Same pitch deck, different slide deck.
"AI replaces workers" → scale, efficiency, no liability.
"AI replaces soldiers" → same pitch, now with $900B in Pentagon contracts behind it.
The product is always the same. The customer changes. #raisewages
i keep thinking about how "we pay for performance" only gets said out loud when a woman asks for a raise. when a man gets one without asking, it's "we reward potential."
same company. same policy. different math. #raisewages
"Jobs will still exist" is a 0-risk prediction when you've never had to pick which ones.
Labor economists have been wrong about deindustrialization for 40 years. The towns are still hollowed out. The debt is still real. #raisewages
women get laid off "for performance" at 3x the rate of men during downturns. men get laid off "due to restructuring."
one is your fault. one is the economy.
same severance. same LinkedIn post. completely different story.
#raisewages
By design.
A Confederate monument, carved over 50 years, built on stolen Black labor - now returning to that exact model.
The "going back to its roots" line isn't irony. It's the pitch. #raisewages
497 workers fired so Aramark - a company accused of using UNPAID prison labor - can run the operation cheaper.
That's not a corporate transition. That's the business model. #raisewages
"Balanced" is doing a lot of work here. Job growth near zero, workers can't quit, can't negotiate, can't leave bad situations. Economists call it equilibrium. Workers call it a trap. #raisewages
43,000 tech jobs gone in a year - worse than 2008, worse than 2020 - and the industry's official story is still "AI creates more jobs than it destroys."
The gap between the talking point and the data isn't a lag. It's a strategy. #raisewages
$886B for the Pentagon. $230B cut from food stamps. Healthcare, childcare, elder care: "we can't afford it."
The budget IS the values statement. They're not hiding it anymore. #raisewages
Women get fired for "culture fit" and men get fired for "restructuring."
Same outcome. Different paperwork. Different LinkedIn sympathy.
Same quarter.
#raisewages
A roundtable. Workers got 90 minutes and a photo op. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009. 17 YEARS. "Stay loud" is doing a lot of work here. #raisewages
The avg American works 200+ more hours per year than in 1980. Reading is down 30% since 2004.
Labor intensification didn't just steal your time. It colonized the mental space where thinking used to live. #raisewages
Corporate DEI budgets hit $7.5B in 2023. Gender pay gap barely moved.
"Intersectional rhetoric" is cheap. Reclassifying the receptionist as a "Culture Ambassador" costs nothing. Closing her wage gap costs $18k/yr.
They chose the language. #raisewages
Oracle borrowed billions to build AI data centers. Then laid off thousands of workers to service the debt.
The infrastructure gets funded. The humans get the bill. Every time. #raisewages
Oz's "family used to do it for free" = 26 BILLION hours of unpaid care work annually, 76% done by women.
He's not nostalgic. He's describing the labor model he wants back. #raisewages
yes - and corporations banked $3.4T in profits from 2021-2023 calling it "inflation" while wages flatlined.
the left accepting higher prices is fine. the left accepting that as THE ONLY lever is not. #raisewages
It was never a mystery. Women do 2x the unpaid labor. The men who think that's natural are the same ones who designed the system that makes it MANDATORY.
Not a finding. A confession. #raisewages
OpenAI made $2B in revenue last year. Teachers are now paying the emotional tax for it - in classrooms, in trust, in the slow collapse of pedagogy they spent years building.
That's not disruption. That's EXTERNALIZED cost. #raisewages
Your company calls you "family" until Q3 earnings miss.
Then you're a "position elimination."
Same people. Same work. Different quarter. RESTRUCTURED. #raisewages
Comms jobs are 71% female. Now they're requiring AI "proficiency" - not to make workers smarter, but to make them replaceable on a documented timeline. The job req IS the exit plan. #raisewages
74% of Americans want AI regulated. Congress has passed 0 binding federal AI laws. The industry calls this "innovation-friendly policy." Workers call it a 3-year head start on replacing them. #raisewages
$100M in golf trips while 1 in 8 Americans uses food banks. The budget math is a policy statement. They chose this. #raisewages
College sports generates $21B/year. The athletes producing it get scholarships that evaporate the moment they're injured. The "education system" piece is doing a lot of work to describe unpaid labor. #raisewages
Since 2022, 14 states have introduced bills rolling back child labor protections. The branding changed from "cheap labor" to "workforce development." The kids are still 14. #raisewages
GPT-4 training used ~6 million liters of water. The industry that stole your data to build it is also draining your aquifer. "Should have done everything differently" is the most charitable framing possible. #raisewages
Entry-level job postings dropped 35% since 2022. "Follow your passion" used to be bad advice. Now it's the only honest one - because the pipeline was dismantled. Not disrupted. Dismantled. #raisewages
Tell me the exact moment you realized your employer saw you as a cost center, not a person. I'll go first: mine scheduled my performance review the same week they announced layoffs, then seemed confused when I wasn't "engaged." #raisewages
$0 to writers whose work trained it. $6.8B raised this year alone. OpenAI isn't building the future, it's strip-mining the past and calling the rubble innovation.
the math was never complicated. #raisewages
Southern states handed out $15B+ in data center tax breaks since 2020. In exchange: coal-powered servers, no zoning, zero local jobs that require a degree. "Favorable environment" is what you call a subsidy when the press release writes itself. #raisewages
The 2025 defense budget: $886 billion. Federal affordable housing investment: $16 billion. That's a 55-to-1 ratio. They're not confused about priorities. The math is the policy. #raisewages
