I think the decline of the worker is a fairly recent and cyclical phenomenon. The current conditions mirror the first Gilded Age in a lot of ways, and that's when unions really came to the fore, so I do believe that'll gradually happen again over the next few decades.
Posted by Elayne Riggs at September 4, 2006 04:34 AMHANG BUSH RIGHT NOW! TODAY! MOTHERFUCKER IS A GENOCIDAL SOCIOPATH. HANG HIM, HANG HIM, HANG HIM!!
Posted by steve duncan at September 4, 2006 06:11 AMIn the proud Show Me State, workers have absolutely NO RIGHTS, whatsoever. If they did, Dillard's Department Stores could not fire a 'woman' if she had 3 unexcused absences from work. What they fail to tell you at time of employment, is that no excuse is sufficient without a doctor's note. In other words, you better be sick enough to have your doctor write you a little note. Stuck in traffice, a sick child, an accident, or a sick parent are not consider appropriate excuses. You are fired after three unexcused absences within a 6 month period, and they don't care if you have been their 25 years or 1 year. Remember that the next time you shop at Dillard's.
Posted by Judith at September 4, 2006 07:02 AMIf you have a car accident, and are late, the delay is unexcused. If you are stuck in traffic and late, you are considered late and it will count against you. After being late seven times in six months, you are also fired. Furthermore, it doesn't matter if you are one second late, or ten minutes late. There are no excuses for being late. My contention is that they can do this because most of their work force is the older woman. By-the-way, Dillard is owned by a family in Arkansas. Does that tell you anything?
Posted by Judith at September 4, 2006 07:13 AM'cause today is no celebration of labor. It's the "End of Summer" holiday. We just haven't changed the name yet.
Posted by idiosynchronic at September 4, 2006 07:16 AMThe neocon agenda is a hungry one. It is stunning how systematic their various agendas can be to starve civil rights, pulverize the working middle class, deny sentior citizens medical aid, threaten baby boomers with a social security black hole. The ACLU is loudly labelled unpatriotic and the organized Unions of America seem to be blamed for all the layoffs of America's manufacturing dinosauers. Not managements' fault that we've seen these declines, golden parachute mentality has nothing to do with it, no the workers, the environmentalists, the civil rights activists, the Liberals, the weak political will of middle America is poor victim Bush's challenge.
Posted by mainsailset at September 4, 2006 07:40 AMWe continue to celebrate Labor Day because its an important date on the COKE/PEPSI calendar marketing plan - you know, one gets to have a "sale" on Memorial Day and the other gets Labor Day.
If we quit celebrating Labor Day, we would need to create another major holiday to sell the unhealthy sugar water with no flavor.
Posted by at September 4, 2006 08:06 AMIt's very simple, for the past quarter century American workers have been told that economic class does not matter and that anyone who "played the game" right would get ahead and have nothing to worry about. Enough working people have bought into the lie for it to be sucessful. The result is what we have today, a class war where the labor side does not defend itself and continually loses ground.
In the 1920's the same thing happened. Even the poorest shoe shine boy knew that if he used his tips and played the stock market right that he too would be a millionaire. The cycle seems to be that as the people who survived the last crises die off we forget the lessons they learned and become materialistic to the point of worshipping greed. This leads too many people to take on a debt load that tey cannot repay and eventually the system crashes again.
Looking at the twin deficets of trade and budget plus the level of household debt coupled with the recent decline of housing prices, it's beginning to look a lot like 1929.
My advice to everyone is to reduce your personal debt as much as possible before it's too late.
Posted by herbal tee at September 4, 2006 08:14 AMLabor is quite healthy. What you do is form a corporation to provide private prison services. You incorporate manufacturing or some service as part of your "rehabilitation" plan. Those prisoners who are profitable have no hope of parole, since it's so easy to get "violations" of corporate...uhh, prison...policy. 1 or 2 "good" productive prisoners will get parole to provide an incentive to those who will never get parole.
Prison Industries. The corporate model of the future! There is a reason Americans are 5% of the world population, but have 25% of the worlds prisoners.
Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix recently urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and bring it to his state, telling the shoe manufacturer that "there won’t be any transportation costs; we’re offering you competitive prison labor (here)."
Posted by phidipides at September 4, 2006 09:00 AMI think unions have out lived their usefulness to the working class of America. I remember growing up in W.V. and seing union miners with clearly mark company tools in their garages. Talking about using the company resources for their onw benefit such as washing their trucks then complaining about the wages when they were making $20.00 plus dollars an hour. Granted most had been with the compamny years but at lot were there becuasethe union didn't let them get fired for the various reasons that they should have been. Honest non-union workers couldn't get hired on and workers would strike every thing would be in an uproar over it. Union to day are both workers and management. they hire hundreds if not thousands of workers in their office buildings. We have a union guy here where I work but I can't see paying union dues to employee people like him to "look out for me" when I perfectly willing andale to do that for myself.
Posted by Avenger D-22 at September 4, 2006 11:59 AMWe have a union guy here where I work but I can't see paying union dues to employee people like him to "look out for me" when I perfectly willing andale to do that for myself.
That attitude is common here in South Carolina. It's starting to die a hard death as workers who believed this see their jobs outscorced without warning wherea unionized workers often get severance packages including money for retraining.
Self sufficentcy is a good thing but is often an unsuccessful strategy when dealing with forces larger and more powerful than yourself.
Feeding Frenzy: What's Eating Us?
We live in a world that likes to focus on flash...the best news is breaking news that portrays the latest tragedy...whether that be a plane crash, a shooting, or any of a number of calamities. At the same time, slower burning, less inflammatory catastrophes unfold at a reliably steady pace each day. The question is what makes one the focus of near obsessive attention and the other an item to be placed obscurely on the back burner?
A new article points to a classic example of this phenomenon...the expansion of humanity...around the waist. While we do see an occasional news piece on the topic, it rarely breaches the psyche to the same degree that, for example, the number of U.S. troop fatalities in Iraq has achieved. Clearly, many Americans could cite the number of troops lost but only perhaps a handful could offer the statistics on deaths attributed to obesity. The full article can be read here.
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - An obesity pandemic threatens to overwhelm health systems around the globe with illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease, experts at an international conference warned Sunday.
"This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world," Paul Zimmet, chairman of the meeting of more than 2,500 experts and health officials, said in a speech opening the weeklong International Congress on Obesity. "It's as big a threat as global warming and bird flu."
The World Health Organization says more than 1 billion adults are overweight and 300 million of them are obese, putting them at much higher risk of diabetes, heart problems, high blood pressure, stroke and some forms of cancer.
Zimmet, a diabetes expert at Australia's Monash University, said there are now more overweight people in the world than the undernourished, who number about 600 million.
I found the information in the last paragraph fascinating...overweight people now outnumber the undernourished! The reason I find it fascinating may surprise my readers...but I guess the element of surprise may well be what we all prefer. It is fascinating to me because it seems to be consistent with the polarization that permeates the United States and much of the world...perhaps a further sign that humanity is woefully out of balance...living largely at the extremes.
Read full text here:
Posted by Daniel DiRito at September 4, 2006 05:50 PMFirst vivid memory: Driving to Safeway with my dad and hearing on the radio that JFK had been shot
Mine was being in school, the teacher telling us Kennedy had been shot and we needed to do a duck-n-cover drill because the Russians would probably nuke us. Then being sent home crying on a bus. They told us to duck and cover under a coffee table if we had to. I still don't think a coffee table has the same anti-radiation properties as a school desk. I'm quite used to goverment fear mongering.
Posted by phidipides at September 4, 2006 07:56 PM