No More 24/7
Link to article
– Bob Swiatek
I have three words for the new word and idea in the dictionary of 24/7: el toro crappo. It just doesn’t work and we need a replacement: 30/15. A few years ago I wrote a book entitled “Tick tock, don’t stop: a manual for workaholics.” It was published in July 2003 and it received some very good reviews. Not enough people read it so I’m writing a new one: “This page intentionally left blank: 30/15 not 24/7.”
Too many people struggle to stay ahead in the rat race of the workplace. Today the gap in pay between upper management and those who actually produce the goods – whether it is a product or a service – is higher than it has ever been. The minimum wage has been stuck at $5.15 an hour for almost a decade. Meanwhile congress has approved its own raises in the middle of the night eight times during that same period. On the average, those at the top receive five hundred times the salary of those in the work force. The employees’ plight is so desperate that I am convinced that slavery was never abolished. All you have to do is witness the downsizing and outsourcing that has occurred and the lives of workers today.
Laborers in the Third World, various workers in this country – blue collar, white collar or no collar – have all been turned into slaves and are no better off than those who suffered in the heat on the plantations for too many years before the Civil War restored some of their dignity. You can be unemployed, underemployed or overemployed and underpaid – working two jobs to pay for food and shelter. You could have a job but no home. Having to make the choice between being homeless or without food is not a choice anyone in America or any third world citizen should have to make.
No one can be productive putting in sixty hours a week and the minimum wage is minimal in every sense of the word. How much productivity do employers get from workers during a “mere” forty-hour week? If so, why do managers – some appear to have the brains of a rutabaga – still insist on the practice? I experienced the shortening of the workweek for a while on the farm, in the factory and in the office, but that changed and the workweek got to where it is today. With technology, shouldn’t it have decreased over the years, rather than skyrocketed to such heights? On April 6, 1933, a bill was passed by the Senate to establish a thirty-hour workweek and the House of Representatives was on the verge of passing it. Unfortunately for all of us, it didn’t quite make it, as the Roosevelt administration – you figure out which one – didn’t approve of the idea. It is time to pass the 30 into law. In addition, a new minimum wage of $15 dollars an hour should be passed nationwide. With the vast wealth of our nation, there is no reason for poverty, homelessness, the unemployed, underemployed or people working sixty hours a week and still not making ends meet.
“We are going to have to develop a concept of enough at the top and at the bottom, so that the necessities of the many are not sacrificed for the luxuries of the few.”
Marian Wright Edelman
“We should be able to earn a living wage without sacrificing our psychological, spiritual and sometimes even physical well-being by giving over our entire lives to our jobs.”
Paul Rogat Loeb, Soul of a Citizen
December 11th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Bravo! I agee wholeheartedly with you. I’ve done the 60 hour plus weeks at the expense of a family life, friends, health - with a tiny paycheck at the end of grueling hours. It’s not a positive nor productive lifestyle. You are correct about wages - if congress can work two days a week and sit on is collective bottom for major monies - the Senate can certainly pass a bill to ensure a living (at least $15 per hour) wage.
December 14th, 2006 at 10:21 pm
I hope that organiztions like United Professionals will grill the apparent front runner democratic presidential nominee (we all know he will likely declare) Illinois Senator Barek Obama ( and other contenders), on the entire array of labor/economic issues that have resulted in the explotiation of all workers, the erosion of opportunity, and the guaranee of downward mobility for all of us.
December 17th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
Out Chao! OUT NOW!
To have heard Elaine Chao (U.S. Sec’y of Labor) talk to me so warmly those couple of times we spoke while in grad school, you would never have sensed the socioeconomic chasm between us. But the issues facing labor in the U.S., which have been amply documented in recent years in the media and in these UP blogs, call for strong leadership, vision and the guts and drive to push the right initiatives forward; a nice personality simply does not suffice. That George Bush would appoint someone from Elaine’s social class in this role so critical to working people itself makes the wrong kind of statement. Among the goals for UP should be replacing Elaine Chao with someone who will champion the working people who are the heart of America.
OUT CHAO!!!! OUT NOW!!!!!
December 21st, 2006 at 2:04 pm
It’s ironic that you mention the abolition of slavery, because that holds, indirectly, a key to the political climate that has grown to accept slavery as the norm. In interpreting the extension of civil liberties to the former slave population, judges with a warped sense of humor extended these same liberties to corporations, something the founding fathers would have found revolting.
When a corporation exercises privileges, it must do so in such a way that it does not risk the revocation of those privileges. When it is deemed to have “inalienable rights,” it is able to corrupt democracy through the exercise of its “freedom of speech” in bestowing bri–er, “campaign contributions”–unto elected officials and in not being required to reveal certain negative or potentially negative aspects of its products or services (e.g., BSH in dairy cattle).
The pre-Reagan Democrats had their faults, such as LBJ’s obsession with the Domino Fallacy, but they had no illusions about the “goodness” of unregulated capitalism or Smith’s invisible hand picking our pockets or Friedman’s voodoo economics. The “New” Democrat is too much like an old Republican to offer much of a respite from the global kleptocracy that accompanies global capitalism.
August 7th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Hi Bob,
I was searching for my business and found your article. I think we share a common philosophy And your article was a real inspiration to me. I have not had too many jobs but have half killed myself in the past running my own businesses.
This obsession with money and work has to be bad for us.
Cheers
Pete