I’ll get back on the 30 Day Tumblr Challenge thing soon. I just need to take a little moment and grumble where I won’t feel like I’m just being whiney (because few if any people I know personally follow this blog and I feel like I’m just a bitchy broken record when I start talking on this topic and they shouldn’t have to listen to me all the time). I don’t talk much about myself around here. At least, not in any real way. I just need to take a little space and take a little moment to be mad at the world. 

Now, I’m not looking for any handout or easy ride or anything like that but I could really use the world opening up and saying “hey, here’s an opportunity.” Not that I haven’t had some opportunities come along. I just need one to pan out. I’ve pursued just about everything that’s crossed my path. Applied for jobs and shown up for interviews and tried to make my presence and need known. Tried to help out others. Volunteered here and there helping out on the projects of others. I’m not sitting around with my thumb up my ass. I’m trying. 

So, hey world, can you just give me a chance not to scramble to pay my bills next month? Can you give me something I can rely on? 

What pisses me off is the attitude that permeates everything right now. Everyone’s getting work out of people for free or looking to get work out of people for free. It’s fucking rampant. What annoys me more are people who I know and respect who do it. “I need an intern/personal assistant, but I can’t pay you. You’ll get great experience, though! You can put it on your resume! I can get you into events! You’ll make connections!”

And people flock to those gigs, because it’s pretty much the only game in town. Companies and individuals get work for free. Don’t tell me how valuable the experience is and don’t tell me how great it will look on a resume. That’s a load of horseshit. You don’t go to the guy in the deli and say “hey, I know I should pay you for this sandwich, and I’d like to, I totally would, but I can’t. You can put that you made me the sandwich on your resume, though.” 

Look, I can’t pay my rent in “experience” and I can’t cover my student loan debt with resume entries. I can’t feed myself with connections made at events. It’s a bunch of bullshit and it’s not payment. It’s free labor. It’s the new standard. It’s bullshit and there is nothing anyone in my position can do about it. 

Let’s be clear. When you’re employing someone or someone is doing a job there is one way to show your appreciation for that: money. Benefits are great. Positive work environment and encouragement kicks ass. They are, however, meaningless bullshit without money. 

Now, I have literally put my money where my mouth is on this matter. I had a big project a few months back and needed to bring a lot of people in on it. Every single person at least got offered money (some people refused to take it but I didn’t let them refuse until I was standing there with cash in my hand holding it out for them to take). They got paid poorly, because I funded the project with donations and I didn’t have much to pay them with but everyone was offered money. I’m working on completing the project now, which will require involvement of more people I’m lining up and I’m not asking them to do anything until I get money in hand (I’m applying for a grant) to pay them. 

Let me remind you that I can’t afford to do this at all. At all. I’m putting in the effort to show my appreciation for how these people are going to help me by paying them for their work. 

Yet, there are these people with regular income sources who want people to show up and do hours of work for them every week for nothing. You can’t offer $50 a week? Nothing? Nothing at all? 

If you’re getting free labor from someone right now open your wallet and hand them the cash in it. Show your appreciation by not perpetuating the slave labor mentality festering in our currently shit economy. I’m not saying you even have to offer a living wage (that would be nice, though), but give them something that can help pay the rent. Stop conditioning them to work for nothing. Consider the long term effect on the economy and psychology of those working. Quit being another asshole.

Give them money and quit pretending like the bullshit perks make up for it. They don’t. You’re still a piece of shit.

I hate everyone today.