Posh Hotels, Painful Jobs
Room attendants press for better conditions.
Hotel workers at last week's rally. Photo by Tom Sandborn.
They spend all day at work stooping, lifting and twisting in cramped quarters while wrestling with heavy mattresses, rushing to polish bathrooms and counters. Arms get bruised, backs get wrenched, the schedule keeps getting tighter. And at the end of most exhausting days, they depend on a handful of aspirin to blunt the pain.
That, say room attendants at some Vancouver tourist hotels, is the stark reality of their jobs.
Now they are organizing to demand their corporate employers reduce their work loads and raise wages for the women who make the operations of the city's luxury hotels possible.
Last week, The Tyee met with some of these women. Uttra, Elsie, Lila, Sarla, Razeema, Sharla and Carol have together worked 160 years in Vancouver hotels. Most in the group are immigrants. They described having to regularly try to fit 10 hours of assigned work into a seven and a half hour shift. Many said they go home each day aching, wrists swollen with carpal tunnel syndrome and other stress injuries they accumulate as they rush all day to complete their ever-increasing work load.
Hotel workers have a 40 per cent higher injury rate than the average for all workers in the service sector; room attendants in turn have nearly twice the injury rate of other hotel workers, and 91 per cent of all room attendants report workplace pain according to data collected by the U.S. government and unions.
The women who spoke to The Tyee all agreed they have seen their workload rise faster than their wages, which now are about $15 an hour.
'We are in pain a lot'
"We should have at least 30 minutes to finish a room, and sometimes the rooms are so dirty we really need an hour, an hour and a half. It depends on how they trash the room. Sometimes it is really dirty. You know how they are. At my hotel they have something they call the "Hyatt mattress," which is really heavy to work with. Two girls are home sick right now with their wrists swollen," said Uttra, a 30-year veteran at the Hyatt.
"It's hard. We are in pain a lot," said Lila, who has worked for the Delta Vancouver Airport Hotel 31 years. "We are drinking the aspirin all the time because we are in so much pain."
"The work we do to clean each room has increased ten-fold in the last 20 years, and so has our pain. Many of us are too tired and in too much pain after work to spend quality time with our families," said Elsie, who has cleaned rooms at the Delta Vancouver Airport Hotel for 21 years.
'Friendly rally'
The women are members of UNITE HERE local 40, and on August 10 they joined nearly 500 other hotel workers and community supporters in a boisterous, joyful crowd in scarlet union T-shirts that spilled out through the streets of downtown Vancouver and rallied in front of four city core hotels where their union is currently bargaining for a new contract, the Hyatt Regency, the Four Seasons, Renaissance Vancouver and the Westin Bayshore.
More than 2,000 UNITE HERE members are currently negotiating new contracts, including members who work at the four downtown hotels. Their old contracts expired at the end of June.
Marriott International, which operates the Renaissance Vancouver, says on its website that it made sales of US$12.2 billion in 2006, while Starwood Hotels and Resorts, operators of the Westin Bayshore, reports a 2006 net income of US$1.04 billion. Revenues for the Four Seasons chain was $235 million last year.
The night before the rally, seven women met with The Tyee in the Burnaby offices of UNITE HERE local 40 to talk about the upcoming rally and their hopes for the Hotel Workers Rising campaign they are conducting in Vancouver. Despite the fact they had all been up at dawn to start tough dayshifts at their hotels and had just emerged from a long union meeting, they were excited and hopeful, both about the upcoming rally and the prospects for a better contract.
"They should treat us very nicely, you know. We are the ones who are running the hotel. The work is hard and the wages are low," said Sarla, who has worked at the Four Seasons 15 years.
"This will be a friendly rally," said Uttra. "We are just saying to our employers that we want better working conditions. Lots of the girls work through their breaks to try to finish everything. We want random sick days like the managers get. We only get five sick days a year and we have to get a note from the doctor. This is one of our big demands."
A "random sick day" is a single day taken when sick, without the several days' delay and doctor's note currently required by hotel contracts.
Manager: 'committed to resolution'
As hotel workers marched, sang and chanted outside the Renaissance on West Hastings, The Tyee went inside for a word with Smith Munro, the hotel's general manager. Soft spoken, well groomed, Munro was standing in the Renaissance lobby looking out through its floor to ceiling glass doors at the red shirted, chanting throng.
