Get a job! No not that job!
Interesting. We’re supposed to despise people who are on welfare because they should get a job no matter how scarce jobs are where they live or how young and dependent their children are or how hard they’re working in school to improve their chances of finding work…but also, it turns out, we’re supposed to despise people who do have jobs if the jobs are not posh enough for our refined tastes.
Former Cosby Show actor Geoffrey Owens made headlines this holiday weekend after a New Jersey shopper snapped photos of him bagging groceries at a Trader Joe checkout line — then provided them to the Daily Mail.
Instantly, Owens — who played the Huxtables’ affable son-in-law Elvin on the show from 1985 to 1992 and is still a working actor — found himself at the center of a complicated conversation about low-wage labor. It involved social media shaming, a backlash to the backlash, and a SAG-led campaign to celebrate the many actors who, like Owens, work less glamorous jobs to make ends meet and do what they love.
…
The Daily Mail took a scornful approach to reporting Owens’ employment, publishing several photos of him in “a Trader Joe’s T-shirt with stain marks on the front as he weighed a bag of potatoes.” The tabloid also reported the average hourly wage at the store ($11), and implied that Owens was washed-up as an actor, quoting the photo-taker as saying, “Wow, all those years of doing the show and you ended up as a cashier.”
So there you go. Get out there and find a job, you lazy parasite, but when you do we will make fun of you, you proletarian loser.
However, neither the Daily Mail nor Fox News, which circulated a widely-shared follow-up, made any attempt to contextualize Owens’s appearance in the Trader Joe’s line.
For instance, the outlets failed to note that more than two-thirds of all SAG-affiliated actors make less than $1,000 a year as actors. They also failed to note that Owens has worked steadily an actor throughout the decades: In addition to regular theater work, he’s been consistently active as a television guest actor every year but one since 2007.
Not only that, but the Yale alumnus has been busy teaching acting classes at Yale, Columbia, and the well-respected New York play incubator Primary Stages.
But naturally some people on Twitter made fun of him anyway, because hey, menial work, how dare he.
The overwhelming majority of people who read the Daily Mail and Fox News pieces, however, were outraged at the media outlets for sensationalizing the honest labor of a respectable man and dedicated working actor. Performers of all stripes and professional levels swiftly came to Owens’s defense.
https://twitter.com/TheRebeccaCorry/status/1036706500255789058
#ActorsWithDayJobs Why actors want a day time job pic.twitter.com/koTWXOXkDA
— ♫ Adriano&Paulina ♫ (@keet0007) September 3, 2018
Not to mention the fact that Cosby’s crimes and the subsequent pulling of reruns on TV had a significant impact on his income. But does he complain? No, he sucks it up and works his regular-person job like a *gasp* regular person.
The Daily Mail is a scourge. It hasn’t changed much since the “hooray for Mr Hitler” days.
The whole subject of work and our attitude to it needs to be subjected to some serious sceptical enquiry.
Here’s some reflections on the subject by Bertrand Russell http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
It doesn’t help that people–and especially the Fox News conservative crowd–talk about “Hollywood” as if it were this monolithic…thing…showering riches and cocaine on everyone who works in entertainment (each and every one of whom is of course a smug latte-swilling liberal with poor sexual morals.)
As a native Angeleno with friends in The Business (and has worked on the unglamorous fringes of it myself), I resent that shit.
It reminds me of an experience I had. During the 90s, I worked for about a year and a half as telemarketer, trying to make ends meet and keep my son and I from being homeless and malnourished. It was a crap job, but it paid a little over minimum, and kept the wolf from the door.
Fast forward three years. I was in my doctoral program in Texas, and working for the school to enable me to pay tuition. I was living a decent, middle-class existence by then, having made a couple of moves up the ladder, and married a man making a middle-class wage. My classmates, most of them having come from the middle class and having been middle-class their entire lives, all of them dedicated liberals, were crapping on me for having worked as a telemarketer. They felt it was not only beneath them, but an evil job that no one would or should do for any reason. The statement I most remember is “I would never work as a telemarketer!”. I just looked at her and said “I am not ashamed of having done what was necessary to support my teenage son and myself during a tough time.”
People are notoriously hard on those who do things they do not consider worthy. They will be sympathetic to people who pick up garbage and empty trash and clean hotel rooms, but other jobs taken out of desperation and used to keep life moving on are treated with scorn, contempt, sneering, and in some cases, as somehow immoral and indecent. These are people who would have supported me 100% if I had found it necessary to work at Hooters or do sex work, but calling people on the phone was absolutely beyond the pale. I was classed in the same group as axe murderers, and slightly below rapists.