Guerrilla Social Work

As a tax payer, I am really tired of paying for those lazy asses on welfare, you know, those lazy ass greedy corporations that suck corporate welfare dollars out of the tax base. We’re all familiar with the standard types of corporate welfare like when the government gives a company money for job creation. Just in case you’re not familiar with it, it works like this;

The government give a company money to create jobs.(it’s partnership right)

$50,000.00

The company creates too full time jobs at $19,552.00 per year (They can’t pay more that that, I mean you have to think about the economy)

total $39,104.00

The balance is used to cover payroll costs and the company’s EI costs etc.

Two people now have jobs, the government’s job creation works yay!

Well sort of, couple of problems.

1. Minimum wages is not enough to eat, pay rent and utilities. So these workers need to access the food bank, subsidized housing, emergency dental and prescriptions or other services offered by our social safety net. (That thing capitalists hate paying for)

2. Once the money is gone, so are the jobs. A company is not in business to spend money on things like jobs if they can get the government to do it so if the government won’t renew the grant the jobs are gone.

3. The two employees are now on EI, and because of the grant, only the government  and the employees contributed to EI not the company.

Our government contributes our tax dollars to corporate welfare then the social safety net makes it possible for the companies to pay a low wage. Why don’t we demand that companies pay a living wage and then maybe the cost of subsidizing housing and buying jobs would go down. There is a lot of  crying wolf that costs will go up and everything will be unaffordable. But prices will only rise as much as the market will handle, it will level out maybe  little higher but wages will be up and taxes will be down,

What the hell is wrong with asking companies to pay their own why rather than relying on government hand outs. Maybe that’s a little too socialist. the reality is that without a social safety net the capitalist system we have will collapse. It keeps the works strong enough to be ready to work when a company needs them but not strong enough to rise up and revolt when they realize the system doesn’t work. (An underfunded education system keep people from developing critical thinking skills that would allow people to figure this out.)

I heard a story today, it’s a story I’ve heard a thousand times and it always leaves me speechless. It usually goes like this, someone is complaining about a difficult client, someone who has complex needs or issues. They have strong addictions, tormented by delusions or they haven’t find the motivation to change. This “professional” will often say things like “we need to discharge them” or “they won’t change, why waste our time”. Or sometimes you’re talking bout how good a client is doing and you hear the famous, “oh you can’t trust them, I’ve never met them but you know these types you can’t trust them”

What the hell do they think we’re doing here. We work with people who have complex, challenging and sometime down right interesting needs and issue, some of them even have a, dare I say it, mental illness, criminal record, active charges, or personality disorder. Why do some people expect they people we work with to not have problems, if they didn’t they we’d be out of a job