I’m a model. In 2016 (16 years old) I moved to China on my own for work. I’ve been working as a model since I was 13, but it was in China where I discovered that the model-to-escort pipeline is very real & sex is used as currency. Modelling doesn’t really pay that well - the real money is made by escorting & modelling work is just a fancy ad: you being the product.
I work in workplace safety, hazardous materials/waste handling and certification. Nobody knows shit about the entire field.
The government leaves the whole thing to the certifying bodies, who audit on form and process without any technical knowledge. The actual rule-makers are either the personification of regulatory capture, or completely oblivious about how their rules will be interpreted in the real world.
The companies doing the work hire independent experts who are fully dependent on those companies and can’t afford to burn too many bridges, despite the fact that they are the only skilled people making important calls.
The majority of the companies (naturally) only care about the profits and will gladly find experts to agree with them and pressure employees to ignore the rules.
And most baffling of all: the people suffering under all the above just see the safety regulations that keep them alive and healthy as annoying and needlessly slowing them down.
I live and work in a place where these people have permanent employment contracts and get paid by the hour. They have no reason to be idiots, and yet…