HAPPY LABOR DAY FROM DWT!

MY TRIBUTE TO THE ONE AND THE MANY
-by Mags


As I sit down today to pay a tribute to labor, to workers, the worker that comes readily to my mind is my husband. Don’t worry this is not going to be a lengthy treatise on the virtues of the man I married. When I met my husband he was a temporary worker. He is a journeyman millwright, and the plant where he had worked for 20 years had just closed the previous year. Working as a temp was a good thing for him for the time, because it gave him a chance to find another environment where he felt at home. He did find such a place in 1999.

This year in March that plant also closed. They packed up and went to Mexico. Even though the state offered them tax offsets to make up for costs of labor, they declined. The American workers at this plant could not compete with the barely $4 an hour a Mexican worker would make. We had the advantage of time. But, that does not mean that the transition was easy.

Luckily he landed on his feet. He was reemployed within a month due to a job tip by a friend. The pay is a few dollars less per hour. We must pay for our benefits, and there is little if any overtime. There is another twist here, this is a Ford supplier, and if you have been paying attention to the news, Ford is not doing well. So lay offs are underway. Temporary for now, but for how long? The company is working to diversify, but financially they are strapped.

We are the lucky ones. We have work. But, many here in our area were suppliers to companies who have moved to Mexico or China. China pays its workers just over a dollar an hour. And, the suppliers either moved or closed.

We hear a lot about the American worker being lazy. We hear a lot about the American worker being unskilled. But, many of those out of work here are skilled tradesmen. Tool and die men are struggling. I remember listening to Alan Greenspan opine that the American worker was uneducated, but we are educating people in this country who will come out of college to find no job waiting for them. Engineers are working as temps. There are few teaching jobs in states where literacy is high. Teachers who teach in colleges make very little money unless they are tenured, and universities have fewer and fewer tenured track positions. And, we employ a steady stream of immigrants whose skills are low.

When I am late on my mortgage payment a gentleman with an Indian accent conveniently named Don calls me. The bank has outsourced our records and collections to India. Isn’t that lovely? And, when I need a tech to answer a question about my computer again, Bob, from India is there to answer my question, I think. I often cannot understand him through his thick accent, but he tries. (Foreign countries are asking their workers to adopt American names so as not to upset Americans whose jobs they are taking.)

When we have x-rays taken, they are often read in India by a radiologist. The results are sent back here. I think that radiologist is educated and I think that there are Americans with similar education. Problem is that the cost of living here in America will not permit the American to take the job for the same wages.

I hope my husband will be able to make use of the extra education he is getting with computers in the factory at this new job to find another job should this one go south (literally and figuratively).

Many tell us that we need to move. We need to follow the work. I know that sounds logical, but we have 4 children who live in this area and two grandchildren. I know that this modern society has long torn families asunder, but we are not there yet. We like our state. We like our home. We do not mind change, but we do not feel that a complete upheaval and a relinquishing of our involvement in the lives of our kids and grandkids is a price we are willing to pay to find employment elsewhere that is likely to dry up and disappear as well.

Our prospects for retirement are almost non-existent. And, pension plans are increasingly under funded or are being revised. George Bush is trying to privatize Social Security, another name for siphoning off the funds and pocketing them. George and his buddies like to make money off of our hard work, since they can barely manage to do much work themselves. Imagine having a job where all you do is sit around figuring out how to make money from the work and lifeblood of others.

Corporate America has used up the American worker. They have sold us goods we could afford, and then they sold us credit so we could buy even more goods we could not afford. Corporations are moving, moving south to Mexico, moving across the oceans to China, to Russia. They are moving on to greener pastures, the pastures where the workers are hungry, and where the workers still have little if any credit. They moving on to sell the goods they now make for a pittance in these new countries. They will make more slick advertisements in new languages until the inhabitants of new lands think they need to fill their lives with meaningless clutter. Then, they will sell them enough credit to buy more.

Corporations have had no heart and no soul. They do not care for anything but the bottom line. The younger generations were cooed to sleep with the lullaby of profits, and so they accept that business is separate from everything else, that the bottom line is reason enough to do almost anything. But, this only leads to broken lives at the price of profit, not sustenance. And, contrary to all natural law, the one thing in the universe that must increase is profits.

So this is my tribute to working and out of work America. This is the country I truly love. I love it with my whole heart, not in the fickle way that the GOP loves it with pomp and showmanship of jingoism. I love this country and I love its workers. I love its spirit. I believe that we as a people will find a way to rise up and reclaim our history of being proud laborers in business and industry. I believe we will find a way to take back our country from the greedy and corrupt.

For all of you out there struggling to find work, for all of you who work years on end only to get little or no raises and in many cases taking cuts in your pay and/or benefits to keep a job. To all the workers who labor with little hope of doing more than being able to eat and keep a roof over your head, this tribute is for you, the many. Along with that, this tribute is for the one, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.