phantom unemployment / rewrite

phantom unemployment
rewrite/ edit


lousy jobs are abundant

fiction
edward w pritchard

Why don't waitresses flip out at work. They have no prospects, no benefits and no security. Somehow they never go on a shooting spree. Do all of them have rich husbands these days?

Fast food workers are always busy. Making someone else money. If they look sideways they get a warning and if they ever say anything they are not scheduled anymore. Maybe they need a union. Maybe they are all in college, piling up and leveraging student loans to pursue a better life. Wait, I forgot the conventional wisdom; fast food workers are gathering valuable skills to be used later in the workplace as captains of industry and Lawyers. It happens sometimes.

How many fast food workers and waitresses are there? Everyone else in our Country goes either to fast food or is served food by a waitress. If everyone who sympathizes with their plight would help them just once or twice they would be treated more fairly. Maybe everyone else is too busy to notice.

Rubber workers got shot and killed when striking in our town in the 1930's when demanding better pay and benefits. When they were initially assessing their situation I bet they were a lot better off than waitresses and fast food workers are now a days.  Waitresses, fast food workers, and service workers in general are employed but it is phantom employment. They have no security, no benefits, and do not earn a living wage. It's wrong, it's little different than many other exploitations, to numerous to list.

Most of us are just getting by. Here's how we could help waitresses and fast food workers:

a story about phantom unemployment; working but not really thriving

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Gwen worked part time at the national chain bookstore. She worried because she had no benefits, no health insurance or retirement. She hoped someday to get into the local county library system but they only hired part time any more. No benefits and it was hard to get scheduled, because of declining tax revenues locally. Gwen liked to go out on Saturday night and go to a nice rival bookstore and then have a nice dinner. It was her splurge for the week. She always tipped the waitress because they didn't even get paid minimum wage. Gwen didn't tip the cashier at the rival chain bookstore because they did brain work, and that was compensation in itself.

Gwen should talk to others and they should get together and skip the trip to the bookstore and the restaurant and tell everyone exactly why they organized to bring attention to low wage part time jobs and things might get better for waitresses, fast food workers and customer service people, and people who work at bookstores and people who work at drug stores and people who are cashiers and people who do telemarketing, cut hair and all people in those kind of jobs.

How can everyone be doing well if so many people aren't? Surely that many people can't be happy in those kind of jobs working temporary and part time. Maybe phantom employment  has something to do with all the declining tax revenues. I wonder if eventually everyone else who has planned wisely and made the grade in American life will be effected?

If so many people aren't making a full time wage how can everybody be good, living the good life, planning that big vacation, looking at the next new car. Prosperity is just round the old corner.

Everyone is busy with there own situation and doesn't have time to be concerned about the plight of others, who might be being exploited right under their noses. Meanwhile the invisible hand of capitalism is supposed to shelter everyone in absolute security, as a group, but here's the rub, not as an individual.

Is there a reckoning coming for the American economy? If so things will adjust, but will the fall out be bearable by the majority who have never doubted that invisible hand of capitalism and their own good habits will shelter them from economic harm?