And the Workers Shall Eat Their Own

I read the quotes of some of the people concerning the Denver RTD transit strike and find even my cynical view of life shocked at the outright stupidity of some.
One particular quote by a college student at Metro State was probably the worst. “Why should they get more money…all they do is sit on their butt all day”.
Yeah, sweetheart, and put up with moronic fools like you who give them attitude, threaten them and insult them. And then there’s a matter of dealing with the insanity of Denver traffic.
I remember a few years ago the Rocky Mountain News…the same newspaper now vilifying the drivers…wrote an article about a bus driver doing the Number 15 route along Colfax.
Among the many things the driver dealt with were drug dealers, mental health patients not taking medications, elderly needing assistance on and off the bus, blind passengers and the list went on. All the while the driver is supposed to maintain a professional attitude and deal with some of the worst congestion in a metropolitan area.
Now we have Bill Owens, always the compassionate conservative Governor, pouncing on his privatization band-wagon as quickly as he can. Of course Bill wants to privatize the bus lines just like he’s tried to privatize all of the public sector jobs.
Owens has always tried to disband unions and any other entity that might give the common workers a voice in their work life.
All we really need to do is look at the salary structures of the managers making more than 100,000 dollars and then look at the highest pay of a transit worker which tops out around 40,000 dollars each year.
RTD was amazingly voted the best transit system in the country recently. Here’s the question I always ask about such awards….are they the result of a workforce doing an excellent job or a management keeping the workers in line and oppressed?
A local mental health center ironically won an award honoring Martin Luther King at the very time it was ignoring a vote by its union workers to reject a contract offer. Ironic an organization would win an award honoring a man who gave his life fighting for a union in Memphis while they implemented their last offer despite a 94% vote against that offer.
I see men and women struggle to work at all hours of the day, haggard and depressed looking. They obviously aren’t happy about their jobs. Just go to a 7-Eleven or some retail store and gauge the overall attitude and affect of the workers.
I hear men and women complain about the long hours and the poor pay of their jobs. They voice anger toward their bosses who make far more than them and tend to never have a clue about the work their employees have to do to meet the quotas or standards of an organization that only cares about the bottom line. They complain about being taken advantage of by the “man”.
Then I hear the same folks berate a union employee standing up to employers who have taken huge pay raises and offer a bone of 1200 dollars a year to employees who’s pay has been frozen for the last three years.
The raise offered won’t even cover the inflationary costs of the past three years of a pay freeze but the employees are called greedy by other workers in the same situation.
What is it? Do low paid workers resent others getting ahead? Do other workers displace their anger toward the corporate thieves upon workers who try to rock the boat?
I’ve argued for years that unions are the reason wages are as high as they are in several areas of the work force. All I hear back is the unions take dues out of workers’ check each month.
Seldom do even the more intelligent workers calculate even with dues subtracted they’d still be making more than without a union.
Seldom is there any understanding unions dying won’t benefit workers; they will further enslave them and further increase the divide between the “haves” and the “have-nots”.
The notion hard work and loyalty will get the American worker ahead is a thing of the past. Companies now look at cost benefits versus cost liabilities of workers. The older the worker gets, the more likely they’ll have major illnesses which will increase insurance costs.
The longer an employee works at the same place the more the pay and pension costs. It’s less costly to have a reduction in force of the more senior workers and then hire less experienced and less paid employees.
If you’re an American worker and you think there’s going to be any loyalty toward you, think about the workers who have had an extended illness or injury keeping them off work for some time. How did management treat them? Are they still working for the company?
And still if a strike should inconvenience us or linger on it’s always the workers who are the bad guys. Even when other workers are told of the huge salaries of incompetent managers, the workers who challenge management are the ones who are smeared in the press and cursed by other workers.
Even as forced overtime and dangerous conditions increase in the workforce, a group of workers challenging management are the villains.
American labor remains divided and continues to eat their own while the rich continues to reap huge tax cuts and huge profits. American labor continues to fall for the slave master’s lies about other slaves of the military industrial complex.
Seriously, how much longer will we continue to tolerate the obscene profits and wealth earned from the sweat and bent backs of labor?

Wm. Terry Leichner, RN
Former Pipefitter’s 208 member
Former SEIU 105 member