Resist the Peer Pressure: Leave You're Cup on The Table. Don't Scab

Peer pressure is a force to be reckoned with.  Peer pressure leads to something being accepted that you don't really accept.  It's like fashion in a way.  They design something they want youth to wear or women/men to wear, market it with all sorts of tricks like you'll be more successful or have a more exciting sex life; people start wearing it and before long, you feel like an outcast, not "with it" if you don't.

It's a bit like that when it comes to busing your own tables at the coffee shop like the one I'm in now.  How did it come about that the consumer cleans the tables, removes the used cups and plates?  If you don't do this now you get a nasty look as if you are being a complete scoundrel.  They lay this crap on you that you're not thinking of the poor underpaid workers; they'll have more to do and be overworked.

They lay this sort of guilt on workers when we go on strike or take job actions.  The busdrivers here have been having a sick out in protest of a concessionary contract that has been imposed on them and the news reported the other day someone saying that it is pretty irresponsible of the drivers to inconvenience the public like that.  Of course, its pretty irresponsible to deprive working class and poor people of bus routes as the company has that would take them to jobs that they don't have any more, or to the hospital for treatment. But that's sort of forgotten for some reason.

I never agreed with cleaning up my own table, I'm a customer not a worker here.  But it's become so common, people look at you like your scum if you don't do it.  But it's being a scab really.  Why should the employer hire more workers if the customer does the clean up for free?  Cleaning our own tables is hurting workers, it's taking a possible job from someone. Volunteering is become increasingly more common under the guise of helping the community. Religious groups are getting in on it.  A Church group did a whole lot of clean up work at a state park I was in with my grandkids; people get laid off, lives destroyed, and in step Jesus' troops to pick up the slack for nothing.  And, as I wrote the other week, the trails are becoming more overgrown as the state claims there's no money.  There are wealthy liberals doing clean up work as a community gesture.  They can afford to work for nothing.

As I sat in the coffeeshop yesterday I see the owner there sitting at the counter.  She's a nice person, no doubt about that.  But why should the customer be clearing tables when they owner's sat there talking and drinking coffee? I see people walking by the owner taking dirty plates to the sink; the owner can go around cleaning tables, but why would they when we do it?

And let's not forget, if you put any money in that jar they have on the counter, you've already subsidized the employer on the wages front.  I do not refer to tips as tips but as an "employer subsidy".  Tipping is a bit different as the set up is such here in the US that the workers would receive nothing without them in many cases, si I do do it at times, but I am totally opposed to tipping, it encourages bootlicking and it subsidizes wages on behalf of the employers, if they paid a wage people could live on we wouldn't need to subsidize.

So stand against that peer pressure. If you're in a coffeeshop and get up to leave, leave the cups and plates behind.  You'll get a sneer and a scowl here and there but you'll maybe have a decent discussion as well and might change some people's minds.  Better to help the workers organize than subsidize the employers.

Don't tell me we always did it.  So don't encourage it and don't scab.