The ever present insecurity inherent in the capitalist system has many victims

I just left my daughter in law's graduation and stopped at this store to pick up a cake for afterwards.  The woman serving me looked very sickly, like she had been receiving chemotherapy or something similar. As she packed the pie I bought she said to me quietly:

"I had better hurry up so I can go to the bathroom before the manager gets back, she gets mad if we go to the bathroom."

"She get's mad?" I replied.

"Yeah," she said, keeping a nervous eye on the front door, "She always looks at her watch and asks what we were doing in there to take so long and stuff like that."

We had a little back and forth before I asked her if she could retire pretty soon.

"I wish I'd never left the school district" she says, "If I had stayed I would have been able to retire but I got sick and had to leave, I can't possibly retire now.'
She handed me the pie and scurried off to the bathroom before the boss returned. It reminded me of this supervisor at work who gave a letter of reprimand to one of my co-workers because he violated a minor work rule about not calling in on time for a sick day.  This was a guy who had and eventually died from cancer.

The attacks on Unions will intensify the insecurity and workplace terrorism that people have to deal with as the employers gain more control over our work lives.  The ongoing economic crisis has also affected a broader strata of the working class, highly skilled workers many of whom thought they were safe; that what was happening to the low waged, unskilled and poor, wouldn't happen to them.

The comments below are from G, a regular reader of this blog.  His comments give some idea of the severity of the present economic crisis, hitting all sections of society including highly skilled workers some who thought they were immune from such attacks. When you consider the extreme crisis in the US housing market as home prices continue to decline and a report out earlier in the week that 38% of homeowners who took cash out of their homes are underwater, we get some idea of what we're facing. The market brings a life of constant crisis and insecurity, one minute you have it, the next you don't.  This is not the height of civilization by any means.

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One of the biggest reasons I never had any children was job security. I have a degree in mechanical engineering and have been working as a mechanical engineer in the dying manufacturing sector since 1994, the longest I've been at any one company is 3 years. That's it, three years. I have never had more than two weeks paid vacation unless you count layoffs as paid vacation which is a joke because you're basically stressed sick.

If anybody could have told me when I went to college for engineering in 1989 that the future would be like this I NEVER would have chosen this profession. But I digress really.... at this point this is a class issue and not just a bad choice of profession... since virtually no profession is immune to outsourcing at this point

As it stands, I may be at one of the most secure companies I've ever been at and I started here as a contractor after getting laid off in 2008 when the economy crashed. Its somewhat secure because they have strong ties to the major defense contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon... etc...

Now another point. I've found that traditionally white collar engineers typically drink the right wing Kool Aid... that may be changing ever so slowly as more and more of these professionals find their careers upended by outsourcing and labor arbitrage while the CEO's and top executives run off with the spoils.

In fact I remember reading somewhere at some point that engineers at Boeing were trying to start a "white collar" union. I must admit, I fear that any such effort at this time is doomed to failure and I will not see such a change in my lifetime. I hope I'm wrong.