Tuesday, May 24, 2005

rage rising...

Its bad enough that big companies are breaking their promises and backing out of their pensions (see Bodie’s post below). To make it worse, I heard this morning that there are many school districts in California who have been promising teachers lifetime health care, even after retirement; however they are now realizing that they can’t pay up. How is this possible? Is my outrage out of line? Where is the worker protection?

It seems like this is yet another offshoot of the American cultural thought that one is not necessarily responsible for his or her own actions. That big companies are not responsible. The government is not responsible. It’s always someone else’s fault. And who gets fucked in the long run? We do. It’s nobody’s fault but we’re stuck without our retirement. And the government and big business are rolling around in a bed of our tax dollars.

So now when we’re wading through corporate bullshit we also need to try and figure out if the company we’re working for (which we once thought was big and stable) is really going to hold up the promises made. Sweet. It really makes it easy to be optimistic, eh? (Insert
sarcasm point here.)

2 comments:

Lefty said...

Yeah, I really look forward to the future¡

Merce said...

Oh, come on guys... All this doom and gloom? Don't you know that getting screwed by the powers that be is the American Dream? It's the American way to do business. Spend more than you make. Promise more than you can deliver. You're not being responsible if you're actually making money and living up to your end of the bargain and not spongeing off the taxpayers to clean up your financial disasters.

I'm all for the survival of the fittest notion of doing business. Let the crappy companies die and support companies doing good business.

The thing that gets me is that taxpayers pay twice for companies like United to operate and live up to it's promises to it's employees. We pay when we fly and we pay again to cover the pensions. Like I said, getting screwed is the American dream and we're all paying for it.