I'm an American Worker and I'm Tired of Getting Screwed

[Better Believe It]

I'm an American Worker and I'm Tired of Getting Screwed
By Rick Kepler
Alternet
November 22, 2008

Rick Kepler has driven beer trucks in New Orleans, Louisiana; Colorado Springs, Colorado and Oakland, California. He has tended bar in San Francisco, and worked on the railroad and loading docks in Ohio. Currently he's a Teamsters organizer who speaks to thousands of unorganized workers every year.

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I am an American worker, and you are damn right I want the wealth to be shared and spread. I am talking about the wealth my hard work helped to create, but was taken from me by George Bush's base, the very rich, or as I know them, my corporate bosses. For the past eight years I have watched W.'s and McCain's (Country Club First) base grab the largest share of our country's wealth. Where did they take it from? They took it from my family's pocketbook, and my co-workers' families' pocketbooks. They stole the wealth that I was trying to build for me and my family when they stripped my pension plan from me and told me to invest in a 401k. Then they stole most of that 401k and other workers' 401k savings with this economic meltdown. This was a massive transfer of wealth from the workers' pockets into the already stuffed pockets of the rich. My retirement savings and my coworkers' savings all across America have been looted by the corporate bosses, who just got bailed out while we got left out. Again!

The American worker, whether black, brown, white, red, yellow, or rainbow color, has been fleeced over these past eight years. We are the ones who go to work every day. We don't own our places of work, nor do we help manage them. We just go in and do the job. And we must be doing one hell of a good job because we are told that we are the most productive workers in the world. We are working longer and harder, but our paychecks keep shrinking! Where are those productivity gains going then? Not into our pockets. Our standard of living has been going down these past eight years ($2,000 less in family income since W. took office) This is another damn transfer of wealth into the hands of the extremely rich.

To further sweeten their own pots, they took full-time jobs and converted them to part-time with no benefits, or they just made their employees line up and reapply for their exact same jobs at half the pay. Are we beginning to see what a true transfer of wealth looks like? So, do I want to see a spreading of the wealth? You bet your sweet hind-end I do. But all I ask of Obama is to give me and my co-workers the ability to retrieve some of the wealth that has been stolen from us.

Strengthen the laws that give workers the right to organize and bargain for a contract with our bosses. The current laws on the books have been torn to shreds by W. and McCain on behalf of their base. This is just part of their attack on American workers. Under globalization, the bosses seek a much cheaper workforce, which always means non-union, which means "can't fight back." That is why they have gutted the laws that protect workers. The laws that once gave us a level playing field with our bosses have been rendered useless, including our legal right to strike. That law said I had a right to strike, and could.

The American worker doesn't want a handout. Never did. We do want a hand up from our government. We still believe and have hope that this is a government of, by and for the people. We do want to know that our government will finally stand with us against this onslaught, this Robin Hood in reverse, being conducted by the bosses against the workers. The bosses know that W. and McCain have been on their side for the past eight years - and so do we workers. We just want our government to now stand on our side as we stand up against this corporate attempt to create third world working conditions right here in America. Restore our right to fight for a better living for ourselves and our families, and let the power of pissed-off workers, united in struggle, spread corporate America's stolen wealth back into the pockets of those whose pockets got picked these last eight years - the American worker.

Please read his entire article at:

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/108144/i'm_an_american_worker_and_i'm_tired_of_getting_screwed/

[Bluzmann57]

1. BRAVO! Standing O for this guy!

He says it very well. Of course we want the wealth to be spread around. After all, if a company has no workers, how is the product going to be made? And study after study shows that workers who are treated like humans are going to be better and more productive than those that are treated like property. My daughter went to college and let's hope her children have the same chances she had. Or maybe even better chances than she had.
By the way- kicked and recommended.
On edit- there are some words which sometimes people just have trouble spelling. Recommend is one of them, at least for me. But thread recommended regardless.

[ikojo]

2. The assault on workers started in earnest under Reagan and

has continued unabated since he was inaugurated in 1981. Reagan fired that Air Traffic Controllers and showed corporate America that "organized" labor would not put up much of a fight.

Bill Clinton continued the assault via NAFTA, welfare "reform" (for people but not for dependent corporations which should be painfully obvious by now), the WTO and by allowing permanent normal trade relations with China.

It appears Obama will continue down the same path.

[SammyWinstonJack]

3. K&R!

:applause: :applause: :applause:

[leftofthedial]

4. Welcome to global capitalism!

The only "free" resource left for capitalism to exploit (without "free" resources, capitalism can't work), is the worker. That is, it will be the worker once they finish destroying the last vestiges of unionism and the American middle class along with it.

Capitalism can not be saved. It will NEVER serve the interests of workers. To think it can is nonsense.

[madrchsod]

5. yup....it`s not the workers who fuck up industry

we do what we are told to do with the tools we are given

[Citizen Number 9]

9. Not as a whole, you don't...

That's why we have to hire "managers".

[SammyWinstonJack]

13. "We"?

:eyes:

[Citizen Number 9]

18. That's right, "we"

Managers are everywhere, didja ever notice?

[Joe Chi Minh]

6. K&R

[LatteLibertine]

7. What?

You aren't content with scraps off the master's table? Come on...