In a soft Scots burr, he said, "Four of the hotels in the city, including ours, are negotiating a new contract. UNITE HERE has decided to have a rally, a parade to lend some excitement to the negotiation process. I think the negotiations are going very well, very amicable. We are all committed to finding a resolution."
Asked about the complaints The Tyee had heard about hotel work loads and wage levels, Munro said the employers were looking very seriously at union demands.
"We truly understand that this is very hard work. We do appreciate that. We are working very hard to come to a good solution. We have three days of meetings scheduled next week, and we may well get a settlement then."
In San Francisco, where UNITE HERE recently completed a successful Hotel Workers Rising campaign, room attendants now make $17.09 US an hour in unionized hotels.
Outside on Hastings Street, the crowd was marching and chanting "We're fired up and we can't take it no more."
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G West
4 years ago
As I wrote on another story here at Tyee
Women hold up more than half the world and do more than half the work to boot.
Good luck! Thank God for Unions.
DJT
4 years ago
Stan Hagen keeps shooting
Stan Hagen keeps shooting his mouth off about how much money the new convention centre is going to bring to Vancouver. I will be waiting to see if a respectable amount of that wealth is shared with those who roll up their sleeves and sweat.
I won't hold my breath.
Frank
4 years ago
Good on em
Great to see!
Grumpy
4 years ago
BC in a boom ecconomy..........NOT!
Strange, despite all the hype and hoopla about BC's economy, wages lag way behind. As costs spiral upwards, real income remains stagnate.
RAV now costs over $2.4 billion, yet the provincial government can not afford to pay compensation to local merchants adversely affected by construction (The Musqueems got compensation for the bridge crossing their land) and had to bring in 3rd world construction workers (paid at third world prices).
Despite a supposedly labour shortage in the Lower mainland, wages paid to workers do not reflect the fact.
Historical note:
After the great plague in the UK, because of a massive labour shortage, labourers were paid record rates, so much so that many were able to buy into established businesses and buy land, thus helping to create a 'middle' class!
It ain't happening here!
alive
4 years ago
way to go
Glad to see that folks understand the point of unions!
Now, if people with "better" jobs could only realize that they are just as much in need of proper representation, we would get somewhere
G West
4 years ago
Note: number 21 and 26 on this list
http://www.hrmguide.net/canada/general/50-best-employers.htm
I wonder if the Human Resources Experts who compiled this list actually talked to any of the chamber maids who do the actual WORK at these places....
DanceMan
4 years ago
Know your history
Local 40's name used to be something like the Hotel Restaurant Employees Union, and it has a long and disreputable history in Vancouver.
Perhaps it has now changed; I don't read the Vancouver Sun now and could be out of touch with developments in recent years. Years or decades ago it was a union whose international office appointed the local business agent, signed sweetheart deals with the hotels, and scooped the members' dues. When the members had the temerity to elect their own official, the international put the local in receivership and put their own man back in. Local 40 used to appear in the Sun every few years with another scandal 20 to 40 years ago.
It's no coincidence that the only union I know of (there could be others I don't) in GM Place is local 40, and the concession workers make a fraction of the concession workers at the PNE. Some work I do know of at GM Place that doesn't have a compliant union available is done non-union.
Realist
4 years ago
minimum wage
If the Liberals raised the minimum wage to say ten dollars, wouldn't everyone benefit due to increased taxation revenue? Just a thought as the government is not interested in helping the common man. Perhaps appealing to their greed might work. Linear thinkers lack the ability to see the gray areas such as benefits to individual human being so maybe they will react to their primary fixation: More money! I hope that this union can stand up to a corporate bully but, if the past shows us anything, it is difficult(But not impossible!!!) to fight the demon at their own game.
dorothy
4 years ago
How things do change...
- Would these be some of the same people, due to the oh, so willing and eager availability of whom 'lazy' canadian youth with 'unrealistic demands' were regularly denied jobs?? Pardon me if I don't flow over with empathy! So the undersell only lasted till the foot was solidly in the door. Where I come from, that is not considered upright dealing...
G West
4 years ago
dunno dorothy
the story says that 7 of these ladies have worked a cumulative 160 years in Vancouver hotels - you do the math. I don't think you can call them "come latelies" do you?
I think empathy is entirely apropos under the circumstances.
RickW
4 years ago
Employment is Slavery (Part One)
I had a conversation a while back with a couple FN people, and after we got our terms of reference straightened out, it seems we were in agreement that employment is slavery.
