There is, unfortunately, a common pathology amongst white-collar workers, and especially the "managerial class". Of which I am a member, so I get to see this first-hand quite often.
It is incredibly common that my economic peers and betters treat blue-collar workers as filthy meat-robots, tolerated purely out of necessity. Because, after all, if they were worthwhile human beings, they'd have a college degree.
I find this mindset abhorrent. Anybody that works a job well deserves respect, regardless of the job.
Everyone deserves respect, even those who do not work "well". Being bad at one's job doesn't means anything in terms of access to basic services. Half the people in any job are below the average. Basic dignities must be provided to all, even those a day away from being fired. I've seen it so many times that the "underperformer" or new guy in the office ends up working through every lunch or pulling the bad shifts because "they deserve it". That isn't a healthy work environment.
One way someone whom you label above as an “underperformer” can make themselves more valuable to the team us by taking work that others don’t want to do. One way they can close some of their performance gap is by working more. Both of those could easily be a perfectly rational and voluntary response to preserve their job.
Society simply sucks as even to view someone as a human being, they have to be a valuable member (means work whole life). Not good enough, just work more. Basically be a cog in the economic system or die.
It's way better than hunting for food everyday or facing starvation or predation like most other animals face. We've advanced significantly over the inherently brutal and unforgiving initial conditions of life.
We've built economic and social systems that allow most people to die of what we used to call "old age" and now name as specific diseases that typically manifest in old age [rather than starvation, expousure, or predation].
That people have to contribute in some way to enjoy the fruits of all that aggregate labor doesn't seem so unreasonable to me. All the people required to do all the back-breaking work of farming, transporting, building, cleaning, purifying, and cooking aren't going to do that labor while you enjoy life doing nothing constructive that helps them via some chain of events/transactions.
> back-breaking work of farming, transporting, building, cleaning, purifying, and cooking
Those hard working class are not the most respected or even earning. They are also just doing that for basic needs, minimum wage. This truck driver story itself is about them. Pandemic made it even more clear what society think about them.
Other hand people that are making personal data selling websites, playing stock market, destroying planet for greed are doing great. They can suck millions by unethical means, retire, buy yacht. But goddammit, as soon as someone from lower or middle class wants to slack off, they are told to be useless part of society, work hard, break health. Feels like some kind of capitalist propaganda.
Well, you got me. When I’m not making a dead easy million on stocks, I’m lazing about on my various yachts; unless, of course, the mood to crush a few peasants strikes.
Consider that being "valuable" means contributing to the services that provide for human beings, be it bathroom facilities, medical care or pensions; If being treated as human means being provided these services, why shouldn't there be conditional contribution?
And the people who virtue-signal "Well I think they should be treated humanely!" are rarely the people at low-paid services end, struggling to compete with the status quo.
>It's not an easy situation to deal with, and it has little to do with white-collar vs. blue collar.
>It's all about what level of restroom management is appropriate to keep people from dealing with 'surprises'
And the more fundamental reason is the very different social mechanisms of restroom use by transient drivers vs office workers. Psychology is very different:
- transient user: The restroom belongs to someone else and I can leave a mess for others to deal with after I drive away. Therefore, there is no pride in keeping the toilet somewhat clean because I don't need to care who the next user is. This is what causes public restrooms to become disgusting. (Thankfully, some drivers are considerate but unfortunately, a few inconsiderate ones ruin it for every one else.)
- office worker: The restroom belongs to us that we have to re-visit repeatedly. Usually, we don't embarrass ourselves by leaving disgusting presents for our co-workers. This pride keeps the office restroom relatively clean (compared to public restrooms) -- even without a janitor standing by 24/7.
This is really an idealized view of how office workers view restrooms. BFC I worked in a 5 story office building with 6 bathrooms per floor. Nobody felt ownership of the restrooms, nor treated them particularly well. Some stayed clean (largely because they were either relatively unused) and some were dirty. The idea that we wouldn't allow a vendor or repairman to use them (since in your view they didn't have ownership and would thus soil the restroom) would never enter our minds.
>This is really an idealized view of how office workers view restrooms.
It's not idealized. I linked a video of a business owner and his office workers cleaning their own company bathrooms. The owner of that company includes himself in the rotation of employees to clean the bathrooms.
I can't discount your anecdote about your particular coworkers because your personal experience is what it is. I'm describing population tendencies and not absolutes. In my experience, office workers who are not transients do tend to take better care of their shared bathrooms. The office employees may not be as fastidious as the workers in that Youtube video but they usually don't let it degrade to the level of nasty public restrooms on highways.
In the larger companies, you do have janitorial staff that actually does most of the cleaning and other upkeep, but the employees still don’t want to embarrass themselves in front of their co-workers. If the janitorial staff doesn’t respond quickly enough, then the situation can rapidly deteriorate.
I was always quick to call them if I spotted anything amiss, and I made sure to always thank them if I saw them in person.
In any organization , tone at the top matters. You talk about managers. I would say we need to look higher up in the chain of command.
