Human Rights are at a lower point now than they ever were. What we're going through today would make the Roarin' 20s and Ancient Egypt look like post World War II America by comparison. Labor rights? Please. We're all just independent contractors. We don't even have the right to bathroom breaks because bathroom breaks make Jeff Bezos have a shit fit. Just ask the delivery drivers who have to piss in bottles or shit in bags just to make deliveries on time. Or the people who work in Amazon's warehouses who have to be brought to the emergency room for heat stroke because Jeff Bezos and the shareholders don't wanna pay for adequete air conditioning.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVGaEU7mY1Y]

And if I may borrow from Mark From Queens post from Steven Greenhouse's book, The Big Squeeze in another thread:

In his job at a Wal-Mart in Texas, Mike Michell was responsible for catching shoplifters, and he was good at it, too, catching 180 in one two-year period. But one afternoon things went wildly awry when he chased a thief—a woman using stolen checks—into the parking lot. She jumped into her car, and her accomplice gunned the accelerator, slamming the car into Michell and sending him to the hospital with a broken kneecap, a badly torn shoulder, and two herniated disks. Michell was so devoted to Wal-Mart that he somehow returned to work the next day, but a few weeks later he told his boss that he needed surgery on his knee. He was fired soon afterward, apparently as part of a strategy to dismiss workers whose injuries run up Wal-Mart’s workers’ comp bills.

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Immediately after serving in the army, Dawn Eubanks took a seven-dollar-an-hour job at a call center in Florida. Some days she was told to clock in just two or three hours, and some days she was not allowed to clock in during her whole eight-hour shift. The call center’s managers warned the workers that if they went home, even though they weren’t allowed to clock in, they would be viewed as having quit.

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Twenty-eight-year-old John Arnold works in the same Caterpillar factory in Illinois as his father, but under the plant’s two-tier contract, the maximum he can ever earn is $14.90 an hour, far less than the $25 earned by his father. Caterpillar, long a symbol of America’s industrial might, insists that it needs a lower wage tier to remain competitive. “A few people I work with are living at home with their parents,” Arnold said. “Some are even on food stamps.”

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At a Koch Foods poultry plant in Tennessee, the managers were so intent on keeping the line running all out that Antonia Lopez Paz and the other workers who carved off chicken tenders were ordered not to go to the bathroom except during their lunch and coffee breaks. When one desperate woman asked permission to go, her supervisor took off his hard hat and said, “You can go to the bathroom in this.” Some women ended up soiling themselves.

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Don Jensen anticipated a relaxing life of golf after retiring from his human resources post with Lucent Technologies in New Jersey, where he was in charge of recruiting graduates from Stanford, Cornell, MIT, and other top universities. But when Lucent increased its retirees’ health insurance premiums to $8,280 a year, up from $180, Jensen was forced to abandon his retirement. He took a job as a ten-dollar-an-hour bank teller.

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As part of her software company’s last-lap sprint to get new products out the door, Myra Bronstein sometimes had to work twenty-four hours straight testing for bugs. She felt great loyalty to the Seattle-area company because its executives had repeatedly promised, “As long as we’re in business, you have a job.” But one Friday morning the company suddenly fired Bronstein and seventeen other quality assurance engineers. The engineers were told that if they wanted to receive severance pay, they had to agree to spend the next month training the workers from India who would be replacing them.

One of the least examined but most important trends taking place in the United States today is the broad decline in the status and treatment of American workers—white-collar and blue-collar workers, middle-class and low-end workers—that began nearly three decades ago, gradually gathered momentum, and hit with full force soon after the turn of this century. A profound shift has left a broad swath of the American workforce on a lower plane than in decades past, with health coverage, pension benefits, job security, workloads, stress levels, and often wages growing worse for millions of workers.

That the American worker faces this squeeze in the early years of this century is particularly troubling because the squeeze has occurred while the economy, corporate profits, and worker productivity have all been growing robustly. In recent years, a disconcerting disconnect has emerged, with corporate profits soaring while workers’ wages stagnated.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukropK3kom8]

And yet my mom's boyfriend, a rabid Trump backer, insists I'll eventually be hired by somebody because the unemployment rate is (supposedly) lower than it's ever been. For a guy like me, who will never get a fair shake no matter where he goes even with Voc Rehab's help, things like the unemployment rate or job numbers don't mean shit to me. After all, while the overall unemployment rate is (supposedly) 4.9 percent, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is double that, at 10.5 percent (again, supposedly). And for people 25 tp 34 with a disability, unemployment is at three times the (supposedly) nominal rate, at 14.6 percent.

I don't buy it. Not for a minute. And neither should anyone else.

See ya around,

Aspie