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[side_show]

Holy hell, I wrote an essay.  What the hell?

[melack]

Upton Sinclair was wrong! People in the sausage is good!

[littlefallsmets]

sideshow, it is okay. Of course you are writing essays. It is merely the LFM virus spreading.

It's okay. I am awesome and it is awesome to be me, except for the panic attacks and being broke.

When someone says "taxes are extortion", I have to assume they're either just trying to rile up people or they're... unstable. In other contexts, A-CAP seems to have his head on straight so I have to assume at this point that he's willfully exaggerating his opinion just to argue.

However, thank you, lp. There is nothing to lighten the mood like a well-placed Batman's Origin reference.

[theinevitable]

side_show, I think it has been too long since I have said that I am basically in love with you.

no, I am not checking your facebook right now to make sure it still says "in a relationship." why would I be doing that.

[linnea]

I am staying away from this whole masturbation-fest, but goddamn that was humorous.

Tiny can to both lprkn and lfm.

I think that to prove your commitment to your principles, you should move to Wales and mine coal for starvation wages.

Shit yes. Wholehearted agreement over here. Tiny can.

Speaking as someone in a non-union industry...

...who's spent more hours at work than away from work for the past three weeks with no days off...

...who has no health care plan because it's not offered...

...who has been technically the employee of a temp agency for as long as I've been with this company...

...who gets no paid leave, at all, ever...

...who gets paid slightly more than a shift lead at an In'n'Out Burger...

...who gets to spend part of my day training people in India who are taking the places of other Americans who used to have jobs like mine...

...who is only paid overtime because it is the law, and whose hours were limited to 12 a day only because it would cost too much to keep me more...

...who, with all of this overtime, is still making less than I did my first year as an IT tech...

...who could be terminated immediately with no severance and escorted from the building for posting the wrong thing on a message board...

May I be extorted, please?

Pretty, pretty please?

That is eloquent and very well stated. Tiny can.

[littlefallsmets]

Everybody, quick!

L-Money's totally flashing her cans!

[lprkn]

...And you don't even need Mardi Gras beads! Gratuitous cans for everyone!

[V-Adore]

I can only approve of this thread taking a turn for the sexy. After all, if we're gonna be masturbatin', much better to do it over Linnea flashing some can and not weirdo Teamsters, right?

[Doc]

better to do it over Linnea flashing some can and not weirdo Teamsters, right?

You have your... interests, I have mine.
Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to google some pictures of Jimmy Hoffa.

[AlohaDawg]

What Ash said. See, I'm a manager now in a union organization. It blows. It's not winnable because the Union in my case maintains the pretext that what they do they are doing to protect the business and serve the customers, and it's a load of crap. They exist to serve themselves, and they spend more time looking for ways to nickel and dime the company then they do serving the business or the customers.

In your case, you are dealing with an organization that has a long history of corrupt behavior including violence, shakedowns, murder, and kickbacks. Standing up to such an organization can buy you some tire iron marks or an eternal gig inside a concrete column someplace - not that they would do that to you when starving you out makes more sense. And they appear to be 100% capable of that, probably through intimidating whoever is making the work schedule. Bottom line is you can't win without nukes and you don't have 'em.

If you can jump to management, that would solve your immediate problem to some degree. Any chance of that?

I think that this country briefly benefited from unions when workers were being exploited. Now, they've priced US made goods out of the market to a large degree so the exploitation is simply moved overseas.  Since the unions only seem to care if American workers get exploited, its all good to them. I think that 1) workers have choices, and they can and should vote with their feet. Two identical companies with a quality, desired product will succeed or fail on the a) the cost of the product and b) the commitment of their employees to the business. A company that treats it's employees well will succeed in the market place over one that doesn't, everything else being equal. 2) There have been enough labor reforms and laws and protections put in place to make Unions a hindrance to companies being able to compete. Look at the Steel and Automotive industries. They were killed by inability to compete on cost in this country, and a lot of that is due to the contracts awarded union labor.

That said, I admire the indignant idealism that drives your desire for your perception of justice. If you have a family and no other prospects for work, I would admire it more. If you are on your own and/or other jobs are out there, I would say your energy is misspent. I disagree with your take on taxes- after all, to some degree they support those structures government has put in place to protect workers outside the union environment - and Sideshows comment about actors and unions is the most telling reason Unions may be no longer necessary. They really only serve the most successful? What's the point of that? the most successful don't work for scale. They name their price in many cases. The same is true for professional workers. It is interesting to think about how that works - if I were the best hold digger in the world, would I be able to name my price? Probably not. Attorneys can. Why?

[littlefallsmets]

But when you let blind competition work its "magic"... the workers get paid less and less and less and pretty soon, we're a third world nation that just happens to have a small elite class sucking its blood like a tick in... a generation and a half at best but maybe even quicker. Hell, we're already headed in that direction at a slower pace, as it is, y'know.

Unions aren't killing American commerce, allowing imports from countries that allow barbaric labour practices does, allowing "American" corporations to outsource all of their business apparatus into countries where people can't stand up for their human rights... to the point where "buying American" is only American in that the stockholders are American multimillionaires becoming billionaires.

Union protectionism isn't perfect and it can really really suck on the occasional personal scale... but its the least of many many evils.

If there's an even lesser evil out there, that's fine, but I ain't throwing out the baby with the bathwater on that idea until its presented.

You let businesses go into a downward spiral of total-free-market undercutting each other without government pressure and union pressure and general public moral pressure against such bullshit, the endgame is a new feudalism and faster than you'd ever want to believe.

