Do you feel it? I certainly do.
You go to a restaurant, the food is overpriced, the service is poor, and a 20% minimum tip is expected.
Your municipal taxes increased, but the roads are worse than ever.
You feel sick, but you’ll just tough it out because your family doctor is booking four weeks out, and the ER is so full you’ll wait all day sitting around other sick people. (Hope it’s not an infection!)
You learn to live comfortably carrying a little more debt each day, as the number slowly ticks upward.
Better not drive too much, oil changes are at least $100, and those tires need to make it till the end of summer!
Oh no! You’ve got three family birthdays next month and people generally get you $30-$50 gifts, so you’re obliged to do the same.
It’s relentless.
The consequence of more than four decades of cutbacks, shrinkflation combined with inflation, and companies maximizing efficiency while chasing endless growth: We’re stretched. Thin.
I work in public education and I see it every day. Overworked teachers, administrators, specialists, and virtually every other employee. There is so much need but never enough resources to go around, despite the fact that we live in an age of abundance!
Kids are also more stressed than ever, largely because they are coming from homes that are more stressed than ever. Food and housing insecurity is on the rise and parents are feeling the squeeze too. Their kids come to school carrying these worries and it gets expressed in a number of disruptive ways. Now the kid is suspended and the overworked, underpaid parent needs to leave their job to pick the kid up. They blame the school. “Can’t they handle this kid?” That increases stress on education professionals exacerbating the issue further.
There is lots of talk about teacher “burnout” in nearly every education discussion. 30% of new teachers quit the profession within the first five years, and in 2014 (pre-COVID!) 85% of teachers said the work/life balance was negatively affecting their ability to teach effectively, with 35% reporting it as a “significant” issue. None of this is new information to most people, but how have we let it get this bad?
Cutbacks + increased demand = 🗜
(That’s a vice emoji BTW. I’m working with the “squeeze” metaphor)
And make no mistake. The vast majority of people doing these jobs are wonderful, loving, kind, people doing their best. They’ve dedicated themselves to a career based on taking care of others.
But they’re being squeezed in the name of efficiency!
And its not just education. We see it in other areas of the public sector. Nurses and doctors working in understaffed, overflowing ERs. People living in rural centers needing to drive further and further to see dentists, optometrists, pediatricians, and even family doctors! Rising utility costs and increased taxes, yet poorer roads and fewer services.
How did this happen?
One big mistake was thinking governments should operate like businesses. It’s an attractive prospect at first glance: Let’s streamline things. Close smaller schools and hospitals in favor of larger centers we can focus resources on. Only to then creep back more services to make things more efficient:
“We can fit 30 kids in this class, right? How about 32? Well, then it’s not such a difference to go to 35, right?”
“We’re not using these 30 hospital beds 50% of the time. Let’s close this wing and combine it with another.”
“We’ll have the SLP specialist “train” the teacher assistant on how to do this program rather than do it herself, because we only have one of her and there are 50 kids on her caseload who each need daily practice to improve their speech!”
But with each successive cut the pressure on the system ratchets up. After forty years, we’re reaching a breaking point. Governments should never have acted like businesses. In fact, they should regularly provide services for the public good that are not profitable. I don’t resent paying taxes. I do resent paying one of the highest tax rates in Canada and not even having a doctor despite living in my current community for three years!
Would it really be a problem to build beyond capacity? If those 30 hospital beds weren’t closed, then maybe our hospitals would have accommodated the increased demand in the pandemic with less stress and fewer lives lost. If teachers and administrators were not working 15-20 extra hours/week and teaching 30 students at a time, perhaps they’d have the bandwidth for the increased needs the students are presenting.
Would it really be so bad if people’s jobs were easier? Who would that hurt?
The corporate world is no better. The relentless pursuit of growth has shredded our once robust middle class over the past forty years and the trend continues. For an increasing number of people, they no longer have careers, they have gigs. Companies elect to hire “contractors” to do integral jobs because it is cheaper and they don’t need to provide benefits.
We sacrifice so much in the name of profit.
How to change it? The system seems rigged doesn’t it?
We have plenty of data telling us that we should be breaking up large monopolies like Facebook. Google, and Amazon. But it doesn’t happen.
Legislators are too deeply in the pockets of corporate lobbyists. Why do corporations spend all that money? Its a safe investment in their increased growth.
Algorithms designed by these same companies control the media we consume, pitting us against one another, rather that seeing the real source of our hardships.
In 1982 there were 13 billionaires in the world. In 2023 that number had risen to 3323! If you don’t think that consolidation of wealth came at the expense of the middle class, then you are not paying attention.
Society is suffering and more of us are feeling a harder squeeze each time we wake up.
I know I am. Aren’t you?
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That wasn't a "Like = Like". More of a "Like=I agree with your take on all this awful bullshit".