Hate your job? Watch the dumpster divers…

Hate your job? Don’t like the working conditions and think you are not paid enough?

Watch what I watched a few minutes ago and you might change your mind.

These days, I have read, it has become a status symbol just to have a job – any job.

I was getting something out of my car in the apartment complex where I now live (we had to downsize from a house to an apartment – we like it though). A young couple was dumpster diving, gathering all the recyclables they could in plastic bags. The guy said hi and told me “it’s a rough way to make a living”. While I was out for a morning walk a few days ago I had seen an older man and a younger man doing the same thing, dumspter diving, that is.

You could say, oh well, people make their own life choices. But really, especially in this economy, it is only by the grace of God, yes and maybe some decisions you made along the way, and luck that you are where you are now.

I truly think that as a nation (a world?) we are in another Great Depression. It may not be as bad as the last one or, in fact, it may be worse. But a lot of people whose lives have not been terribly affected yet, and especially that insulated class we call our leaders, don’t realize the misery much of society is going through.

On a happier note and related to all of this, I am back at work again truck driving. Unfortunately I am not at my last job – I had to go back to a previous job and am making half or even less than half as much as I made in my last job. But I’m not complaining. In fact, I am hopeful that I can keep working, and that will depend on two things: the economy, and my health.

For my regular readers, I had blogged the other day that I would be off the web for awhile because I was on the road. I’m back at home for a day and a half, but it’s back on the road tomorrow.

The optimists (the Republicans) say that if there is15 percent unemployment that it is not bad because that means 85 percent are working. Well without going into all of it, I doubt whether the statistics accurately reflect the real situation – they are at best an indicator. And the indication is that society is in turmoil.

I noticed a lot of businesses along the road boarded up. I was going to stop at a café I used to stop at out on Highway 97 in eastern Oregon, but it was no longer in business.

Stay with me here – I’m not skipping to another subject: I just read a news story that said that Iraq war veterans now in Afghanistan are finding the enemy there fiercer.

It’s an all-volunteer force now – kind of like a mercenary force, and I’m sure they all feel happy to at least have employment. And they seem to be quite brave.

But maybe our leaders need to rethink this whole thing. We’ve already leveraged or indebted ourselves to the tune of a trillion dollars or more to fight in Iraq, which we did not have to do, and now to fight in Afghanistan where our goal is illusive. And Afghanistan has been resistant to invaders through the centuries. Maybe in some broad geopolitical sense there is a rationale for fighting there. But in the real world of economics I am afraid it is going to bankrupt us.

If my job and I hold out I won’t have as much time to blog and pontificate or bloviate (maybe), but at least I will be part of the world again, and I do plan to continue this blog and may blog quite often when I can upgrade and get more mobile with it.

To management: don’t put down labor — Labor: don’t bite the hand that feeds you…

When the big-time executive world of the good ol’ boy clubs makes it where each other is protected by golden parachutes and performance really means nothing, we call it “networking”.

When the working class joins together to improve its prospects for happy retirement and to protect itself from the ravages of health care expenses we call it “legacy costs” and left wing politics.

And when Wall Street bankers get paid million-dollar bonuses for losing money we call it contractual obligations that cannot under any circumstances abrogated.

But there is no obligation to those legacy costs or to hard-fought wage increases and benefits.

I haven’t got that quite right perhaps, but close enough. I’m no union person but at the same time since there are far more workers than big time executives it seems that the condition of workers ought to carry more weight.

What set me off here is when I saw outgoing GM executive Bob Lutz on a cable news show blaming GM’s woes on the so-called legacy costs of its retired auto workers. Did not GM agree to all of that in labor negotiations? And what about all those golden parachutes executives get and what about the fact that even though executives are paid in the millions they could not keep American-made cars competitive with those made elsewhere in the world?

(Actually I think maybe that consumers have been robbed over the years by a cabal of networked management and union labor.)

And by the way, under the leadership of folks such as Lutz, GM has filed for bankruptcy. His salary last year, according to Wikipedia, was estimated at $6.9 million.

Yes, I think that the auto workers did probably help cut their own throats and maybe that should be a message to other unions, but I also know this:

Even though in American labor’s history there have been episodes of leftist (communist) politics, for the most part and in these past several decades, the U.S. labor movement has been quite closely connected with mainstream capitalism; it just has done everything to get its share.

I once had a political science professor in college who expressed puzzlement as to why the labor movement in this country did not tend more toward socialism (maybe he just wondered that for purposes of instruction – I’m not sure).

