KoolBak wrote:Secondly, I find it....hypocritical?....that so many lambaste the rich, yet people come here claiming it's the "land of opportunity". However, if you make it big, then you're hated.
Nobody hates a guy like you, KB, for making it big. You make an honest product through your own labour and I can't imagine anyone hating you. Everybody loves the self-made man.
Not everybody's a self-made man, however. Not going to argue about what percentage it is, but I think you'll agree it's probably a minority. The rest inherited it, or they married it, or they stole it.
The guys who started out on the shop floor are decent human beings and respect their employees. It's the ones that were born to privilege that spend all their time figuring out how they can screw the worker just a little bit harder.
The part-time drivers where I work have just had their third pay cut in six years. They went from $26/hour, to $24, to $22, and now to $20. You'd think the company was really struggling, but in fact its making more money than ever before. We just renewed our contract with the government to do about 20% more work than before at something like three times the price. Essentially a windfall of something in the neighbourhood of $200 million, and you can be damn sure not a penny of that will go to raises or benefits for the guys that actually do the work. In fact, I just got a letter saying that because I made too much money last year, they're jacking up how much they'll deduct from my pay for my dental benefits. I'm a full-timer so they can't arbitrarily cut my pay like they do to the part-timers, but they'll f*ck me in little ways like that.
I shouldn't say too much, but you won't be surprised to hear that our illustrious president inherited the company, and didn't even start "working" for it until after it had reached its current size.
Everywhere I go, I hear the same story. People being asked to take pay cuts in the name of "staying competitive", but profits keep zooming toward the stratosphere. Don't know how much more competitive we need to get.
