Dear family who want me around for major holidays,
If you haven’t worked retail since the Reagan administration, kindly FUCK OFF. Your Reagan-era and Reagan-inspired laissez-faire policies are why I fear retaliation for even considering asking off for any time in November or December. Yes, this will be my sixth holiday season in a row with no time off. I am well aware. I don’t have “seniority,” I can’t “pull strings,” there is no one who can “cover for me,” and my manager will certainly not “understand if I just don’t show,” not this time of year. Those are statements of things that were possible when unions were stronger in the 1970s and had the lobbying strength to make sure that employers weren’t running busy times on overworked skeleton crews with no backup. Accrued time off, and especially paid accrued time off, simply doesn’t exist anymore for anyone on an hourly wage, so even if there was coverage, I still need to eat.
If you’re so upset your children and grandchildren can’t see you for the holidays, maybe you shouldn’t have sold them into wage slavery in the 1980s and every election since with your voting habits.
As this circulates again for the 2018 holiday season, I’d like to remind everyone that the best ways to fix this are to 1) vote, early and often, 2) unionize, and 3) don’t shop on Black Friday weekend or the weekend of/immediately before Christmas. (Yes I’m aware Black Friday already happened, but it’s a good rule for all years.) Yes, the doorbusters are good deals. Those deals come at the expense of your comrades in labor. Don’t fall for it.
IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN. Welcome to Christmas 2019!
This was posted one December night at 3 am after I had been badgered for over a month by my family to do a thing I simply could not do. I would like to remind everyone that the complaints in this post are NOT excuses to be assholes to your family members. Let the notes of this post be a place to vent, not the dinner table.
I would also like to remind all the nurses, cops, call centers, and everyone else with a “my job is so much harder than yours!” comment that yeah, probably, and you should demand better pay, conditions, and understanding, too. This is not zero sum. We ALL can and should expect better from our employers, customers, government, and families.
Give yourself a holiday present this year and unionize.



