My answer was something to the effect that the average American wage earner always holds out the promise that he and she can get ahead and once he or she is ahead would rather not be saddled with helping others do what they should do for themselves. We have the promise of individual opportunity.

But when business leaders casually dismiss the needs of labor or blame labor for business failures instead of themselves and excuse their own extravagances, they might do well to keep in mind that what keeps us a free nation with a capitalist system is that hope to create a better life. And the answer is probably not that everyone can be in business for himself. There will always be those who do the work for others.

Best to keep them happy.

And to labor:

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you or kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Bankers can’t have contracts broken, unions can…

Question for all of you Wall Street apolologists and the Obama administration, who just can’t do enough for the billionaire bankers:

If the parent company New York Times can attempt to force the unions at the Boston Globe to accept abrogated contracts, then why couldn’t  the investment banks have abrogated their contracts with the million dollar bonus babies who put them into insolvency?

There seems to be little honor in corporate America

The federal government should not be bailing out domestic auto companies. It should not try to run them either. I am uncomfortable that the Obama administration felt it had to be the one to give CEO Rick Wagoner the boot out of  GM. Maybe the stockholders should have – I don’t know. Don’t even know if they had the power to.

It just doesn’t seem like the government ought to be that intamately involved in business.

And to make matters more bewildering, Wagoner reportedly may leave with a $23 million golden parachute. He had supposedly recently agreed to work for a $1 per year salary, it must be noted.

Maybe he felt guilty about having to beg or to extort the federal government out of billions of dollars in taxpayer money for a bailout. And maybe he felt a little bad about the fact that during his tenure as CEO, GM’s stock went from $70 per share to $3. He can’t blame it all on the worldwide economic downturn and that fuel spike last summer, since even in the good year of 2005 his company had lost $10.6 billion and suffered a 75 percent drop in its stock value under his leadership. (I got all those numbers out of an online Wall Street Journal story.)

But he’ll take his millions and run. There really is no shame in corporate America.

Most or all of these people who have led their companies down the drain and then had the audacity to ask for (demand?) taxpayer bailouts should have taken the traditional Japanese approach, no, not commit suicide, but resigned in the face of dishonor they had brought upon their companies and themselves.

As to their golden parachutes, well that is just part of the good old boy culture that has run corporate America where no one loses except the stockholders and the man and woman on the street, and oh, yes, the displaced workers, simply referred to as  ”labor”.

One does not have to be anti-corporate to call for a new system of personal honor and morals and eithics and integrity, although maybe one has to be a bit of an idealist to do so.

To some extent we have reaped what we have sewn throughout society. Morals and honor and ethics and integrity  are lacking perhaps at all levels.

P.s.

The Obama administration has made it plain bankruptcy might be in the offing for both GM and Chrysler (and why didn’t we go there to begin with?). Strangely and thankfully, Ford so far is surviving without bailout money. And American workers are turning out cars in the border states and South working for foreign auto makers and are glad to be working even if their wages are lower than those up north.

I understand the United Auto Workers union might think it can hold out for retaining some of its more bloated benefits because the new administration is more labor friendly. Seems like they might be happy just to retain or recover their jobs for now. And maybe management may have to have an attitude adjustment, at least until the market comes back,  as well.

Some inconvenient truths about truck driving…

(This is a slightly updated version of a previous blog.)

People out of jobs are going to truck driving school, an article in my local newspaper said. Been there done that. In fact, a newspaper article is what led me to my more than a decade odyssey out on the road.

Things are not as bright out there today – while there has been a big demand for truck drivers for years, with the downturn in the economy freight movement has fallen off sharply.

But I just wanted to get something in here for anyone who might be considering going the truck driving route.

Most of the entry level jobs for big truck driving are in what is called long haul. You need to realize that the rules of employment are different in that field than most others. The normal laws of pay and working conditions do not apply.

Typically, long haul drivers find themselves waiting a lot, far from home, baby sitting a truck, as I call it.  For the most part, as a long haul driver you will only be paid when your wheels are rolling. Long haul pays by the mile, not by the hour or fixed salary. Some companies do pay a little something for layover or even wait time (but usually not total wait time and such pay is usually not much, often not even minimum wage). And layovers can last for several days. I was once laid over for nearly a week, some 2,500 miles from home.

And if you don’t like wait time, I’d advise staying away from hauling refrigerated or temperature controlled freight (such as produce).  I once logged in 40 hours of wait time in one month, not counting sleeper birth or meal breaks. And I was not paid for any of it, as I recall (and if  I was it was only a few dollars).

