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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Before they can rise up, they’d have to wise up

Published: March 25, 2013 1 minute 4 comments

Tt130325
Tom Toles with a hopeful take on the wavering loyalty of the wage slave.

Nq130325
In Wiley's world, the victims of the new economy are fully aware of their status. Does that mean they are going to revolt? The notion is a non sequitur.

There's a gap between wising up and rising up.

The other day, I ran into a fellow I hadn't seen in a couple of months and asked how he was doing. "I have the bad luck to keep getting promotions," he groaned, and I laughed. Yeah, I know that one.

The problem is (he explained, for overseas readers and naive Yanks), once you get to middle management, you go on salary instead of an hourly wage, which means that you end up working insanely long hours for no additional compensation and, if you figure it out by the hour, you have actually taken a substantial pay cut.

You're putting in a lot of OT, but it's not "overtime." It's "own time."

In 2008, when I was editing a small paper in Maine, I stopped to assess my situation shortly before quitting. I was typically working 60 hours a week over six days, but, when special projects were on deck, I might go three weeks without a day off.

During that year, I took two days in a row off three times: Labor Day, Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, and then only because I had made specific plans to visit family. Easter and Christmas were solitary days off.

It didn't change much at the new place, but at least that newspaper had the decency to promptly go out of business.

I don't mind being exploited as long as the boss is actively, genuinely losing money in the real world, and not simply in the beancounter spin-fantasy he uses to justify things. (See above comics.)

And, in this case, Chapter 7 genuinely meant no more money. Nobody got any magical bonuses on the way out the door, and he was even honest about vacation pay and suchlike.

I worked another place, a corporate gig, where we were all told about "working smarter, not harder," but, of course, that translated to "doing more with less" and we were the less who had to do more while the bosses at Corporate were awarding themselves six- and seven-figure bonuses.

One of the true believers near my desk there had his retirement mostly tied up in the company's stock, bless his heart. When I left, less than a decade ago, it was selling for $40 a share. This past week, it closed at $1.30.

He was a good guy and I feel for him, but I'm sympathetic with the victims of any cult. And, to be honest, I'm not sure you get a lot of karma-points for sympathy that is based on an attitude of "What in the hell were you thinking?"

But we've come to the point where nobody is thinking at all, and that's pretty scary. You've got Joe the Plumber becoming famous because he lived in a fantasy world where he claimed to be head of a small start-up that cleared — cleared — more than a quarter million annually, and he's only the tip of an iceberg of delusional sheep.

Maybe the conservatives are right: Maybe we've made it too easy to be poor and to survive.

Back in the days of Joe Hill and Emma Goldman, the steel workers and coal miners and other workers knew they were being exploited by robber barons, and they didn't blame unions for their woes.

In 1894, Nellie Bly went out to Pullman, Illinois, to cover the strike against the sleeping car maker. Bly was a fan of George Pullman and expected to write about ungrateful workers who didn't appreciate the model town he had built for them.

What she found, rather, was that, among other things, Pullman had cut their wages without cutting their rents, while, if they moved out of company housing, they lost their jobs.

"What I had seen and heard in Pullman had not only converted me into a striker," she wrote, "but had left me very despondent as to the ultimate fate of the employed, men and women."

Same song, different century, plus ça change.

 

Love hurts:

Jj
Meanwhile, over in DailyInk's vintage comics, we learn how Juliet Jones managed to keep that famously romantic heart of hers forever available. Good thing the suit Pops has picked out for her wedding is black.

I wonder what would happen if Juliet Jones fell in love with Little Joe Cartwright?

 

 

Meanwhile, those who like this sort of thing will probably like this:


Agt130325

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Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.

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Comments 4

  1. “Maybe the conservatives are right: Maybe we’ve made it too easy to be poor and to survive.”
    Ouch. I fell off my chair.

  2. We teachers are not middle management, but all that “free time” of ours on weekends and over the summer is only “free” in the sense of unpaid.

  3. The business side of education is so Alice in Wonderland that it needs its own discussion zone. Teacher pay does take the demands of the job into consideration, even to the point of, in most places, offering a choice between being paid during the school year or throughout the calendar year.
    But the odd interface of history and reality makes school budgets one of the few things voters can approve or disapprove (apart from communities in New England with true town meetings). So they are subject not only to political manipulation but also to the misunderstandings of voters — hence the “only work half the year” argument that repeatedly comes up.
    Not to mention the hatred of unions, a favorite scapegoat maneuver that IS relevant to this other discussion.
    One oddity is that teacher pay is publicly disclosed so that, unlike pay in the private sector, it is more prone to comparisons, often that make little practical sense. This tends to homogenize it so that teachers in rural areas with relatively low-incomes overall live very nicely and often well above the median, while teachers in more pricey suburban and urban areas are quite poor.
    Where the “do more with less” comes in is precisely with the weakness of unions. Despite the complaints and misinformation of the teacher-bashing contingent, teachers unions don’t do that good a job of grieving additions to the workload or changes in evaluation criteria that would never be tolerated by the IBEW or United Mine Workers.
    Mind you, a journalist may not be the best judge of relative worth in the marketplace anyway. There was a point at which I had 25 years in the business and all three of my adult children were new to their careers and already outearning me, which seemed to go against something or other, given that they were a priest, a nurse and a teacher.

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