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Notes -
I can't be the only one getting tired of the same couple topics, so here's some comparatively lighthearted fare. Well — if one can call lighthearted anything involving a first-world nation flirting with plague.
https://x.com/lara_e_brown/status/1909607333090513144
Long story short: The Birmingham City Council employed (employed) garbagemen, roadworkers, and grave diggers, who naturally were mostly men. They also employ cooks, cleaners, and caregivers for the elderly; these are mostly women.
At some point someone noticed that the former set of workers tended to earn more than the latter. A lawsuit was launched which argued that this was obvious sexism and a violation of the Equality Act since, in aggregate, male employees were getting paid more than female employees. The lawsuit succeeded, which spawned countless followup lawsuits. Any woman working in a job which paid less than a typically-male job was suddenly able to sue for damages, and consequently the Council has paid out over a billion pounds in equal pay compensation. The Council estimates that it is likely to have to pay an additional 800 million or so pounds before the thing has run its course.
Naturally, they also had to fix the problem, and so slashed the pay of garbagemen, road workers, grave diggers, and so on to match the female average. (Raising female pay to the male level would have been untenable before paying out >£1B, and certainly isn't possible now, as they're already basically bankrupted.) Unfortunately, it seems that people aren't interested in doing those jobs for so much less pay, and have declined to continue.
Result: Ever-growing piles of garbage all over the place, leading to a massive population of disease-bearing rodents and other pests. Weil's disease and hantavirus are suddenly major concerns. And, as the average daily temperature rises, the already-unspeakable miasma is getting worse. And no one can do anything about it, since, afaict, it's not allowed for the private sector to 'compete' with the government.
No one's even arguing that it's different pay for the same job. It's universally agreed that it's different pay for different jobs. However, the rhetoric here has to do with the value of the job not economically, but in some ineffable moral sense. Supporters of the move argue that surely the 'value' of the predominantly-female jobs must be the same as the predominantly-male jobs. To think otherwise would apparently imply that female labor is less 'valuable' than male labor, which in turn would imply that women are less 'valuable' than men.
What can one say in reply? It's one of those things where all one can do is shake one's head. Especially in Birmingham, where anyone considering pointing out some obvious considerations on the matter is liable to be charged with misogyny. And modern polite white society doesn't seem to have any kind of defense against women's tears.
All in all it's one of the clearest examples I've ever seen of wokeness destroying a society's ability to perform basic functions.
Birmingham is, FWIW, the economic and cultural center of the Midlands region, and Britain's second-largest city after London. Now it's facing problems which sound like something out of its medieval era.
And I have to wonder: if it happened there, can it happen in London?
To add some of my own commentary, this seems to me an example of the impossibility of compromise with wokeness. There can be no detente. Wokeness can never rest until it has erased all practical distinctions between human beings, and one generation's gracious, ostensibly common-sensical compromise ('equal pay for the same job') not only doesn't address the real problem but serves as a springboard for the next generation's 'equal pay for different jobs', e.g.
The fundamental relationship between men and women hasn't been harmonious since Eden at the latest, but it has at least remained functional throughout most of history. When I see the above, it occurs to me that one side effect is even fewer men able to generate enough income to provide for a family or maintain the respect of potential mates. Another straw on the camel's back.
This refusal to work is that defense.
Then the way I see it, the women have two choices- they can deal with it themselves (unlikely), or they can accept that their unwillingness to do certain types of labor makes that labor inherently more valuable.
I expect either forced arbitration or military action (financial or otherwise) will come next, perhaps both at the same time; this is a threat to the Two-Tier English order. (Ever wonder why China censors discussion of 'lying flat'? Now you know).
Uh, the result of forcing them to go back to work with a pay cut will be work-to-rule at a deliberately slow pace. This will not get garbage off the streets.
Ok, so forced arbitration then military action.
I think the current English order is evil enough to order them shot as a motivator if no alternative can be found; whether the soldiers actually pull the triggers when so ordered is another matter.
You’d start with the police, actually. The British unarmed police, many of them female, tasked with arresting physical laborers for not working quickly enough. This will go very badly and build the kind of sympathy which makes deploying regimental system armies against their social equals dangerous enough for Westminster to think twice about it, and possibly call sympathy strikes.
Like the structure of the British army makes it very bad for that kind of operation because the soldiers are loyal to their noncoms over their commanders; commissioned officers have less ability to issue unpopular orders in the breach without the support of the sergeants. And I’m given to understand that the British army is much less diverse than the American one; there’s a reason it wasn’t deployed to Liverpool.
Such an action is sufficiently unprecedented in the Anglosphere anyways that it would make senior political leaders jumpy enough to actually think long enough to consider the mutiny angle.
There is no need for any of this when the British government can just hire Polish garbage men (inventing a visa category if necessary, and it is barely even necessary) to do the job.
Well yes, there is likely a ‘scab’ option before getting on the escalation ladder to begin with. But the escalation ladder does not begin with military force, and military force is likely enough to go badly, that it would be unlikely anyways.
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You left out a third option: raise taxes on the entire country to equalize compensation across the different job classes. You even get to hit highly productive men (and women) more, creating even more equality.
Do this process enough, and you can eventually make sure part time yoga instructors get paid the same as the top researchers at DeepMind!
There's also the fourth option, of doing pretty much nothing and then complaining on BlueSky about the conservative incel wreckers for causing the Fourth Bubonic Plague.
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