IT’S not true that hard work will get you out of poverty – or at least it used to be.
Brain power, parental legacy, and often times, pieces of stamped fancy paper – in this age, these are what’s needed to get comfortable lives. Sweating and toiling alone excessively won’t get you much.If you do not have at least one of these, you will not be entitled to be properly clothed, sheltered, or fed.
If anything, it is that the harder you work, the more you make others become richer – and when I say richer, it means that they have had something great to begin the race with. Sometimes, privileged people will tell those who work themselves to the bones that they are poor because they do not work hard enough.
But in really, it’s not that the privileged ones are where they are now not necessarily because of physical labor alone. Nonetheless, they need those below them to work hard to keep the cogs of their businesses running.
Even if a cargador or laborer were to work like a dog day till night, an office employee in an air-conditioned room who worked for only eight hours or less that day would still get a higher pay. It’s because the office worker had a fancy paper with him called a college diploma, while the cargador only has his body, his whole physical strength, and buckets of sweat he had shed in his labor.
This goes for every public transport driver, farmer, fisherman, vendor, and other “common” worker. Even if vegetable vendors sacrifice sleep to lay down stores out in the streets at night, people who had worked less but had “qualifications” would still have more money than them at the end of the day.
It’s because they did not study hard, they did not go to school, or that they were born like that – we then blame their status to their life choices or birth lottery. Then do nothing more genuine than that to uplift them.
At most, they only get pats at the back and a thumbs up, but in the end, it was their employers or land lords who would get richer at the end of the day. They are still not appreciated genuinely. Their due wages are even oftentimes cut, withheld, or delayed, even though they worked with their entire body.
Even if they had sweated the whole day, away from the comfortable offices of their heads, they would still be seen as indolent, ineffectual, or a nuisance as soon as they stop to barely take a rest from their heavy labor.
They are so annoying in their eyes that most would be laid off, or remain as job orders, or in contractual status. Despite their hard work, they are then seen as ‘rebels’ the moment they demand for their rights such as leaves, claims for a permanent status, or other due compensations.
It seems that our commemoration of the Labor Day is nothing but an annual façade to make our employees look like humans. But in the end, we only give our thanks – and no other tangible reparation for the “blue-collar” workers.