Work | Working Stiffed

American Workers are Less Productive: No Job Security, No Motivation

American workers are not feeling the love. A lack of job security, combined with increasing responsibilities (and fewer resources) has resulted in exhaustion, low morale, lack of motivation and (drum roll please)…lower productivity.

The U.S. Department of Labor said last Tuesday, that productivity fell 0.5 percent in the second quarter of 2016, while labor costs rose by 2 percent. U.S. worker productivity has been weak for the past five years and stands at 1.2 percent, less than half of what it was before the 2007 recession, when it was at 2.6 percent.

Many economists say Americans are working more to create less, because workers have outgrown existing technology. As a result, we can expect “restraining” of wage growth and more layoffs. And so the epidemic of myopic economics continues.

Don’t these geniuses realize that reducing financial incentives and increasing employee workloads as the result of layoffs will only drive productivity down further? These “experts” may know the price of everything, but they know the value of nothing.

U.S. workers today are routinely being pushed to their mental and physical breaking points. Workplaces are toxic work environments staffed by people either in the midst of a psychotic break or on the brink of one. The stench of fear and uncertainty lingers in every cubicle, assembly line, water cooler, coffeemaker and non-subsidized vending machine.

It doesn’t help that employers like Disney, Toys ‘R Us, Xerox, Pfizer, and Microsoft are turning to “insourcing” of H1-B visa workers in order to lower their payroll costs, despite posting record earnings…and then they force their poor displaced American employees to train their “guest” worker replacements or forfeit their severance.

Corporate Hunger Games?

As an unwilling participant of the gig economy, I’ve been flitting in and out of different corporate offices for the past four years. The mass psychosis and/or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) I see is alarming, but not surprising.

When you experience three or four (or more) reorgs a year and know that on any given day you could walk into work and be handed a severance package, even if you’ve been a rock star employee (damn those surprise mergers!), it’s bound to damage your psyche to some extent at some point. And at the end of the day, you become aware that there is no “i” in team, but there is one in “survive.”

This past year, I’ve had two assignments where the person responsible for training me held back information I needed to know in order to do my job. Both women were overworked and clearly needed my help, so I can only conclude that they felt that if I knew as much as they did, they wouldn’t survive the next reorg.

They obviously felt it was safer to be overworked to the point of mental and physical exhaustion than to have the well-trained help they desperately needed. How sick is that? Still, they survived round after round of layoffs and salary dumps, so I suppose it’s not an unrealistic fear to expect to be replaced by a contractor who probably made less than they did.

Needless to say, this epidemic of fear and loathing in workplace after workplace makes it hard to stick to a new employer, even when you do a good job under most challenging circumstances. It’s like an endless loop of different movies made with the same script. Sometimes, I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

No rest for the corporate weary

This environment of perpetual job insecurity has scared workers into being on the job 24/7. According to a study by Project Time, more than half of U.S. workers left unused vacation time in 2015. In fact, over the past 15 years, American workers have been taking less and less vacation time.

These poor souls likely feel that if they take time off, their bosses might replace them with an intern or hourly contractor…or worse, that someone of importance may decide that their department functions just fine without anyone in their role.

These are the same people who make work calls after dinner and send emails at 11 p.m. on Saturdays in an endless quest for validation and job security. It’s madness! But this is exactly the frame of mind that bipolar CEOs value in their employees.

Rising labor costs? No shit!

Hiring people costs money, and when your business model involves having a revolving door of “talent,” even if you’re replacing 20 full-time employees with 10 gig contractors or H1-B visa guest workers, you’ll end up throwing a lot of good money after bad. Recruiters, equipment and training costs add up.

And then there is the learning curve. It takes a while (sometimes years) before most employees achieve optimal knowledge of their company and/or industry. Many employers learn the hard way that inexperience can be pretty costly, especially in industries that are heavily regulated.

And how many times have employers carelessly displaced long-time employees, only to find they also unwittingly displaced a lot of company knowledge that their low-cost millennial or H1-B visa colleagues didn’t have? Too many; but they repeat the process, anyway. Einstein said the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. So, there you go.

And while we’re on the subject of insanity: If a company wants to treat employees like disposable widgets, then they should stop asking employees to participate in charitable drives in the company’s name. This is inconsiderate at best, and perverse (or even sociopathic) at worst.

Also, I’m not sure why this isn’t obvious, but it’s never a good idea to have leadership team members spew empty rhetoric about “teamwork” and “commitment” at employee or town hall meetings in the same breath that they announce layoffs. What is up with that? I can’t think of a better way to incite workplace violence or corporate espionage. Seriously.

When I worked at Philip Morris in the 90s, we were hit by lawsuits left and right while dodging regulatory challenges by the FDA. If our then CEO had followed today’s popular strategy of slashing headcount and hiring cheap labor, the company probably would have folded before the end of the millennium.

