As an Irish Canadian, Come from Away referring to the fact that that I now live in Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada I can see that since I came to Canada( not planning to stay) in 1985 I notice a massive increase in inequality, which brings with it a massive increase in crime, homelessness, hopelessness and poverty that started under PM Brian Mulrooney. Whether we call it Reaganism, Thatcherism, or Harperism, there was a concerted attack on the concept of community, the common good, our common humanity and our commonwealth and a push to commercialize and privatize everything. The same forces were at play in my homeland in the Republic of Ireland, but by joining the European Union, ordinary girls and women in Ireland had a chance at education for the first time in centuries of millennia and every time I return to Ireland I notice a massive improvement in the quality of life of many people despite the real challenges and the reverse has occurred in Canada. Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hamalainen is just one of many attempts to record the history of life on Turtle Island, going back just five hundred years.
What we know for sure is that abuse, cruelty, chaos and domination never lead to health and happiness. I recommend checking the work of Vandana Shiva, an Indian thought leader on Oneness versus the 1%. Project 2025 is the latest catastrophic iteration of the hell that extreme elitists chose to inflict on everyone else, and only a massive coalition of all kinds of people who are not psychopaths can undo this horror, starting with the arrest of Donald Trump for his many crimes that are contained in reports filed with the FBI that seem to be missing from the released Epstein files?
That pause does matter. It’s the kind that settles in when something lands gently but deeply, when recognition arrives before reaction. What Wendy’s laying out doesn’t shock because it’s extreme. It stays because it’s familiar. Work that once helped hold lives together now pulls them apart. Risk that used to stop at institutions now runs straight into kitchens, bedrooms, and aging bodies. And the damage doesn’t arrive with alarms. It arrives as routine.
What this essay names, with such care and steadiness, is that labor doesn’t fail people by accident. It’s been shaped to fail them. When wages no longer cover housing, healthcare, or aging, the system hasn’t broken. It’s been rearranged. Work remains visible, even constant, but life becomes tentative. Employment turns into exposure.
That’s the turn that matters.
We often speak about poverty as absence, as though something simply went missing. Wendy shows something more unsettling. Poverty is produced when protections are peeled away, enforcement thins out, and risk is quietly reassigned downward until individuals are carrying what institutions once held. What looks like neglect is actually policy doing what it was designed to do.
What stayed with me most is how tightly labor degradation and public health unravel together. This isn’t incidental. It’s intimate. When injuries go untreated, when illness becomes a private burden, when vaccination falters because trust and access erode side by side, disease becomes another form of worker turnover. Bodies wear down. Others step in. The system keeps moving.
That pattern repeats wherever it’s tried, no matter the country. Bangladesh. Nigeria. Haiti. Different histories, same logic. Weak protections produce a working poor class whose instability then justifies more policing, more emergency care, more incarceration. The costs don’t vanish. They’re simply passed along. Hospitals, courts, shelters, and prisons become the safety net, only harsher and far more expensive.
One thing that often slips past notice, and that Wendy gestures toward with restraint, is how this reshaping quietly thins democratic life itself. When work no longer produces security, participation becomes fragile. People worn down by churn don’t organize easily. They don’t strike. They don’t show up. They endure. And endurance narrows what feels possible or worth the risk.
That’s why the history matters so much. The American middle class didn’t appear by accident or virtue. It was built through enforcement. Through patient, sometimes unglamorous governance that aligned productivity with dignity (how could expound upon the dignity!) and treated safety, bargaining, and health as shared goods. When that alignment held, families stabilized, health improved, crime fell, and democracy grew sturdier.
Project 2025 isn’t only undoing policy. It’s eroding memory. It trains people to forget that work ever functioned differently, that security was once ordinary rather than rare. When that forgetting takes hold, precarity begins to feel natural. Inevitable. Personal. And…disastrous.
That’s the most dangerous shift of all.
Because a society that comes to believe its suffering is simply the way things are stops asking for repair. It learns to manage decline instead. It adjusts itself to disposability.
