Get a job! No not that job!

Interesting. We’re supposed to despise people who are on welfare because they should get a job no matter how scarce jobs are where they live or how young and dependent their children are or how hard they’re working in school to improve their chances of finding work…but also, it turns out, we’re supposed to despise people who do have jobs if the jobs are not posh enough for our refined tastes.

Former Cosby Show actor Geoffrey Owens made headlines this holiday weekend after a New Jersey shopper snapped photos of him bagging groceries at a Trader Joe checkout line — then provided them to the Daily Mail.

Instantly, Owens — who played the Huxtables’ affable son-in-law Elvin on the show from 1985 to 1992 and is still a working actor — found himself at the center of a complicated conversation about low-wage labor. It involved social media shaming, a backlash to the backlash, and a SAG-led campaign to celebrate the many actors who, like Owens, work less glamorous jobs to make ends meet and do what they love.

The Daily Mail took a scornful approach to reporting Owens’ employment, publishing several photos of him in “a Trader Joe’s T-shirt with stain marks on the front as he weighed a bag of potatoes.” The tabloid also reported the average hourly wage at the store ($11), and implied that Owens was washed-up as an actor, quoting the photo-taker as saying, “Wow, all those years of doing the show and you ended up as a cashier.”

So there you go. Get out there and find a job, you lazy parasite, but when you do we will make fun of you, you proletarian loser.

However, neither the Daily Mail nor Fox News, which circulated a widely-shared follow-up, made any attempt to contextualize Owens’s appearance in the Trader Joe’s line.

For instance, the outlets failed to note that more than two-thirds of all SAG-affiliated actors make less than $1,000 a year as actors. They also failed to note that Owens has worked steadily an actor throughout the decades: In addition to regular theater work, he’s been consistently active as a television guest actor every year but one since 2007.

Not only that, but the Yale alumnus has been busy teaching acting classes at Yale, Columbia, and the well-respected New York play incubator Primary Stages.

But naturally some people on Twitter made fun of him anyway, because hey, menial work, how dare he.

The overwhelming majority of people who read the Daily Mail and Fox News pieces, however, were outraged at the media outlets for sensationalizing the honest labor of a respectable man and dedicated working actor. Performers of all stripes and professional levels swiftly came to Owens’s defense.

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