https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/essential-workers-deaths-underclass.html
Who is essential in this economy?
Was it acceptable (or just inescapable?) to the miners and railroaders of America, the factory hands, the men and women who died by the hundreds of thousands from accident or sickness, where they worked or where they lived – casualties of progress? … If there are necessary sacrifices to be made for human progress, is it not to essential to hold the principle that those to be sacrificed must make the decision themselves?
If we are really to make the decision to sacrifice ourselves in the name of progress, we must own the means of production.
Anything less is slavery, and we have a new slave trade in the world today, the essential workers sorting packages for the great and powerful Jeff Bezos so we might enjoy our one-click quarantine, the sanitation workers dying of disease so that we can flush our hoards of toilet paper, and the card-carrying essential farm workers who collect no returns on investment, only a paycheck.
These are the essential wage-slaves of our era, and while we site comfortably in our homes with on-demand 24×7 internet addiction, who is dying to bring us our daily news cycle? Did we give them a choice? Did we give them a path to ownership?
Some of us have been doing this for generations, and some of us own our means of production, and sometimes you see results like https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2020/02/24/808764422/data-privacy-concerns-are-raised-after-startup-tries-to-rent-farmland when big corporate contracts are canceled as the result of the outcry of some long-standing local connections and farmers who own their means of production.
This is a dramatically different power exchange than the union organizing that went on at Amazon until the organizer was summarily fired for disobeying the mandated social distance between wage-slave and owner.
Do you really want this caste system? That may be fine for some of you city folk who think renting is a great deal (until you can’t pay your rent), however I can tell you it’s going to keep creating more catastrophe until we start having a conversation about essential ownership.
Mayor Troy 