Living Large With Less
“Living Large with Less” sounds like an ad slogan for The 99¢ Stores. It is, however, a short film produced by In The Trenches Productions and playing on their website, inthetrenchesproductions.com. This film is a satirical feel-good talk show about thrifty living for downsized workers. It’s the kind of propaganda film we could see corporations making to mollify the masses. As the middle class is financially squeezed, the media will need to promote an upbeat message that living with less can be fun, noble and even patriotic.
Why should you check out this film? To see how callous corporate America can be when it cuts labor costs.
The film centers on an incident at Northwest Airlines. As you know, when CEOs are let go, they are given huge severance packages. But when a number of Northwest Airline workers were fired and replaced with $8-an-hour employees, these fired workers were actually given a brochure called “100 Ways to Live with Less”. This brochure was their ‘golden parachute’.
A CEO can lead a company into ruin and be rewarded with a $100 million parting gift. Contrast that experience with the plight of many workers, who took pay cuts, scrambled to work longer hours and then were fired. Their parting gift for making financial sacrifices to keep the company afloat was a brochure, which seems to suggest you can live on $8 an hour with a few ‘simple’ changes in your lifestyle. Changes like - move back in with your parents, sell your car and take the bus – essentially live like you’re back in high school. And if you live frugally enough, you can re-apply for your old job at that new $8 an hour rate.
That’s right; it takes some kind of unmitigated gall to distribute a brochure that advises newly fired workers to downscale their life to the point that they shouldn’t be shy about pulling something they like out of their neighbor’s trash. Dumpster diving actually was suggestion #46 in the brochure. Yep, your former employer is giving you a send-off with the jolly suggestion to root through garbage in search of a meal or some ‘pre-owned’ outfit you might wear to your next job interview. Oh, and, good luck finding that job interview. Oh, and, be sure to hit the trash cans early, because trolling through trash is becoming highly competitive.
So, check out this film for a true “let them eat cake” moment from corporate America.
Jan Bina, Blogger for In the Trenches Productions
