Working People Work Themselves to Death
by Joey Only

It seems to me that working people must face a greater struggle to live healthy, for many do not have the time or money to properly take care of themselves. When there is no time to stop and make a proper meal, fast food and restaurant replacements often supplement the diet. Coffee, coffee, coffee to get the body going...and then its cigarettes at first break to calm the nerves. When you get home you cannot relax, you are a single mom and the children are demanding, clothes need washing, homework needs doing, housework must fit in somehow...so you put something in the
microwave.

The capitalist economic system is terrible for the body, soul and mind. Many jobsites are unsafe, contaminated with chemicals, destroy the human spirit and eat up as much energy as the company can possibly steal from its workers.

This summer I fell very sick and got to spend some time in a hospital seeing for myself how health care works. I met there a Pakistani man who had spent two months in the hospital having his lungs drained. He was a roofer in Surrey with six kids. Perhaps he noticed his condition was deteriorating a long time before he was hospitalized, but he could nil afford to take any time off work with so many mouths to feed and bills to pay. Eventually he worked himself to the point where his body broke and he had to spend two months and probably more in the hospital.

If only we had an economic system where this immigrant worker could take time off and heal his body without losing his home and everything he owns.

Canada has a safety net for its workers, it's the healthcare system. So when you work yourself to near death, or you have an arm ripped off on the jobsite, there is a place that will fix you up. But with all the technology and gadgets and pills, the system still lacks a common sense approach to wellness. It's as though the technology advanced while the mentality behind the practice stayed in the 1950's.

While my immune system was suppressed I could only eat high quality and organic foods...while the hospital brought me hamburgers, hard bread and other foods with no medicinal or nutritional value. The detergent in the bedsheets made me itch. The morphine made me constipated and constantly nauseated. I would rather have had marijuana then opiates. There were no herbs, no natural medicines and no massages. Because the Hospital Employee's Union (HEU) lost their strike, the cleaning services were terrible and too often
nonexistent, even though cleanliness is the simplest way to prevent the spread of infections. Because of a shortage of nurses some of my needs were ignored or dealt with too quickly to have a positive effect.

If I only were rich enough to go to the United States and pay for better healthcare. But we get no such option, working class people are worked to death.