The American dream is going to finally devour itself, I know, I know, but... jeez, its still worth fighting against, even if only because its the right hopeless thing to do.

[AlohaDawg]

One big problem is that all those that wrote about economics on the left or the right never predicted the level of global economy that's emerging. Without any global government that is capable of creating and enforcing labor law on a global scale, all you have left is the market to regulate itself, whether you are a market economy believer or not. The market tends to regulate to it's own interest, which is growth and profit. "Blind" competition is hardly blind. It's about creating a product that meets some kind of real or perceived need, at the lowest price possible. That's what it is, at it's simplest, and the cost of production is one of the biggest elements in being able to compete. Period.

What's left is country A to make market decisions on the global level. If country A is not a country whose government controls to a large degree the economy, all they can do is attempt to erect policy barriers - import restrictions, tariffs, duties, and the like. However, since it's a free economy globally to a great degree, country A is allowed to by a product from country B even if it is manufactured under slavelike conditions. Companies unfortunately do this constantly and without transparency, regulation and punishment when necessary, there are almost never repercussions except the bad publicity in the media. Which usually happens after the product sells a ton (and the kids who toiled to make them are crippled or dead).

Are American workers to blame? Is this the legacy of the booming WWII economy that expanded the manufacturing sector by orders of magnitude, giving blue collar workers (many immigrants) the American Dream? A dream that itself has evolved to the point where, two generations later, blue collar work isn't good enough for many Americans? I don't know. I do know that many labor and professional unions are 'protecting' workers that really don't need protected, and negotiating contracts for workers that break the back of the employers to the point where they were forced to send production or assembly overseas because of cost. Add that to the need to compete with 100% foreign made goods on cost and it's a recipe for disaster unless you can prove better quality...and even then, there is a segment of the consumer market that buys strictly on cost due to their personal economy...and that segment is expanding as the middle class shrinks - downward.

[littlefallsmets]

I'd chalk it up to the actions of ignorant politicians, either simply short-sighted or more often simply bought-off.

When the middle class dies, when the middle classes die, everything that made the idea of America valuable basically dies with it.

When the middle classes die, entire societies, entire civilizations fall.

I don't care about ideology, I don't care about theory... as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the idea of upward economic mobility blows away into dust at the benefit of only the veryvery richest... whatever's causing it, that's wrong.

If it means stronger unions, if it means a second rise of unions for the skill sets that are now the true working class jobs, if it means massive economic protectionism, it needs to happen, it needs to be done.

When you play down to your competition, you're fucked, if sports have taught me anything useful ever, it's that.

And if being a shining beacon of light means a few motherfuckers only can have two summer homes instead of five, then we need to do that. We need to do it, though we won't, of course. Our leaders are bought off and we the people are brainwashed... brainwashed by the Nikkei, brainwashed by Dow Jones, brainwashed by the FTSE, Nasdaq and secure loans... brainwashed into a Stockholm Syndrome that our captors will protect us if we just follow orders and their obscene largesse will somehow "trickle" down from their coffers.

Well, there's something trickling down from them and... it is yellow... but it ain't gold.

And they're asking us to open our mouths a little bit wider, we've missed a few stray drops.

I dunno.

There's no answer, there's no solution that anyone call pull off in one paltry mayfly of a lifetime. Violent revolution tends to just put the same kinds of monsters into commands, just different faces and different talking points, but the same kind of oppression and all those goddamned dead bodies along the way.

I haven't the stomach for that.

And non-violent revolution... there is no alternate form of communication, now, all the forms are owned by all the people who are profiting from the death of the middle class. Big Brother didn't need to be one voice or one set of eyes, no, a flood of ten thousand viewpoints all cancellling each other out into an unintelligible white noise machine was all that was required.

Even if there was a Gandhi now, we'd be too busy to hear him, too overwhelmed already and... they wouldn't even have to kill him these days, you know. A sex scandal would do so much more nicely, not just killing the leader but making the ideas laughable with the memory.

They wouldn't have to kill Jesus these days, you know, they'd just make fun of him until H/he couldn't accomplish a thing. Lump H/him in with the motherfuckers who put aluminum in their hats to protect themselves from alien mind-beams and then... there you go. There you go. It is accomplished, you see.

Ah.

The big picture is so completely fucked, y'know.

At least its something to write about.

[littlefallsmets]

Oh, in the small ways, in the personal ways, in the temporal and fleeting ways, many things are awesome. Many many!

But the big picture, the future, the long-view just looks like a long stretch of neon signs spelling out "Danger" until there are no signs at all.

A lot of why I'll probably never be a father is that I have no faith in that future, in that confused overwhelmed future.

It's just... the fix is in and, yes, I know that I have decent odds personally of carving out a small place to weather that out until I expire and whatever but... maaaaaan, the fix is in and I kind of can't imagine the kind of widescale action it would take to turn this ship around, now.

The idea that there's an event horizon to black holes, you know, and once you're past it... struggle all you like, you are gonna be one with the singularity.

Part of the reason I have a hard time enjoying individual and temporal pleasures is that I... have this issue with my empathy circuit kinda being welded permanently "on" and... I get overwhelmed by how terrible things are for so fuck*ng many, even more than my personal struggles and discomforts.

I'm... I'm just venting.

Thank you for letting me vent here, venting it into public even if y'all wanna just skim it...

It's nice. It helps a little bit. Thank you.

[AlohaDawg]

I officially have lost track of what it is you are talking about. But I picture you sweating profusely and rapidly looking from side to side while you say it.

I also picture you with, like, 30 locks on your door like the Nicholson character in "As Good as it Gets".

Also, sometimes, Travis Bickle.