Essential Workers



Your dependency is required.

Dependency applies to many concepts in ways that are personal, interpersonal, substance-related, and financial, to name a few, but have you ever considered the dependency of countries and nations? I have considered countries and governments to exhibit the same dependent addictive behavior as an individual.

It is called the Dependency Theory and gained prominence in the United States in the 1950s most certainly as an adaptation to the societal shift in the cheap labor pool. It uses a Marxist concept of Surplus Value applied to our beloved Capitalist society to exploit resources in the form of raw materials but primarily cheap labor for the benefit and advancement of those in power or the elite.

The theory is to mass-produce an excluded class of poor and underdeveloped states or people to benefit the wealthy, enriching themselves at the expense of the subordinate states and people it creates. In short, a cheap workforce that will be competent but obedient and deemed “essential workers” for the elite’s wealth accumulation.

Dependency is a state of the individual, the collective, or a controlled situation to produce a form of reliance and expectation that is almost always viewed negatively and judgmental toward the subordinate position. All dependency has an element of submission to perceived power, fear that carries the insecurities of exclusion, or the expectations of some continued benefit.

In other words, an excellent way to look at it is not so much what is provided but how badly you can be made to rely upon it. Dependency is an unequal balance of what is irresistibly desired and required for it to be provided. The balance of power is always against the one who is dependent or beneath.

Being beneath the power of that which you are dependent on is recognizing and submitting to it because you feel like you don’t have a choice or dread being without. Dependency introduces a state of despair that lessens your initiative, resistance, and hope. Complacency is used to rock you to sleep by accepting the distortion that you cannot function without it or its guidance, but mainly that’s just the way it will be or has been.

The resulting void produces a weakness for the dependency followed by the continued discouragement of opposition that leads to addiction. Your willpower has been compromised and captive to your wants, elevating them to something that becomes a need. This mutation of you adapting a want to a perceived need stamp out your power to resist or refuse, elevating this power over you by your very own desires, like dope.

Fueled by hope and belief becomes the very thing that has power over you, not realizing that emulation is not assimilation. It is the carrot the mule chases but never or rarely catches. The illusion to obtain it is part of the psychological motivation but was never intended to allow you to achieve it.

It is effectively used to exercise control for reproducing the conditions for its survival and advancement while denying yours. The wealth of Europe was primarily obtained through this manner of exploitation and force. The more suitable method of exploitation today is coercion and restricting opportunity.

For this to work as a sociological theory for cheap labor to persist since colonialism, it was based on the inhumane and economic abuse and exploitation of a designated class. This theory had to be expanded to include those who were viewed as undesirable or expendable. All cheap labor is secondary to, virtually interchangeable with, and “essential” to that theory.

Territories and nations were made subordinate to other countries, creating a form of economic captivity by suppressing and high jacking their benefits from their own labor and resources. The swindle is accomplished by establishing debt and using compound interest to create disparities for their utilization of your funds and resources. This is by pure systematic economic exploitation of the lower class masses.

Another way quite prevalent and noticeable today is overpricing and fees that prevent you from using your money for your own interest. It places constraints on your prosperity and makes it less likely and more difficult to rise above these manipulations of wealth. Just notice a pattern of your money going out as opposed to coming in. It takes a lot longer to make it than it does to spend it, keeping you in a financial spin cycle.

The tools used to maintain a constant generational supply of an underclass labor population for economic gain are systematic and on purpose. Extending your reach educationally and financially beyond your station can be done, but it takes an enormous effort to elevate yourself against the system. Often to achieve and maintain an elevated status, you must then adhere to the standards of that status. That creates a different level of benefits and a different level of constraints.

The more you have, the greater the need to protect and maintain it becomes. Same game, different level but more at stake, which puts you in a position to really embrace the system you thought you were escaping, dependency.

You are now more invested in producing or maintaining your position only to become a more valuable commodity but still a commodity. Therefore, to elevate yourself, you have to position yourself to have a commodity beneath you to produce for you to maintain their position that supports yours.

