How's that working for ya?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/business/23prichard.html

Prichard, Alabama. Failed town, gutted pensions.

Here is the deal. The bosses, those who hire and fire and make the big money, are more familiar with contracts than workers. The bosses agree to and sign work and pension agreements. They know full well what they are signing, even if they don’t intend to fulfill their end of the contract. The bosses want your labor.

Another part of the deal is this; the bosses get your labor first. Afterward the worker is paid. Benefits are paid months later. Now, who is taking the risk? But labor is always portrayed as the bully, the thugs, the union bosses. When businesses fail because of mismanagement, or municipalities renege for the same reason, you can't take back your labor. Under the guise of suspicion, a worker is seems, needs her good faith enforced under the hammer of dismissal; she can be fired. There is no equal lever to hold the corporate and municipal bosses to their bargain, the workers only recourse is to withhold labor by striking in mass or, not as effective, to quit alone. Sometimes, maybe more than we want to believe, the bosses sign these contracts knowing that they will not honor it. As a union bricklayer I remember many pay and benefit “give backs” starting from Reagan’s era of anti- labor, anti-unionism. The first I recall was the San Francisco Bricklayers returned one dollar an hour that had been signed for less than a year earlier; we gave our wages and benefits to the contractors. The contractors maintained their profit margins. A vindictive labor force could have struck, this was breach of contract. But we were fed the line from our union that helping the contractors was helping ourselves. The mason contractors don’t view things the same way. The refrain from brick contractors is, “Anyone can be a bricklayer…” Though we’ve made some of these men rich, we’re expendable.

2010 would seem the perfect time to organize a disgruntled and demoralized workforce. But a lot of our work has been off shored or automated out of existence. And the Reagan Babies, who have come into the workforce since the eighties, with the non stop drum roll of market economics and anti-laborism, were raised essentially non-union. Reagan/Bush/Chaney era distortions of labor leaders is similar to Nazi era characterizations of Jews. Labor has become the other, and by extension; enemy. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” No matter what color your collar everyone who works for a paycheck is labor; a fact that high tech Americans tend to forget. Yahoo laid off seven thousand individuals last week.

Labor strikes are reckoned by conservatives as treasonable, media doesn’t dispel this. And American workers look on the general strikes in France and Greece with longing and bemused horror. When push comes to shove, we know too well who has the upper hand; we can be disappeared from the workforce as quietly as the stroke of a pen.

The gloves are off, anti-worker sentiment in the form of obfuscation on the health care debate, the continued push to privatize Social Security, the Citizens United gift to corporations, and the unrepentant anti-government, anti-regulation mythology rains down on workers unabated. And the Supreme Court is five-four in the corporate pocket. Meanwhile, workers pension funds which through mutual funds buoyed wall street and the bubble economy, are going broke. Real people, working people who have already given their labor are hurting bad.

Sarah Palin might say in her chirpy nasty voice, "How's that workin for ya?"