Wendy’s warning isn’t abstract or rhetorical. It’s structural and human at the same time. If labor no longer pays for life, then life becomes the expendable input. Everything else follows from that choice.
The window she names still exists. Rebuilding is still possible. But it begins with refusing the story that this is modernization or efficiency. It’s regression, carefully administered.
The real question isn’t whether we can afford to restore dignity to work, it’s whether we can afford not to.
Thank you for yet another deeply thoughtful post, Wendy.
This year, we will be celebrating our 250th anniversary. When we compare our history with that of Europe, we observe a dramatic difference in the number of years of existence.
The history of Europe begins with classical antiquity around 800 BC, meaning this civilization has existed for 2,826 years, including the 2026 years of our present calendar.
If you start with the Middle Ages (AD 500 to 1,500), also known as the medieval period, which lasted 1,000 years, and then add the years from 1500 to 2026 (a total of 526 years), you get a combined duration of 1,526 years. Our 250 years of history represent only about 6% of Europe's total historical timeline, which extends back to the medieval period and covers 1,526 years.
Historically, our history has been limited. We have experienced one major internal conflict, a civil war, and several other wars since our separation from Europe. We have lived under a single constitution; we have had expansive land and resources; and our population has grown through both natural increase and immigration. We had vast areas of land that allowed for growth; we were a fortunate land.
The early inhabitants of our country were very different from each other; northerners differed significantly from southerners. The South had valid reasons to consider seceding from the North. This division between the North and South has existed and continues to exist today. The expansion and settlement of large areas in the West have further complicated our history. We were expanding rapidly, further fragmenting our country's natural resources.
Europe experienced aggressive wars and state reconfigurations, whereas our short history of 250 years has seen no major restructuring, division, or reform of our government. A vital consideration is whether you can imagine what the country will be like in 5 or 10 years. Or, put differently, will we still be a divided nation? A nation with essential disagreements about significant aspects of our lives. Combine that with the destruction of every aspect of our government by the neo-conservative shadow government that is directing our present government.
Do you think we will survive in our current setup, or will we need to make significant changes to steer our course and ensure our country's longer future? We have a considerable disagreement that can't be resolved within our current government structure. There is no way for aspects of our country to coexist; we have enormous differences in the very nature of the things we think are essential to our society. We were founded by diverse groups of people with different philosophies about the values by which we should live. We will never be able to reconcile these differences; we should acknowledge them and work toward reforming our union's structure. We don't have to make our differences our enemy; instead, they are our neighbors living in a neighboring state that is separate from my state.
Why do you only start the clock for America with the ratification of the Declaration of Independence, and not with indigenous nations of Turtle Island? In any case, it’s a strange way to introduce the fact that despite a civil war, USA have one of the oldest, unbroken constitutions (and governments) currently on the planet. And to answer your question, it is probably due for a major overhaul at this point. I think one of the greatest failures of the United States was not making slave owners pay reparations to hold them more accountable for their crimes against humanity. This nation let the cancer of white supremacy spread and metastasize, and it has nearly succumbed to the scourge. So, like you ask, is there even enough left to save? And should we try to save it? (I’m not talking about the people…I’m talking about our system of government)
Rocco ... thanks for your thoughtful comments today. Reading them prompted me to access and read your blog. The "Street Fight" offering has my "wheels turning." In the whole I agree to oppose the Neo-conservative/Maga/Pseudo-Christian/2025ers in some fashion we do need to take off the gloves. I am not sure I would go as fully as you might imply, but that is not to say you posit an alternative to that end. Best regards.
If there’s global poverty how will the financial wheels keep turning? I mean, there’s not enough in the 1% to continue to get money if the bottom half are not buying.
