The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
November 24th
WORKING
STIFFED!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
Now... who'da thunk a New York piece o’
fish would be that final straw as scuttled organized labor and tossed it off a
pier to sleep with cods and smelts; not to mention careers of all those boy
bands and network karaoke winners a body can't escape hearing, years after the
fact?
Up on that West Side...
used-to-be Seinfeld and Friends territory, rotten with degenerate-capital
liberals as write checks to arm whales, engage in banter salvaged from Dorothy
Parker’s wastebasket and drink the mostly obscure coffees... is this fish
market. On 75th and Broadway, name of Citarella's. Three workers there tried to organize a union
'round the usual things - no overtime or vacations and a lack of ventilation in
the basement. For their trouble, they got canned, neatly as sardines. Lack of
ventilation, where Osama and the fishes sleep, is taken more seriously than in
stores as sell cinnamon, radiator hoses, pencils and the like, so the Food and
Commercial Worker's Union threw up this typical New York City picket line with
some expectation it would be honored, unlike in real America... where termites
say that real Americans don't need unions. Or masks.
Them Upper West Side
liberals didn't give a rat's ass... wanted
their crabs, fresh trout and scallops, and wanted them yesterday! Even the
few who did honor the picket line
only did so, like that one who told that Congressman from up there, "...because
my father would've killed me if he heard I'd crossed the line." After six
months, the union scuttled away, scabs stabbed in the back... wouldn't fish
market scabs be called "scales"?... fired workers taken back on
condition they take their pay and benefit cuts with a smile, and never, ever, breathe a word of complaint about
breathing lungfuls of decomposing halibut in
mid-July.
Case closed.
Labor... either in the
sense of organizations as look out for those Americans who do real work, or the
real work itself... has ceased to count for a cardboard box of fish guts in this
brave new millennium as stretches outwards and onwards, against us. Ask those Writers’ Guilt gomers
out in Hollywood... and get ready for the fall TV season when all the scripted local
eyecandy and earworms are replaced by imported cop
shows from Germany and romcoms from Bollywood.
Great technological shifts
as occur once in about seven decades... formerly only once in several centuries...
call forth portentous nomenclature from G-forcers and Z-stringers and such to
define yesterday's vanities as have become today's necessities. When the Civil
War ended, Americans began moving off farms and into the cities with their
factories. They stopped making their own shoes, homes and whiskey, stopped
growing potatoes, canning pears and raising hogs and drove their buggies into
town to buy from the store. The age of
the specialists and the assembly-line was born. Turn-of-the-century genius created the
automobile, electric light and cinema, and whole new industries arose to meet
the public's insatiable demand for novelties.
World wars came and went.
New contraptions like the television and computer, built by Americans, took
their place in American homes. Just as we'd left horse and buggy behind to squeeze
into trains, streetcars and Pontiacs... now we'd flock to airports to fly round
the world in less than a day, then wait hours more for our security and luggage.
We sent a man to the moon and then recoiled, almost ashamed at the audacity of
our endeavor... and the risk that it entailed. We bought and sold insurance and
passed laws against fizzy soda-water and directing the proper way to butter
bread in nursing homes. When banks
failed, our gumment bailed them out and, with millions
lined up to beg for mortgages, the bankers took that money to buy more jets and
vacations in the sun and finance a string of Wall Street mergers that has left
us with a handful of corporations too big to fail.
We grew old, cynical
and Squeamish.
One by one in the
wake of the plague, great industries of the Twentieth Century withered or
relocated to hot, unpleasant cesspools of cheap labor in the Third World, where
the environment, democracy and human rights are given all the respect granted
the toilet paper as fails to exist in them places and then, for us,
disappeared. These workers were kept in their
place because management had the option of disposing of them all, even the
Chinese, and bringing in robots. Newly
de-industrializing sybarites of Western Europe, North America and Japan watched
real people pretending to be actors pretending to be real people eat rats, fall
off balconies and gamble away the family car at suckers' odds for pathetic sums
of money.
Virtuecrats exalted
Leviticus and wiped their behinds with
the Sermon on the Mount.
"There's dignity in working at $4
an hour," contended Phil Gramm a decade ago, when the minimum wage was above
two Jeffersons. Now, these minimum-wage and part-time
service jobs left to an ever swelling population of Americans living in
shelters or prisons and eating dogfood "are still jobs, and they will
still generate income," as boasted Martin Regalia, chief economist for the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce over a steaming plate of dignity.