Instead, they doubled down on staffing up, paying above average salaries and they had the best benefits. They understood that if they were going to survive, they needed a knowledgeable and dedicated workforce. Not only did the company survive, but it thrived…the stock split multiple times during the 90s and they’re still around today.

If employees feel valued, enjoy support, and know that if they do a good job, they’ll not only stay employed but they can expect to be promoted and rewarded financially, well…there’s no end to the growth a company can experience. Until “leaders” rediscover the core fundamentals of entrepreneurial success, true growth and peak productivity will likely remain elusive.

A lot is written about the trendy, flexible perks of the gig economy. Sure, it can be “liberating,” if you have a husband or wife who is a high-powered lawyer or doctor and you can “gig” with abandon between sessions of binge-watching “Orange is the New Black,” but for those of us in single-income households, these new “alternative work arrangements” are nothing short of a nightmare that keeps us on the constant brink of financial disaster.

The gig economy is even harder on people over 50; we’re less likely to be able to slide into consecutive contract positions as effortlessly as workers who are in their 20s or 30s.

Last week, my latest “gig” ended prematurely, because the multi-billion dollar medical device company that had hired me just three months earlier decided to dump all the contractors in my business unit. This was the “first wave” of their third reorg in six months.

This was supposed to be a one year assignment…so much for honoring our contract. I didn’t see this one coming, because several managers had sent my manager unsolicited compliments about my work and I really liked it there.

I actually thought I had a shot of staying on and eventually becoming an FTE (full-time employee). My hiring manager even dangled that possibility during my interview. Huh…foolish mortal. At the end of the day, I was just another anonymous blip on some overcompensated executive’s spreadsheet.

Health care or wealth care?

This scenario was déjà vu all over again for me; the gig I had before this one — this time with a multi-million dollar health care system that is owned by a multi-billion dollar global chemical company (chew on that alliance for a while) — ended exactly the same way after only four months. Again, I was told this was a one year assignment, and again, I was caught under the wheels of a budget-cutting reorg.

It’s not just small- or medium-sized budget-conscious businesses that treat their workforce like the girlfriend they like to sleep with but will never marry, its billion dollar health care conglomerates, and equally flush Wall Street and Silicon Valley mega-employers.

If they can’t afford to hire people at a decent wage and provide benefits, who can? Of course they can; they just don’t. And they have our government’s blessing to treat us like disposable napkins…wipe and toss.

After a lifetime of steady, salaried middle-management employment, it’s hard to find yourself unprotected as an independent contractor. Gone are jobs that pay a living wage that increase with time for work well done, humane work hours, job security, health insurance, pensions and other traditional benefits.

We no longer have rights or unions to protect us and keep us steadily employed. In fact, the globalist-owned media has been waging a successful propaganda campaign to demonize unions for years, while our politicians (beginning with Ronald Reagan) have been simultaneously gutting the rights of unions and union members.

This is a tragedy, especially since gig workers can go weeks (or months) without work and we live in fear of getting sick or injured, because if we can’t work, we can’t earn money. Frankly, I could use a strong union right about now.

And when we do find work, it’s usually through temp agencies we’ve never heard of (some are offshore). They place us and pay us (while taking a piece of every hour we work). All we can do is hope that, since they have our social security number and all of our proprietary information, that they don’t sell our identity to some cyber criminal or exploit it themselves.

What’s to stop them? I’m not aware of any protections in place. Again, this is not a priority for our “representatives” in government.

The curse of NAFTA

The table was set for our growing transient workforce with the passage of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement). We have Bill, and yes, Hillary Clinton to thank for this travesty. NAFTA gave greedy corporate chieftains access to unlimited cheap, offshore labor and officially placed the middle class American worker on the extinction list.

The post-NAFTA war against the middle class began when companies started getting rid of our pensions; phase two involved outsourcing tech support and customer service to countries that provided cheap offshore labor for U.S.-based companies.

Eventually, with the assistance of bought-off members of Congress, greedy corporate titans started bringing in foreign workers through H1-B visas. The rationale was that there weren’t enough qualified people in this country to fill the many “jobs” they were creating.

This is a lie, as the recent Disney IT employee fiasco proves (they let go of their U.S. IT team, imported foreign workers to fill the positions at lower wages, and forced the displaced workers to train their replacements or forfeit their severance packages).

Other companies have, and continue, to follow Disney’s example. Mainstream media has (surprisingly) covered this issue, and still not a peep from Congress or Obama.

Elizabeth Warren did recently mention the need to address this issue, but to date, she hasn’t introduced any legislation to remedy the situation, so who cares what she thinks? She’s paid to fix these things. So, get to steppin’ Betty.

