No it’s not. Lol. Hey there I’m your local cog working the wheels. Im a Forklift driver at a Lumber yard in SoCal for 5 years now. Inflation, stress, heat, and skeleton crews. Imagine loading up customers who spend more than your annual income in lumber and hardware in less 2 hours. Only to be hauled up a hill to high-end neighborhoods where everyone has swimming pools, tennis/basketball courts and luxury cars. The customers that create these monuments of ignominy are underpaid, desperate, undereducated, and deluded. I know because I have tried my best to hear their stories as I helped them every day I work and assist them. I sell the lumber, load and offload customers trucks.
We are Gentrification. The people desperate enough to work their bodies into disease, injury, and mental illness. We work check to check. A self-fulfilling prophecy of construction workers barely getting paid enough to rent an apartment and erecting a new building down the street that creates no true value to the to the community. It has no value as a mean to the communities end only the owner who will profit and spend intravenously. The hypocrisy I face internally is incessant and draining. I now make $23 an hour and yes I’m still tired and I’m still poor because I don’t own anything of true value. All I got from 5 years of working there was a car that I use to get me there and back, food, and a roof over my families heads.
Some coworkers are old enough to not give a shit because they are on their way out to retire. Others are scared of acting because of how desperate they are for checks. The fear of unionizing comes from the looming recession/depression on the horizon. I still say fuck it and attempt to unionize. If they have to close because of lack of sales then they never deserved to operate under the guise of fair labor as; it is inherently unfair to create conditions in the community that increases cost of living while not providing your employees a fair wage that compensates regularly for those variables. If we fail I still plan on leaving because of the constant toxic work culture. People always say “ oh yeah that managers old school” I have come to understand old school is slang for misogynist, racist, and or sexist.
I come from a family of immigrants, I am a first generation Mexican American, seeing the exploitation of immigrant workers in construction is sickening and gut wrenching. I know how hard these people work and it breaks my heart knowing how much our voices are dismissed and often scapegoated. Coming to a new country shouldn’t be frowned upon when one can see the conditions and poverty they are attempting to escape.
As for the title quote my old coworker said it once and I could never agree with him.
TLDR; unionize and contemplate if your job has its communities best interests in its principles. And demand a living wage for all.