Employee Safety in a Workaholic Nation

If you hadn't heard, we had a ridiculous Bomb Cyclone in Colorado yesterday. The weather was so terrible that schools closed, government buildings closed and people were stranded in their cars on the side of the road. People are still out of power and it's predicted that some neighborhoods will not have their power restored until tomorrow, that's two whole days without power. (This is obviously relative since there are lots of places in the world and in this country where others have had to deal with worse for longer periods of time, but I'm focusing on my area for the purposes of this post).

As with most weather predictions in Colorado, people here were very skeptical. We've had predictions of crazy blizzards before and end up with maybe 3 inches of snow that melts by the afternoon. One of the good things about Colorado is that we get so much sun that the snow typically melts by the next day. Unlike Michigan, where the snow on the ground in November is the same snow on the ground dirty and frozen over in April. This time around, we received notifications around 10 pm the night before from work and schools that operations would be closed due to inclement weather, and thank goodness they did.

We definitely got over 6 inches of snow and the wind was no joke. The winds were up to 70 mph in some places. The visor on put on my windshield has disappeared and the windshield wipers I put up were down and frozen to my windshield. Trees were ripped out of the ground in some places and as mentioned previously, power went out in a few places. I was lucky enough to not need to leave the house yesterday, but I remember being in positions before where I needed to "brave the storm." I used to work in a jail and I also used to work in a hotel (places that never close) and I remember being extremely annoyed that my supervisors and managers wouldn't tell us to stay home. In the nicer scenarios, we're told that if you want to take a day off you need to take PTO for it. In these moments, all I help but to think is the phrase "everyone is replaceable." We live in a world where people aren't measured by their humanity, but by their productivity. I wonder what it would be like to shift that culture, sure it would not be as efficient, but I think we think about what the costs and consequences are to the efficiency that we demand.