IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 7 ENGLISH | Page 28

ther can I say I have ever taken care of
any home necessity with my so-called
‘vacation’ money. Paid vacation money
comes from a monthly discount that is
made from our salaries that accrues and
is then returned to us, so we can take a
vacation, which are obligatory, according to our plan. If you don’t take a vacation using that money, you receive the
money but are cannot enjoy the days off
even at some other time. Who watches
out for the interests of the mass of workers? No one. In our society, there is no
one who really defends our interests. It
would apparently be the unions, but in
reality they don’t defend worker’s rights.
Retirement or death?
Recently, workers approved a law that
extends the length of time people must
work from 55 to 60 for women and 60 to
65 for men. The justification for this was
the increase of people’s quality of life.
They compared us to European countries. Yet, no one is doing much to study
the very contrary truth. All one needs to
do is visit hospitals and talk to patients,
doctors, and health workers. Not only is
the sharp rise in people who are sick
extremely alarming, but most of these
people are suffering from chronic conditions, too. Few leave their medical visits
with much hope of improving. What
happened to preventative medicine? The
answer must be sought in documents and
statistics if one is to find them at all, in
the numbers. That aforementioned law
came to workers after having been well
elaborated. It was read at different assemblies all throughout the country and
it is said that workers voted in favor of

it. Yet, I was able to see that they in fact
were resigned with regards to accepting
it, sort of like accepting death at the end
of a long illness. Nothing can be done. I
even heard that it was a government
strategy to avoid having to pay for retirement, since this new measure would
mean that fewer people would live long
enough to collect. We cannot ignore the
growing number of sick children, youth,
and adults: nor the fact that medical offices are always chockfull of patients.
Where is the hope for life? Few people
can actually eat breakfast, lunch, and
dinner; a large part of the population eats
only once a day, particularly those who
have no snack and resign themselves to
the lunches offered at work or study centers, meals that are loaded with carbohydrates and rarely include some protein or
vegetables.
Nominal and real salaries
Despite all this, the large mass of workers goes to their work centers so they can
be paid, since they don’t believe in the
Cucarachita Martínez children’s story,
in which the protagonist did not know
how to use money. Workers’ needs are
never truly met and the cost of those
goods that are most essential is going up
every day while the salary remains unchanged. People suffer physical and
emotional degradation as a result of the
enor mous effort they have to make to
keep surviving. A young person gets by
because of the health he or she may have
enjoyed since childhood, but parents
become ill because they must deprive
themselves of nutrition to give it to their
children, and then illness become -

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