The Post-Pandemic Revenge Tour of the Working Class

Not sure if anyone is noticing, but we are seeing the birth of a new era.

The Working Class is no longer putting up with bullshit.

The Working Class is demanding for changes, improvements, and stronger support from the higher powers. And until conditions improve, we’re going to continue to see a wide open job market and companies falling apart because they can’t find enough labor to continue.

Under Joe Biden, the pandemic has definitely weakened (albeit only in the United States thanks to early access to all the vaccinations), and perhaps by the end of the year we can achieve strong enough numbers to feel like we’re truly over the hump of infection and death rates. But one aspect of this pandemic that was criminally underreported was the devastating effects of the survivors in the working class while death, destruction, and uncertainty was reigning. The boiling point had already been reached during the Trump administration, was steaming as the pandemic raged and people were dying while making less than $10 an hour, and now Biden has to see it all overflow and spill onto the economy and future of the job market.

The tourism industry in Florida is struggling to keep employees, ultimately forcing Universal to speed up their process at getting to $15 an hour (with Disney eventually having to follow if the rumored reports of mass quitting even among the college program cast members continues). The food and beverage industry is also struggling to employ enough people and even see enough workers deliver their product, leading to hundreds of your usual fast food destinations struggling to even remain open. There were reports of over 110,000 drinking/dining locations shutting down in 2020, and that might increase as we roll through 2021.

What has happened is the job market has become open season, allowing for those who were unemployed or furloughed thanks to the pandemic to reconsider their position, reconsider their life path, reconsider their work careers, leading to massive shifts of employment. The extra money that they had earned while furloughed (which is ridiculous that people were making so little that temporary government help was literally lifting people off of poverty and was allowing others to pay off some debt) gave millions inspiration to see that perhaps there’s a better pathway to happiness out there, and it does not involve industries that relied on them as the world shut down, and then betrayed them when politicians (and consumers) were demanding for an end to this shutdown period.

Side-Note: This is also true, in the United States we’re seeing the worst customer-related behavior in recent recorded time, ranging from the fighting happening in flights nationwide to restaurants and eateries having to temporarily shut down because the misbehavior, threats, and mistreatment reached feverish levels. Even before the pandemic started, we were seeing the customer mistreatment get worse and worse, and I am positive this has also led to the mass exodus of workers from the restaurant industry.

2020 revealed companies for who they were better than any other time period in recent history. Your theme parks could not handle being shut down beyond a couple months and attempted their reopenings even when the positivity and death rates remained high and there was no vaccine on the horizon. The restaurant industry collectively balked at higher pay during the shutdown, and balked even louder as the restrictions were reducing and people were pouring back to -normal life- at the expense of those at the highest risk.

2020 saw an industry that tried to continue running even as deaths and permanent side effects to a brutal illness were stacking up in numbers. The Latino and Black community, the most vital sources of employment for hospitality, were dying and getting sick in much higher rates, and these were presented facts being largely ignored. So when the help became even scarcer and the vaccines became available, this was the working class’ opportunity to continue or bolt-----and the number of those bolting became higher than what any analyst could have ever imagined. Unless you were surrounded by the flames, there was no chance you could predict where the fire was going.

As a worker in Tourist Country in Florida, I saw the wild wave of self-teminations coming from a mile away, especially when DeSantis was shifting towards reopening Florida to a point of no legal return. Surely enough, the industries were getting hit so hard that they started clamoring for state and federal help---which led to the unemployment system getting completely obliterated. Although Florida was the most extreme example, we are seeing a working class with much less patience battling back nationwide.

Alabama recently had the infamous union vote at Amazon which may or may not have been chock full of illegal activity from Amazon——and there will be more Amazon-related labor battles happening within the next few years. There’s a giant strike happening at Frito-Lay in the Midwest, as an entire factory was fed up with rancid conditions that was leading to people literally dying while working and refused to return until their demands were met. We are seeing wild swings of support for $15 minimum wage (which is a demand being met by places clamoring for any additional labor), shorter work weeks, paid family leave, among other features seen in most developed countries worldwide. Things that were considered acceptable and normal in the United States is losing support at a rate that is scaring the larger companies.

Of course, there’s the extreme rise in the gig and small investment economies.

