Many of you live on a tight budget and perhaps are using Medical, child credit on your income tax,

rent apartments rather than live in the house you own;  some of you are perhaps using public transportation while many of you work from 9am to 5pm commuting every day to work and getting stuck on the freeway during rush hour.  You probably don’t dine at upscale restaurants too often and your vacations are limited to some local road trips and occasionally all-inclusive resorts in Cancun or Hawaii.

Your children probably go to public school because you can’t afford private school and you need to use mechanic’s services to fix your car with some regularity because buying  a new car is too expensive.

In his controversial and groundbreaking essay “Victims of Compassion” Dim Simple addresses you directly as the consumer to show you how you are being systematically abused by low-ranking employees in both the private and public sectors as pro-labor establishment brainwashes you into a false sense of compassion for workers and misguided hatred against business community and “rich people”

MISGUIDED RESENTMENT

When many of you observe rich people driving nice cars, living a life of luxury in their Beverly Hills mansions, dining at 5-star restaurants, and traveling to remote and exotic destinations all over the world, some of you develop this sense of jealousy and resentment against them, comparing your lifestyle to theirs. You are tempted to suggest that you deserve to live like this because you work hard, but they don’t work hard and somehow got ahead of you in life because their ancestors were privileged or because they cheated the system somehow.  When you are dealing with large companies – whether it’s a hospital, or insurance company, or a bank, you feel frustrated and powerless when you don’t get the services you deserve. When you face oppression of the big government you rail against bad politicians at the top and are trying to vote them out of the office.

As you are overwhelmed with resentment against big corporations, rich people, and big government, you are at risk of missing the real and most important source of the negativity and frustration: your fellow employees and fellow consumers. You may be unhappy with “greedy” big corporations that overcharge you for everything and provide you with crappy service, but you rarely realize that if their employees were making less money and had fewer rights, the products you buy would be a lot more affordable and customer service you get would have been much higher quality than what you are getting now.

You may be envious and feel hostile towards rich people, but judging by how civilized and non-confrontational they usually are, you would rather live side by side with them than with your low-income or no-income neighbor with a criminal record, violent personality, and noisy and rude kids.

You may be upset at the big government for long lines at the DMV, excessive income tax charges, or unpaved roads and dangerous metro stations; but you overlook the power public employee unions have over how government operates to make it nice and convenient for the public employees at the expense of the population they serve.

THE REAL CULPRITS WHO ABUSE CONSUMERS ARE LOW-RANKING EMPLOYEES WITH BAD ATTITUDES AND SOCIAL SAFETY NETS TO BACK THEM UP

When you are getting your cheeseburger at McDonald’s drive-through and they forget to give you ketchup and give you a bad attitude – its not Mcdonald’s corporation that is mistreating you – it’s the low-ranking rude employee who doesn’t care about providing good customer service and even if you pay them double the minimum wage – they will still be giving you the same nasty attitude.

If you have a plumbing issue in your apartment, and the plumber is taking forever to come and fails to unblock the jam in your toilet, you want to blame the management company that is in charge of the building, but in reality, it is a negligent incompetent plumber that is at fault for not fixing your toilet.

When you leave some cash at some professional office to pay for their services – say doctor’s office or a convenience store, and that money gets stolen by the receptionist – you can’t blame the employer – you blame the low-ranking employee for theft.

When you get burned pizza at a restaurant, it’s the negligent kitchen employee who burned it, not the pizza joint owner and it is that employee who needs to be reprimanded and punished in your presence, not the pizza joint owner!

When your hotel room, bed sheets, and pillow are dirty – it’s not the hotel’s fault, but the actual housekeeper’s fault who is not doing her job and needs to be fired

When your  evil babysitter is chatting on the phone with her boyfriend while your crying and hungry baby is covered with her own feces for 2 hours in another room, it’s not the employment agency’s fault that provided you with that nasty babysitter, it’s the babysitter who must be prosecuted for child neglect

SELF-DEFEATING AND FALSE SENSE OF EMPATHY TO LOW-RANKING EMPLOYEES

In our daily lives, we rarely deal with big government or big corporations directly – it’s always done through their employees. It’s the employees, especially low-ranking ones, who mistreat you as a consumer in a million different ways, and yet, you feel a lot more closeness to and empathy toward an employee that shares the “bottom of the food chain” position with you and this is how you, as a consumer, contribute to your own suffering.

Consumer rights are not limited to getting the government to crack down on “corporate greed” or “corporate fraud” – consumer rights should also include your right as a consumer to go after bad employees of those companies that provided you with terrible service and low-quality products!

There must be a new consumer movement that would encourage consumer rights groups to go after the unions, go after negligent, rude and thieving low-ranking employees just as aggressively as the consumer lobby goes after private businesses.

Consumers must wake up from their complacent attitude to workers. Consumers must realize that in their daily activities, they suffer most harm from low-ranking employees, not from their employers!

It is time to get rid of this poisonous myth that somehow consumers and employees are one and the same and that they share common interests in extorting more rights and concessions from businesses.

This myth has so far allowed negligent, rude, and incompetent employees to get away with customer/consumer abuse with impunity!  Its always “big bad corporations” or small businesses to blame, but not the employees who actually abuse the consumers!

It is time for consumer advocates to face the truth about employees abusing consumers and change priorities to not just go after bad businesses but to aggressively go after particular employees who caused harm.

Consumer advocacy groups must be instrumental in forcing the political establishment to roll back the employee rights and minimum wage requirement to put employees in a position where they will be terrified of getting bad reviews from customers and desperate to keep their bosses and customers happy.

CONSUMERS ENJOYED MUCH BETTER SERVICE IN THE PAST

Our establishment and revisionist historians are telling us that when this country was still capitalist, and not socialist like today, employees were being exploited and abused by their employers. As a result of this, unions and employee rights movements completely changed the legal landscape to ensure that the rights of employees take precedence over the rights of the employer. What these revisionist historians are NOT telling you is that in early 20th century and until the 1950s America was number one in the world in terms of providing excellent customer service to consumers and the highest quality products no other country could compete with! In the past, when employers could deduct salary from negligent employees and make them work extra time if they weren’t productive enough within 8 hours, and there was no social safety net and health insurance, employees valued their jobs and had the best work ethic.

When you get an employee in a position where there is no social safety net if they lose their job due to poor performance, and it’s difficult to get another job without good references from a prior employer customers have a much greater say in evaluating employee performance, employees develop excellent work ethic.

It has already been shown that only conscientious employees respond well to financial rewards and more rights and benefits by providing a better service – they are in the minority. The majority of employees will only provide quality service and make quality products under duress – out of fear of being punished or losing their job and losing their livelihoods.  Consumer advocates must understand that.

Consumer advocates must also understand that high salaries and benefits for the employees are coming out of CONSUMER’s POCKET  – so even when an employer is rewarding a conscientious employee with better working conditions and compensation,it is still getting passed on to the consumer!

CONSUMER ADVOCACY REVOLUTION AGAINST THE PRO-LABOR ESTABLISHMENT

Today’s desperate situation with the ever-worsening quality of service, the entitled attitude of young generation workers, expanded safety net for the employees that doesn’t depend on their work ethic calls for a consumer advocacy revolution.

What this revolution would mean is that united front of the business community and consumer community against the labor advocates and labor lobby at all government levels. The power is in numbers: if the majority of us will identify more as consumers rather than as employees and join forces with the business community to fight back against labor interests, we will be able to roll back anti-consumer and anti-business legislation by either convincing the existing government to change its policies or sweeping this government from power altogether and replacing it with consumer and business-friendly government.