MemeMachineGo!

I read something very disturbing this morning. It seems that some Walmarts lock their employees in at night, without anyone on the premises having the key , and with the warning that they’ll be fired if they use the fire escape in any event other than a fire. And there have been several cases of people being injured, but waiting hours to seek medical attention for fear of losing their jobs.

But that’s not the disturbing part.

In the ensuing Metafilter discussion , there are several blame-the-employees perspectives offered, including the theory that this proves that poor people are stupid and deserve to be treated like shit.

You probably think I’m exaggerating. I would in your shoes. So; :

These are adults. They have some level of responsibility for themselves. If they’ve got broken bones or are having possible heart attacks, then they’ve got to take the initiative to attend to their problems in the best way that they can and if they lose their $6 an hour job, that’s not a worse fate than an ankle that ends up requiring pins because it was walked around on for several hours with a fracture or dying from an ignored heart attack. […] When you put your crap job above the fact that you’ve been hit by a friggin forklift and need medical attention, what do you want to be told? There was an option for these workers and they didn’t take it. Of course, it could be that the reason why they’re working one of the crappiest jobs on earth is because they don’t have the capacity for independent reasoning and can’t realize that personal health and safety are priority issues, but I don’t know why that’s anyone else’s fault.

Because, of course, there are always so many jobs available that one’s loss of a job could never mean the difference between housing and feeding your family and not. So there couldn’t possibly be anything rational about being so desperate to keep your job that the cost-benefit analysis favored suffering for a few hours over being unemployed when your ability to seek jobs and what jobs you could accept are impaired by your injury. Nope, gotta be stupidity.