Thanks for this, Jim. On a positive note, my county Democratic committee (we are one of the most Democratic counties in the country, met tonight for a complete reorganization ahead of Jon Ossoff's run in '26 for re-election to the Senate. We had more people--largely young, enthusiastic, tech savvy, and ready to hit the ground running than we had positions. I believe America might survive the current malaise after all.
So, those lazy, caviar-slurping, good-for-nothing corporate suits are too stupid to figure out that workers are their customers? And if they don't pay their workers enough and treat them right, then those workers (the customers!) are not going to buy a skinny latte to go with their Big Mac and fries? How many Big Macs can E. Lon Muskrat eat, anyhow? Henry Ford, whatever his faults (and there were many!) at least thought that he should pay his auto workers enough so that they could all afford to buy a Model T. I think he was on to something...
So management has been whining about this for over a century and they STILL haven't read the tea leaves. I was fortunate to have mostly desk jobs with managers who did their job of getting rid of things that prevented us from doing our jobs. But I did have a few low-level manual labor type positions over the years but again I was fortunate to have them in places where we were treated like human beings rather than cattle. (One of my jobs entailed working with dairy farmers and most of them treated their cattle very well because they recognized that they needed the milk and calves that the cows produced.)
Yes, I do--and I give details about the implications of this in my main comment above, "Personnel" was almost respectful. "Human resources" is as if the property of some corporation; things to be used up.
This is the owners' press,not the workers. When Scotland was first industrializing in the 1700's, unions were illegal and the bosses were pretty much the nobility that had never lost control in Scotland. Early wealth, to these few, came from tobacco, slavery and milling cotton as well as big landed estates converting to cattle and sheep, away from rents from sharecroppers, who were kicked off the land. The owners tried to cut weaver's wages 25%, which set off some of the first riots in this feudal country. The police and army came and shot and killed some of the workers. The rest went back to work at the reduced pay. More riots continued, more shootings, but eventually the feudal lords lost power to the merchants and factory bosses. Adam Smith rose out of this and wrote that, contrary to the "free markets" that our wealthy cite Smith for, that the wealth of nations rises out of work. No one shares less of the wealth today than the US. And now that the wealthy own all branches of government, what should we expect?
Jim, corporate America will have it even easier now that Democrats failed to confirm the reappointment to the NLRB that came up recently. The Senate had a three hour window, with the WV Dino Joe Manchin and two other GOP senators absent, to save the Democratic swing vote on that important board. Shumer couldn't be bothered so the vote failed, and Trump will come into office with a 3-2 GOPer majority on the NLRB. Now if it had been another shipment of 2000 lb block buster bombs for the IDF to drop on Palestinian children you can bet Shumer would have held a vote, if he had to do it on Christmas Day.
Of course the C-suite doesn't care. To them, we workers are merely costs; the fact that without us they would have no product is never to be acknowledged. We were once personnel--you know, respected. Then rebranded as human resources--like natural resources; things to be strip mined and clear cut, profit extracted, and the valueless remains tossed aside.
Yes, it sure IS about respect!!! And it's not just that arrogant bosses denigrate us, either. It's all too common (as are we, I guess) that upper middle class liberals in places like, for example, North Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto, by body language as well as actual words make it clear we're merely the help and they expect deference. It rankles.
Yesterday, Les Leopold on his "Wall Street's War on Workers" blog wrote about how D party strategists like James Carville and Rahm Emmanuel are now talking populist. Apparently they've noticed the roiling anger about things like 30 million workers hit by mass layoffs 1996-2024. Done mostly to finance stock buybacks that suck up corporate profits to benefit CEOs and banksters while producing nothing. Yet not a word from the Dem party about an issue that would have been a winner. But at the cost (literally) of alienating their corporate sponsors.
We'll see if the Ds are serious. If in addition to talk, they do the work of forming political alliances. If they speak with us workers as labor allies in a common cause. If they ask for advice from people like Jim, a real populist from the farmer side of the Populist farmer-labor coalition. If they start discussing publicly why union membership is important. Not just wages, either. Union workers are under contract law. Non-union workers come under a provision inherited from English Common Law--it's called a "Master-Servant relationship." Really!!! What does that imply about how elites think of us?
Well, Jim, I hate to rain upon your parade, but count me as by another of them there bums that don’t want to work no more! ‘Course, I’ll soon be 81, and nobody wants me, anyhoo!
It’s ever been the complaint, that’s true. Also, I think the complainants have themselves to blame, because they don’t value their workers, just the money made off the backs of them.
Guess you might say it’s all a matter of respect….or, the lack thereof! Huh!
Maga wants to go back to the 1950's (I know, some want to go back even further). Well, times were good then because of strong unions.
PS Jimmy Carter was pro-choice. Remember, his mother was a rural traveling nurse. He must of heard some tragic stories of sickness and malnutrition due to too many offspring.
