I'm trying to quit my Medium habit--and you are bringing back in!

I live in a town with a beef packing plant. I worked there for a short time in my younger days. The wages were comparable to entry-level oilfield jobs. These days, it is mostly immigrants. The plant wages are about 60% of the oilfield.

It is brutal work indeed.

I helped a worker get a workers' compensation pension for a repitive stress injury. In the trial, I made the plant look real bad--as if it didn't care about the welfare of its workers.

Since then, the plant has taken a better stand for its workers. It is rotating workers to different positions if they want. Both morale is higher and employee retention is higher. The plant actually made significant changes to deal with Covid. The managers have indeed taken a more positive appreach. But working at a packing plant is still brutal work.

A UBI would do a lot to alleviate the plight of the meat plant worker. If the plant wants such workers--or perhaps better said 'if the consumers want the meat'--the plant needs to pay enough to attract workers to earn more than their basic income. In this way, the worker truly makes a free choice to work there or not.

As far as class struggle goes, George Orwell pretty much outlined that in 1984; 2% of the population make the decisions and live in luxury (the Inner Party; 13% of the population (the Outer Party) serve the needs of the Inner Party; and 85% are proles to be exploited.

We can see similar ratios in so much of history. During Christmas, I watched the musical called Oliver. Take away the singing and dancing, and the plight of poverty is well portrayed in this depiction of 19th century England.

Our current middle class is an aberration of Orwell's natural order. The current political system is unable to resist the trend for the middle class to shrink.

Time for a new system.