To make things worse, our taxes are used to provide these companies with subsidies. So, essentially, we’re paying for our own funeral.

More than half of all jobs created since 1995 were non-standard jobs, which include part-time workers, contract workers or self-employed people, according to a report published in May 2015 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

While our politicians hammer us with wedge issues like gun control, whine endlessly about the “humanitarian” need to let in an an endless stream of unvetted refugees and pat themselves on the the back for enforcing the “Dreamer Act,” they ignore the plight of their constituents, the American worker.

The American middle class is dying, and while Congress and Obama administer the last rites, it’s becoming obvious that there won’t be anyone left to attend the funeral.

At my most recent “gig,” I worked with some people who had been employed for anywhere from six to 18 years. The only three people “hired” within the past year, including me, were contractors…not one FTE.

One of the “vested” employees often griped about the threat of her bonus being sub-par this year. She knew that I had a solid career as a salaried management employee until recently and that, despite being good at my job, I couldn’t find a similar role in this economy.

She sympathized with my circumstances, but I could tell she didn’t think she was at risk of experiencing a similar fate…after all, what happened to me only happened to “other” people, not her. I wish I could tell her that she’s right, but I know better. The reality is that if we all don’t push our representative to fix this now, my gig worker misery will have a whole lotta company soon.

Yes, it’s true. Obamacare has sentenced me to death…and financial destitution. I feel it’s important to address this issue on this, the last day we are told to register for Obamacare without incurring an unconstitutional tax penalty.

I have been without health insurance, which I cannot afford, for a year-and-a-half and I live in a state that does not extend Medicaid to people in my position. As a result, I am one serious disease or accident away from certain death.

After dutifully paying taxes for close to 40 years, helping to send other people’s kids to school (I don’t have kids) and funding food stamps and benefits for thousands of people, my government is repaying me by turning its back on me during my hour of need…and penalizing me for my new-found destitution, to boot.

How did this happen? I am a 52-year-old woman who was last employed in a full-time position with benefits four years ago; I was part of a group purge after my company was acquired by a competitor. This scenario is familiar to most of you, I’m sure. I thought I’d find another job with benefits easily, but I was wrong.

As The New York Times recently reported, women over 50 account for half of all long-term unemployed people. After remaining steadily employed in good, white collar lower management positions for more than 30 years, I was suddenly an unwilling participant in the trendy new gig economy out of necessity.

For this I owe a big thanks to Bill Clinton and NAFTA, which destroyed the American middle class by allowing companies to ship jobs overseas and import H1-B visa “guest workers.” Now, many of us find that we’re unemployable more than 20 years before we can collect a pension (if we even have one) or Social Security (if it will still exist by then).

My new reality involves going months without work, or “contracts,” and even when I do get a temporary contract position, my “clients” periodically cut my hours without warning. As a result, I made less than $10k last year.

Needless to say, I can’t afford the so-called affordable insurance Obama promised. According to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health care exchange marketplace, I’d need to pay $550 a month for a policy with an $8,000 deductible. And what good is a subsidy when you go months without any income?

A low-cost, pre-Obamacare catastrophic insurance policy would be helpful right about now. Unfortunately, Obamacare-less forces me to buy an overpriced policy with a high deductible, so that I can share the privilege of paying for some dude’s Viagra prescription and pediatric dental insurance (like I said, I don’t have kids).

To make things worse, I’m about to get hit with the Obamacare penalty…and this is on top having to drain my savings and take hardship withdrawals from my 401(k) (which I am also about to be unfairly penalized for) just to survive in our “new normal” transient, gig economy that mainstream media finds so hip and trendy.

I’ve decided that if something happens to me health-wise, I’m just going to die, because if I am hospitalized, I stand to lose my home and what little I have left, so why bother sticking around?

If you like Obamacare, it’s probably because you don’t need it

I am so tired of brainwashed Obamacare defenders crowing about the 12 million Americans who couldn’t get insurance before now having coverage. Frankly, in a country of 330 million people where close to 100 million are out of the workforce (many not by choice), that’s a drop in the uninsured bucket, so bragging is totally uncalled for. Maybe they’re promoting this “success” because they know that math-challenged Common Core students are easily impressed by any number you throw at them.

Obamacare supporters are also quick to blame states that don’t extend Medicaid. Why? Should citizens of states that aren’t on board with Obamacare be penalized? There wasn’t a Medicaid referendum in any state that I am aware of.

And, if Obamacare is supposed to mandate affordable insurance for all, why didn’t it nationalize Medicaid? At the very least, it should exempt those of us who live in Medicaid-deprived states from Obamacare.

And then there’s the pre-existing condition clause. Sorry, Obamacare defenders, but I’m not down with being stuck with the rest of this ugly baby just for that one benefit. Besides, a single-payer health care solution would take care of pre-existing conditions just as effectively. As it stands, the insurance companies are offsetting their pre-existing condition “losses” with double-digit rate increases each year.

