Let’s start this thought with a look at the past. Most of us started out with the company looking for decent work. Maybe we were in college trying to get by, or maybe we had been laid off from some other menial job. We saw an ad about working for Brown that offered decent wages, and benefits, and paid vacation, and even retirement. Wow, we thought, “too good to be true!”
We jumped at the opportunity and soon we were wearing the Brown zoot suit, pushing the big brown truck, and living the good life. No where in all of this did anyone ever explain that all of this was also courtesy of the Teamsters Union. We thought the company just gave us these benefits out of the goodness of their hearts, and because we are such fabulously valuable, self important, heros of the working world.
We wondered why the Union would ask for “dues” when they had done nothing to earn them. We asked why the Unions supported “Labor friendly candidates” when these candidates did not necessarily support the issues we had with the world. We could not understand why the Unions would not support social issues outside of what was important to them. We began to listen to the “right-wing”, “anti-union”, talking heads that told us our money was being sent to crooked hoodlums bent on destroying the earth.
We believed their flapping gums, (no one lies on the radio) and started to protest having to pay those dues to an organization that has done nothing for us. We understand that the company will continue to give us the highest pay in the small package industry, and the best benefit package available, out of the goodness of their hearts. We know we are worth more than the ‘bottom line” of the company.
We actually are fools. We continue to vote against ourselves, yet believe that what we have, will be there forever. Of course we tend to be very self-focused, and worry only about ourselves when it comes to the world around us. We can stand there and spew the hate filled rhetoric of the union haters, yet continue to pocket our solid paycheck, and use our healthcare, that was negotiated for us by the Teamsters. Of course we are special somehow, and did not need the Teamsters to fight for us.
OK, actually I shouldn’t call us fools. Many of us are just hypocrites. Corporate hypocrites. We support corporate hypocrites. We vote for the “Society of the Bottom Line”. We are being sold out in the name of the corporation, and loving it. All because some lunatic says we should. All because we can’t see past our own nose.
Keep it up and we will lose it all! Wake up! You are a peon when it comes to the bottom line!
You will be the first to go!