We apologize if the following story is just too difficult to read. This is a sad – very sad – report. Mother Jones has released the results of an investigation it did into the work conditions of average Americans at a Mississippi warehouse. And the results are shocking.
“And we want to start here if we could. This is very sad. It really is very tragic,” Glenn said on radio this morning. “Do we have any music to go with it?”
Cue the sad and depressing music to supplement this gut-wrenching discovery.
“The audio we're going to play for you is an undercover exposé,” Glenn said somberly. “If you go undercover and take your microphones and cameras and you start to go into some of these sweat shops. You won’t believe what some of these giant corporations are asking people to do.”
“This is actual audio. We are verifying this is not Communist China,” Glenn joked. “They did get this. But the conditions are beyond imagination, and the music says it all. Here's a poor woman going in just trying to make a living. And look at what these evil capitalists have done. Thank goodness Mother Jones is there to expose the horrors of American capital.”
“If you’re driving, please pull over. If you have children, excuse them from the room,” Glenn warned. “You know, you are going to change your mind about America and capitalism when you hear this expose from Mother Jones.”
The woman speaking the clips below is the undercover reporter from Mother Jones who debunked this groundbreaking story.
VOICE: You can get in trouble for not doing enough. If I said I can't do it. So when someone comes to tell me I'm doing a bad job, and I say, ‘I'm sorry this is the best I can do,’ I will get fired.
“Can you believe if you don't do a good job you could get fired,” Pat asked exasperatedly.
“Occupy this factory,” Stu added.
But it gets worse…
VOICE: People are running around all day and doing terribly non-ergonomically friendly actions over and over and over again because you have to get down on the floor to pick up where a lot of the things are stocked, and reach up on your tippy toes. All the angles are uncomfortable. Everybody has joint pain, and knee pain, and back pain. And it's like that for 10 and a half to 12 hours a day…
Now you might be thinking, how bad could non-ergonomically friendly working conditions be? Really, really bad. Everything is not at eye-level, and she is on her tippy toes for Pete’s sake!
“I want you to brace yourself. Imagine you're in a place where they've already made you engage in ergonomically unfriendly actions. You are on your tippy toes from time to time reaching down to pick things up off the floor,” Glenn said before playing another piece of this tragedy.
VOICE: It’s funny you mention China. I asked if I could go to the bathroom during one of my first shifts on one of my first days. This isn't China. In fact if I chose to go to bathroom that meant I would have to work twice as hard when I got back from the bathroom in order to make up for the time I missed because I would be behind in my goals. It's authoritarian, and really awful, impersonal, and horrible work experience.
Listen to what this tortured individual is spending her day laboring for:
VOICE: I think having a wage is great. It depends on which obviously having a job is better than not having a job. The thing about these jobs is they will have to have somebody do them. But they don't have to do them so uncomfortably.
How horrible is it that people in this country are uncomfortably working for wages in non-ergonomically friendly work environments?
“You would never be uncomfortable doing your job. You can go to the bathroom for as long as you wanted. You would never be fired if you couldn't do the job. Just a few minutes ago I thought that's the world we lived in,” Glenn lamented.
Glenn, Pat, Stu clearly had a good time with this story, but all kidding aside, it is this type of entitlement culture that is dooming America.
“What the hell happened to you with your parents,” Glenn asked. “No, you're just dumb as a box of rocks. You're doomed to mediocrity until you destroy America!”