It was explained to me that traditionally (which is to say, before White Man Cometh) most FN societies in the “new world” practiced slavery. And the reason that slavery was practiced was simple enough: slaves were the “energy” of the society, that could be tapped to do the drudge work and repetitive tasks that any society requires for its basic existence. This in turn provided the necessary leisure time that again, any society requires in order to make a culture possible. Culture seldom appears in a society with a hardscrabble existence. There simply isn’t the time and personal energy that aesthetics require.
So, according to FN logic, employment (as we white folk – which is to say, anyone other than FN – know it) is tantamount to slavery in FN eyes, because it is open-ended and without conclusion. All too many of we “whities”, have this preconceived notion of the “lazy Indian”, who disappears for a few days after payday, then shows up for work. But from the FN perspective, payday signals the end of a contract, and the completion of the task required (else, why would [s]he be paid for incomplete work?) Further work requires a new contract, in which a beginning and an end are embedded. Open-ended employment becomes work without purpose; drudge work, repetitive work, slavery.
We “whities” eschewed slavery (more or less) when the Industrial Revolution made machines more efficient than raw human power for most tasks, thanks to hydrocarbons (Of course, we like to think we abolished slavery because it is “wrong”, and other such myths). Instead, we ended up calling it “employment”, and because we have been practicing this for some 400 years now, we think it the normal state of affairs. But open-ended employment rather than task-oriented contracts, is regarded as “inefficient” by employers, who do not want to have to negotiate with each employee any number of times throughout the working relationship – and employees generally have little concept of their worth in the marketplace. Neither side would do well in the necessary dickering process that would take place.
Continued............
RickW
4 years ago
Employment is Slavery (Part Deux)
But open-ended employment necessarily means that the rights individuals must be truncated, in greater or lesser degree. In addition, because governments in general side with employers to skew what should be a level playing field, instead of being a neutral party, enforcing the rule impartially, unions became doubly necessary to negotiate on behalf of blocs of employees (the collective agreement). And with our legal system being adversarial in nature, this inevitably leads to confrontation, rather than cooperation. Of course, individual employees COULD hire a representative to negotiate for them, or form groups and hire a rep on a one-off basis, but again, in this society, that would generally mean hiring a LAWYER, and with MacLean Magazine’s article on the state of the legal profession, that would be risky indeed:
http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=20070726_161005_9580
We could learn well from the FN people, and save ourselves a lot of grief. But it would mean having to work at it…………most (I suspect) would rather be slaves (but let’s call it “wage slaves” ‘cause it sounds much nicer).
And we will continue to have otherwise needless confrontation..........
dorothy
4 years ago
eh?
"..payday signals the end of a contract, and the completion of the task required (else, why would [s]he be paid for incomplete work?) Further work requires a new contract, in which a beginning and an end are embedded."
This would only apply if we are indeed talking about 'piecework'. A longer-term contract usually reads like 'I will take care of this particular area as specified in the stated standards until further notice.' There is really nothing open-ended and inconclusive about that. It remains a specified undertaking. What you and FN are talking about would be the personal assistant, outright servant or handmaiden kind of position, and yes, this is indeed a kind of slavery, except you are not owned, but have 'bonded' yourself to be 'at hand'. I don't see why the distinction is anything other than highly facetious. No one can in this day and age be compelled to do a certain job, and this was the point I was making before. There was opportunity available here these years back, because people presented themselves a more loyal, cheaper and hard-working duty-machines than what local youth and other unskilled personnel was available. Now it is suddenly not thought to be necessary to stick with anymore, what was the selling point back then, and I am asserting that there is an element of false pretense and manupulation in that modus operandi. As an immigrant myself, who had to pay every whit of my dues and walk every inch of the nine miles in order to become an 'acceptable' Canadian, I think I have the right to speak in those terms.
RickW
4 years ago
dorothy
Life (from these FN persons perspective) IS "piecework", Dorothy. Before White Man Cometh, the functions of the "job" changed with the seasons. It is only we "whities" that ignore spring, summer, winter, and fall.
But we've been doing this for so many generations now, we think it normal -- and our society is stressed to the point of falling apart because of it.
We tried to make the "flow" go with us, rather than us go with the flow. And it is not working. A simple check of the stats will show this.
dorothy
4 years ago
It's in the numbers...
