03/12/2022
A former employee of Whalerock Industries, a third-party media company that created the Kardashian-Jenner Official apps, is speaking out in light of Kim Kardashian’s recent comments that ‘nobody wants to work these days,’ and that her ‘best advice for women in business’ is to ‘get your f*cking ass up and work.’
‘I worked hard as part of the Official Kardashian-Jenner Apps launch team — days, nights, weekends, whenever and wherever I was needed,’ said Jessica DeFino, an anti-product beauty reporter, in a statement. ‘My entry-level salary was barely enough to scrape by in Los Angeles. I worked hard to bring in extra income by freelancing on the side. A clause in my contract limited my opportunities to take on work outside of the company. If immense wealth is indeed the product of hard work as Kardashian claims, it is the hard work of the lower-level employees who struggle to make ends meet while their employers reap the rewards.’
DeFino, who authors a beauty-critical newsletter on Substack called ‘The Unpublishable,’ describes herself as someone ‘dismantling beauty standards, debunking marketing myths, and exploring how beauty culture impacts people.’ She went on to critique capitalism as a whole, saying ‘this is not an issue unique to the Kardashians. This is an issue unique to capitalism, and its inherent exploitation of the working class.’
‘While my own story is fairly inconsequential, I hope it can call attention to near-universal labor concerns: Why isn't the average American's income enough to meet the average American's basic needs? Why have wages been stagnant for years, while the cost of living has steadily increased?’ DeFino continued. ‘Why is the wealth gap widening? Why do billionaires born into wealth insist on perpetuating the myth of meritocracy? These are systemic problems that won’t be solved by the ‘hard work’ of any one individual, but by collective organizing, transparency, and solidarity.’
