My sister works on a large industrial site. They do have to wear masks, get tested often, and have temps taken on arrival each day. This is largely a concession the company worked out with the state as a condition of remaining open, even during the lockdown. So the guys on the yard never missed a paycheck. But it doesn't come across as paranoia or a political statement... because most of the employees have to wear masks at work anyway: it's an industrial worksite and there's paint and particulates. The only real change was that now the engineers and supervisors have to wear them, too. If anything, it was equalizing.
On the other hand, in the two working-class establishments where I normally shop for groceries, almost nobody has been wearing masks. Walmart this week got orders from corporate HQ that everyone had to wear masks to be allowed in the store now. This has been... interesting. The greeters at the door explain. Some people comply. Some wear masks until they get inside and then remove them, and some just ignore the admonition and walk in without one. There is a distinct lack of enthusiasm for enforcement on the employee side. HQ mandates they wear masks on the job, but a lot of them are dangling from one ear. Perhaps they did not specify that it must cover the face... and they don't get paid enough to be bothered.
Meanwhile, the Piggly Wiggly is a franchise that gives individual store-owners a lot of leeway in how they run their stores. Corporate sets the basic rules about pricing, but local store-owners make decisions about inventory (every PW I've been to has a lot of local variation in what they stock). In my local PW, mask-wearing seems entirely up to the individual, whether they are customer or employee. The store has installed the mandatory plexiglass shields at the registers. They initially had the one-way tape markings on the floor, but all the customers ignored them, and now most of them have peeled off and not been replaced. Mask-wearing there is down to maybe 10% of people.
Definitely, now is the time to be agitating for the return of neighborhood schools. You don't have to push back against the "virus virus virus" hysteria. It should be leveraged to get concessions that people want. I would love to see people saying "Hey, if funneling three thousand kids together from all over town is an infection control nightmare, give us back our much-safer system of smaller schools, attended by the kids who live nearby, so we're not spreading our germs over half the county via a single middle or high school. Instead, what the PMCs are actually pushing for here (and people have not realized yet) is the complete abolition of schools as we know them: we are testing right now, the concept of mass distance-learning. Why have a teacher for every 30 kids, when you could have one teacher per grade for the whole state? Maybe just a set of pre-recorded education video units? Project them onto a screen, assign a low-paid paraprofessional to monitor the classroom, and you can quietly eliminate thousands of teaching jobs. What's bizarre is that the teachers' unions don't seem to have caught on. They're making all kinds of demands, setting all these crazy conditions for teachers to go back to work, because OMG COVID, and meanwhile those teachers' jobs are being automated away.
I'm not even a fan of schools-- I homeschool my own kids. But that's not everyone's cup of tea, and I firmly believe that if you have to have a school, a small neighborhood school is generally safer and more accountable to its constituents than the gigantic mega-school where every kid is lost in the throng and admin can only care about statistical averages. Meanwhile, for those who will be duped out of schools entirely, and their kids stuck with online "education" at home... I want to see the masses organizing to demand the return of their property taxes, so they can contract their own teachers, buy their own curricula, or at least sign their kids up for higher-quality distance-learning. I mean, the homeschool community has been developing online classes for years now. If we're going to force a huge number of kids to school-from-home anyway, why shouldn't they have access to the same high-quality already-developed programs homeschoolers have been using for years?
The loss of small businesses during the lockdown... while huge stores like WM and Target got to be "essential"... I see that as a future source of pitchforks and torches. Small businesses were already suffocating under an absurd regulatory load. Now: how many just got a death-blow? If this were a place where opening a new shop were easy, it'd be hardly a blip on the radar-- we'd see a million new ventures sprout as soon as it was legal to have customers again! Instead what we'll get is vastly shrunk options and a sharp uptick in untaxable, cash-only shadetree type businesses. I predict a renewed push for the cashless economy.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2020-07-24 02:53 am (UTC)On the other hand, in the two working-class establishments where I normally shop for groceries, almost nobody has been wearing masks. Walmart this week got orders from corporate HQ that everyone had to wear masks to be allowed in the store now. This has been... interesting. The greeters at the door explain. Some people comply. Some wear masks until they get inside and then remove them, and some just ignore the admonition and walk in without one. There is a distinct lack of enthusiasm for enforcement on the employee side. HQ mandates they wear masks on the job, but a lot of them are dangling from one ear. Perhaps they did not specify that it must cover the face... and they don't get paid enough to be bothered.
Meanwhile, the Piggly Wiggly is a franchise that gives individual store-owners a lot of leeway in how they run their stores. Corporate sets the basic rules about pricing, but local store-owners make decisions about inventory (every PW I've been to has a lot of local variation in what they stock). In my local PW, mask-wearing seems entirely up to the individual, whether they are customer or employee. The store has installed the mandatory plexiglass shields at the registers. They initially had the one-way tape markings on the floor, but all the customers ignored them, and now most of them have peeled off and not been replaced. Mask-wearing there is down to maybe 10% of people.
Definitely, now is the time to be agitating for the return of neighborhood schools. You don't have to push back against the "virus virus virus" hysteria. It should be leveraged to get concessions that people want. I would love to see people saying "Hey, if funneling three thousand kids together from all over town is an infection control nightmare, give us back our much-safer system of smaller schools, attended by the kids who live nearby, so we're not spreading our germs over half the county via a single middle or high school. Instead, what the PMCs are actually pushing for here (and people have not realized yet) is the complete abolition of schools as we know them: we are testing right now, the concept of mass distance-learning. Why have a teacher for every 30 kids, when you could have one teacher per grade for the whole state? Maybe just a set of pre-recorded education video units? Project them onto a screen, assign a low-paid paraprofessional to monitor the classroom, and you can quietly eliminate thousands of teaching jobs. What's bizarre is that the teachers' unions don't seem to have caught on. They're making all kinds of demands, setting all these crazy conditions for teachers to go back to work, because OMG COVID, and meanwhile those teachers' jobs are being automated away.
I'm not even a fan of schools-- I homeschool my own kids. But that's not everyone's cup of tea, and I firmly believe that if you have to have a school, a small neighborhood school is generally safer and more accountable to its constituents than the gigantic mega-school where every kid is lost in the throng and admin can only care about statistical averages. Meanwhile, for those who will be duped out of schools entirely, and their kids stuck with online "education" at home... I want to see the masses organizing to demand the return of their property taxes, so they can contract their own teachers, buy their own curricula, or at least sign their kids up for higher-quality distance-learning. I mean, the homeschool community has been developing online classes for years now. If we're going to force a huge number of kids to school-from-home anyway, why shouldn't they have access to the same high-quality already-developed programs homeschoolers have been using for years?
The loss of small businesses during the lockdown... while huge stores like WM and Target got to be "essential"... I see that as a future source of pitchforks and torches. Small businesses were already suffocating under an absurd regulatory load. Now: how many just got a death-blow? If this were a place where opening a new shop were easy, it'd be hardly a blip on the radar-- we'd see a million new ventures sprout as soon as it was legal to have customers again! Instead what we'll get is vastly shrunk options and a sharp uptick in untaxable, cash-only shadetree type businesses. I predict a renewed push for the cashless economy.