Labor Day Ruminations
Whenever Labor Day rolls around I get filled with subversive thoughts about the unfairness of it all. Consider: While it’s the workers who keep the operation going, it’s management who gets the credit. It’s management who gets the credit, the glory, the promotions, and, ultimately, the compensation. Put another way: Management crawls up the corporate ladder on the backs of the workers.
Admittedly, this economic arrangement has been in existence, more or less, since the pharaohs had the pyramids built, so we’re not trying to rediscover America here. Still, given how skewed and topsy-turvy and fundamentally unjust the arrangement is, it’s amazing that people continue to work so hard.
We’re a country of workers. Instead of raising the black flag and setting out looking for throats to slit, people
Corporate America Sends a Labor Day Message
For most Americans, the only significance of Labor Day is that it concludes a three day weekend.
For Kirk Artley, it means he has about six weeks left of employment.
On Aug. 24, RR Donnelley, a Chicago-based megacorporation that claims to be “the world’s premier full-service provider of print and related services,” told Artley and the other 283 workers at the Bloomsburg, Pa., plant that “economic conditions” forced the closing of the book printing facility. The workers said they would take significant pay cuts if that would save the plant. RR Donnelley rejected the offer.
Most of the workers live in Columbia County, a small rural county of about 65,000, with unemployment about 8 percent, slightly less than the national rate. Adding 284 persons would significantly increase that rate.
Under the termination agreement, the workers, both management and labor, wouldn’t have priority rights to bid for jobs at any other plant. “We were told we could apply for open jobs just like anyone else,” says Artley, a bindery technician and president of Local 732C of the Graphic Communications Conference, a Teamsters division. Apparently, there was no way to integrate a couple of hundred workers into a corporation that employs
A Labor Day Tale of Three Cities: Pittsburgh, Birmingham, and New Orleans
As Hurricane Irene made her way up the Eastern Seaboard, my wife and I packed a few changes of clothes and trundled westward out of her path to spend the storm’s duration in Pittsburgh, PA.
The excursion did us some good, in particular, leaving insular Manhattan, and facing the faded, crumbling Industrial Age grandeur of Pittsburgh. Walking, once again, among the plaintive rasps of the ghosts of the devastated laboring class (the social setting of our youth) provided us with a humanizing contrast to our present day circumstances stranded amid the manic chattering of the preening demons of banal self-regard possessing Manhattan careerists.
Nowadays, the island of Manhattan is tediously bright and shiny — a sterile, oligarchic controlled dystopia. Accordingly, any sign of redemptive decay and hint of shabby ass human glory has been banished by official