The Worker's Plight

In case you have been asleep or living on the moon, things ain’t so great here in the US right now, or anywhere in the world for that matter. We seem to be stuck in this mega-recession, which I think is a depression at this point, but we wouldn’t want to scare people now would we?


The political aspects of all this are so complex and volatile that I am not interested in commenting on them, something I am sure brings a sigh of relief to Dear Reader’s lips.
I am simply making a few observations and posing a possible solution to part of the problem. Since this is a blog for musing, the culmination of my thoughts has no more meaning than this.

I have given up on following in-depth news coverage of national events because, with the rest of the stress going on in my life, I choose to ignore the things I cannot control. This is a big part of my feeble, if not well intentioned stress management strategy. But I do hear the meat of the news and read the occasional newspaper or news magazine article. I also talk to people and hear first hand what is going on, especially on the job front since Tom and I have been out of work longer than it takes a body to get through middle school.
What I am hearing is disturbing. The Dow yesterday was over 10,000, a healthy number, there are no signs of rampant inflation taking over, we are ramping down our overseas military operations, hence freeing up some money to (hopefully) use domestically, and reports keep telling us we are in a recovery, though the talking heads are calling it a “jobless recovery”.
A family member who works in land acquisition recently told us that developers are buying up land again, which is good, it means new houses will soon be built and the problem at the heart of this recession will soon begin to recover, plus it means more jobs, from engineers to construction workers to carpenters to landscapers to administrative personnel to accountants. Or will it?
The people that I know who still have jobs are complaining about long hours (60+ a week), double and triple workloads, being treated with disrespect, and working in an environment thick with fear. The young are afraid they will be let go because of their inexperience and the older workers are afraid they make too much money to be kept on the payroll. Vacations are being denied and if they are given, employees are expected to be “on call” during them. Meanwhile, the employers are reaping the benefits of this Ebenezer mentality. Why hire another employee when you can work the one you have to death, without rewarding him and certainly without fear he will quit? This strategy saves money and certainly helps keep some jobs in tact and many companies in business during hard times.
But by many accounts, hard times are ending. Apparently, things are going along swimmingly yet no one wants to part with a buck to hire people. Employers are saying they do not want to hire until they see more people dumping their money in the economy, yet who is going to spend when they are either unemployed or in constant fear of becoming so?
So I think it is time once against to unionize. Now before you begin stoning me to death, hear me out. I am not a big fan of the modern workers union. I believe they have done much to ruin many industries, most obviously the US auto industry. I am sorry Detroit, but no one deserves $28 an hour to stand around watching a machine build a car. But think back to the genesis of the union and how important it was to the formation of the middle class. Unions gave workers a voice, gave them the power to demand vacations and fair wages, clean, safe and secure working conditions, things that our present day workers are complaining they do not have anymore. We have employed people, with college degrees and decades of work experience, being silently clocked when they use the rest room. We have parents with small children coming home at nine every night instead of five or six, too exhausted to spend time with their kids, many not getting paid overtime wages since they are on salary. Hospitalizations for stress related illnesses are growing, as much for the employed as for the unemployed. We have a troop of tired, stressed, scared employees who endure it all and are thankful they still have a job. May I have another crust of bread please?

Meanwhile, their employers cry the blues and yet are reaping the production rewards of 15 workers out of 9 employees.

So I say unionize. How else will the employee’s voice be heard? Without the backing of a union, today’s employee has no leverage, nothing to back him up if he wants his regular hours back, or his workload restored to normal, or even his health insurance coverage partially paid for again, if he still has it at all.
If this “jobless recovery” is prolonged, as workers use up their savings and retirement to make ends meet and the unemployed lose all benefits, we will quickly see the death of the middle class in this country, and are in fact beginning to see it now. Housing is a great example. The wealthy are now buying up the foreclosed houses at a sinfully low price and renting them out at high rates to the people who lost those houses to foreclosure. So you have the rich owning the houses that the now poor used to own, and renting them back to them at a price that is higher than the average mortgage. And for the dramatized version of this reality, please rent “It’s A Wonderful Life”.
So maybe unionization is pie-in-the-sky thinking, but the point is that something must be done. At some point this depression will lift and you will see employers scrambling to find more workers, and workers presenting choice fingers to the companies who treated them so badly during the hard times, at which point Mommy and Daddy will be home by six again, after the family has a two week Disney vacation.

One can dream you know.