Maybe you’ve wondered what is going on when you’ve watched teachers, or airline pilots on the picket line recently, or noted the narrowly-averted strike last week of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.
There are two fairly simple reasons:
• Reasonable days off;
The Locomotive Engineers who nearly walked off the job specifically talked about being able to take sick days when they are sick, rather than being forced to work through illnesses. Many who work are tired of businesses running employees into the ground and ruining their health. It is nothing new. Ten years ago, when my husband found himself working 12-14 hour days, six days per week, with an hour-long commute each way, he asked repeatedly that the engineering firm hire another person. They would not. So he took a substantial pay cut to work for Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where the mentally actually is to understand work-life balance and treat employees as valued assets. He has been happy to go to work ever since. The engineering firm he left had to hire two full-time employees to replace him.
One of my co-workers recently told me of a similar experience. His body was breaking down from the extreme stress and long hours of a previous engineering job he had worked. It culminated in his permanently losing sight in his right eye. He told his ex-employer that their unreasonable demands were killing him . Rather than taking responsibility, they blamed him for “trusting them” to do the right thing in the first place.
Needless to say, he left.
• Pay that keeps up with decades of inflation;
After years of lower and middle income jobs failing to keep up with inflation, many who work are fed up. Depending on your source, if minimum wage had kept up with inflation since the 1960s, it would be some where between $16 and $26 per hour now. Americans have begged for modest increases, while millionaires and billionaires have gone from wealthy to obscenely wealthy. Now, as wages begin to rise, inflation is going crazy. It just won’t do to let average people get ahead!
The truly insidious thing is that wealthy corporations and individuals can buy control the conversation and divert attention away from themselves to scapegoats such as immigrants or those who have differing political opinions. They try to set different groups of desperate person against one another, so they can rob us blind while we are distracted by our misplaced anger.
Let this sink in: According to our own Federal Reserve, in the fourth quarter of 2021 the top 1% of American households held 32.3% of this country’s wealth, while the bottom 50% held 2.6%. You might want to read that again because it’s so absolutely stunning and appalling. Do you think the richest Americans really work 621 times harder than you do? Most who work I know have more than one job. My son, who is a full-time teacher, works for a hospital valet service in the evening to support his family.
Many who work are quitting jobs that don’t respect their skills and hard work. Americans are tired of living in a rich country where they toil long hours to see most of the wealth get sucked upward to those who already have more money than they can actually spend in this lifetime. The next time someone tells you that increasing the minimum wage will make the price of a hamburger increase, suggest that maybe if CEOs hadn’t gone from making roughly 47 times what workers did a few decades ago, to somewhere between 300 and 670 times the salaries of workers today, we could keep the price of goods static and still pay fair wages to workers.
There has been more interest of late in asking huge companies such as FedEx and Archer Daniels Midland, that somehow avoid paying any taxes at all, to contribute their fair share. Amazon paid a paltry six percent on its profits in 2021. Wish I could get that rate! It’s time to fact-check their spin, when huge corporations blame everyone but themselves for the frustration that is leading Americans to, at best, go on strike, and at worst, look for a Bastille to storm.