While reading the magazine version of Plastic Money I came across this quote near the end.

For its part, Plastic Bank isn’t interested in hiring full-time collectors. “I think it’s even more exciting for the world’s most resourceful to have an unlimited opportunity,” Katz says. “If they want to work more, they’ll work more. They are the masters of their lives.”

You hear these types of arguments all the time in Western capitalist culture and it derives from the Protestant Work Ethic, where doing lots of work and being productive equates with being “godly”. It also derives from the erroneous belief that we are the masters of our own destiny, thus if we make it we did it on our own and if we don’t then it’s our own fault and society shouldn’t look at how it’s structures contribute to poverty.

What’s really happening hear is that Plastic Bank is pushing all risk onto workers. Sure they can make more if they work more, but if they get sick they make nothing. Plastic Bank is happy about that because they don’t pay workers if they’re sick. Plastic Bank is happy, because they have the same payout if more pickers get the same amount of plastic waste, it’s the workers who go from not making much, to absolute poverty wages and then have to work ever longer hours to make what they once did.

Society uses economic scarcity to keep people in jobs that are terrible. The thought that if you loose your job, which barely keeps you in a home already, will result in no food and no home keeps people in jobs where employers abuse them. It takes jobs that no one wants to do, and lets them pay almost nothing for the work because someone will do it for poverty wages.

I’m tired of reading company founders spouting this well worn line about opportunity. They’d never take the same “opportunity”. They’d want to get paid what their worth and put the risk back on the company instead of taking it personally.