Kaiser Permanente Gives Nurses Rocks For Appreciation

‘Fuck you, have a rock’ seems to be the moral of the story for Nurses Appreciation Week as Kaiser Permanente offers their nurses literal rocks instead of…you know, anything with tangible value. Dubbed ‘Encouragement Stones’, the images made the rounds on social media last week while nurses were appropriately flabbergasted at literally how low a corporation with over $80 billion in revenue can stoop.

The good news is that if Kaiser Permanente pulls their back from setting the bar so low, they’ll actually be one of the few capable of affording medical treatment for it.

Yet these blasé platitudes seem to be the standardized means of supplementing poverty wages across the United States. To give plenty of opportunity for those young bucks to pull themselves up by the bootstraps onto the ladder that Boomer’s pulled up behind them.

During the midst of the pandemic that offered more than a modicum of concerns about supply lines and the ability to purchase food, corporations started throwing about the term ‘hero’ to placate the lower-income brackets in order to continue exploiting their labor for meager funds. These ‘heroes’ were quasi-celebrated with the standard of adverts that said ‘Thanks’ while attempting to sell some form of grotesque togetherness, banners placed freely and wantonly, and lots of ass-slaps and high-fives.

But that’s pretty much where it stopped.

The pandemic taught much to the world – namely that everything in the modern era relies on the sweat of the brow from a few poorly placed individuals. Truck drivers, grocers, gas station attendants – shit gets difficult once these positions are vacated, when the supply chain that many take for granted comes to an abrupt halt. So we just started throwing about the term ‘hero’.

So everyone stuck on the frontlines during the pandemic continued to get shit pay, little to no benefits, and were also thrust into an international health crisis with no means of protecting their families while un-educated adults bemoaned the usage of masks. It’s not entirely surprising that many roles are now unfilled – many died from COVID, complements of fools with no understanding of modern medicine.

Millions in the United States were blessed enough to have individuals trapped at the forefront of the pandemic to keep the cogs of capitalism churning ever-so-slowly. Rather than receiving increased pay, the vast majority went with receiving mere platitudes – some temporarily received a ‘hazard pay’ for less than a year that managed to keep them at poverty levels.

Perhaps it makes more sense to pay the people at the front of the pandemic slightly better. Or…I guess, just give them all some Kaiser Permanente rocks.