When Sick Means Sick
No Me Digas. Op-Ed: Keith Price
How many times have we all called in sick and knew we were healthy AF? Or better yet, who has planned a Friday sick day call by starting with a strange “cough” on Monday that segues to post-lunch “diarrhea” that you happen to tell the boss “casually” you have on Wednesday? And no matter how many times we have done this, the company still seems to keep on moving.
Well the CoronaVirus is the headline of the day, and this newly pandemic scenario is knocking the underpaid and overworked employees on their asses, and the market is responding. For some reason, it is giving our capitalistic economy a chop to the throat. It is insane because the places that are being hit by this disease are making ALL markets crash. Meanwhile, presidential candidate Sen.Sanders gets so much flack for his seemingly democratic socialist rhetoric, yet he might be right. The super-rich is slowly killing the rest of us with their greed. His push along with another presidential candidate, Sen. Warren, to make sure the super-wealthy are contributing more than they have been doing, is probably the reason that Mayor Bloomberg has entered the race, as well.
In any case, there is a myriad of reasons as to why the super-wealthy corporate bandits should reevaluate so much in their business plans to do right by their workers. Here’s a good one: the entire market gain of 2019 has been eradicated literally overnight, and it is still falling. In many factories owned by big companies, employees are being paid less than a living wage and/or working without any semblance of health insurance or other benefits, like sick pay. This is because the corporate owners are slashing budgets and saving pennies to distribute profits amongst themselves. Now add an administration that has been a roadblock to absolutely everything that makes logical sense, and we have a recipe for certain ruin. But, what if these titans of industry actually cared about their employees?
We can see them combatting medical issues as they happen, hopefully before it becomes a pandemic. We can see them making happy employees by simply paying them actual living wages. If these corporations truly decided to not allow abject greed to step into the mix, we could have workforces that will be productive and healthy enough to not cripple THEIR industries when there is some sort of medical crisis.
Maybe they can now realize that the profits they enjoy are because of so many actual other human beings? Maybe the fight that Bernie should be waging is Conscious Capitalism versus Corporate Capitalism? It might make his Democratic Socialism stance have some legs and be more palpable to the rest of America.
To quote journalist Charlotte Alter, author of the new book The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: “Socialism is a generational Rorschach test: Boomers think of Soviet gulags and bad shoes, millennials think of Swedish health care and free education.” I think that might deserve a mic drop.
