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Friday, March 14, 2014

Workers arise, you have nothing to lose but your chains

Couldn’t you look at it as the dems want to raise our wages and the reps want to cut our taxes, and these benevolent forces are working together to make our lives better in every way, every day? Is that such a stretch? There, now don’t you feel better?

How do you like Obama’s initiative to make companies pay overtime? I think this could be a big winner for him. If companies had to pay overtime maybe they would be more likely to hire additional people to do the job, and that would be good no? This whole thing where companies just keep laying off people and not hiring new people so that the same people have to do more and more work, and if they don’t like it, there are plenty of unemployed people to take their jobs, is just so cruel and stupid. You are right Beagles, we both have made mistakes in our lives, but we both did the right thing in getting out of the working world when we did.

It was late in my working live that I ever heard of this salaried workers thing. You mean they have to work all these extra hours for nothing? That’s insane! At the time I was assured that they got paid so much that it was worth it, and anyway they were mostly workaholic types who loved working anyway.

Well it still seemed a little strange to me, but I was pretty sure I would never be joining their ranks so I wasn’t overly concerned.

You know the forty hour week was a big deal, it was a big struggle, people died and went to jail over it. It was mostly those old, almost comic, lefties from around the turn of the century who we have all forgotten now. Well they wanted all these other high-minded things like liberty and equality, and once we got the forty hour week, we decided we would just stick with that and the hell with liberty and equality and high-minded things. Anyway the idea got stolen from the radicals by the democrats and then it was left to be enforced by the unions, who are maybe a little corrupt and all that, but they are the only force that stands between us and the slavering titans of capitalism who would like all of us to be minimum wage slaves working eighty hour weeks. And anymore candidates rail about how they are out to destroy unions and win office on that platform. What fools we mortals be.

You know there are all these things floating around in politics and maybe this party will do that and the other do this and maybe it will make a difference in your life and maybe it won’t. But working forty or eighty hours a week makes a huge difference in your life, and yet you don’t see it discussed much.

Well you know what the business titans say, oh laissez faire capitalism, such a delicate instrument, we dare not interfere with its workings which yields the golden egg for all of us. Well the golden eggs mostly for us titans, but don’t we let you other guys have a bit of shell every now and then? Oh we dare not mess with minimum wage or overtime pay lest the goose roll over and die.

Well we finally got the forty hour week, I think around the time of WW I, and after WW II it was firmly entrenched and so were the unions and economically we never had it any better.

Then things started to slide, and who was blamed first, the unions, and we, poor suckers, thinking our futures lied with climbing the corporate ladder, and wishing to get closer to the golden teat of the titans, joined in, bad unions, cast them aside like a bad habit, and now we are working overtime and not getting paid for it.


Until Barrack Hussein Obama takes out his golden pen and signs this Presidential Memorandum.

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