Good grief, must we be completely fixated on the whities-versus-real-people perspective? And what you say sounds like some contrived cop-out. Of course the job changes with the seasons! You do not ‘do’ the same things for your reindeer herd in the beginning of summer as you do in the fall, it remains the job of caring for the herd. Not ‘piecework’, but, for all intents and purposes, a job, and an ongoing one….
But even more importantly: If white people regard work in this fashion, why is it that we must bury our notions, so that the notions of others can prevail? What makes them superior and to be given the field without contest, just because they open their mouth? It seems to me, we have been quite successful. So successful, in fact, that in has, in itself, become a problem, but that is not a sound basis for this abject self-denigration. Let us simply learn to modify the ways in which we handle our own success. The most important mythology we need to take on for critical review is the one, that we can keep cramming more and more and more people onto this tired old globe. When mankind as a whole, whatever color we were then, still had some sense, and when we really ‘went with the flow’, we knew better than to effect families of more than replacement rate or thereabouts. We may have known children were the gift of the Gods, but there was still dialogue between us and our gods, and sometimes we wisely declined the gift. Only when the man-god line became unidirectional as in ‘thou shallt not’ did that get messed up. As long as you and other romantics do not tackle this issue and ask why, and to serve whom or what, Canadas’s population is still being allowed to increase, we do not need to look in weird places for why ‘our society is stressed to the point of falling apart’.
A couple of days ago, a man found himself on a city street, so desperate that he lost it and struck out in all directions, including at law enforcement people. He died for that; I suppose he represented a problem, but what the heck, we can just import a new shining one with a better attitude. It would be interesting to track the dead man’s history of knocking on closed doors that never opened for him, because there was always a more attractive, better suited ‘model’ lined up right next to him, for instance somebody who looked more like a workaholic, who was willing to risk a painful back with more gusto. We consider each other as simply commodities, and that, my friend, is why we are so ‘stressed’.
RickW
4 years ago
You have to remember, dorothy.....
.....that the FN are in a state of "civlizationis imterruptus", even after 400-odd years. We unceremoniously tried imposing our "work ethic" on FN people, and it didn't take (by and large), because they did not work "by the clock" (Just what DOES 5:00 o'clock MEAN, anyway?)
Have you ever seen or read "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville? If so, do you remember the part in the beginning of the book/movie where they were hiring a crew for the Pequod? That is how employment should be conducted, and it is much closer to the FN way of contracting work, than the slavery we call employment today......
dorothy
4 years ago
Still slaving away here...
Well, here, now, it goes like this: Some things need to be covered twenty-four-seven. 5:00 o'clock doesn’t mean anything. It’s called 5 o'clock or 5:00 a.m or p.m, or 0500 hours or 1700 hours, but never ‘5:00 o'clock’. But one of these times, correctly specified, might be the time where one of the 24/7 people’s shift is over, and he/she hopes the relief will show up. I will not insult both of us by going into who the 24/7 people are, but I am pretty sure you, like most of us, have at some point relied on some of them.
The First Nations people have their own versions of 24/7 ‘slavery’. In the bad old days, before law and order became as namby-pamby as it is now, many of them would post sentries in order to sleep easy. More recently, I seem to recall that a small contingency of First Nations people proposed to keep guard on the sundance site at Gustafsen Lake 24/7, not exactly piece work, that, but a pretty ongoing commitment. In fact, if I remember correctly, it was here the stupid white man, who objected to this commitment not being in the nature of a more laid-back enterprise.
It would be nice, if everything could be done by gentlemen’s agreements. The problem is, we’re running so darn short on gentlemen. I don’t know that this can be fixed without somehow re-creating those days where the village ruled and everybody had a unique place in the social structure. We can do that, if we get rid of the human surplus, maybe 4-5 billion units to bring us down to the 2 to 2.5 billion, which the wise men now agree is the optimal number. It is most decently done by attrition and common sense. So, assuming you mean business, how many volunteer hours have you put in for Planned Parenthood lately?
RickW
4 years ago
Last I heard......
....the number was less than a billion. I guess the "wise men" thought that a little too extreme. Didn't want to scare people with the notion that the ONLY way to get under a billion is through complete catatrophe (which we seem to be working diligently at, what with the hormon-changing cemicals we insist on pumping into the air, water, soil).
Volunteer? Doesn't that require time to spare.......?
G West
4 years ago
I think that's a little extreme
There was an interesting column in the Los Angeles Times by Niall Ferguson on this very subject sometime around the end of July.
