Since it's Christmas, be wary of any corporation that encourages charity (like Walmart and countless universities across the U.S.). They could just, you know, pay their fucking employees a livable salary.
Each dollar you donate through them is a dollar of tax write-off for them when they make that final check and send it to the charity. I used Walmart as an example because it's the largest employer in the U.S. yet it pays its workers salaries so low that many of them qualify for food stamps. Then it holds food drives for its own employees. Walmart’s charity, like the charitable giving by so many other large corporations, is just a cheap ploy meant to cover up what it’s really doing to its people — devaluing them.
Many U.S. universities hold similar food drives too and refuse to pay their professors and adjunct faculty fair compensation while tuition rates continue to rise and rise each year.
On September 1, 2013, Margaret Mary Vojtko, an 83-year-old adjunct professor at Duquesne University, died in poverty. She taught French for 25 years, receiving up to $3,500 per course and made an annual salary of less than $10,000. She took a second job at a fast food restaurant and and slept in her office until the university kicked her out and she was forced to live in a shelter. Like most adjuncts, she received no benefits or health insurance.
It wasn’t that Duquesne University couldn’t afford to pay her. It was that they refused to. We now live in an economy where entry-level jobs have turned into unpaid internships and full-time jobs have turned into low-paying contract positions. We are in a post-employment economy. Don’t believe what the media tells you —there are actually plenty of jobs out there. The problem is that none of these jobs are paid.
“Fiscal stability that relies on charitable giving is not stability. It is a guarantee of insecurity: income based not on work but on the whims of others. Unpredictable generosity is not a replacement for a living wage. Charity should not be a substitute for justice.” (Sarah Kendzior)
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I usually do a write up of the events I’ve organized or hosted and my most-read articles at the end of the year. This was an unusual year (obviously, there is no need to go into it here) so I didn’t bother. Instead I want to highlight a project of mine that I am particularly proud of — it’s my new podcast show, Unverified Accounts, that I cohost with my frequent collaborators, Chris Jesu Lee and Filip Guo. If you're a big movie/TV/book buff, have leftist sympathies, but can't stand 'wokeness' dumbing down our culture, then we're the podcast for you. So far in our 25 episodes, we’ve covered a range of contentious topics.