Not surprisingly, I find that the strongest supporters of this crony capitalist screw job are people who have employer-paid health insurance or at least make or have enough money to overpay for their insurance.

I know a couple of people who used to sing the praises of Obamacare….until they lost their jobs, were forced to join the gig economy, and had to actually rely on Obamacare for coverage. Needless to say, both have now joined the repeal Obamacare bandwagon.

It’s unconstitutional

The lie Obama sold us (among many) when he was promoting this travesty was access and affordability…and, of course, we couldn’t keep our doctors, after all (not that we can afford them now anyway, so I suppose this is a moot point for those of us who inhabit the Obamacare penal colony). I admit that I bought the spin. I even voted for the lying clown. What we got instead was a gun to our heads forcing us to purchase an overpriced product from PRIVATE companies or face hefty, escalating tax penalties.

No income limits were set; whether you make $10k (or less) or $100k a year, if you don’t buy insurance, you get taxed. Seriously? How is that legal? Or fair? First of all, people who make less than $30k shouldn’t pay ANY taxes, never mind have tax penalties imposed upon them.

And if Obama was so hell-bent on insuring us, why didn’t he mandate maximum premium amounts that insurers could charge? Say, $200 a month? Let’s call Obamacare what it is: a blank corporate welfare check to the insurance companies.

Not a peep from presidential candidates

NOT ONE presidential candidate has addressed this travesty. Several running for president are sitting members of Congress. They’ve taken a two year paid vacation on our tax payer dime to attend fundraisers and campaign for an office most don’t stand a chance of winning. Must be nice.

NOT ONE of them (including our socialist man of the people, Bernie Sanders) can be bothered to spare a moment to introduce legislation NOW to at least waive the “Cadillac tax” penalty. No, instead of nuking the toxic provisions of Obamacare, Congressional members voted to repeal the whole thing, knowing that the president would veto the resolution….pure theater…or political masturbation.

As a member of Congress you have a unique opportunity to demonstrate your leadership abilities through legislation, and there’s no time like the present. That’s probably the ONLY advantage you have over Donald Trump. Talk is cheap. So, why not lead by example? Because, frankly, too many of us don’t have a year to wait for action…nor do we trust empty campaign promises.

Speaking of leading by example, I invite Obamacare defenders to show me how great it is by contributing funds to pay my Obamacare tax penalty and/or my monthly insurance premiums. On second thought, the way our economy is going, maybe you should hang on to your money…you’ll probably need it to pay for your own “affordable” Obamacare insurance someday.

If you went back in time 20 or more years ago and told the people back then that in the near future employers would force them to take a blood test or they would lose their health insurance coverage, I’m sure they’d laugh and assume you were citing some obscure subplot from Orwell’s 1984.

You see, not too long ago, if such a widespread policy was proposed, people would have been outraged and protests would have broken out nationwide to put an end to such a blatant invasion of privacy.

Not so in 21^st century America. It looks like all the GMOs we eat, the fluoride in our water and the toxic mercury- and formaldehyde-laced vaccines we take willingly (or not so willingly, if you live in California) has left us brain damaged and semi-comatose.

We know our smartphones and TVs have taken a chunk out of our IQs, which may explain why 10 percent of college grads now believe that Judge Judy is a Supreme Court justice and some Americans think that Martin Luther King was the first black man on the moon. How else can we explain this epidemic of apathy and ignorance when it comes to our rights and freedoms?

We should have known we were in trouble when poor Edward Snowden hung his life out on the line to warn us about the criminal intrusiveness of our government only to have many Americans just shrug and say, “So what? I’ve got nothing to hide.” Hell, these pod people even parroted the government propaganda that he was a traitor.

I’m sure Snowden was even more shocked by our zombie-like reaction to our government’s widespread violation of the Fourth Amendment than he was when he discovered the extent of U.S. government surveillance. He obviously overestimated our present capacity for outrage and action.

So it should come as no surprise that corporate America wants to get in on the invasive fun. And why not? With health insurance premiums skyrocketing, it was only a matter of time before they would exploit our complacent idiocy by persuading employees to willingly submit to biometric screenings that measure blood pressure, weight, waist size, body mass index (BMI), cholesterol levels and other health vitals, or risk paying health coverage surcharges (as smokers already do) or losing coverage altogether.

So what if these wellness programs violate Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) laws or the protected health information (PHI) provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)? You’ve got nothing to hide, right? And, gee, what’s wrong with getting healthy and getting a discount on your employer health insurance coverage?

The Gift of Obamacare: Making Private Health Information Public

As if the Patient Protection and “Affordable” Care Act (ACA) wasn’t bad (and unconstitutional) enough by forcing you to buy health insurance from a private company under threat of tax penalties (?), we can also blame Obamacare for the explosion of invasive employee wellness screenings.

