The best thing about my line of work is all the new places you get to experience on the road. Painting houses necessitates travelling to wherever the house is. I was never one to refuse work that seemed a little far from home, and although at times it was exhausting, and I scared myself and others with micro-sleeps at the wheel, I am glad for the experience gained.
Health and safety remain one of the most serious concerns in any workplace, and there are serious consequences in Australia for breaches of OHS (Occupational Health and Safety) laws. Still, any pursuit of reward in this life will always involve elements of risk. In fact, the element of risk contributes greatly to the feelings of satisfaction inherent in rewards.
From an economic perspective, I often quote jobs with no up-front deposits from clients, while paying for labour and materials myself. On big constructions, this is often financially risky, yet it is also the most rewarding type of work.
Heavy regulation
Building and construction in Australia is heavily regulated in relation to safety, and while this means great reductions in workplace injuries and deaths, a little bit of on-site life and laughter fades with every extra burden placed upon employers and employees. The shirtless, 9 am beer-drinking characters with glowing wit and killer jokes have largely been replaced by dull, phone addicted, V-drinking zombies, whose most colourful trait is their beloved fluoro safety shirts.
With COVID, working from home has become the new normal for many types of work that does not necessitate travel. While for some this may be a dream, surely for many it is a nightmare. Many houses would not make for a pleasant environment to begin with, let alone working environment. Not everybody’s home life is bad – for some, home is a wonderful sanctuary and working there might seem great.
For me, the family home is a place of relief and relaxation because we are not there all the time, and it is somewhere we can escape from the workplace. The house is not a factory, and fusion of home and work life is not always in humanity’s best interest. Many of us like segmentation. That is why we have drawers, and cupboards and bedrooms. A borderless, globalised world sounds nice in theory, but, even families put bedrooms in their houses just to get away sometimes from those they love the most.
Home-working arrangements
Many corporate giants are now calling for permanent home-working arrangements wherever possible. From the information I have read from quite a few large corporations on the World Economic Forum website, I detect signs that this is another attempt by big tech and big business to further colonise and govern our private lives and what should be, our private sanctuary. They want to pilfer our sacred spaces for their digital museums and auction houses.
The last decade already saw what should have been cause for major concern and more regarding the invasion of the private family home. Smart TVs were outed as recording private conversation, Google maps were caught sending cars out that captured personal browsing history data as they drove down our streets, then selling it off without consent. Not to mention photographing houses at odd hours like a stalker.
We were warned by whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden to tape over laptop cameras which were recording us without our knowledge for intelligence agencies. The few people and places that cared enough to fight such intrusion won a few lawsuits, but such is the wealth and power of big tech that it failed to bring any change of direction. We are still for sale.
COVID has turned data capture into one step shy of kidnapping. When one is forced to work from home, given curfews, shut off from friends and family, given no option to travel, coerced into taking unwanted medication and segregated from the upper classes of society, we have descended into the realms of slavery. These measures amount to human trafficking. Held against our will (though many are suffering severe Stockholm syndrome) for the benefit and exploitation of the elite.
The WEF, which partners with over 500 of the world’s most powerful and wealthy corporations and has the ear and pockets of all our top-of-the-pile politicians, dedicates an entire arm of its strategic intelligence to corporate governance in what is called the fourth industrial revolution.
New world
Welcome to the new world. The Nike shoes you wear will govern you. Google will speak for you. Facebook will diagnose you. Netflix will sermonise you. Politics will demonise you. Sports stars will moralise you. Smart devices will monitor you.
If you are awake, you will have noticed this has been happening for a while now. They have crossed our borders, spat on our morals, desecrated our sacred rituals, separated us from our own kind and fostered new division. We have become, in our own eyes, non-essentials, barbarians, heathens, sick and sinful in need of a new saviour.
Start to think. It is not all a conspiracy theory. How much of ourselves must we give? Satan gives nothing for free. What is being taken from us in exchange for our compliance? At what point do we stop clicking ‘I agree’.