I would discuss that issue upfront with a prospective employer (they may string you on, though).

Employers often quote cents per mile, but what they either lie about or do not tell you is that you may well not get in enough miles to make a living. It costs the employer very little to let you sit out there at a truck stop, because the employer does not have to pay you. It costs you a lot. When I began truck driving I found that a lot of drivers really were not making any money. They were simply drawing on their pay for subsistence and when it was time to get their paycheck they had little to nothing left. In fact, some of them owed the company.

Now this all sounds kind of negative. But long haul driving conditions, I believe, have improved somewhat since I got into it and got out of it.

(And for those of you who have not read my blog before, I drove truck for more than a decade. I worked in long haul for most of that time. My last job was what you might call short haul LTL (Less than a load) and paid well, but I came down with cancer, and am not able to work now.)

But I just wanted to point out some things folks not familiar with over-the-road trucking need to know. Another thing you might not have thought of is your schedule. No such thing. While some long haul drivers may have dedicated runs (going to the same place each time), most do not. In the course of a week, you will work around the clock; your hours will vary each day. That’s because pickups and deliveries are made at any hour of the day or night.

I won’t go over hours of service and log book rules in total detail, but basically under the current rules, you have 11 hours driving ahead of you before you are required to take a 10-hour break. There’s no limit to the time you can do non-driving work, but once you have reached 14 hours in one tour, you can no longer drive until you have that 10-hour break (remember, you could get to 14 hours with less than 11 hours driving, due to wait times and even loading and unloading, which you might be called upon to do or assist in, and don’t forget mechanical breakdowns and flat tires – they happen).

If you were to drive solo across the United States (and I have done that) you will find that your start and stop times roll around the clock. It would be like working at a factory but doing a different shift each day. Remember, somewhere in there you have to eat and let nature call and maybe even take a shower (maybe).

Under current rules, if you have 34 consecutive hours off, you start a week again with 70 hours available on your log book.

Some companies or dispatchers or your own greed or all three may goad you into cheating on your log book.  Or you might feel compelled to because you notice that the first to get his or her load delivered is often the first to get a reload. Do not do it! You, not anyone else, are liable if caught or anything goes wrong. The most likely scenario besides you falling asleep at the wheel and killing folks is that someone will run into you. If this happens and your log book is not up to date and/or legal, you may well get the blame under the law, no matter who was really at fault.

Then there is loading and unloading. I will say for most of time I did not touch freight. But if you do not touch the freight, you or someone (your employer) will have to pay someone to do it. It is not uncommon for drivers to end up loading and unloading on their own time and not get paid for it.

Finally, there is weather. If you will be driving over the mountains, particularly on the West Coast, you have to be prepared to handle snow chains. If you are not up to that, you have no business on the road, because you will be a danger to yourself and everyone else (there’s no shame in not being up to it, but there is in getting yourself out there and not being up to it).

I only touched the surface of this road. Most of what I wrote was negative. Ironically, I enjoyed the work immensely (although not every minute or day of it). A lot depends upon your employer and yourself and the type of freight you haul. And some feel a sense of independence out there. It certainly is not like most jobs. You are not highly supervised.

And in this time of high unemployment to have any job has become a status symbol. Just ask any unemployed investment banker (right after you ask him what the hell he did with that bonus check paid by your taxes).

Oh, and one more thing, long haul is not for anyone who wants a home life (that’s why I did not enjoy it all the time). I don’t care what employers promise you, from my experience, long haul drivers have no home life. I have heard many a long haul driver lament: “I didn’t get to see my kids grow up”.

Good luck!

(Copyright 2009)

USA’s main security threat may be Mexico and there are valid reasons to keep their trucks out…

While we are still fighting wars in the Middle East for somewhat nebulous reasons and no clear idea of our goals, the nation on our own southern border, Mexico, is in the midst of what might as well be called a civil war, with 7,000 deaths in the last 16 months, including high officials in its federal government, as well as town mayors and police chiefs, some of whom have sought political asylum in the U.S.

The Obama administration has announced a kind of token response on the border, but as I understand it, they are pulling immigration personnel from out of our interior to do so, conveniently letting the enforcement of the hiring of illegals slide as a sop to those who for some strange reason support the underground economy of illegal aliens, many of whom come from Spanish speaking nations to the south, most notably Mexico.