Surprised? Don’t be. After all, the ACA was written by the insurance companies and Jonathan Gruber, an arrogant, elitist jerk from MIT who laughed and admitted that the stupidity of American voters made this mess possible.

One would have thought that the Gruber fiasco would have been enough to inspire public outrage and force a repeal of Obamacare…but, again, you’d be overestimating the pod people who have body-snatched millions of once spirited, freedom-loving Americans.

The ACA helped advance the notion that healthy lifestyles would control health care costs; what seemed like harmless, even positive, rhetoric at the time has now been exposed as just another privacy-invading, money-making venture. It’s always about taking your money and invading your privacy with these clowns.

Anyone who has had a screening or physical in recent years knows that these examinations are designed to do one thing and one thing only…to make you a lifelong dependent on some hideously overpriced pharmaceutical drug that has 29 potentially lethal side effects (and the more drugs they can prescribe, safely or not, the better).

In 2014, 95 percent of employers had a health risk assessment, biometric screening or some type of wellness screening program in place, and 74 percent of the programs dangled an incentive carrot to get employees to participate (comply) usually a modest discount in health plan premiums.

Such high adoption rates by employers mean that these programs will now likely determine the course of your career. Good luck climbing the corporate ladder after your boss learns that you’re on an anti-psychotic and three blood pressure medications.

It’s Voluntary…Until it’s Not

Even if your company’s wellness plan is voluntary now, don’t be fooled. That’s how it always starts. Like a lot companies, Flambeau, a Wisconsin-based plastic maker, introduced their “voluntary” wellness program as a way to lower their health care costs and cut down on employee sick days.

But since wellness programs need high participation rates in order to get the best bang for the corporate buck, when participation rates are low, some companies are motivated to take off the kid gloves and make it a requirement for keeping insurance coverage. That’s what Flambeu did, and one employee who refused to participate in Flambeau’s program filed a complaint with the EEOC.

The Flambeu lawsuit is one of several such cases working their way through the legal system these days. The EEOC’s main argument in the Flambeu suit, and others like it, is that forcing employees to participate in wellness programs, especially when they involve biometic screening or health assessments, violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The ADA prohibits companies from obtaining personal health information from employees or requiring that they submit to a medical exam. End of story, right?

Not so fast. For some reason, the U.S. District Court in Wisconsin didn’t see it that way. They ruled that data collected through wellness programs doesn’t violate the ADA. The EEOC is reviewing the decision, whatever that means.

Biometric Gene-ings and GINA

While the EEOC is leveraging ADA protections in its wellness program lawsuits, it’s also citing the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), as it did in its suit on behalf of employees of Honeywell. Under GINA, employers are prohibited from requesting genetic information from employees, especially when that information is tied to health insurance coverage.

Honeywell employees turned to the EEOC after they balked at participating in the company’s wellness program and were slapped with a fat insurance premium surcharge. Employee spouses weren’t spared either; they were hit with a $1,000 tobacco surcharge for not coughing up their DNA, whether they smoked or not (guilty until proving innocent?).

Smokers know a thing or two about health insurance tyranny. Our poor, nicotine-addicted social pariah friends are always convenient canaries in the coal mine when it comes to test driving civil rights violations.

The EEOC cited both the ADA and GINA in the Honeywell case. And while the Minnesota District Court denied the EEOC’s request to issue a temporary restraining order against Honeywell’s wellness program, in its decision, the court expressed some concern as to how the ACA wellness directive would jibe with the ADA, GINA and other privacy laws. Ya think?

The courts are all over the place in these decisions (lower courts have handed out victories to both sides) and it’s hard to say when, or if, definitive judicial determination will ever emerge.

Employee Wellness Programs Can Hurt Your Credit Rating?

Another consideration: you may have noticed that your company hired an outside company to administer their wellness program. In addition to worrying that your boss will learn that you have high blood pressure, should you also be concerned that your info will be sold to a credit monitoring company or third-party marketer…and that your screening could affect your ability to get a car loan or mortgage in the future?

As it turns out, yes, you should be concerned, because wellness program vendors are not bound by HIPAA privacy protections.

If you read the fine print in their terms & conditions, you’ll find that many of these contractors have policies that allow them to share “identifiable data” with unidentified third parties “working to improve employee health.” Also, “de-identified” group health results are regularly shared with employers and researchers, and it’s been proven that this data can easily by “re-identified” and used for credit screening, marketing…or even… job displacement?

Think that Fitbit or other wearable fitness device makes you look cool? It turns out it also makes data mining your vitals that much easier. Nice, huh?

