Status Updates From The Moral Underground: How ...

2006 Ulrich et al: Among more than 1500 nurse practitioners and physician's assistants, 67% reported that in the last year health care policies had threatened the availability of care they could provide, and 58% reported encountering health care policies that threatened the quality of care.

Evidence for low-wage workers' irresponsibility came fairly easily to some employers. I kept hearing about lack of punctuality as if it were completely unrelated to a failing public transit system, absenteeism that was entirely separate from job policies that included no sick days, work disruptions that in no way correlated with the company setting no-phone-calls-home-after-school regulations, and so forth.

Managers pay workers too little to pay for substitute care for children/elderly, maintain stable housing, then complain when disruptions due to moving/homelessness/sick children/no childcare disrupt their work. If the wages you pay guarantee these disruptions will take place, how is that only the employees' problem? It's built into the labor market!

In America business "has free rein, can freely undermine the public good, and can freely buy and sell political will...This book uncovers the parallel story, the one about resistance...the proud history of how people will refuse to go along with economic abuse--and not just the few heroes we recall. Heroes alone don't shift the ground. Deep change comes only when regular people start naming what is happening...

Exploitative low wages and child care. Many parents in this boat try to get child care free, but it is never really free. "Of course it isn't free-- the cost of low wages is damage to children and overworked, overanxious mothers." Not that employers, for the most part, give a shit.

A question to ask: "Do losses to a family, probably an extended family, maybe even a community eroded by mounting poverty-induced problems-- does all that matter in a larger way?" I think it does, and something should be done about it. Then again, I am not a selfish asshole.

Typical selfish out of touch employer attitude, discussing how "inconvenient it was that these workers [that they employ] had families at all, because raising children is so time demanding." Maybe if you guys did not pay shit wages, that would not be a problem, or "an inconvenience." Too bad you can't discriminate to weed out parents and pregnant women, huh? (well, legally at least).