Dear friends,
As an Irish Canadian, Come from Away referring to the fact that that I now live in Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada I can see that since I came to Canada( not planning to stay) in 1985 I notice a massive increase in inequality, which brings with it a massive increase in crime, homelessness, hopelessness and poverty that started under PM Brian Mulrooney. Whether we call it Reaganism, Thatcherism, or Harperism, there was a concerted attack on the concept of community, the common good, our common humanity and our commonwealth and a push to commercialize and privatize everything. The same forces were at play in my homeland in the Republic of Ireland, but by joining the European Union, ordinary girls and women in Ireland had a chance at education for the first time in centuries of millennia and every time I return to Ireland I notice a massive improvement in the quality of life of many people despite the real challenges and the reverse has occurred in Canada. Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hamalainen is just one of many attempts to record the history of life on Turtle Island, going back just five hundred years.
What we know for sure is that abuse, cruelty, chaos and domination never lead to health and happiness. I recommend checking the work of Vandana Shiva, an Indian thought leader on Oneness versus the 1%. Project 2025 is the latest catastrophic iteration of the hell that extreme elitists chose to inflict on everyone else, and only a massive coalition of all kinds of people who are not psychopaths can undo this horror, starting with the arrest of Donald Trump for his many crimes that are contained in reports filed with the FBI that seem to be missing from the released Epstein files?
I didn’t finish this piece angry.
I finished it…quiet, I suppose.
That pause does matter. It’s the kind that settles in when something lands gently but deeply, when recognition arrives before reaction. What Wendy’s laying out doesn’t shock because it’s extreme. It stays because it’s familiar. Work that once helped hold lives together now pulls them apart. Risk that used to stop at institutions now runs straight into kitchens, bedrooms, and aging bodies. And the damage doesn’t arrive with alarms. It arrives as routine.
What this essay names, with such care and steadiness, is that labor doesn’t fail people by accident. It’s been shaped to fail them. When wages no longer cover housing, healthcare, or aging, the system hasn’t broken. It’s been rearranged. Work remains visible, even constant, but life becomes tentative. Employment turns into exposure.
That’s the turn that matters.
We often speak about poverty as absence, as though something simply went missing. Wendy shows something more unsettling. Poverty is produced when protections are peeled away, enforcement thins out, and risk is quietly reassigned downward until individuals are carrying what institutions once held. What looks like neglect is actually policy doing what it was designed to do.
What stayed with me most is how tightly labor degradation and public health unravel together. This isn’t incidental. It’s intimate. When injuries go untreated, when illness becomes a private burden, when vaccination falters because trust and access erode side by side, disease becomes another form of worker turnover. Bodies wear down. Others step in. The system keeps moving.
That pattern repeats wherever it’s tried, no matter the country. Bangladesh. Nigeria. Haiti. Different histories, same logic. Weak protections produce a working poor class whose instability then justifies more policing, more emergency care, more incarceration. The costs don’t vanish. They’re simply passed along. Hospitals, courts, shelters, and prisons become the safety net, only harsher and far more expensive.
One thing that often slips past notice, and that Wendy gestures toward with restraint, is how this reshaping quietly thins democratic life itself. When work no longer produces security, participation becomes fragile. People worn down by churn don’t organize easily. They don’t strike. They don’t show up. They endure. And endurance narrows what feels possible or worth the risk.
That’s why the history matters so much. The American middle class didn’t appear by accident or virtue. It was built through enforcement. Through patient, sometimes unglamorous governance that aligned productivity with dignity (how could expound upon the dignity!) and treated safety, bargaining, and health as shared goods. When that alignment held, families stabilized, health improved, crime fell, and democracy grew sturdier.
Project 2025 isn’t only undoing policy. It’s eroding memory. It trains people to forget that work ever functioned differently, that security was once ordinary rather than rare. When that forgetting takes hold, precarity begins to feel natural. Inevitable. Personal. And…disastrous.
That’s the most dangerous shift of all.
Because a society that comes to believe its suffering is simply the way things are stops asking for repair. It learns to manage decline instead. It adjusts itself to disposability.
Wendy’s warning isn’t abstract or rhetorical. It’s structural and human at the same time. If labor no longer pays for life, then life becomes the expendable input. Everything else follows from that choice.
The window she names still exists. Rebuilding is still possible. But it begins with refusing the story that this is modernization or efficiency. It’s regression, carefully administered.