While some of the illegal migrants have gone back south because of the higher unemployment numbers in the USA, they face a problem in their homeland because their government is still corrupt after all these years, but it is trying to fight off drug lords, some of whom employ paramilitary against the Mexican soldiers and police.

Meanwhile, the violence is spilling across the border and is reaching into our northern cities, such as Chicago. Much of it involves illegals fighting over drug disputes, but sometimes hapless illegals, maybe not involved in the drug trade, get caught in the crossfire or become victims of kidnapings and ransom schemes, another popular line of work for criminals south of the border.

Mixed in with all this somehow is an ongoing dispute between Mexico and the United States over a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) program to allow a limited number of Mexican trucks to be able to cross the border and have a run of our country. Congress cancelled funding for the program recently, but the Obama administration has indicated it might resume the program in the future.

In retaliation, Mexico, one of our top trading partners, has applied tariffs on 90 U.S. products. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Mexico to smooth things over in the dispute and to promise the President Felipe Calderon administration there that the U.S. will help it in its fight against the drug cartels. And amidst all this, a Mexican defense official has warned the U.S. against any military incursions into his country (ala the Mexican-American War of the 1840s and the chase after Pancho Villa in the 1920s, I would suppose).

The truck program was cancelled in part supposedly over safety concerns, but probably also because the Teamster’s Union, a supporter of Democrats, was worried about the loss of American jobs.

Now before you go thinking I think this was a bad thing, think again. I was a trucker and as things stand I don’t think Mexican trucks should be allowed past our border. And I know something – not everything – about this subject, because as I said I was a trucker (and never a Teamster member) and furthermore I dealt with the border trucking scenario and know the landscape (my experience was at Nogales, Az. and Otay Mesa, Ca., and San Diego, Ca.).

Now first you need to know that our northern neighbor Canada runs its trucks throughout the U.S.

But the Canada/U.S. situation is nothing like what we face with Mexico.

A U.S. trucker can cross the border into Canada and go just about anywhere.

On the other hand, American trucks do not cross into Mexico and who would want to?

Canada is a civilized nation with the rule of law (probably more so than the USA, in some respects).

Mexico is highly corrupt (despite the efforts to clean things up by Calderon) with the bribes and intimidation as a standard operating procedure in business and law enforcement and everyday life there.

I once talked to a Mexican trucker and he told me that when he drove in his country there were no truck scales. But a policeman might stop a truck out on a lonely stretch of highway and decide supposedly by eyeballing a truck that it was overloaded and assess the fine and pocket it on the spot.

Who in their right mind would take their truck south of the border?

And working down on the border where my loads were transloaded into Mexican rigs, I got to see some of the wrecks they run up and down the highway. While not all USA trucks are up to par, many of the trucks the Mexicans use would not pass the same inspections USA trucks are given.

While they were running the pilot program allowing Mexican trucks in, I believe I saw some pretty questionable rigs running up and down our highways. I do not believe that these trucks were subjected to the same standards as USA trucks, probably due to political considerations.

Another problem is that while Canadian truckers speak English (and yes I know some of them speak French too), many of the Mexican truckers do not (they can’t even read our road signs).

(In the interests of fair play and full disclosure, I should note that some USA-licensed drivers, some of them from Eastern Europe, do not speak English. I actually watched one of these guys at a warehouse once and the freight receivers could not communicate with him. They had to make hand signals and lead him around and show him what to do with his paper work.)

And you have to understand that once you let an over-the-road truck over the border, it goes all over. It may deliver its original load into the country from Mexico at one place, but then haul other loads within the country between cities and only return to Mexico after hauling several loads.

If Mexico had actual law and order and was not corrupt, and if their truck safety standards and practices were better, it might well have a valid argument that its trucks should be allowed into our country and in turn we could also operate in Mexico.

It is unfortunate to have a dispute with Mexico because it is one of our top trading partners, but realities have to be accepted.

And back to the turmoil in Mexico. I don’t know why it has been downplayed. It threatens Mexico and it also threatens our own security.

Part of the problem is that the U.S. offers such a good market for the south-of-the-border drug cartels. Personal guns are illegal in Mexico, so guns from the U.S., to include high powered assault rifles and other powerful weapons, are basically traded from the north for the drugs from the south.

Combating the drug trade is a tough problem that we have not ever solved in the USA. I find calls to simply “legalize” illicit drugs to be dubious at best (and that was not some kind of marijuana pun – doobie is it?).

