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Thursday, December 07, 2006

Sweatshop


Isn't it interesting how Santa has completely exploited the elf population? That crafty man and his devious wife were able to successfully spin a story about how happy these elves are and how happy everybody is up in the North Pole and fool the entire world. In actuality, he's running a sweatshop filled with a population of tyrannized and frightened little elves.

I don't know how these poor elves got themselves into this situation. Perhaps like Russian peasant girls tricked into prostitution, these elves were lulled into Santa's workshop from their poor, fairyland communities with talk of freedom and wealth: "Ho, ho, ho, silly elves! Don't worry about coming up with the money to pay for your plane ticket. You can work it off in my factory to pay me back..."

Little do they know that this is a trick. The meager amount of money they will make in Santa's workshop will never be enough to even pay off the interest he's charging them. They've got themselves into a bad situation.

These elves spend all year making the toys, wrapping the toys, and loading the sleigh. We've all watched the propaganda films of these happy elves making toys in Santa's workshop. But seriously, when have you ever seen anybody, ANYBODY, working in an assembly-line style factory being that happy. You could stretch that maybe Laverne & Shirley were happy, but there's no question that the show was of a fictional nature. I worked in a plastic cup manufacturing company once. It sucked. I was not happy. In fact, that was the motivation to go to college and make something of myself. But I digress, that's a post for a later time.

So the elves work their butts off all year to make toys. All Santa does is cavort around for one measly night of the year and deliver them. He gets all the glory. What does he do the rest of the year?

Yeah, sure, he compiles a list of kids that are bad/good. But how labor intensive can that be? And if you look closely, most TV shows and movies show that it's mostly the elves that man the monitoring of whether kids have been naughty or nice. Again, the little guys do all the work, Santa just sits around doing nothing. Just passing judgement.

And the most ingenious part about this whole thing is that by locating the workshop at the North Pole, there's almost no chance of escape. And theres almost no chance that anybody is going to come around and discover this hidden sweatshop either. I don't think anybody even has a scientific research camp at the North Pole (unlike the manned US research base in Antarctica), so there's nobody the elves can flee to for help. And the best part of all, there are polar bears roaming around looking for food.

Santa, you are one crafty, manipulative, overweight, SOB.