After 2½ years of COVID, 2½ years of cheering, banging our pots and pans and saying thank you to the clerk at the grocery store, the gas station attendant, the people going to work in the warehouse and the meat packing plant and driving the delivery truck, we as a society have come face-to-face with the fact that the most underpaid and so-called unskilled laborers are the ones that must continue to work or society will collapse overnight.
AND YET people continue to distance themselves from these 'essential workers' because of their fancy university degree and comfortable office job with a bright future full of opportunities to climb the ladder. Professionalism is just a thinly veiled form of class warfare, and a tactic of emboldening hegemonic, divisive, discriminatory attitudes behind esoteric, corporate lingo, like a liberal spin on the southern strategy. “I'm not like those other workers. I'm no ordinary worker, I'm a professional worker.”
No one needs to say they're a professional. We are all workers, and we are stronger united.