The Workforce Strikes Back

(Indefinitely)

So there’s been an indefinite nationwide strike at my job since the start of December last year. Productivity and revenue have been down, and things probably aren’t very far from grinding to a complete halt. There have been several meetings, but nothing good and/or conclusive has come out of them as far as I’ve heard, which means that no one really knows exactly when things will go back to normal. Now I typically love a strike as much as the next person who hates their job, so when someone like me starts to become concerned about how long said strike has been going on, it’s probably not a good sign. Or is it that I’m becoming more responsible since becoming a senior officer? Fuck, I hope not. Ew. Anyway, this ongoing cold war reminds me of this fable about another strike, so here goes another retelling you didn’t ask for:

Apparently there used to be a time when all the parts of the human body had freewill and autonomy over their own actions, instead of working together as a unit the way they do these days, thankfully. Which is probably the reason why, surprise surprise, everyone hated their jobs. And in a scenario of such widespread low job satisfaction, if there’s anyone who seems to be having what looks like the slightest hint of a pleasant work experience, well, it doesn’t take long for everyone else to turn against them. So they all start hating on the stomach for seemingly living an idle, luxurious life of chilling while they labour every day to feed and support it. Eventually everyone decides to down their tools and go on strike. You know what, I’m starting to think that maybe these body parts didn’t have autonomy before, and the brain (who would usually keep everyone in line) was the first to go on strike without telling anyone, which is why everyone else was left to their own devices and able to come up with such a stupid plan.

So the strike begins. The hands refuse to pick up food to put in the mouth, the mouth refuses to open to receive any food, and the teeth won’t even chew anything. This industrial action goes all the way down to the internal organs (except maybe for the appendix, whose actual function still remains a mystery, so it probably makes no difference if they work or not). Of course it doesn’t take very long for the most obvious hole in this plan to reveal itself, which is that the food being received and processed by the stomach is necessary for the entire body to stay healthy. So internal organs begin to fail, body parts begin to atrophy, until eventually the human in whose body all this is going on dies, most likely feeling very confused and forsaken by God.

That poor, unfortunate soul.

Is there a moral? Obviously, if you wanna be politically correct. Know your role within the ecosystem, cooperation is good, strikes are bad, everyone’s job is just as important, blah blah blah. But forget all that right now. Me, I’m more concerned about how long it took for everyone to realize that there wasn’t any winner and that they were ultimately fucking themselves. Of course industrial action is often necessary, sometimes even required in order to achieve real, positive change. But when things grind to a halt, people are suffering, and meetings produce nothing except more meetings, to the point when there’s no actual timeline for normalcy to resume, the question stops being “Is this strike justified?” and quietly becomes “Who can afford for this to keep going, and for how much longer?”

And by the way, why was there no strike action against the tongue? It gets to participate actively in French kissing, as well as taste food, drinks and… other things. Yeah, this strike was doomed from the start for so many reasons. Smh