Do I CRACK you up?

Also, just FWI because this also annoys me: not all natural blondes have carpet that matches the drapes. That’s not a thing you can use as some kind of honestly test. You know, like how blond men often have darker beards? It’s like that.

Seeing them swoop by day in and day out, you got used to the forklifts, which were all more or less identical with each other save for some scrapes and bangs and signs of wear, except for one, which had a tiny, sparkling Hello Kitty -sticker on the side, scarcely larger than my thumb.

One night shift there were only two gatherers at work beside me, and only one forklift operator. On a particularly quiet moment of that particularly quiet night, the forklift driver and I were the only ones in the break room, and though we'd never really talked before, I remarked that he got the Hello Kitty one.

He, a sturdy man in his fifties, grinned in a way that made the ends of his moustache tilt up, made a pointed look around the obviously empty break room and leaned in towards me like men that age do when they've got a great and splendid secret to share.

He asked me, had I ever noticed that it was almost always him who is driving the Hello Kitty forklift? I had not, but that did not swing his glee about this to either direction. He nodded. That was his favourite forklift, it's the one that turns the smoothest, the one with the most even brakes and most comfortable seat. He had put the sticker on it, he had borrowed one from his granddaughter.

You think your company pays you out of the goodness of their hearts? Or even out of “market pressure?” The “job market” is a myth perpetuated by the capitalists. Corporations would pay you nothing if they could get away with it. And you argue “oh, but if they paid me nothing I’d just go to another one.” Wrong. Because to maximize profits, they all want to pay you nothing. Corporations exist to maximize profits while reducing risk for investors. It’s part of their entire function to find ways to cut costs as much as possible, and that includes finding ways to pay you nothing.

Unions are your defense against that. You think all a union does is strike? If you pay union dues, a lot of that is spent on lobbyists in various governments reminding your lawmakers that you have rights as a living human being that a corporation should not be able to stomp all over. Unions hire lawyers so that if you’re fired for bullshit reasons, the union can stand up for you against your boss. They’re called unions because workers are uniting to pool resources so that they can stand up to these corporate overlords with more money than God. Unions exist because you might not have the words, resources, or time to fight workplace injustices all by yourself. That’s the whole fucking point.

Workers: *Go on strike*