[HughBeaumont]

8. Some of the comments on that site make me want to start punching.

Useful idiots such as the pro-Ayn Rand shitheads, Horatio Alger believers and corporate apologists did more to further the cause of Freidman/Feldstein economics than any politician ever did. They're the ones who continually voted in divide-and-conquer Republicans to pit us against each other. They knew the right buttons to push in the right people, and damn it if it didn't work to their advantage these past 28 years. Worked so well, they even had Democrats believing their false theories.

Truth be known, this trainwreck to the abyss was 45 years in the making, starting with Kennedy's assasination. Each peeling away of American conscience, sense of sharing and charity and hope of opportunity for all peoples happened with a marked event in almost every year since then. The old money families and classists still thrived but felt it was never enough. With the help of political accomplices, the wealthy put a plan in place in which it would manipulate a heavy amount of the population to side with their plan without them even realizing it. How? By playing off their hatred of a created enemy or existing idea.

They demonized civil rights leaders and silently cheered when they were killed. They demonized liberal youths and minorities while praising "upstanding Republicans" like the Reagans, Bushes and Nixons. Since they didn't swoon at the feet of the western world, the slowly impoverished USSR remained mortal enemies, with the Middle East and Northern African nations not far behind to take their place from the 80s on. The only progressive president since Kennedy was treated as a weak comedy act (even though he had a far better job creation record than even Saint Reagan's first term), thus leading the country into 12 straight years of heroically portrayed men who made hatred fashionable, charity unnecessary, minorities and liberals a pox on humanity, opulence and military conflict sexy, established fundamentalpatient groupthink into everyday conscience while engaging in high crimes behind closed doors.

They did nothing for African famine victims, the AIDS crisis, emptied mental institutions, defunded pretty much every social program imaginable, and adopted the ruthless "winner-take-everything" economics of bastards like Jack Welch and Al Dunlap to all businesses, leading to a morass of financial piracy, dismantling of unions and layoffs, layoffs LAYOFFS!

From the late 60s onward and peaking throughout the 80s, a black cloud of constant FEAR was established. Anyone remember The Day After? Anyone go to school in the 80s and hear teachers bring up the words "World War 3", "Nuclear Holocaust" and "Armageddon" just a BIT too much?

In 2000, Reagan came back, only turned up to 100 in all the wrong directions, and every child and grandchild on this planet is going to pay either with their health, their finances or their overall quality of life because of it. We made new enemies almost yearly and scoffed at the living qualities of our allies. Corporate talking heads treated any form of European/Canadian socialism or taxation to help others and rebuild infrastructure as a horrorshow of error and praised the "free market", every-person-for-themselves chaos as practically utopian (well, it is . .. if you're well-monied).

How DARE we speak ill of the wealthy, us "jealous" plebes. After all, they work 500 times harder than us, so it's perfectly justifiable that they "EARN" 500 times more than we do. How DARE we speak of job offshoring as if it's a BAD thing. Maybe we should have been smart and achieved that easily attainable PhD; then we wouldn't BE in this mess we're all in.

"YOU have complete control over YOUR destiny, and you have no one to blame but yourself for your problems. There IS no such thing as bad luck."

I just want to kick people dead in the ass hard and repeatedly for believing this bullshit.

[JohnWxy]

14. Song of a (former) Republican voter who thought she would 'get rich" by voting Republican.

http://www.geocities.com/jwalkerxy/Republican_sucker.htm

[1776Forever]

10. This part is what I can relate too...

"To further sweeten their own pots, they took full-time jobs and converted them to part-time with no benefits, or they just made their employees line up and reapply for their exact same jobs at half the pay."

When my husband and I tried for 2 years to find full-time work in Florida to save our home we used all our savings along with keeping our 38 year-old son above water when he developed progressive MS and had no insurance and 3 hurricanes hit and wiped out his business, it became apparent we were swimming up stream and had to give up our home.

[LiberalEsto]

11. Medical co-pays and other givebacks

The other day we paid $163 in copays for 90 days' worth of prescription medications. Before Bush took office they would have cost us $45. What used to be a $5 copay for a doctor visit now costs 3 or 4 times as much. And the amount deducted from paychecks for medical coverage keeps increasing while the benefits decrease.

And yet I know we should consider ourselves fortunate to have any kind of health coverage at all, because millions of Americans don't have any.

For the past 8 years, the bastards have been chipping away at employee benefits. They want to kill Social Security. They force people to work unpaid overtime, then lay them off anyway and bring in cheap foreign workers on H1-B and other visa scams. I am thoroughly sick of it all.

[unlawflcombatnt]

12. TARIFFS are the only solution

There is no way American workers can continue to compete with 49¢/hour foreign workers. We need TARIFFS to offset the wage difference between cheap foreign workers and American workers.

[Better Believe It]

16. Tariffs Would Only Deepen And Speed The World Economic Collapse

That's what the government did after the 1929 stock market crash.

[JohnWxy]

15. Recommended!

[earth mom]

17. Did you hear that Obama?

Workers of America must unite & fight for our rights! :applause:

[BrklynLiberal]

19. and our tax money is bailing out yet another bank, and letting the auto co's sink???