Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1259-1261

Most of us don’t have the freedom to complain much at work. There’s something a touch tyrannical about this condition. Our Protestant work ethic has blended with contemporary notions of self-actualization to create a situation in which we are all expected to whistle like Disney dwarfs.

The Tyranny of the Forced Smile

By PAUL JASKUNAS
FEB. 14, 2015

New York Times

A new report by the Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United and Forward Together titled “The Glass Floor: Sexual Harassment in the Restaurant Industry” exposes this epidemic.

The report states that women make up 52 percent of the restaurant industry’s 11 million workers. About two-thirds of these female workers are tipped workers, who often earn a sub-minimum wage and rely on customers for the rest of their wages.

The report writes that this creates “an environment in which a majority female workforce must please and curry favor with customers to earn a living. Depending on customers’ tips for wages discourages workers who might otherwise stand up for their rights and report unwanted sexual behaviors.”

The groups spoke to one New York server who explained why workers deal with inappropriate customer behavior.

“There is a lot of sexual harassment [but] you just kind of brush it off,” she said. “I just want my tip, I don’t want anything to mess up my tip.”
'As A Waitress, I Brush Off Sexual Harassment Because I Just Want My Tip’
AlterNet / By Alyssa Figueroa 
[emphasis JS]

According to the Nova Scotia study, a single mother with three children in the province, earning the minimum wage, will be nearly $500 in the red every month if she were to purchase nutritional food (that’s after paying for other basic living costs such as rent, heat, hydro). A family of four, meanwhile, with two adults working for minimum wage, would face a monthly deficit of $44.89.

The study looked at minimum-wage data from 2002 to 2012, and used the National Nutritious Food Basket, a Health Canada measurement of 67 foods easily found in grocery stores, eaten by most Canadians and considered nutritionally balanced, to cost the food. And it concluded that the “risk of food insecurity is a critical public-health issue for low wage earners.”

The effects of a poor diet are well known. Along with stress and low energy in the short term, poor nutrition over a long time period puts people at risk for obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke, and a myriad other illnesses.

The dilemma between healthy eating and staying above the poverty line

JANE TABER

HALIFAX — Globe and Mail

updated Wednesday, Oct. 22 2014