The bosses are still singing the same song! It's all about greed and blaming the victims. Now we have a criminal president brought up on taking whatever he wants, bringing these refrains to heinous new levels...
You have struck a chord in this that I wish MORE folks would do as well! "Unions Booming?"
Saying it that way is so much more positive than all these folks who want everyone else pulled down to their level saying things like "Pensions are a thing of the past!"
We need to get fully into the "Dialog Competition!" The opposition has been doing it for decades! I have been working at this for years,.. unfortunately pretty much by myself.
American industries have outsourced and off-shored good paying jobs with benefits and employer paid pensions (run by a Pension Board) so much it has devastated communities all over the country. Our automobile plants (the ones we still have) have been reduced to "assembly centers". It's all in HOW we say it! Send me an email and I'll be glad to respond by telephone and share with you how I turned up the heat on "the opposition" in Michigan so much that my State Party Chair preserved the evidence under glass and kept it hanging on the wall in his office for years! I'm certain you will be impressed enough to seriously consider implementing a program yourself??!!!
To expand a bit on William Porter's comment re: Ford - 1) my grandfather-in-law worked for Ford back in the day, quit because of those faults alluded to, but had by then earned enough money to start his own business; 2) over a half-century ago I worked summers in heavy construction manufacturing and was represented by the Teamsters (ditto with the comments of Ford's faults), but I earned enough during those four summers to not have to take out a loan to finish college. I earned twice as much, or more than many of my classmates. I can't imagine working for $7.25/hour today, unless I decided I wanted some "walking around money" in retirement; but then I'd be taking a job away from some kid just starting out in the workforce.
I retired as soon as I could. I had a good manager, but the management ethics of the mortgage bank I worked for had no respect for the people keeping the money coming in. We were people at a desk answering the phones and explaining to mortgagors why they needed to keep making their payments even when the payments were being misapplied. And our pay depended on how many phone calls we could take in an hour. It sucked.
This a movement that's waaaaay overdue. When the suits in the top floor executive suites and board rooms decided that stockholders bottom lines were more important than the folks who made those bottom lines so attractive, the erosion of the American middle class started becoming the poor class. Well, the pendulum is starting to swing the other way and again I say "bravo."
Thanks for this, Jim. On a positive note, my county Democratic committee (we are one of the most Democratic counties in the country, met tonight for a complete reorganization ahead of Jon Ossoff's run in '26 for re-election to the Senate. We had more people--largely young, enthusiastic, tech savvy, and ready to hit the ground running than we had positions. I believe America might survive the current malaise after all.
So, those lazy, caviar-slurping, good-for-nothing corporate suits are too stupid to figure out that workers are their customers? And if they don't pay their workers enough and treat them right, then those workers (the customers!) are not going to buy a skinny latte to go with their Big Mac and fries? How many Big Macs can E. Lon Muskrat eat, anyhow? Henry Ford, whatever his faults (and there were many!) at least thought that he should pay his auto workers enough so that they could all afford to buy a Model T. I think he was on to something...
Henry Ford was indeed onto something!!!
Instead of only narrowly trying to maximize shareholder value, corporations need to spread stakeholder satisfaction to properly propel profits.
So management has been whining about this for over a century and they STILL haven't read the tea leaves. I was fortunate to have mostly desk jobs with managers who did their job of getting rid of things that prevented us from doing our jobs. But I did have a few low-level manual labor type positions over the years but again I was fortunate to have them in places where we were treated like human beings rather than cattle. (One of my jobs entailed working with dairy farmers and most of them treated their cattle very well because they recognized that they needed the milk and calves that the cows produced.)
A living wage and respect are essential.
Remember when the Personal department became Human Resources? The beginning of the end!
Yes, I do--and I give details about the implications of this in my main comment above, "Personnel" was almost respectful. "Human resources" is as if the property of some corporation; things to be used up.
This is the owners' press,not the workers. When Scotland was first industrializing in the 1700's, unions were illegal and the bosses were pretty much the nobility that had never lost control in Scotland. Early wealth, to these few, came from tobacco, slavery and milling cotton as well as big landed estates converting to cattle and sheep, away from rents from sharecroppers, who were kicked off the land. The owners tried to cut weaver's wages 25%, which set off some of the first riots in this feudal country. The police and army came and shot and killed some of the workers. The rest went back to work at the reduced pay. More riots continued, more shootings, but eventually the feudal lords lost power to the merchants and factory bosses. Adam Smith rose out of this and wrote that, contrary to the "free markets" that our wealthy cite Smith for, that the wealth of nations rises out of work. No one shares less of the wealth today than the US. And now that the wealthy own all branches of government, what should we expect?