Lo and behold, Thursday’s New York Times stated that the labor
shortage is more myth than reality. “If anything, wages today are historically
low,” they noted. “They have been growing slowly for decades for every
income group other than the affluent. As a share of gross domestic product, worker compensation is
lower than at any point in the second half of the 20th century. Two main
causes are corporate consolidation and shrinking labor unions, which
together have given employers more workplace power and employees less of it. |
“Just as telling as the wage data, the share
of working-age Americans who are in fact working has declined in recent decades.
The country now has the equivalent of a large group of bakeries that are not
making baguettes but would do so if it were more lucrative — a pool of
would-be workers, sitting on the sidelines of the labor market. |
“Corporate profits, on the other hand,
have been rising rapidly and now make up a
larger share of G.D.P. than in previous decades. As a result, most companies
can afford to respond to a growing economy by raising wages and continuing to
make profits, albeit the wages perhaps not covering inflation
nor the unusually generous profits they have been enjoying since the plague
maintaining their mojo.” |
The Labor Department, reported
conservative columnist Mona Charen in Slick Willie's
day, funded "...34 programs totaling about $7 billion... the Department of
Education alone runs 59 different job-training programs at a cost of $13
billion." DOE retrained "...81,600
cosmetologists a year. But there is only a market for 17,000."
That was
Liberalism's carrot... to its own Insider Rabbits, not the workers. The stick
became that more and more of those seeking child care, food stamps and other
tangible benefits either had to fill chairs in these bogus programs, or enroll
in a "job search" which, as a couple of Wall Street Journal writers
in Baltimore cited by Charen found out, consists of
hitting up the same few weary retailers in the vicinity of the welfare office
to make a quota of two dozen "applications" every 60 days.
"You just have to
get through this," a Federal "jobs
counselor" with a Federal paycheck told her bewildered clients.
Not to say that
there ain’t industry… such as it is… in some parts of
America. Not to make excuses for the
plague, but the pandemic did light a fire under Big Pharma
and Big Medicine and things finally got done; done so thoroughly that
Presidents Trump and Biden are still rolling round in the dust to snuff it out.
We got the drones to drive pizza
deliverers out’n their jobs and, now, them whitecoats
at Princeton have been tinkering with rodent genes to enable rats to do simple,
repetitive human tasks... work!... while more ambitious whitecoats in Oregon
have transplanted glowing green jellyfish DNA to monkey embryos. Boy howdy!... maybe this'll lead to a workforce as toils for peanuts,
literally, and can labor in the dark, saving money on electricity! Who needs robots? Castoff unterproletariat
look for fags and Meskins to bash, tout their vain identification
with the bosses and the snake-oil salesmen in Washington while clutching onto
their misplaced trust in corrupted union Kommisars as
look up from their schemin' and schismin'
to rubber stamp their pink slips as a consequence of being replaced by some glowing
rat.
At least the P.I.C. psychologists (not to mention the Attorney General) are hip to
all-but-certain outcomes when the suckers wake and wise up. Underpaid,
overworked Americans may develop "nonworking behaviors involving political
or union activism to satisfy needs for esteem and fulfillment," suggests
psychologist H. G. Kaufman, adding, "In Germany, we saw large numbers of
unemployed professionals supporting the Nazis."
"If we don't fill
the political void…" Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil,
Chemical and Atomic Workers' Union threatened, a while before the advent of
Team Biden with its merry band of Goldman-Sachsters as
slew the Dragon Trump, with its Wall Street
hoboes, ."…something
much uglier could take over." Like Trump, 2024!
Wouldn’t
be any less than we deserve. The
21st century has seen a the Presidency
occupied by second rate, second generation royalty who crashed the e-con’me. Then we get
a Democratic President and filibuster-proof Congress in ought-eight, as wasted
its time and credibility quarrelling about the rights of microbes and issuing
subpoenas and then, two years later disapparating. The 2016 and 2020 contests were dominated by
conspiracy theories, ranting ministers and hate between the blacks and women,
culminating in a massive Asian-American fire drill of ballot fraud and
subsequent sudden death… Congress, as a consequence of spiteful Republicans
voting with the Dems to pay The Donald back for bein’
himself, exploiting the filibuster and the gerrymander to stall out in gridlock
as we stumble, lurching and slouching towards 2024 with about nine percent of
those polled liking donkey Tweedledumbs, seven
percent for Party of Trump Tweedledumbers and the
rest telling those pollsters to go off and have intercourse with their dead
grandmothers.
