business is business

"There’s never a real carnival except for the shopkeepers, and then it’s deep down and secret. The shopkeeper rejoices at night when all the unsuspecting yokels, the public, and the profit fodder, have gone home, when silence returns to the avenue…that’s when the accounts are totted up, when the shopkeepers register their receipts and take stock of their power and their victims." journey to the end of the night

the clusterfuck of a "major retailer" i find myself working for ( mostly to give contrast to home ) has, again, proven that its public face and its corporate behavior ( perfidy? malfeasance? amorlal grasping greed? ) are at odds...since they were allowed to reopen the "offical" corporate line is the "health and wellbeing of our customers ( always first? see celine above ) and employees comes first"...that is patent bullshit...a close co-worker contracted covid-19...at a meeting held at reopening we were told that if anyone we worked closely with came down with the virus we would be notified...either their definition of "closely" is wildly divergent from mine ( we were in the same area and, at times, well within six feet of one another, albeit masked ) or someone is lying by omission since no one at any level of management informed me of this event...my co-worker did...this corporation is concerned with two things...how much profit it can turn and what the public perception of its operations are...and being a plauge ship ( this isn't the ifrst unmentioned case in the store ) isn't good pr...since, in the consequentialist system capitalism is, what you have matters, not how you got it, misleading your employees as well as the public serves a capitalist ethical good...and that consequentialism is displayed by this as well...

the article ( ny times today ) says, among other things, that the public spirited members of the imperial senate are concerned that "organized workers" would "decimate" busineses...well..what else would employees of a wholly owned corporate subsidiary say? they owe their jobs to corporate cash ( voters are just an necessary evil to lend an aura of "freely elected republican government" to oligarchy )...what organized workers would do is bargain collectively ( a foul word to corporate ears...they want us isolated and unaware of our true numbers ) for, perhaps, higher, if not living, wages...which would put pressure on profits and wealth hates to give away anything it might not be able to take back...oligarchs like gates and bezos and trump stand to lose some of the filthy lucre they have extorted from the economy and the influence it buys if workers could actually make a living wage...the mouthpieces in the imperial senate aren't having any of that...they loathe working people every bit as much as their owners do...look for any expansion of workers rights to be ruthlessly quashed in the upper house... either talked to death or buried under a tableful of other doomed legislation...the house can say it tried...one wonders if that counts when they knew it was a dead issue from the beginning...workers "health and wellbeing" could only be enhanced by a living wage...that does not seem to fall in the purview of "public sevice".