the zombies, for they cannot be dead villagers? Scary

The Endermen being eldritch abominations that just travel around collecting blocks for some unknown purpose, becoming hostile should you look in their eyes. Scary

Literally having a hell that you can travel to, where you can harvest the souls of the dead in a convenient block form. Scary Traveling too far until you reach the edge of the world where reality breaks down and nothing makes sense. Scary

The darkness being a source of creatures that serve no purpose but to do one thing and one thing only, and that is to kill. Scary

The idea that the only thing keeping you safe is light and that no matter where you are if it is dark they will get you. Scary

The median annual salary for a home health aide was $24,200 in 2018, above the $16,460 federal poverty level for a family of two. That’s about $11.57 an hour. Cooks, janitors, and farmworkers make more than home care workers do, and they aren’t caring for the sick and elderly. [...]

But it’s not just about low pay. The majority of home care workers get zero benefits.

About 88 percent of domestic workers don’t get paid time off, sick time, employer-sponsored health insurance, or any other benefits. Angelica, for example, never gets a day off.

“Take a day off? And miss paying a bill? I can’t really afford to take a day off,” she said. [...]

Yet she’s one of the lucky ones. Because Angelica is part of a co-op instead of working at a for-profit company, she gets to keep about two-thirds of the money clients pay for her services. The co-op charges clients $18.50 per hour if they need more than nine hours of care each week; Angelica gets $12.50 of that. The rest covers the co-op’s administrative costs and goes toward a pool of money that caregivers will split at the end of the year.

That’s not common. About two-thirds of all home care workers are employed by businesses that take a huge cut of the earnings. For example, in New Mexico, the median pay for home health aides is $9.50 an hour, but most agencies charge clients up to $20 an hour, said Adrienne Smith, director and CEO of New Mexico Direct Caregivers Coalition, which advocates for home care workers. [...]

On a recent Wednesday, Smith led a session for five women who work at a group home for people with developmental disabilities. The point of the training was to help the caregivers deal with difficult clients.

“What do you think is most challenging for you, emotionally, in these settings?” she asked the group of women seated around the kitchen table.

“When we get hit,” answered one woman.

“We tend to take a lot of physical abuse, mental abuse, you know,” said another. “We’re called every name in the book and get spit on. Stuff can get pretty physical. When a client is having a behavior, they have rights, so we can’t do anything to protect ourselves ... we have to literally just stand there and get the physical abuse. And that’s very frustrating.” [...]

“It messes with you mentally,” one caregiver said. “It makes you traumatized.”

“It makes you question if this is something you want to commit to. Is this a place I want to be at?” said another, adding that it’s normal to get bruises and black eyes at work. “It’s degrading.” [...]

Nearly every expert interviewed for this story pointed to historical reasons to explain why home care work is difficult: American society has always undercompensated the work of women, immigrants, and people of color. [...]

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938, for example, excluded both groups from the right to earn the minimum wage or get overtime pay. Farmworkers and domestic workers were left out as a concession to Southern lawmakers, whose constituents were highly invested in paying low wages to personal servants and farm laborers. [...]

Lawmakers amended the FLSA in the 1970s to cover most domestic workers, but not live-in housekeepers, nannies, and home health aides who provide “companionship services.” Because most caregivers are also companions, the amendment meant that home health aides — once again — were excluded from minimum wage and overtime rules.

Both groups were also left out of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which gave workers the right to form labor unions and organize for better working conditions.

When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, some domestic workers were left out again. That’s because the law didn’t include protections for workers whose employers have fewer than 15 employees. To this day, it’s not illegal under federal law for employers to sexually harass their nannies and housekeepers, or to discriminate against them based on race, religion, gender, or national origin.

The same thing happened when Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970. The landmark labor law, which established a worker’s right to a safe and healthy work environment, didn’t extend that right to domestic workers and farmworkers.