But meanwhile I don’t think we should tolerate cross border incursions, be they illegal aliens looking for work or engaged in the drug trade.

We need a military show of force at the border, as well as  a strong commitment of the various appropriate law enforcement agencies where needed to fight the drug cartels. And we should not let up on our enforcement of immigration laws at the workplace in the process.

We may well find that the biggest threat to our security is not in the rugged terrain of Afghanistan or the deserts and urban areas of Iraq but instead at our own southern doorstep.

In the long run we need to work hand in hand with the Calderon administration in Mexico, which from all reports is doing its best to fight both the drug cartels and to turn the tide on corruption that has existed so long in Mexico.

(Copyright 2009)

Union card check debate can be misleading

There’s a lot of misinformation going around on the so-called Employee Free Choice Act that has been introduced into both houses of congress.

On the one hand, the pro union side would have you believe the proposed legislation is designed to enhance freedom of choice for employees (I’m not so sure). On the other hand, the anti-union side, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, would have you believe that the unions are attempting to rob workers of their right to a secret ballot (well not entirely, maybe).

To compound all the misunderstanding a lot of liberal proponents who are not hourly employees who would likely be affected by all this are jumping on the bandwagon and pontificating on something they know not. They think they support the rights of workers, but they don’t wear the workers’ shoes.

While Wikipedia muffs it in its entry on card check, coming off as blatantly pro-union, it does a better job on its entry under Employee Free Choice Act. So if you want to get a synopsis of the whole issue read that.

But basically, as I understand it (and sometimes labor law is about as easy to read and understand as the baseball infield fly rule) as things stand now, a labor union can force a union vote if they can get 30 percent of the eligible employees to sign up for a card check. But employers can demand a secret ballot vote even if a union can get 100 percent to sign cards.

The new bill before congress would allow certification of a union without a formal vote if the union could get more than 50 percent to sign cards. “Card check” is the term bandied about by both sides.

As a side note, as I understand it, under current law a union can be decertified if 30 percent of the employees sign a petition calling for a decertification and then if a majority vote for decertification via secret ballot. All of this must be done under National Labor Relations Board oversight and rules. It can be complicated.

(Also, disputes over union votes, often involving eligibility of voters, drag on in the courts for years.)

So what does this mean to the common person? At first glance not much if you are not a union person. Of course you know that the more unionization the costlier products become, just ask General Motors.

My initial thought was chard check was an intimidating process. I mean you’re going to be approached by possibly a co-worker, someone who has more seniority, officially or unofficially, than you, or a union organizer who wants to imply you care nothing about your fellow workers if you don’t sign up.

I still think that way, but I also realize that no matter what the system, unless you eliminate unions altogether (and many would like to), there has to  be at least a posibility that a worker will will be asked to sign a petition, how else would a union request certification?

So on the card check, I think I won’t have an opinion, other than the fact that it does not interest me.

I did notice that the liberal blog The Daily Kos said something to the effect that card check was a secret ballot for employees. How so? Someone approaches me and asks me to sign a card. That is not much of a secret. It was suggested elsewhere that many employees would be tricked into thinking they were just showing a preference by signing a card, but that the actual certification of a union would require a further secret ballot vote. Not so. Under the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, 50 percent plus one sign up of cards and the union is in. The unions counter that there is still supposedly an option for workers to go the secret ballot route, but obviously the union organizers prefer the chard check route.

I have mixed emotions about unions. While I personally don’t prefer them, they may provide a kind of baseline for other workers.

The last trucking company I worked for had its union side and its non-union side. I worked on the non-union side. I was paid just as well as the union workers and I did not have to pay dues and I only had one set of bosses, the company, not the union and the company. But again, I have to believe that the union served as a baseline for wages and benefits. But under present economic conditions with a drastic downturn in freight, all that means nothing. Unions do not supply freight. (I’m using trucking as an example because that is where my applicable experience lies.)   

Unions at their best help workers get better pay and benefits and at their worst lead to overstaffing and inflexible work rules that hurt both productive workers and the employers who provide the wages. Unions sometimes force toleration of malingering in the workplace, and that hurts everyone (and I have witnessed this personally many times in many places).

For my money, employers who treat employees with respect (which by definition includes decent wages), demand a full day’s work for a day’s pay from everyone, need not fear unionization.

Right now I am not in the workforce. But if I were to return, card check would be a non-issue to me. I don’t plan on signing any union cards. I’ve always worked for the people who pay my wages.

(Copyright 2009)