Nasty Little Man

One man's legacy

The air traffic controller who was working in Lexington on the day Comair 5191 crashed had worked a seven hour shift on Saturday that ended at 2:30pm and then came back on duty Saturday night at 11:30pm. In between, he had two hours of sleep. The crash happened at 6am on Sunday. In addition, he was working by himself when he should have had a partner.

How does an air traffic controller end up in such a vulnerable position? A weak union. And why is the union weak? Ronald Reagan, who conservatives lionize by naming an airport after him and actually suggesting that he should replace F-Roosevelt on the 10-cent piece. That would actually be appropriate because thanks to Reagan and the Bushes the middle class is left with just one thin dime.

I've heard a lot of great stats on what has happened to the middle class on Thom Hartmann's radio program. Unfortunately, some of them are not handy, but here's what sticks out: Before the air traffic controller's strike that Reagan busted, there were on average 300 strikes per year across the country. In the years since, there have been an average of 30 strikes per year.

Connected to that, real wages have stayed stagnant in the years since the Reagan administration while CEO salaries have gone up hundreds of percentage points. In the decades between WWII and Reagan, real wages went up more than 60% while CEO salaries only went up marginally.

There is a war on the middle class, and it has been led by conservatives and their anti-worker policies. Hartmann has a new book called Screwed: The Undeclared War against the Middle Class. I haven't read it yet but would like to read it.

When I was a kid, my parents were able to live on my dad's salary as a tech at IBM. My mom stayed home, only occasionally working weekends as a nurse, until I got to high school when she went back to work full-time. We had a nice home in the suburbs, we took annual summer vacations, and we were able to get new clothes each school year.

Today, my wife and I have a home that is probably the equivalent of that home I grew up in, but if we lived on just one of our salaries- and my wife has a master's degree- we would not be able to live here, let alone do all of the things listed above.

And the same conservatives who support the anti-worker policy also lament the fact that so many kids are in daycare today. They've made the bed and now they don't want to sleep in it.

I worked at a union shop recently. While I was there, the administration changed, and the new administration was anti-worker. Wages were cut for new employees (to be fair, existing employees got a significant pay raise), vacation was cut in half, and off-time vulnerable to being scheduled as work time. They even rolled over our existing contract, intimidating employees into voting for the changes by threatening an even worse atmosphere if we didn't accept the changes.

Many of my colleagues were conservative Bush supporters. One of my buddies said to our colleagues over and over again, "I assume that all of you are OK with this because you support George Bush. This is exactly the kind of atmosphere that we have in the country now." I don't know how many of them got what he was saying.

That's how conservatives are. They don't care about things until it affects them personally. They don't care about workers' rights until they're the workers who are losing rights. They don't care about the environment until someone wants to build a land-fill or a factory farm in their town.

The difference between progressives and conservatives is that those on the progressive side grasp that there is a vaster world around them. Conservatives only see what is in their immediate vicinity.

posted by Kinder Gentler Little Man @ 7:39 PM