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I still only get piece work here and there. My whole family life has changed. I am suffering the R Word Syndrome, at this point. But I'm not alone.
Boeing is talking about relocating to another state, which means a lot of other guys my age, with mortgages and roots in the community, are going to face that hard choice of move with the job -- essentially cut and run -- or try to tough it out here. The newscasts on television and the newspapers don't help. Lots of big companies, from Lucent to AOL Time Warner, are adding to the list of organizations deciding that cutting people is the fastest way to staunch the red ink.
That's been an American tradition since the 1980s. Let the people go. Layoffs are always rewarded by Wall Street and the Board room. CEOs get fat bonuses worth 400 times the average worker's salary for producing nothing, for moving nothing accept the pen signing off on all those pink slips. Then they collect more fat checks for showing up on those financial talk shows on television whining about the low quality of the workforce and how college grads are under-prepared for global competition. Maybe they are. So why, one has to ask, are you continuing to lay off the competent older workers who have the experience. "Competitiveness" my ass! Everybody over the age of 40 knows our grey hair is considered the mark of Cain or something. We're usually the first out the door.
Why pay an completely "prepared" older guy a living wage when you can get that supposedly "under-prepared" college grad for relative peanuts. PLUS he or she will be more pliable (meaning willing to work unpaid overtime, for example) and grateful for the job. That's why they're willing to work for half of what a "prepared" person would.
A major characteristic of the R word Syndrome is that workers must live in fear. Fearful workers can be demanded to do a lot more for a lot less. And that's the grinding nature of this new form of hyper-capitalism we call globalization. I'm not surprised that smart young people are taking to the streets of this globalization issue; all they have to do is look around and they see that it's a code-word for reducing working people all over the world to a form of neo-serfdom. I'd be hard pressed to come up with anything that I'd consider an advantage for the average person about globalization.
All the benefits of globalization, like all the money, are accrued by those at the top of our industrial societies. If globalization were truly global, then you'd see more of a fair deal for resource-rich countries in the southern hemisphere. But guess what? Not happening. They are as upset about this phenomenon as most working people in industrialized countries. And it seems that nobody -- especially not those people asking for increased security measures and police presence at their secret meetings -- is listening. "The poor, ignorant unwashed," they tut-tut. "They simply don't understand that what we are doing is good for them. Free trade promotes democracy and prosperity." It rankles more because it sounds so much like Marie Antoinette.
They must believe our eyes are shut as they raise their champagne glasses of self-congratulation around those banquet tables, jowls greasy from the troughs of collusion and priviledge.... Free trade, they wink, means opening more markets to foreign investment, especially American investment, for more plants that hire workers at substandard wages. The very idea of a living wage, meaning enough money to buy a home, raise a family, have food, medical care and the potential to educate your children -- that idea is becoming more and more an anachronism every day.
And that's a result of the R word syndrome, fearfulness among the average people such that they don't demand a better quality of life, too.
Seems like only yesterday that Mr. Greenspan and others wouldn't use the R word at all. It was just a minor "correction" of the market, they assured us. Things would be fine by the fourth quarter (at least for investors, as the rest of us were being laid off by the tens of thousands) and surely with our booming economy there was amble cushion for President Bush's tax cut. Oops!
They're printing the checks from that tax cut now, and we're all looking forward to getting that $200 - $300 band-aid. But two or three hundred bucks does not a windfall make. And its a damned poor substitute for a healthy economy. I don't think I'm the only person suffering from the Recession Syndrome. And I'll wager I'm not the only person who is mad as hell.
The local newscasts in my town here in America are finally using that dreaded "R word" from a few months ago, "Recession." Everybody from the Federal Reserve Board chairman, Mr. Greenspan, to the Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of most major American-based multinational corporations accept that that is what is happening in our country and infecting other world economies right now. Me, I accepted that fact those many months ago when I wrote an Op Ed piece for this magazine about my worries and fears after being laid off.
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