You Shouldn’t Have to Work Until We Know Who Wins the Election

It is frankly, bullshit, that you may be reading this at work right now. No—it’s not bullshit that you’re reading it, please keep doing that—it’s bullshit that you have to work in all this…bullshit!

Those in politics and all its adjacent constellations have no choice in the matter, but there should be a federal exemption for like, accountants, to have to work until they know the fate of their future. Who the hell has all that time for matching numbers to words when not only is yours and your loved ones’ future wellbeing at stake, but the way you have to get this information is either through a fundamentally fractured digital maze that hopefully leads you to outlets like us, or a shallow and vacuous TV media. Life is hard enough without having to carry the burden of 248 years of baggage through a workday like it’s a normal thing to do.

Election Day should be a federal holiday—on or next to a weekend, no less—but that would mean more people voting and engaged with politics and the powers that be can’t have that. As George Carlin famously and correctly said, the real owners of this country whose names will never appear on a ballot don’t want an informed and active populace.

The owners who “want more for themselves and less for everybody else” have rigged the game to a narrower set of outcomes than one a real democratic system would produce, and today we are all participating in their charade as we get to choose which one of their cynical visions for their world to vote for. In a time filled with increasing precarity, being an “obedient worker” is a must, as the age of breakdown brings more questions than answers with it, and election day’s inequities have a way of really driving home how trapped we all are within this 18th century system managed by modern capital.

So fuck work man. I can’t imagine working a normal job while this Sword of Damocles hangs over our heads. I left that world the day after Trump won in 2016 and ditched it to write for Paste Politics, and the rest is history. It’s genuinely unfair to American workers across the country to have to walk around pretending everything is fine and normal while we wait for some people in Clark County, Nevada to count every last vote.

It’s popular to push for election day as a federal holiday that everyone has free so they can go do their patriotic duty on a Tuesday, but that is a lowball ask America’s real owners would probably be happy to concede should they ever have to give something up to get something. We must aim higher.

One week off minimum, potentially longer should any lawyers in Florida and their sympathetic Supreme Court Justices get any funny ideas. If Americans are going to cast a vote in a rigged aristocratic system that has degraded to a point where a demented fascist game show host is genuinely a threat to the fate of the republic, then the least this collapsing empire can do is give us a week off while we deal with and process this madness.

The endless unfair bargains Americans are forced to accept at work, the collapse of unions and our eroding politics are related. As the NYT Tech Union is proving today by killing that damned needle once and for all, unionizing your workplace leads to good things.