I'll see if I can find a link to it, it was called Malthusian misery's comeback.
I think this should get you to it:
http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-oe-ferguson30jul30,1,6741316.column?coll=la-news-columns&ctrack=3&cset=true
dorothy
4 years ago
Voluntary acts as opposed to back-against-the-wall ones
“Volunteer? Doesn't that require time to spare.......?”
Here I wasn’t occupying myself with logistics and how to overcome it, just making the observation that, if we aren’t dicussing the most pressing issue, which you seem to have made yourself familiar with already, how can we begin to pretend that we have any largesse with which to act as bleedin-heart anything?
I have heard it till I am blue in the face, that ‘by comparison’, we Canadians are so well off, blah, blah, blah. Bono and cohorts and their ‘disappointment’ inundates us morn, noon and night.
What we may have is a grip on the notion that it will pay us to set quality before quantity, but our politicians, living in the pockets of the fathers of the religion of ongoing ‘market growth’ (there’s the quantity), are constantly cramming our wise insight back in our throats by keeping up the import of eager and willing cheap labour. This is why I am less than sympathetic to such labour thirty years later. Why don’t they just bite the bullet and step aside for the next new shining generation of workaholics, who doesn’t yet know that we all get older and weaker in the knees and backs? There is, perhaps, something lemming-like in the whole scenario?
I don’t think the ONLY way to get down to reasonable numbers is by way of catastrophe. But it does present a problem, that so many nations are still in the business of uncritically ‘pumping them out’ in unmanageable numbers. We must manage to persuade, them, one way or another, that it ain’t the way, Nike and Mattel be damned. Not to mention the whole gang of jealous Gods looking for followers in greater and greater numbers. We must help by making clear, that we look at the writing on the wall in this here country, and we are going to act accordingly. Fat chance there are any politicians who will really represent us in this. Do they already have the life-preserving bunkers built somewhere we don’t know about??
There were Vikings in this country once, and they understood entropy: the mythology has it, that the enemy ships at Ragnarok will be built from dead men’s clipped-off nails. Some stupid people tried to forestall Ragnarok a little further by klipping those nails on the dead men themselves and throwing them away, so they wouldn’t be available for the staffers in Hel, but the wiser people understood, that the trick was to produce fewer dead men by putting fewer new ones into circulation, who would end up dead….Well, the ancient wisdoms weren’t convenient for the upper crust and its aspirations to wealth, power, and glory, and the rest is history as we know it….
What shall we do? Until we know, it seems to me there is little profit in discussing the decoration of the cake.
PS thanks to G west for the link.
RickW
4 years ago
dorothy
I think we're on the same boat....but one of us is starboard, and one of us is port......
RickW
4 years ago
G West
Extreme? By all means.........
But why is the mantra of our society "get a job"? Jobs are, by necessity predicated on someone having something that needs doing. So why does it have to be multi-mega corps.?
It has been noted that people coming out of school today stand a good chance of having a half-dozen "careers" in their working lifetime. What that tells me is the traditional "get a job" doesn't offer much by way of security anymore -- and the average Joe and Josephine Lunchbucket are in fact looking for a little security, especially when the kids come along and bills begin rolling in. There are not many of us, who will "take the bull by the horns", a la "the self-made man". All I am saying is: "Why not?"
PS Can't access your link unless I register.....
dorothy
4 years ago
Security (sigh)
"...and the average Joe and Josephine Lunchbucket are in fact looking for a little security, especially when the kids come along and bills begin rolling in."
Good luck! That is one of the big lies. Whoever told anybody and where did it happen, that security is part of the package deal? Hit the asphalt running and never stop, that's the best security you can have. Nobody says you have to work for a big corporation - 'gainful employment' can take many forms: renting a hole in the wall with a stove, where you cook the world's best chili and serve it to bypassers is OK, and so on, everything from walking and scooping after people's best friends to doing contract sniping is supposed to be a worthy enterprise, inasmuch as thousands of people the world over live by these means. In all of these undertakings (no pun intended), you can be an independent agent and your own master/mistress. Security lies in your professional acuity in whatever you choose to do. And that is also true for real regular 'jobjobs'. You only get paid as long as you perform to the standards you said you would. But then again, it's never been any different' all the way back to us being hunter/gatherers. No work, no eat. Unless you would be a robber, and you know what happened to them back then. I think we can safely say that there was a selective advantage on being mostly follwing the accepted rules.