The real question isn’t whether we can afford to restore dignity to work, it’s whether we can afford not to.
Thank you for yet another deeply thoughtful post, Wendy.
Part of the trend you are signaling is "republican weakening child labor law".
https://www.epi.org/blog/coordinated-attacks-on-state-labor-standards-are-laying-the-groundwork-for-dangerous-project-2025-proposals-to-undermine-all-workers-rights/
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025-would-exploit-child-labor-by-allowing-minors-to-work-in-dangerous-conditions-with-fewer-protections
Yes, it is definitely Republican leadership’s desire to weaken labor laws across the board.
This year, we will be celebrating our 250th anniversary. When we compare our history with that of Europe, we observe a dramatic difference in the number of years of existence.
The history of Europe begins with classical antiquity around 800 BC, meaning this civilization has existed for 2,826 years, including the 2026 years of our present calendar.
If you start with the Middle Ages (AD 500 to 1,500), also known as the medieval period, which lasted 1,000 years, and then add the years from 1500 to 2026 (a total of 526 years), you get a combined duration of 1,526 years. Our 250 years of history represent only about 6% of Europe's total historical timeline, which extends back to the medieval period and covers 1,526 years.
Historically, our history has been limited. We have experienced one major internal conflict, a civil war, and several other wars since our separation from Europe. We have lived under a single constitution; we have had expansive land and resources; and our population has grown through both natural increase and immigration. We had vast areas of land that allowed for growth; we were a fortunate land.
The early inhabitants of our country were very different from each other; northerners differed significantly from southerners. The South had valid reasons to consider seceding from the North. This division between the North and South has existed and continues to exist today. The expansion and settlement of large areas in the West have further complicated our history. We were expanding rapidly, further fragmenting our country's natural resources.
Europe experienced aggressive wars and state reconfigurations, whereas our short history of 250 years has seen no major restructuring, division, or reform of our government. A vital consideration is whether you can imagine what the country will be like in 5 or 10 years. Or, put differently, will we still be a divided nation? A nation with essential disagreements about significant aspects of our lives. Combine that with the destruction of every aspect of our government by the neo-conservative shadow government that is directing our present government.
Do you think we will survive in our current setup, or will we need to make significant changes to steer our course and ensure our country's longer future? We have a considerable disagreement that can't be resolved within our current government structure. There is no way for aspects of our country to coexist; we have enormous differences in the very nature of the things we think are essential to our society. We were founded by diverse groups of people with different philosophies about the values by which we should live. We will never be able to reconcile these differences; we should acknowledge them and work toward reforming our union's structure. We don't have to make our differences our enemy; instead, they are our neighbors living in a neighboring state that is separate from my state.
Why do you only start the clock for America with the ratification of the Declaration of Independence, and not with indigenous nations of Turtle Island? In any case, it’s a strange way to introduce the fact that despite a civil war, USA have one of the oldest, unbroken constitutions (and governments) currently on the planet. And to answer your question, it is probably due for a major overhaul at this point. I think one of the greatest failures of the United States was not making slave owners pay reparations to hold them more accountable for their crimes against humanity. This nation let the cancer of white supremacy spread and metastasize, and it has nearly succumbed to the scourge. So, like you ask, is there even enough left to save? And should we try to save it? (I’m not talking about the people…I’m talking about our system of government)
Rocco ... thanks for your thoughtful comments today. Reading them prompted me to access and read your blog. The "Street Fight" offering has my "wheels turning." In the whole I agree to oppose the Neo-conservative/Maga/Pseudo-Christian/2025ers in some fashion we do need to take off the gloves. I am not sure I would go as fully as you might imply, but that is not to say you posit an alternative to that end. Best regards.
If there’s global poverty how will the financial wheels keep turning? I mean, there’s not enough in the 1% to continue to get money if the bottom half are not buying.
How can I find the Master Emergency Voter Documentation Guide?
Hi Morgan, enter the shop area for the free guide at: buymeacoffee.com/glassempires