“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” Abraham Lincoln
August 27, 2025, And Every Wednesday
By Linda Case Gibbons, Esq.
(Check out Lest We Forget and FYI.)
What’s the difference between driving an Uber, and sweat shops?
Between delivering burgers for GrubHub, and slave labor?
Nothing. Except the drivers are driving nice cars. But it’s their cars, being used to make money for millionaire employers.
And that’s the point.
No offense to millionaire employers.
They worked for their money. They take the risks. They provide jobs. And they pay the lion’s share of our taxes.
But there’s something wrong about jobs that desperate people have to take, although we agree no work is beneath you.
As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Whatever your life’s work is, do it well.
“If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music.
“Sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and earth will have to pause and say ‘Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well.’”
And the workers doing delivery jobs are doing a good job.
But something is wrong. It’s an Elitist issue.
After 12 years of Obama/Biden, we’ve been groomed to a certain kind of complacency.
If today you saw a severed head on the side of the Jersey Turnpike, you’d be horrified, but not too surprised.
After all, we hear reports of heads found in ditches and graves in Mexico every day, and, well, we become used to it.
Just as we have become used to millionaire elitists calling the shots.
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, George Soros, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg. They all do whatever they please.
In the really olden days, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt and J.P. Morgan had a tough railroad, oil and steel monopoly road to hoe.
They were undeniably powerful captains of commerce. Some said they were ruthless.
But they were also dedicated philanthropists. Some made the treatment of their employees part of their business plan.
Milton Hershey built a town for his workers in Hershey, Pennsylvania, with housing and schools.
His stated goal was to provide his employees with dignity, and a good quality of life.
In 1914, Henry Ford doubled the wages of his workers to $5 a day, and introduced a 40-hour work week.
Jeff Bezos isn’t chopped liver, either.
He worked hard, and is now worth $270 billion dollars, creating Amazon, originally an online bookstore in his garage, and with his finger in a lot of pies, GrubHub and Uber included.
I don’t know if Bezos is good to his workers. But it feels as if there’s something disrespectful in connection with these delivery/driving jobs.
“We agree that slavery is wrong,” Noam Chomsky wrote. “But there’s another thing, which in the old days used to be called wage slavery, which means that you rent yourself to somebody else in order to survive.”
Of course, Chomsky would say that. He’s a leading figure of the political left. He refers to himself as a Libertarian Socialist.
And, he opposes capitalism. But he has a point, at least here.
There’s no denying we need entrepreneurs, like Bezos. But when I saw his wedding, in Venice, that spanned three days, with flotillas, and water taxis...
When I saw the crowd he runs with, Ivanka and Oprah and Kim Kardashian…
When I learned the whole shebang cost $56 million, I couldn’t help thinking about the GrubHub driver, a company in which Bezos has a stake.
I pictured the delivery guy, standing outside, in the rain, with a bag of burgers and fries from McD’s, waiting to make his delivery. And to get paid.
Or the delivery mother of an autistic child, in her car, calculating how much money she made from her deliveries that day, so she could pay for her son’s dental work.
And somehow, it just didn’t seem right.
Hold the line, America.
Stay strong, Patriots.