I was watching television news when I got home from work - and it made a long day feel more strange and out of place. There was the story about full-time workers being pushed to part-time status, which is clearly an epidemic this election year. The news anchor was going on about how the number of Americans who have seen their full-time jobs squeezed down to part-time has grown to more than 3.7 million. Evidently, this is the largest figure since the government began tracking such data more than half a century ago.
The video accompanying the voice over was of a custodian in NY. She was seen taking out the trash, dumping it ... going back for more. She told the camera that she and her husband have nothing left over after the necessities are paid for; they are raising two boys.
The story, or the journalistic delivery of the story was sympathetic to working people, and that is fantastic; but why no mention of unions? Should a story about the largest number of workers being squeezed from full-time to part-time include something ... anything ... even a crumb about what a union can do for a worker? I am not holding my breath ... you shouldn't either.
Instead of holding our breath we need to think about spreading the word of the Employee Free Choice Act - something I'd wager a full-time check that most of the 3.7 million Americans mentioned never even heard of. The primary reason we need to think about, educate and spread the word of the Employee Free Choice Act is simple: If you think it is easy to form a union, think again.
If you think that because of your X number of years providing dedicated service to your company keeps you out of the woods; and therefore you don't need a union, think again. Over at FedEx Express the workers there, as of June 1st, saw their pension freeze up. What does that mean exactly? It means that these workers will look to lose thousands and thousands of dollars over the course of their life time? Why? Because Fred Smith, the CEO of FedEx (who is rumored to be on John McCain's short list of V-P candidates) wants to raise the bottom line ... Whose bottom line, though? Certainly not the skilled mechanics in the class and craft.
Maybe the workers at FedEx can still afford toys for their kids and so we shouldn't care ... but, even writing those words sounds like madness to me. And besides, a reader at Union Review told us today that though Congress planned to pass significant legislation on toy safety, our elected President Bush already said he'd veto the bill. I am doubtful we'd see anything different from McCain, um ... McSame.
Admittedly, I am all over the place in this blog posting/diary entry; but maybe DC is doing this to me(?) Earlier I was reading a Washington Post article called "Rappers' Shout-Outs Make Obama Skip a Beat." The article is more or less about Hip Hop artists singing their praise for Obama and how "Barack Obama now finds himself exposed."
I think it is great that McCain and Obama, nicely or disgustingly, put "race" on the table. Why? Because maybe eventually we will get to class! Sure, why not? Let's talk about the working class, largely made up of the working poor, overpopulated with the part-time workforce sliding away from unemployment benefits, union benefits or G-d forbid ... health care!
When will we wake up? When we will put aside all the bullshit diplomacy and call "it" what it is ... a separation of wealth and power ... I mean ... isn't that what it is?
Both union and nonunion workers have told me, personally, that they'd never vote for a black man. I shake my head, laugh instead of cry ... and then talk about something that our social studies teacher in the 1970s hated to talk about ... CLASS. Is McCain in touch with your working class uncle, mother, or your own check book more than Obama? Is Obama more in touch with labor's needs for the Employee Free Choice Act and a Department of Labor that is NOT a Department of Management?
I digress ... or do I?
The Washington Post, in the article mentioned, writes:
Some of the Democrat's most vocal (literally) supporters are sticking him with a hip-hop dilemma: how to respond to an art form that has a long history as a cultural wedge issue but whose fans and wildly unpredictable practitioners are a part of his base?
And call me what you want, but when I put myself through college (it took 14 years), I remember someone saying something about "Dead White Guys." The whole notion was that the literary canon is a shelf of dead white men ... hardly did we hear from Black folks or women. It took the professors with a little sense of danger, or ... as we'd say in my neighborhood, "professors who had balls," to introduce us to Langston; Neruda and Behn (and so many other African-American poets and novelists, so many other Spanish speaking poets and novelists, and so many other WOMEN who wrote and actually published at a time when a woman was treated worst than someone with Barack's skin tone climbing a corporate ladder).
How to respond to an art form? For crying aloud, embrace it! Embrace the fact that kids from my old neighborhood actually give a shit about who runs for the highest office in the world. Embrace the fact that multicultural diversity now has more than a tired white guy from down south claiming to be the first black white guy ... or whatever that was about. (I liked Clinton, for the record, until NAFTA!)
I apologize if my ADD has come into play when I sat down to write this. I need some new medication, which I will be getting on Monday. With my union card, I pay 5 bucks for a bottle of 30 pills. In the end, I wish everyone had the same coverage as me. In the end, I wish people would stop talking about their pigmentation and more about the class their sorry asses found them in ... in the end, I think I am going to change the channel and refuse more news for the rest of the night.