Labor Pains

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" You've found a righteous web site run by a Blue Redneck, dedicated to the proposition that religion should be like the food table at a family reunion and politics ought to be conducted with some degree of intellectual competence.

Today's topic: Better dead than Red.

Nowhere has the Red Right had more success than in undermining organized labor. Puppet shills of the corporate elite like Bill (he-man) O'Reilly, Rush (the junkie) Limbaugh, and Sean (the taxi driver) Hannity have harkened to the signers of their paychecks and demeaned unions as the stomping grounds of mafia goons and lazy slackers who want checks and benefits for drinking coffee and eating donuts.

The Three Stooges mentioned above would be very happy to see a return to the Triangle Shirt Factory days, when a 14-hour shift earned enough to live in a fifth-floor walkup tenement with no heat or water. That would actually be good for America, because then we wouldn't have to send the jobs overseas to Sri Lanka or Guatemala. And by golly, the "work harder for less" philosophy is a winner for Wal-Mart, now isn't it?

Don't you just love those Wal-Mart commercials where they crow about what a wonderful place it is to work? It isn't even a wonderful place to shop, let alone work! Everything you buy there, you feel like you're putting money into some fat cat's pockets at the expense of every worker on the globe.

I don't shop there, by the way.

But back to my point. Unions exist to give ordinary working people a chance to earn respectable wages and realistic benefits so they can live comfortably. Not lavishly. Not lazily. Comfortably. People would like to feel, when they get out of bed in the morning and put on the working clothes, that their jobs are secure, that they'll be paid enough to live on, and that they'll be cared for when they're sick.

Unions have taken it on the chin over the past twenty years (thanks, Rush). Membership is declining. Clout is at an all-time low. It's time for a change, and if the venerable AFL-CIO can't change, then we need some new thinkers in charge.

Therefore, we here at "The Gods Are Bored" endorse the recent split in organized labor, and we are rooting for the mavericks who see membership recruitment as the most important goal. Yes indeedy, there are jobs that cannot leave the ol' US of A, and those workers deserve union protection!

Here's a cute little slogan from a t-shirt I bought at a thrift store.

United We Bargain
Divided We Beg

How do your employment prospects look?

Sign that union card.

ANNE, FREELANCER WHO BEGS