Jim, corporate America will have it even easier now that Democrats failed to confirm the reappointment to the NLRB that came up recently. The Senate had a three hour window, with the WV Dino Joe Manchin and two other GOP senators absent, to save the Democratic swing vote on that important board. Shumer couldn't be bothered so the vote failed, and Trump will come into office with a 3-2 GOPer majority on the NLRB. Now if it had been another shipment of 2000 lb block buster bombs for the IDF to drop on Palestinian children you can bet Shumer would have held a vote, if he had to do it on Christmas Day.
Of course the C-suite doesn't care. To them, we workers are merely costs; the fact that without us they would have no product is never to be acknowledged. We were once personnel--you know, respected. Then rebranded as human resources--like natural resources; things to be strip mined and clear cut, profit extracted, and the valueless remains tossed aside.
Yes, it sure IS about respect!!! And it's not just that arrogant bosses denigrate us, either. It's all too common (as are we, I guess) that upper middle class liberals in places like, for example, North Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto, by body language as well as actual words make it clear we're merely the help and they expect deference. It rankles.
Yesterday, Les Leopold on his "Wall Street's War on Workers" blog wrote about how D party strategists like James Carville and Rahm Emmanuel are now talking populist. Apparently they've noticed the roiling anger about things like 30 million workers hit by mass layoffs 1996-2024. Done mostly to finance stock buybacks that suck up corporate profits to benefit CEOs and banksters while producing nothing. Yet not a word from the Dem party about an issue that would have been a winner. But at the cost (literally) of alienating their corporate sponsors.
We'll see if the Ds are serious. If in addition to talk, they do the work of forming political alliances. If they speak with us workers as labor allies in a common cause. If they ask for advice from people like Jim, a real populist from the farmer side of the Populist farmer-labor coalition. If they start discussing publicly why union membership is important. Not just wages, either. Union workers are under contract law. Non-union workers come under a provision inherited from English Common Law--it's called a "Master-Servant relationship." Really!!! What does that imply about how elites think of us?
Well, Jim, I hate to rain upon your parade, but count me as by another of them there bums that don’t want to work no more! ‘Course, I’ll soon be 81, and nobody wants me, anyhoo!
It’s ever been the complaint, that’s true. Also, I think the complainants have themselves to blame, because they don’t value their workers, just the money made off the backs of them.
Guess you might say it’s all a matter of respect….or, the lack thereof! Huh!
Maga wants to go back to the 1950's (I know, some want to go back even further). Well, times were good then because of strong unions.
PS Jimmy Carter was pro-choice. Remember, his mother was a rural traveling nurse. He must of heard some tragic stories of sickness and malnutrition due to too many offspring.
The bosses are still singing the same song! It's all about greed and blaming the victims. Now we have a criminal president brought up on taking whatever he wants, bringing these refrains to heinous new levels...
Nobody wants to work for $1.25 an hour.
You have struck a chord in this that I wish MORE folks would do as well! "Unions Booming?"
Saying it that way is so much more positive than all these folks who want everyone else pulled down to their level saying things like "Pensions are a thing of the past!"
We need to get fully into the "Dialog Competition!" The opposition has been doing it for decades! I have been working at this for years,.. unfortunately pretty much by myself.
American industries have outsourced and off-shored good paying jobs with benefits and employer paid pensions (run by a Pension Board) so much it has devastated communities all over the country. Our automobile plants (the ones we still have) have been reduced to "assembly centers". It's all in HOW we say it! Send me an email and I'll be glad to respond by telephone and share with you how I turned up the heat on "the opposition" in Michigan so much that my State Party Chair preserved the evidence under glass and kept it hanging on the wall in his office for years! I'm certain you will be impressed enough to seriously consider implementing a program yourself??!!!
To expand a bit on William Porter's comment re: Ford - 1) my grandfather-in-law worked for Ford back in the day, quit because of those faults alluded to, but had by then earned enough money to start his own business; 2) over a half-century ago I worked summers in heavy construction manufacturing and was represented by the Teamsters (ditto with the comments of Ford's faults), but I earned enough during those four summers to not have to take out a loan to finish college. I earned twice as much, or more than many of my classmates. I can't imagine working for $7.25/hour today, unless I decided I wanted some "walking around money" in retirement; but then I'd be taking a job away from some kid just starting out in the workforce.
This is a stunning post, Mr. Hightower. I listened this morning to the entire funeral for President Jimmy Carter. Do I really have to say more?
I retired as soon as I could. I had a good manager, but the management ethics of the mortgage bank I worked for had no respect for the people keeping the money coming in. We were people at a desk answering the phones and explaining to mortgagors why they needed to keep making their payments even when the payments were being misapplied. And our pay depended on how many phone calls we could take in an hour. It sucked.
And I say "Bravo!"
This a movement that's waaaaay overdue. When the suits in the top floor executive suites and board rooms decided that stockholders bottom lines were more important than the folks who made those bottom lines so attractive, the erosion of the American middle class started becoming the poor class. Well, the pendulum is starting to swing the other way and again I say "bravo."