The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy

[Valin]

YES:

All around you are everyday heroes who refuse to be complicit in the economic mistreatment of other people.
Lisa Dodson
5/18/11

Bea, a manager at a big-box chain store in Maine, likes to keep a professional atmosphere in the store. But with a staff struggling to get by on $6 to $8 an hour, sometimes things get messy. When one of her employees couldn’t afford to buy her daughter a prom dress, Bea couldn’t shake the feeling that she was implicated by the injustice. “Let’s just say ... we made some mistakes with our prom dress orders last year,” she told me. “Too many were ordered, some went back. It got pretty confusing.” And Edy? “She knocked them dead” at the prom.

Andrew, a manager in a large food business in the Midwest, told me about the moral dilemma of employing people who can’t take care of their families even though they are working hard. This was something that he couldn’t pretend was okay. He came to the decision to “do what [he] can” even at the risk of being accused of stealing. “I pad their paychecks because you can’t live on what they make. I punch them out after they have left for a doctor’s appointment or to take care of someone ... And I give them food to take home....”

(Snip)

Between 2001 and 2008, I spoke with hundreds of lower- and middle-income people about the economy, work, schools, health care, and what they saw happening around them. When this research began, I was focusing on parents in low-wage families, documenting their accounts of working, being poor, and trying to keep children safe. But that changed when I spoke with Jonathan, a middle-aged “top manager” in a chain of grocery stores in the Midwest. I was asking him about the stresses of running a business that employed lots of low-wage parents. He acknowledged there were plenty. I was getting toward the end of the interview and he seemed to sense that, so he stopped me and asked, “Don’t you want to know what this is doing to me, too?”

At first I thought he was going to tell me his own financial problems. But he wanted to talk about being someone who makes enough to live “fairly comfortably” while having authority over hardworking parents who do not. He spoke of parents whom he got to know pretty well, who headed home each week with less than they needed to feed their families. Yes, he said, it is the “going wage”—America’s “market wage”—that doesn’t cover the market cost of basic human needs. Still, it didn’t seem right to Jonathan. He described how it changed his job, tainted it, to be supervising people who couldn’t get by on what he paid them.

(Snip)

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About YES!



A small experiment by me to see how the right and the left respond to this.

CGP: The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy


"Bea, a manager at a big-box chain store in Maine, likes to keep a professional atmosphere in the store. But with a staff struggling to get by on $6 to $8 an hour, sometimes things get messy. When one of her employees couldn’t afford to buy her daughter a prom dress, Bea couldn’t shake the feeling that she was implicated by the injustice. “Let’s just say ... we made some mistakes with our prom dress orders last year,” she told me. “Too many were ordered, some went back. It got pretty confusing.” And Edy? “She knocked them dead” at the prom."
My reply
"So in other words it's ok to steal, as long as it makes you feel good, and it's stealing from an evil exploitive (meaning they pay less than you, or someone else thinks they should be paid) big company."

[Sanguine]

Exactly, Valin. Interesting use of the word "Moral".

[Argyle58]

I felt the exact same way when I read this story yesterday morning. It would have been a great story had any of the principals donated out of their own pockets in an act of charity. But, what they did was just plain theft.

 

I guess that's why these "heroes" last names were left out of the article.

[pollyannaish]

This is exactly the core problem with the left's mentality.

 

Honesty is not something THEY need to do or be. It is not about them. It is about what OTHER people need to do. Personal responsibility and the concept of doing the right thing no matter what other people are doing is completely lost in the equation.

 

I would cheer if these people stepped up and used their own money to help others. But this is theft, pure and simple. And it is in no uncertain terms immoral.