Health Care Employees VOLUNTEER their Protected Health Information

As an uninsured, underemployed freelancer, wellness programs didn’t ping my radar until recently when my client, a prestigious regional health care system, needed me to craft some employee communications regarding their wellness program.

The last time I was a full-time, salaried employee, employee wellness programs were strictly voluntary, so I didn’t give it a second thought. I quickly learned how much the ACA changed things.

Having worked in health care in some capacity for nearly two decades, I couldn’t believe that hospital personnel would agree to this madness. After all, these people would be terminated immediately if they violated a patient’s private health information, so why would they surrender their own private information? Shockingly, I learned many did just that.

I’m sure many workers realize this is a violation of their privacy, but they’re scared that if they don’t participate, they’ll end up on some undesirable human resources list (unfortunately, they’re probably right).

Others, who see themselves as being fit and healthy, may comply because they feel that they…wait for it… have nothing to hide. Good for them, but what if someone has a condition that they have a right to hide from the world?

What if you’re bipolar or diabetic, for example? Or, what if you have either condition, but don’t know it yet? Would you feel comfortable having your boss find out at the same time that you do? And how confident are you that you’d survive the next mass layoff if your biometric screening places you outside “normal” health levels in one or more categories? After all, there’s no way to prove that your condition would have had anything to do with your termination.

Don’t think for one minute that today’s corporate tightwads won’t weigh your health status when deciding if they want, or need, to part company with you, especially if they know that your fat medical bills will go with you.

Unfortunately, these days, the government and large employers don’t have to try too hard to push us toward controlled serfdom; they’ve handed us the shovel and we’re digging our way there ourselves, thank you. The powers that be have no need to fear torch and pitchfork mobs in the U.S. anymore.

No, the freeze-dried American zombie masses are content to drink beer, obsess over football and reality TV (our modern day bread and circuses) and to silently go along to get along. I guess as long as we have “nothing to hide” and Judge Judy is sitting on the Supreme Court, we have nothing to worry about.

It’s less than a week before Christmas, so it must be time for Congress to perform yet another hate crime against the American people…the people they were hired to represent (but rarely do). As always, they try to slip through the most revolting legislation in the dead of night, preferably on a holiday, when they hope most of us will be too drunk on eggnog to pay attention. I’m surprised they didn’t pull this latest legislative abomination on Christmas Eve, actually. Maybe they were counting on all of us to be blinded by light sabers after watching the latest Star Wars sequel.

At 2 a.m. Wednesday morning, Paul Ryan, unveiled a trillion dollar omnibus spending bill to his colleagues that included a number of jaw-dropping provisions; many of which further assaulted U.S. workers and our ability to find and retain meaningful employment. Basically, the bill:

Strips protections for low-wage American workers
Quadruples the number of foreign workers in the U.S. through the H2-B visa program

Meet the new boss…same as the old boss…

Paul Ryan, the overwhelming choice for House Speaker (by both democrats and republicans) after John Boehner was “smoked out” a few months ago, has now ably demonstrated that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

If they ever consider making another “Despicable Me” sequel, Paulie can throw on a gender-neutral, yellow minion costume and drag on Boehner’s nicotine- and alcohol-stained coattails, while obediently squeaking incoherently.

Wedged into the 2,000 page bill was a provision that allows employers to import up to 264,000 low-wage foreign workers under the H2-B “guest worker” program; this more than quadruples the 2015 maximum of 66,000. The program allows these low-skilled “seasonal” workers to stay for up to 10 months.

Apparently, Congress thinks that there are an awful lot of jobs that Americans won’t do. We know otherwise. Up to 200,000 blue collar hotel, construction and other service industry workers could find themselves out of work without re-employment options. The omnibus bill not only allows employers to set migrant worker wages, it also allows them to cut the hourly wages paid to American workers. How’s that for representation?

The bill was passed by the House (by a 2-1 margin) just days after the Pew Research Center reported that the American middle class is indeed shrinking, and just weeks after another recent Pew Research poll found that 83 percent of American voters want to see the level of immigration frozen or reduced.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), expressed his exasperation in a passionate speech on the House floor; he chided his colleagues for readily supporting the bill, despite the fact that the nation’s labor force participation rate is at just 62 percent.

“The people sent us here (Washington) to protect their interests,” Sessions said. “They did not send us here to bow down to the president’s lawless immigration policies or to line the pockets of special interests in big business.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBqrWL3h9-g

Sadly, Mr. Sessions…that’s just what they did. The hubris of this group is unbelievable. How long will we allow this to go on?

Being a freelancer these days has a lot of perks: you make your own work schedule and you can work from the comfort of your home, thus you can avoid messy office politics, getting stuck in commuter traffic and blowing your ever-shrinking “gig economy” earnings on a “business casual” wardrobe and workplace lunches.

Sure, there are some challenges to freelancing, like convincing clients that your rates are reasonable while they plead poverty or hide behind budget cuts, or getting them to pay you on time (or at all), or having to diplomatically push back on their requests for additional revisions or input that they don’t feel they should have to pay extra for.

Still, the biggest challenge I’ve found as a freelancer is my lack of psychic ability.

If you’re a freelancer, you may have noticed that your clients tend to fall into two categories:

Small businesses that need to hire you because they don’t have the in-house talent to do what you do (e.g., marketing, Web development, etc.).

Middle managers in mid- to large-size companies that have downsized their marketing or IT departments into oblivion who need you to help them get the work done (without having to offer you a steady salary or benefits).

Champagne Dreams on a Spam Budget

Small business clients don’t like budgeting for anything outside of their company’s inventory, so when they reach the painful conclusion that they need to hire you to help increase their brand’s visibility, your biggest challenge is usually managing their expectations.

Even if you find yourself pricing their projects on the low end of your rate scale and they can only offer you a limited amount of work, some clients will expect your handiwork to deliver astounding results in record time.

This is when the fun starts. With some small business clients, you can expect one or both of the following outcomes:

(a) You will spend the next three months asking for your money.

(b) Your client will continue to ask/expect you to do more work outside of the scope of your original agreement until they feel they got an adequate return on their investment. Some of us foolishly keep feeding this beast in the hope that someday these clients will actually pay us for the original work.

If you were psychic, you could avoid a lot of aggravation by knowing ahead of time who won’t pay you or who will likely run you into the ground making you “earn” your money.

I May Not Know What I Want…But I Know What I Don’t Want

Sometimes it’s easier to work with mid- or large-size businesses, because the manager who hires you is more likely to process your invoice…unless they are so overworked that they keep forgetting to do so (which happens more often than is acceptable). Still, as long as they have the budget, you’re not likely to get any push-back or experience unreasonable haggling.

The biggest challenge of freelancing for larger companies is that the mid-level managers who tend to hire you are so overworked that even though they desperately need your help, they often don’t have the time to provide you with what you need to do the job right.

As their hired gun, you’re priority No. 59 on their long to-do lists…way below assisting their VPs and other important business stakeholders, planning the company United Way drive, booking their vacations, arranging their bimonthly date nights with their spouses, finding babysitters for their children or getting their dogs groomed.

Sometimes these clients don’t even know what they’re asking for, while other times all they know is what they don’t want. And woe to the freelancer who receives limited guidance and inadvertently submits what they don’t want.

These clients expect you to have the skill to write or develop exactly what they would, if they only had the time. So what if they’ve had months or years to become well-acquainted with their company’s business objectives, and to attend company-sponsored training and meetings on a regular basis when you haven’t? You oughta know what they’re looking for, anyway, dammit!

The Phantom Lucrative Project

Another potential pitfall of being hired by a large company is one I call “the phantom lucrative project.” A typical scenario involves you blocking out weeks to do a job after being hired by a large, reputable company. Sometimes, you’ll be so happy you got the gig that you’ll celebrate by going on a shopping spree for laptops, patio furniture…or food, if things have been tight for you financially of late.

Then, you hear nothing more from them. When you contact your client, you are given excuses as to why the project is being delayed (e.g., they were on vacation, the project still needs approvals that your client wasn’t aware weren’t in place when he or she hired you, etc.).

The fact that you turned down smaller projects to work on their mega-project doesn’t resonate with them. After all, these people get paid even when they’re working on their tans in Cabo.

Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you’ll wait for weeks to start the project only to be told that it’s been canceled (again, for any number of reasons from budget cuts, to the need to move resources to a more important project, or the project has been mothballed so long it’s actually now irrelevant…or the sponsor was terminated).

Having the psychic intuition to avoid these phantom projects would help keep you that much further away from financial ruin.

Having a pay-or-play deal in place would also help. Unfortunately, unless you have a waiting list of clients or you’re regularly profiled by the top trade media in your field, that ship won’t sail. Your prospective client will just move on to another freelancer who will agree to grant the company the option of leaving them hanging without compensation. Ah, the joys of working in the “gig economy.”

Since I wasn’t born with psychic ability, I’ve decided that the best gift I can receive this Christmas is a crystal ball that can offset my psychic shortcomings…or better yet, a winning mega-jackpot lottery ticket that would get me out from under the freelancer-client bus for good.

Anyone who is surprised by the recent Pew Research Center report that the American middle class is “losing ground” hasn’t been paying attention.

Even Helen Keller could have seen this coming. According to the report, the rich keep getting obscenely richer. You don’t say! Another shocker: more than a quarter of adult Americans 65 or older improved their bottom lines (26.7 percent), while many of the rest of us have been bleeding out financially.

