This is a non-MMO post, so forgive me, but I have to vent.
I am incredibly tired of the way this country, our US-of-A, is run. Who the hell decided corporate America was anything other than an abomination, eh? I know that offends a lot of you but hear me out. I worked for Washington Mutual for three years, up until 2009 when our “We Ensure Slaves” progenitors bought us out. That’s Chase Bank Incorporated, by the way, the same company who has been repeatedly nailed for foreclosing on the homes of active duty veterans. Literally, one time wasn’t enough. Not to mention credit card exploitation. Don’t misunderstand, Washington Mutual was pretty terrible in its own way, dutifully ripping off its loyal customers with unethical posting practices — what, you mean deliberately posting charges in an order which maximizes $30 overdraft fees is bad, despite the actual order in which items were purchased? — and purposeless services charges which offer and require no actual service for $20+ a month. (Really, we did nothing on those accounts. Nothing. If you’re paying them, stop. It’s a fool’s errand.)
I am tired of working for Board of Directors, CEOs, project managers, and site overseers whose only job is to ask other people if they’ve done their job. This gets us nowhere. You know who makes America? Me and you. The people on the ground floor doing the work that makes these people their incredibly large paychecks. Our swear gets their mansions and our undersized houses. Hell, most of them don’t even answer their own email.
Let me give you an example. In the last three months of Washington Mutual’s life, over 5,000 people were laid off. Stock prices dropped immensely – two years made for an 85% drop in stock, from $45 to $3 per share. Our CEO earned a final quarter bonus of $15 million dollars. For three months. You and I lost our jobs. Kerry Killinger destroyed an American institution. He got millions upon millions while we got a spot in the unemployment line. Trickle down economics is working well, am I right?
Who are Boards? Faceless entities that give two shits about the people who are their company – because make no mistake, if you have ever talked to a customer, you mean more than any tight-wad suit ever did. They just earn off of our sweat. You get the anger and, on occasion, their kudos. It’s nice when it happens, really nice; makes you feel good as a person. Still, there is no millions to back up that satisfaction and probably not even a solid hundred. Maybe it’s because they had a family member in the business. Maybe they just worked their ass off. Both are possible. It doesn’t change the fact that it takes a heartless bastard to cast a blind eye to the people who make them their fortune and then fire huge swatches of them to match the bottom line. It’s self-serving. It’s un-Christian. And it’s damnably unkind despite the necessities of business. Moreover, it goes against the American spirit of Rising Up and Doing Well. That died with Nixon.
And on that token, let me give credence where credence is due. People need to be fired sometimes. I’m not some bleeding heart. In any industry, hard decisions need to be made and people will be hurt regardless. My issue is in pay differential. My issue is in social class differential. It is in the assholes collecting massive bonuses while simultaneously firing the people who made those bonuses possible. It is in the poor, the needy, and the weatherworn. It’s in the people that represent the companies who most of us probably have come to hate. Why? Because despite healthcare, despite the regularity of a paycheck, despite somewhere to go during the day – all great and admirable attributes we should all aspire to – that we’ve let our nation reward those who work the least.
Your damn board, your CEO, your store manager and power-hungry CSM, they all mean nothing. You know what pisses me off most? The deluded store manager who laces his emails with exclamation points hoping some douchebag manager sees it in hopes to get ahead. Make no mistake, a two year degree gives no asshole a right to talk down to you. And no, that’s not my case, but it is that of a friend — a well educated and highly experienced friend who has spent years upon years doing highly technical work for the Air Force. Work in corporate America a while and you’ll see. It’s not about how you can manage, it’s about how hard you can crack a whip. Why? Because we’re expendable, you and I. Forgive me for this, because I’m a Christian man, but it’s simply because they don’t give a fuck about us. We’re a means to an end. We on the ground floor and the managers in the store we work in. Except our managers have been fed a temptation of hope.
Forget your impoverished working-man and you doom yourself to Rome and the rest of our world’s fallen nations. Make no mistake: America, Europe, and all the world are one big Justice Scale. Let it lean too far in one direction and everything we work for gets pissed away in one great lean.
There is no hope to be found in this post, despite how much I hope their were. The only thing I offer is awareness. Don’t buy in to the utter bullshit that they can be you. Maybe in another life. And maybe you can build that. I hope you can. For most of us, our lives levy on the whim of people we’ll never meet and to whom are families are dots on a bottom line. Is that who you want to support? If you ask who else, I have no answer. Our nation is well and truly down the rabbit hole and we have no recourse. Occupy all you like but it would have best happened 100 years past. Today, all I can say is scrape with all your will. I wish you the best.
Not that this, or anything we might say, makes a differences. We’re not CEOs after all.
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