Between Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and other social media brands, we are seeing more and more people utilizing these forms of social media to promote themselves and offer their services and skillsets directly to the consumer as opposed to joining another company to do it. Through things like OnlyFans, Kickstarter, IndieGogo, and Patreon, now fans and supporters of people’s work can directly donate to the individual and now we’re seeing millionaires emerging from social media advertisements. The internet is as wild and open as ever before, and thus is providing other options for those who don’t want the usual route of college-to-work.

Twitch has over 120,000 consistent streamers, and some of them make 500k-800k per month through streams and advertisements. Never in a million years could I have predicted a website tossing these numbers a decade ago. But of course, this influx of content was spurned by the shutdown period during the worst of the ongoing pandemic. Millions upon millions of Americans (especially young Americans) had the free time to witness the power and potential of the internet, and we’ve seen many take advantage as opposed to re-entering the job market.

Yep, also time to talk about WallStreetBets…

We have an ongoing battle on Wall Street as the disgruntled working class became investors and wall street gamblers and poured their earnings and savings towards seeking newfound wealth. By joining internet forums especially WallStreetBets, we’re seeing more and more people that would have never touched the stock market suddenly making giant investments on neglected, forgotten, and even destined-to-fail companies in hopes of landing that stock that’s being inundated with vulture hedge funds profiting off of other’s failures. Among those with limited funds plans are hatched, strategies are developed, and theories as well as details are shared to ensure that everyone succeeds. The AMC stock in particular has the bloodiest financial battle, which has the small investors currently owning most of the company in the market.

Even though the battles have remained one-sided with the big businesses and vulture companies still surviving against the movement, we’ve also seen several hedge fund companies lose billions upon billions from the meme stocks and smaller stocks rising rapidly in value. One particular day in late January was so ugly that even Biden’s White House noticed the chaos and its led to demands of the regulation Wall Street had been able to evade all these years. Even after millions of dollars were lost in RobinHood leading the charge to cancel all purchases of Gamestop, AMC, and Nokia stocks, all it did was anger the masses even more as they saw the desperation as proof that they’re figuring out the formula to survive Wall Street’s unfair practices.

Then there’s the cryptocurrency battles, which is seeing Americans and other people from around the world pouring money into new kinds of currency in hopes that their values will exponentially go up and will lead to savings and great financial wealth that they know they’d never achieve through the usual working class routes. Bitcoin has gone up exponentially in recent years (which got the support---then disapproval from Elon Musk), we’ve seen the rise of dogecoin (which also…got the support and eventual disapproval from Elon Musk), Ethereum, and others even while global superpower China has essentially banned them. All these investments and battles for relevancy do not happen if not for a working class that got squeezed into a corner. Lastly, we’re seeing more and more people investing in a variety of items increasing in value: used cars, Pokemon cards, baseball cards, new and used video games and consoles—-each of these markets have seen value increases of over 100%.

Side-Note: Although I’m all for people making some extra money on the side, I’m also strongly against those who are financially well-off taking advantage of the demand (like this prick who is hoarding hundreds of thousands of dollars of new consoles)

At the end of the day, we have to consider what the 18-34 crowd has witnessed this century:

Two global economic crashes, a major housing crisis, a horrific terrorist attack that directly led to two expensive and globally-panned Middle East conflicts, two of among the worst administrations in the entire history of the United States (Bush Jr., Trump), an administration whose hands were tied by a white supremacist political party for six straight years, mass shootings up the wazoo, intense climate change being met with zero repercussions for the biggest instigators, a deadly attempted coup led by an administration that made the pandemic infinitely worse, the extreme rise of hate groups, and now a global pandemic that refuses to give up because a large portion of the country refuses to be vaccinated over a mix of MAGA-related bitterness, Facebook-supported misinformation, stubbornness, and outright disdain for factual science.

All this while the richest one-percent increased their wealth more than the bottom-half of the country combined.

How could the working class not have rebelled after all these atrocities and tragedies and yet still seeing the financially-leading superpower nation struggle to simply increase minimum wage?

Joe Biden has a lot of problems at his doorstep, so its going to be hard for him to approach the working class rebellion with the attention it deserves, but unless he manages to create major changes the job market is going to remain very much fractured. At the rate we’re going, we’re going to see thousands of places connected to large corporations shut down because of lack of money and lack of labor as the slave wages of the last several decades is being met with its strongest resistance yet.

A large wave of resistance is growing stronger, and back to normal is a reality that may never happen because of it. And I’m all for it, as its finally time that the working class steps up, sees its value, and demands the improvements that we all deserve.

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