Americans have diverse
wants, but I find it hard to believe any of us see much future in zombie union
bluster, or a government as keeps doling out the subsidies to train
nail-polishers when the only working people as can afford purty
nails (or paws? claws?) are rats... the ultimate survivors in
Entropy's rat race!
Like them Starbucks people
– that seven dollar cuppa plain, thirteen for some
goop added, can’t support a living wage for workers? Some of the baristas went out in strike, so Starbucks
shut down one of its franchises in Maine – which was a sort of sacrifice,
because you need a lot of hot coffee in Maine. No matter! Worth the lesson you teach to those peasants who
grind all those exotic beans.
To be sure... of
late... workers have won some victories here and there. Hollywood, Detroit. A few other places, even
Starbucks.
But they’re not
keeping up with inflation.
Here’s Catfish labor
policy. The CNC will raise the minimum wage
(though not to fifteen, not everywhere – twelve in some places, maybe, as that
Federal floor, above which states can opt into further increases, probably lin), but only after completely overhauling coercive “independent
contractor” loopholes as let some employers like the boo’d,
sued and ultimately screwed telephone directory rackets as paid their wage
slaves an average one dollar sixty
seven cents an hour - less than they would earn in Manila or Bombay. Them as lose their
jobs for the reasons now allowed by gummint get the
pay allowed by gummint for ninety days. Then, (unless they prefer a life of crime)
they have to report to a Federal employment center three days a week… twenty
four hours… and do such work as is necessary at the time and place for the
minimum wage plus ten percent, another ten percent if they have dependants and
maybe a little more for those as volunteer to do the dirty or dangerous jobs
like assistant first responders or health care workers as mostly did receive
hazard pay during the plague. Them as unqualify for the unemployment can go to the center too,
and get paid the minimum only for up to their twenty-four. People who quit their jobs or get fired
“appropriately” as advocated by the thousand-dollar company lawyers, people
just out of school or the army, old folks whose social security doesn’t cover
the rent and their meds, even prisoners fresh out of jail... come on down! Good Americans may hate these, but they still
need to eat and sleep somewhere out of the rain and the reach of police and, if
enough of ‘em can’t, somebody’s gonna get robbed or shot and, unless we go the
full Duterte on Americans, the perps’ reward will be
years of three hots and a cot on the taxpayers’ dime.
Oh – and them as get
fired from their public or private jobs for refusing to get vaccinated: that’ll
be the same as a “voluntary quit”. No corner
niche allowed.
So will the CNC
bring back “at hard labor” for the incarcerated? Watch us! What jobs they do are those that society needs
but refuses to pay for, or private parties as need work done can rent them out’n the center for half or maybe two-thirds the minimum, in
some cases… as would be worked out with the Congress and the local gummints… or the whole in another.
During the Great Depression
– the real one eighty-some years ago, not the Bush-Obama not-so-great
recession, not the here-today-gone-tomorrow plague stagflation as mostly
hastened trends already cooking on the back burner since the teens turned –
President Roosevelt instituted a sort of similar policy that he called the
W.P.A. The Works Progress Administration… not the Welfare
Progress Administration.
Them employment agencies
as charge the unemployed two hundred bucks to find a dishwashing job that lasts
until the training wage loophole starts to close… those might squeal a little
but – hey! – the essence of capitalism is that anybody
has the right to compete in the marketplace without government intervention…
even the government!
Back at Citarella's on the Upper West Side, meat manager Charlie Gagliardo now says there was "a time and place for unions
and this place is just not it." The old union sorts who used to occupy the
neighborhood die off, or get evicted to house stockbrokers and dotcommies-turned-biotechsters at
three times the rent, those as don't even blink at paying five bucks for a cuppa coffee, ten for one red-white-n'-blue herring on a
Norwegian cracker.
"Now that's all
changed," said this history professor Joshua Freeman, who works Columbia, a
ways north. "These days Upper West Siders earn more and care less about unions
than them who came before them."
CLICK the CATFISH to go to
PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |