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Edited on Mon Oct-30-06 01:36 AM by kgfnally
Then I realized something: in a bad economy, bad employers are cheerful. They like the economy to be bad, because it means they can treat their workers however they like and nobody will do anything because those workers have no other job to go to.
But further, it's doubly true for temps- or, as we in the USPS call them, "casuals". Versus APWU/NALC/NPMHU members, casuals receive no vacation time or sick leave, can be made to work any shift up to the legal hours limit, do the exact same work union members do, do not get trained- ever- and make about half the houly wage.
The USPS is trying to break its unions. Casuals are the direct result, and you know what? It's postal managers capitalizing on a bad economy in which jobs are scarce; they know this, they revel in it, and they treat the casuals like absolute shit into the bargain. The fact that "casuals-in-leiu-of" grievances have been won, and won big (in PA, I think, to the tune of $14 or $15 Million for one local), doesn't bother them, because as I said in another union-related thread up right now, the fines- or, in this case, grievance settlements- are treated as a cost of doing business.
That needs to end. The fines for violating workers' rights or laws or whatever need to be made truly onerous, a real fright, a true and company-crushing burden. ALL corporate fines ought to be in the tens of millions of dollars, if not higher; it really should be a sliding scale based upon a percentage of company value. And no, I don't care that this might drive Company X out of business, because if they're abusing their workers or breaking the laws to the extent that the fines do force their doors closed, those doors clearly deserve to be closed or at the least the entire management and supervisory structure summarily terminated and a new group put in.
This all ties into my black, utter, absolute hatred for the concept of corporate personhood, which of course is what makes all of this possible in the first place. Take away their "right" to "run their business the way they want" and you take away their power to inflict harm on the public and the individual worker.
edit: I don't blame scabs anymore. I was lucky to get into the USPS as a full-timer, right at the very very end of their willingness to hire such. We desperately need the help in our plant, and if all the- as you put it- scabs were to walk en masse, there would be a fresh new group there only a few days later. Oh, but there's a "hiring freeze" right now; the USPS can't "hire" anybody.
They hire casuals up the ass, though- but that's a management fuckover. The casuals themselves have nothing to do with it, and (if they couldn't be fired at any time) could organize themselves if they had a mind, and in fact I've advocated as much to them, and will continue to do so.
It'll never happen, but it tends to inspire people who make half what I do and have to work twelve hours a day, every day, without a day off.
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