Link: so why don't you register? it would qualify as taking the bull by the horns, eh?
I refuse to be stuck with one side of the ship. Any decent Viking woman would. Versatility is where the fun is, so don't ever become blockheaded unless you get paid very well for it.
G West
4 years ago
Registration is free - go for it!
The LA Times is actually a pretty decent paper...and it's an interesting column
RickW
4 years ago
G West
The zip code foiled me.............
G West
4 years ago
Try this one
13329
That's for Dolgeville, N.Y.; or 35209 - which means you're from Birmingham Alabama; here's one for Malibu California - 90265.
RickW
4 years ago
Thanks, GW!
Population crashes occur throughout the world, virtually in all species (both plant and animal) save our own (and those we "fiddle" with).
One of the indicators (as Niall Ferguson notes in his Malthusian misery) is inflation in the foods we take for granted, as the volume of food produced struggles to keep up with the population increases.
And (to relate to subject matter of this thread) our collective reaction is to seek increased remuneration, as inflation tends to pervade every aspect of our lives. This plainly does not solve the greater problem (the Malthusian Misery), but what else can we as individuals do?
Dorothy mentioned all kinds of things, and while I would welcome a population vapable of pursuing this, independant of unions, associations, and other cabals, on a practical level it ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
RickW
4 years ago
On Further Relection.......
.......the one thing that might likely put a dent in Malthus' hypothesis is: education.
It has been universally observed that, those countries and societies where a universal education is acquired, show a concommitant drop in birth rates.
G West
4 years ago
Prices
I'm told the cost of tortillas in Mexico has trebled or quadrupled lately. This is apparently in response to the increased demand for corn in ethanol production.
I'm not sure how much more ethanol is meant to be distilled in the coming months and years but, given the finite amount of land suitable for corn cultivation, I'd suggest that price inflation for tortilla flour is going to be pronounced.
Perhaps we can look forward to a bit of Malthusian medicine in the form of mass starvation...happily we’ll still be able to drive our cars without increasing the demand for more oil – doing something more benign for the atmosphere into the bargain.
The problem with education is that folks, in countries with excellent education and a high standard of living, more than make up in personal consumption for whatever savings result from smaller families.
Perhaps we're just screwed.
RickW
4 years ago
G West
Now you are assuming that we here have an "excellent education"......? :~)
Methinks, while it may be "excellent", it ain't well-rounded...........
RickW
4 years ago
www.thehungersite.com:80/clic
http://www.thehungersite.com:80/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1
G West
4 years ago
Don't disagree on that point
But given the fact that Canada's energy consumption (notwithstanding our low birth rate) actually exceeds that of the whole continent of Africa - I find it hard to accept that birth control is the only way to tackle the grim reality of limited resources.
Just as simply pumping money at problems won't solve them either.
dorothy
4 years ago
it's about our heads
"...I find it hard to accept that birth control is the only way to tackle the grim reality of limited resources."
No, it is not the only way, but all the other ways we can come up with will only postpone the problem, if we don't start there. Resources are not just 'limited', they are finite. There is a brick wall we will hit on how much of the biomass we can turn into 'us' and still expect to survive. We will show respect for that limit - or we will be made to do so. There are certainly many other things we will need to do, but almost all the other ills, over-consumption and warped values that send our 'footprint' off scale - most of them are based on there being new needs 'created' for market shares to go up, and this again is based on the ideology of economic growth. There is no more economic growth to be had. That is why we are into the marginal if not outright criminal marketing strategies, as well as mountains of useless 'cool' junk on offer, and turf wars all around. As long as the 'growth' paradigm keeps gaining credibility due to increasing populations, those who need to will not be moved to give up the paradigm, but it is vital that they do. The only way is for the regular Joes and Janes to stop delivering more and more human 'substrate' for those parasitic operators to live on top of.
G West
4 years ago
On the 'growth' sickness
On the sickness of continued economic 'growth' I certainly agree dorothy - my remarks about birth control were really a continuation of this:
...in countries with excellent education and a high standard of living, (we) more than make up in personal consumption for whatever savings (in terms of consumption) result from having smaller families.
It is a double-edged sword - reducing the birth rate seems to, from all evidence, increase the sense of entitlement of the remainder. So I don't think it's just a question of stopping the baby parade.