I highly mistrust anything on /r/antiwork. So many of the posts are the “and everyone clapped” variety but get hundreds or thousands of upvotes, I’m pretty sure it’s at least half a troll karma farm.
The stories can be fun but under no circumstances should anyone take what is written at face value.
> I wake up with the worst existential dread I’ve ever experienced. I cried for an hour straight. Not because amazon specifically, but for the broader state of labor in general.
All you need to do is look at the subs the same mods mod...
r/Anarchism r/Anarchy101 r/IWW r/LateStageCapitalism r/lostgeneration r/Socialism_101 r/mutualism r/radicalmentalhealth
Employee: I can't come in today for a very good reason.
Boss (rudely): You have to come in or you're fired.
Employee: I quit.
+1000 karma
There are billions of workers around the world, tens of millions using reddit.
The 1000+ upvote ones are long, overly personal explanations of why they can’t come in that make the boss look extra evil, but also sound fake as hell.
If someone just quits good on them, but that text exchange is not going to draw enough eyeballs.
I mean, the OP post already alludes to the issue with american labor where you're pressured to do something like fake a death in the family to justify taking a day off of what should be a totally replaceable hourly shift. Hourly wage labour jobs are pressured to give those overly personal explanations to get managers to respect any request for time off and it's just seen as the norm.
But to be serious, I don't personally believe the stories, because I just can't know. Sometimes entirely plausible stories get debunked as fake, other times wild ones turn out to be true. I'm not committed to call them all fake, but we really just can't know.
Retail is hell. It's the worst on-call you've ever experienced times a thousand.
If you haven't worked retail in the last few years, I'd actually suggest doing the following: Go on the dating app of your choice and put out that you're legit looking for coffee with folks who work hourly retail jobs. You're vaguely tech adjacent, you can automate those swipes. Literally just ask people who match with you to tell their worst experience in retail.
Ask those retail folks: Are you trained enough? Are you understaffed? Does your manager give a shit? Do you actually get the tips you're supposed to get? If you could walk away right now, would you?
Invite 'em to have a coffee/tea, etc in some public place. Talk about what's going on. Genuinely give a shit. What you'll learn is that most hourly retail folks are living hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck. A friend of mine in college was making $7.70 an hour as a shift manager at a Taco Bell. The straw that broke the camel's back was when his manager suggested he take a *decrease in pay* and an *increase in hours* in exchange for "maybe getting salaried". He left and now is paid $35/hr to sell marijuana.
As someone who works a salaried job at a MANGA/FAANG Forbes Top 100, I feel that some of us lose sight of what our retail-facing hourly folk are actually doing. Retail folks get the most abuse from both sides that I've seen.
Last week, in the grocery near me, I looked at a dude who was mad about a few labels being misaligned, screaming until he was red in the face at an employee about how he was being ripped off, about how this was terrible. It wasn't until I walked over and (legitimately wanting the thing he was mad over) asked him to politely shut up and get over himself for not reading that he stopped, stomping out of the store. This store, like many others, basically demand that these people be happy in the face of abject abuse. The security at the door? That's only for shoplifting. Being a complete jerk to the floor workers? Not that poor fuck's job, and they can be reprimanded for stopping a fight from happening.
In the face of [Nine dollar paychecks for 70 hours of work](https://www.today.com/food/working-mom-received-9-paycheck-7...), a [rising wage theft issue that accounts for billions in unpaid wages](https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...), it's no wonder that [suicide rates of retail workers is going up](https://archive.md/VrvBu).
Thank God I don't work retail.
but the whole problem is that these people are powerless. they are not the majority[0] and of course they are the wrong minority (not the rich one, duh).
[0] which - compared to agrarian times - is great, [yaay progress!] but at the same time it's completely fucked up because the "median voter" [still] doesn't really care. (due to a myriad of reasons from the evo-psycho Dunbar's numbers reasons to the "Marx: capitalism is alienating the worker from its self", or in a bit more modern phrasing "neoliberalism atomized society [1] (by focus on individualism and individual rights)" - , plus things are changing too fast[2] and the vastly different responses by different ideological groups are leading to extreme political polarization, and so on).
r/Anarchism r/Anarchy101 r/IWW r/LateStageCapitalism r/lostgeneration r/Socialism_101 r/mutualism r/radicalmentalhealth
It's part of an anarcho-socialist grouping of Reddit subs that push a specific agenda.
You cannot take anything there seriously.