We Are all Whores

When you think about it, we all sell out at one time or another. Maybe it's only a partial sellout, and maybe it's only temporary, but the only way to get money is to sell something and, if you don't have anything else to sell, you sell yourself. Another way to look at it is that you're not really selling yourself, you're just renting yourself out. I suppose there isn't much practical difference, but it always made me feel better to think of it that way. That's why I always worked hourly jobs instead of salary jobs.

An even better way would be to think of yourself as a contractor. Of course a real contractor is different from an employee. The main difference is that nobody tells a contractor what hours to work, he agrees to do a specific amount of work in a specific amount of time and, as long as he gets the job done by the agreed upon deadline, he can work any hours he wants. Also, a contractor bears all the responsibility for his own safety, and they usually carry insurance to cover that. If you get hurt on the job, your employer is usually not liable, unless he caused a hazard on the job site that you could not reasonably have been aware of.

Probably the best of both worlds would be to have a job where the pay and working conditions were spelled out in a written contract. This is essentially what labor unions are all about, but the problem with that is it's a collective contract. You pay somebody to negotiate the contract, and then the company and the union both have to ratify it. The union membership votes to do this but, of course, you only have one vote. A better way would be if you could negotiate your own contract, but that's usually not done in the industrial world. There used to be something called an "implied contract" that didn't cover much, but was better than nothing. Nowadays, though, most employers want to hire you as an "at will" employee, which means they can fire you "with or without notice and with or without cause". The only thing good about that is that you can quit the same way.

Back in the lumbering days, if you had a disagreement with your boss, you could quit or get fired and it was no big deal. All you had to do was walk down the road a ways and you would come to another camp where they would usually hire you on the spot, no questions asked. If that didn't work out so well, you could just walk down the road some more until you came to another camp. You might even walk back to your original camp and get hired back there. I guess people didn't hold grudges as long in those days as they do today. These practices led to the coining of an old saying that is still in use today around here: "You keep that up and you're going to be walking down the road talking to yourself."

I'm not sure when it changed, but at some point the employers all got together and agreed that they wouldn't hire anybody who had quit or been fired from another job. This led to the formation of labor unions, which were designed to protect the jobs that their members already had since, if they lost their job, they were not likely to find another one anytime soon. In a manner of speaking, then, companies had unions before workers had unions, and the formation of one led to the formation of the other.

It's been a long time since I went looking for work, so I don't know what the labor market's like today. I understand that there are more available workers than there are available jobs, which must put the workers at a disadvantage. Labors unions are a mere shadow of their former selves, so you can't count on them to help you anymore. What's needed is for all the workers to get together and agree about what they will and will not do for money, and exactly how much money they will demand for their services. It would kind of be like a union, only better. For it to work in today's global economy, it would have to be organized something like an international corporation. All we've got to do now is get all the workers of the world to agree on exactly what they want out of life. Since I have already done the conceptual part, I'll leave the nuts and bolts implementation to others. How hard could it be?