A Boring Dystopia

There will be about the same consequence as the Amazon warehouse that wouldn't let their employees leave during a tornado. Nothing.

There should be some consequences to the management who ~~didn't allow them to leave~~ didn't send them the fuck home immediately.

I work in a factory that sits on a flood plane. It's happened more than once that by the time a decision is made to cut people loose, it's already difficult to leave the area. Often by the time a flash flood warning is issued there are only a few minutes of clear roadway left.

It's entirely possible that a similar situation happened here, that the safest place for those people to be was in that building, that there was no way out and they would have been swept down stream regardless.even if that's the case, this company should be held liable for sitting on their hands and keeping people at work through a storm where the risk of flooding was so great. That decision should have been made much sooner. If there was a job to come back to you can always post them for a Saturday and wouldn't have to pay overtime until they actually hit 40 hours.

I'm so fucking fed up with the false urgency in these places. This company made high density plastic parts. Literally nothing they were making is life or death. Nothing they were making couldn't wait another day. No customers were going to bail because the factory they needed their parts from got hit by a fucking hurricane.

But everyone, every fucking person in leadership, is constantly pressured to squeeze out more units, more production. Keep people working as long as possible, because every second they're not making a product is a second the company is losing money. And because now every fucking company has jumped on to the lean manufacturing model, they are constantly, perpetually, chronicly behind. The second an order comes in it's already too late and we need those units NOW. no lead time, no back orders. So stay at your machine because the boss man needs another Lexus.

Fucking burn it down

Why? They were immigrants so they could be disposable labor right?

One of the employees who died, Bertha Mendoza, 56, fell off the truck and vanished into the flood, according to Ingram and a representative from Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition.

Same with the fucking bridge that got destroyed in ~~Delaware~~ Baltimore and every factory disaster. Immigrants doing the labor that die for our carelessness, and easy to replace.

If I learned anything durring covid it's that basically every business is "essential".

We have the hindsight with full knowledge of the risk they were taking. I'd bet they only thought they were risking their next paycheck, not their lives.

Homesslessness in the US is about a coin flip off for death or suffering, every hour of every day. Quitting your job or getting fired for insubordination prevents you from collecting unemployment, and most Americans have less than a weeks expenses saved due the the last 60 years of low pay and exponentially rising expenses, causing homelessness if you lose your job. You might die in a hurricane induced flood, but that risk can seem less than slowly dying while homeless or in prison for being homeless.

We really need to break our conditioning that employment is the highest priority in our lives.

It's not really conditioning when it's actually the case. Without my job I'm likely homeless or dead within weeks. If Iose my job then I can no longer pay my bills, within a few months I'll be homeless. More urgently though I lose access to my health insurance which means I lose access to the medications keeping my mental illness in check. Finding a new job normally is a pain; finding one when you're so depressed that you really don't even care if you live or die is next to impossible. Also once it flares up you tend to stop caring about even seeking treatment for it making it a self perpetuating issue. If I got fired I would have only a few weeks to find a new job before I wound up in a position I likely wouldn't recover from. Sure there are things like unemployment but that doesn't even come close to paying my bills let alone affording my own health insurance.

So it would take a lot for me to risk walking away from my job and risk getting fired. I could easily see myself in the same position as these people, waiting until it's too late to run out of fear of losing my job. If we want people to be able to walk away from situations like this then we need to make survival possible without employment. We need healthcare to not be tied to employment and we need real unemployment pay to keep people afloat while they find a new job.

If only our health insurance wasn't tied to our jobs.

If only wages were high enough to have something extra to cushion.

If only we didn't have to work so long, wr could think and make better decisions.

In old Japan, they would have made a bunch of management chop their finger off or commit seppuku.

Im not suggesting that. I'm just saying.

Murder wouldnt stick, have to prove intent.

Negligent Homicide or Criminal Negligence on the other hand...

How many times in your life have you been without a meal for an entire day because you couldn't afford one? Ever been without a place to live?

Well on the bright side at least now they don't? I hope their families sue the shit out of the company and the manager.

Is.

And it will happen during the next Hurricane as long as thr employers face zero repercussions.