According to business dictionary.com, the definition of a commodity is a reasonably interchangeable good or material, bought and sold freely as an article of commerce. A service-based economy depends less on goods or materials than it does you, the service or servant. You are that “service” becoming the interchangeable thing bought and sold freely as an article of commerce.

Being interchangeable means being just another brick in the wall easily replaced with another one just like you. You either give out or wear out, but eventual time or circumstances prevail to replace you. So being interchangeable also makes you expendable but nonetheless “essential” to generating more commerce.

Check and see if your value to your employer remains the same during good and bad times, especially if they might get the short end. Often their benefit is preserved despite what might happen to you. It is being done for profit margins.

It creates an efficient cycle of reliance where the top of the mountain must sit on a broader base or foundation, meaning there must be more at the bottom to support those at the top. When applied to a service industry, it creates an abnormality from the top-down. All who are below in reliant subordinate positions are conditioned to be obedient and tolerant to maintain their dependence or status, hoping to raise or sustain it.

Imagine if you are a professional athlete during Covid and the terms of your contract were coerced into far more hazardous working conditions for less pay depending on how those above you do. Participation in the losses but not the surpluses.

Imagine if you are an “essential worker” under the same circumstances. Your pay is less or the same under the severe hazard of contracting Covid or dealing with a disagreeable public. The difference is the perceived value of the commodity to generate revenue. Tariffs to the king to maintain the kingdom enriching themselves by concessions expected from you. Done despite the value of or risk to the commodity of you as the essential worker.

Reliance is the bait held before you to expose your habits that feed your wants, revealing just how plain old thirsty you can be made to be, and the thirstier, the better. Labor unions and collective bargaining came about due to the exploitation of how thirsty you can be made to be to maintain a cheap labor force.

A cheap labor force must hustle to increase their individual value, but by design, cheap labor works best when it lacks initiative and resistance. Practices of Marxism, Colonialism, Capitalism, and many more at their peak all are cheap labor by design at their base to survive. This labor theory has gone from nations to individuals as a societal structure and systems that support it.

This is just a little thought for research and conversation to more fully understand the underlying, the behind-the-scenes, or flat out in the open for all who want to see to notice. A significant influence in what is going on and the societal objective is to quantify you as a commodity for your benefit but for others much more substantial benefit, valuation, or expectation.

Getting a better job, a bigger house, a more prestigious neighborhood, more money, or hand to mouth surviving with the shoes tight, the more you are required to hustle to achieve and sustain expectations to secure your gain. To excel at the game and play it well, there is an expectation that the rules would be honored, so you work hard for a fixed calculated reward.

Congratulations if you enjoy the reward, but you should also recognize the efficiency of designing a societal structure that produces a population for depriving economic mobility by restraining opportunities and resources not equitable with the labor you invested or profits produced. For those who can excel at getting the most profit margin from others’ labor, a perspective is sometimes to view those who have not as being less than or being lazy.

Notice the smug comfortability of some not affected by the reality of the struggles that those considered beneath them endure. At a time like this, one can see how influences beyond our control can put us in positions that we never imagined. In a blink of the eye, jeopardizing our lifestyles and wellbeing. Economic dependency is interrelated from the bottom up as well as the top down. You need a paycheck, and they need you to produce their wealth. A general needs soldiers, but there are always many soldiers and few generals.

The status of a profession has different levels of prestige within the profession. The more the prestige, the farther the fall and the more required to maintain the exploitation, though undoubtedly mutual but still exploitive and dependent, making you the essential commodity for their wealth accumulation. If you need further proof, look at the discontinuation of unemployment benefits and the powers that are eager for you to return to the way it used to be, even by economic force. It is mandatory and essential for the machine and cycle of dependency to work.

Essential workers are dependent on the system and the system can not function without essential workers. It is a comparison of pennies versus dollars.

Thurston K. Atlas

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