Hullabaloo

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

 
Overworked against their will

by digby

I wrote about how the governments and the bankers are planning to take away the Greek worker's week-end and make them work long hours. Here's a little tale of America today. The biggest problem with our economy today is that vast numbers of people are unemployed. But one of the side-effects is that others are being worked far more than they want to be:

Union workers at the Pittsburgh Glass Works in East Deer will vote Sept. 13 on the company’s latest contract proposal.

The 218 workers represented by the United Steel Workers of America heard details of the proposal Tuesday in meetings at the VFW Post on Fourth Avenue.

Brian Markiewicz, president of USW Local 126, said it is hard to tell if the proposal will be ratified or rejected as two others have been.

“People are sitting there thinking through it,” Markiewicz said. “I really couldn’t tell you which way it will go.”

“I think health care has been the biggest stumbling block, but I think we have that knocked over,“ Markiewicz said.

Rich Bordick, 55, of Kittanning, who has worked at the plant since 1978, discussed the proposal after emerging from a session late Tuesday afternoon. He sees forced overtime as a major issue.

“Just today, 14 people got forced to work 16 hours,” Bordick said angrily. “(Workers) are in there right now arguing with the international reps about it.”

He said it is a by-product of two other factors. One is the company’s reluctance to hire enough workers to operate the plant that manufactures glass for the auto industry. He said five crews are needed and right now there are three.

“They need five more people per crew now, and they’re talking about hiring a fourth crew,” he said. “They don’t have enough people now.”

He said so far this year, the only time off he has gotten is holidays such as Easter, July 4th and Memorial Day.

“I didn’t even get Father’s Day off,” Bordick said. “You can’t treat people like this.”

These are union workers. As someone who went through earlier recessions, I recall being forced to work exceedingly long hours in the wake of layoffs as I absorbed several jobs into my existing one. (The other jobs never came back, by the way.) In those jobs, there was no overtime, so we were much worse off than the union workers. But overtime or not, the fact is that in a job market like this nobody wants to take a chance on losing their job, so they do what they're told. And often that means working themselves to death.

If the company is in real trouble, there's always a sense that it might be for the greater good to suck it up for a while until things get better. But it's not getting better for the workers this time. These companies are making huge profits, their stocks are soaring and the 1% who owns most of them are getting richer and richer. Meanwhile, these guys are working night and day. This is probably happening in workplaces all over the country, many of which are asking their workers to work more without more pay. (It happens all the time, believe me.)

If the politicians can be stopped from negotiating a series of Cameron-Osborne style agreements that push us back into recession, it's possible that this situation will turn around soon. But it takes years to wring this mentality out of the system, both on the part of employee and employers. After this much time it's become normal for some people to work far more than 40 hours a week, much of it unpaid, while others languish, desperate for a job. That's a plutocrats dream.


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digby 9/05/2012 01:30:00 PM