I would posit that when you have candidates running for higher office referring to that group as "deplorables" I would say the tone of the top has failed.
I agree that Clinton's "deplorables" speech was a gaffe, but I also just re-read it. She's not talking about blue collar workers in general, but a particular strain of voters who are motivated by racism, sexism, etc. Naturally her opponent fought back, pretending that she was attacking the working class in general.
Today, what she said is considered to be a basic fact of American politics. Part of what makes the Deplorables such a powerful force is that it has become politically incorrect to talk about them openly in plain terms, or to confront them with their own beliefs.
> ...but a particular strain of voters who are motivated by racism, sexism, etc
It was received quite properly as an attack on any voter who would not vote for her: that is to say, anyone not voting for Clinton herself would by definition be deplorable: racist, sexist, etc.
It was received that way because Republican propaganda is very effective (see the way they reframed "fake news" as an example,) but no reasonable person reading the actual text of the statement would interpret it that way.
And obviously it was self-serving. Hillary Clinton was giving a speech running for political office, not having a casual conversation. Every word coming out of Donald Trump's mouth was self-serving as well, for the same reason. Yet (again, due to the effectiveness of Republican propaganda) it's a sign of arrogance and elitism when a Democrat does it, but virtue and strength of character in a Republican.
Can you address the point without reference to Trump? We were talking about Clinton, not Trump. If it helps, I think they both were self-serving, full stop. But. Whenever a criticism of Clinton hits the mark, a supporter invariably pops up talking about Trump. It comes off as an attempted diversion from Clinton herself.
So, to the point, she was not even implying that those who were on the fence about her were motivated by racism, sexism, Russian manipulation, etc? She acknowledged there could be principled reasons to disagree and not vote for her?
Clinton and Trump were opponents in an election. She was talking about her opponent's supporters. The reaction to Clinton's speech can't be described without reference her opponent's campaign.
She said something like "half" which is essentially a statistic, not an accusation towards any individual, and was not an unfamiliar idea at the time. I used the term "political correctness" for the social habit of leaving some truths unspoken, and "gaffe" for breaking that rule.
Principled reasons could have been articulated by the other half. There were also Democrats who had principled reasons for favoring other candidates, but Clinton won the primary. Knowing that those people were in the minority on both sides was a fact of contemporary political campaigns.
Given that it was essentially a two-way contest, principled objections would need to identify actual principles, and indicate whether her opponent was likely to address those principles.
Trying to discern which opinions are indeed "principled" and which are propaganda driven is a fact and challenge of modern political discourse.
>Can you address the point without reference to Trump?
No, because the point I was making was that both parties were equally self-serving, because they were both politicians running for political office, and making that point requires reference to the other party.
>If it helps, I think they both were self-serving, full stop.
Yes, that was literally my point.
>But. Whenever a criticism of Clinton hits the mark, a supporter invariably pops up talking about Trump.
Neither can one criticize Trump without his supporters deflecting with rants about Democrats, Hillary Clinton, BLM or whatever. Also, I'm not a Clinton supporter.
>So, to the point, she was not even implying that those who were on the fence about her were motivated by racism, sexism, Russian manipulation, etc?
Ok. Let me paste in the entirety of the quote, verbatim:
"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters
into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? [Laughter/applause]. The racist,
sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are
people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that
used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive,
hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable,
but thankfully they are not America.
Now first, notice that Hillary admits that what she's saying is "grossly generalistic," so it would be a mistake to assume she's attempting to speak in precise terms - when she says "about half" here, she doesn't mean literally 50% within some margin of error, and she certainly isn't referring to the entirety of Trump supporters, much less the entirety of rural Americans (who are not all Trump supporters) nor the entirety of blue collar workers (also not Trump supporters.)
Continuing:
"But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over
America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as
well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people
who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about
what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change.
Here, she's referring to the legitimate concerns and fears of Trump supporters, and further in, suggests that these Trump supporters - explicitly not the ones motivated by racism, sexis, etc - are the ones the Democrats need to empathize with, understand and reach:
It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says but
he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and
see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they're in a dead-end.
Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
So to finally address the points:
>she was not even implying that those who were on the fence about her were motivated by racism, sexism, Russian manipulation, etc?
No, she was not. She was implying that those people were not on the fence and would never vote for her to begin with.
>She acknowledged there could be principled reasons to disagree and not vote for her?
No she did not. Obviously no politician would ever do that, even if they believed it. She was arguing that the Democrats need to convince the subset of Trump supporters willing to listen that they have better solutions to their concerns than Trump.
Ok. You convinced me. Clinton's "basket of deplorables" comment was not transmitted charitably. A charitable reading can be criticized, but yes, she was not calling all Trump supporters deplorable
It is incredibly common that my economic peers and betters treat blue-collar workers as filthy meat-robots, tolerated purely out of necessity. Because, after all, if they were worthwhile human beings, they'd have a college degree.
I find this mindset abhorrent. Anybody that works a job well deserves respect, regardless of the job.