I Was Thinking About All The Stories Of Exploited Workers Explaining That They Can’t Leave Work Even

I was thinking about all the stories of exploited workers explaining that they can’t leave work even if they’re sick, prompted by coronavirus concerns & I was thinking about when I was a *part time* librarian at a community college and was made responsible for making ALL college IDs for students and staff and how once I called in sick for 2 days (unpaid because no benefits but I took the pay cut to stay home) and when I got back I had panicked emails from my boss who had gotten panicked emails from their boss who had gotten a swarm of panicked calls from people who hadn’t received IDs cause no one took any photos or processed or printed them for a week (cause I was only scheduled like 3 days a week to begin with) & therefore people couldn’t register for classes or in some cases even get in the building, and an emergency meeting was called where I had to explain how I got so far behind. Because they had no one else who knew how to perform this vital function to the college except a part time, unbenefitted person working in the campus library, and just relied on the assumption that I would never call in.

I’m sure none of the students realized how absolutely dysfunctional their college was. They probably thought the delay was some sort of disorganized bureaucratic nightmare, which would have been a valid theory. But no, it was 1 worker who was sick for 2 days and it brought the whole functioning of the college down.

People really don’t understand how precarious literally everything is. So much relies on the sacrifice of exploited labor, and the precarity only reveals itself when someone in that position refuses to provide that sacrifice