Ah, yes, the postwar “me-me-me generation” of baby boomers; the generation that was in charge in the ‘90s. Some of their notable achievements:

Supporting job-busting “trade” agreements (NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT, et al.), which laid the groundwork for the even more suicidal TPP
They converted the personal-sounding term “personnel” into the more disposable-sounding “human resources”…morphed “hiring” into “onboarding” … and turned “firing” into the sterile “offboarding” or murderous “terminating”
And now, many won’t retire, even when they are comfortable financially, making an already tight labor market even less accessible to the rest of us

Me-me-me to the end.

The study also showed that from 1970-2015, adult blacks saw a larger increase in income than any other racial or ethnic group (up 11.2 percent), and blacks were also the only group not to experience a decline in their lower-income share. See? Sometimes black lives do matter!

Married people with or without children at home also fared much better than single people. That makes sense, since it now takes two salaries to equal half of what one salary was worth 10 years ago.

Pew defines middle class Americans as adults whose annual income is double to two-thirds of the national median wage. In 1971, 61 percent of adult Americans enjoyed middle class status; that rate has plunged to only 50 percent now. The number of high income American adults spiked from 14 percent to 21 percent, and the number of low income households also increased (from 25 percent to 29 percent).

All in all, the study further validates Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound” prediction. In 1992, he warned that America’s labor market would be destroyed if NAFTA passed; how right he was. The report charts the decline of our middle class beginning in the early ‘90s and accelerating considerably in the ‘00s.

By then, NAFTA was really kicking into gear and virtually all of our manufacturing jobs were exported overseas. I just hope that Chinese factory workers can take a break from making our iPhones every once in a while to make enough respirators for the citizens of Beijing. Sure, let’s cry for the polar bears while our captains of industry suffocate the poor Chinese people with low-cost, unregulated manufacturing and limited breathable air.

With our manufacturing gone, our labor market now consists primarily of very high- or very low-skilled occupations.

But, wait, there’s more!

In recent years, our crooked Congressional “representatives” continued to beat the walking dead middle class by boosting the number of tech “guest” work visas granted to their corporate sponsors. U.S. workers in high-skilled positions are now routinely replaced by foreign “guests” who are paid much less.

Congress also has allowed an endless parade of illegal aliens to cross our open boarder and they are now calling for us to import Syrian refugees to fill the low-skilled jobs that Americans supposed won’t do. It’s clear that the psychopaths running our government are fast-tracking us to Third World status. And…we’re…letting…them. Why?

Each holiday season, retailers bemoan the fact that people aren’t spending as much as they used to. Well, if we don’t have jobs, or the jobs we have pay less they used to, or we are “gig” employees who don’t know if or when we’ll see another paycheck, then the odds are pretty good that we’re not going to have a lot of Benjamins…or bitcoins…or any type of digital currency…to slide across your registers or online shopping carts.

In my last post, I described how today’s U.S. worker is trapped in an environment of economic cannibalism; the Pew study proves it.

Pew. Something sure does stink around here.

This Thanksgiving, Obama and the mainstream media outlets that promote his agenda, were working overtime to convince Americans that we should accept thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, because it is “who we are” as a nation.

I have to ask: who are we as a nation? And does it even matter, now that Obama and Congress are working to dissolve the U.S. into a North American Union through the Trans-Pacific “Partnership” (TPP)?

Forgive me; I know this post is a little long, but I feel compelled to make a few points in support of the working stiffed in this country. And it seems that whenever I express the opinions that follow on Huffington Post or Facebook, they get scrubbed, even though I don’t use profane language or indulge in troll-like behavior. Censorship. Is that “who we are” as a nation? It would seem so.

There’s no question that the refugee crisis is a terrible human tragedy. And there’s also no question that the crisis was created by the criminal neocons in our government who insist on invading and overthrowing governments in the Middle East and Africa on behalf of their transnational bankster benefactors and Saudi Arabia.

But bring these people here? I don’t think so. I think it makes more sense to have the wealthy Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia (the true architects of chaos in the region) resettle these poor people, as Ben Carson says. I don’t care for Carson, but his recommendation in this case makes the most sense.

Even if we can all agree that the majority of those seeking asylum are not ISIS terrorists, allowing hundreds of thousands of them to come here would be an act of economic terrorism against the millions of U.S. laborers and citizens who are struggling to survive in 21st century America.

Let me explain:

There are more than 94 million U.S. citizens out of the workforce; most don’t work because they can’t get jobs (people over 50 have it particularly rough)

A shocking number of our veterans (a number of whom were forced to do close to a dozen tours of duty), are homeless and/or have no access to health care

Our college students are saddled with an astounding amount of college loan debt that they can’t get rid of through bankruptcy—and to make matters worse, they have little hope of finding work to pay off their loans if or when they graduate

We are told that we “don’t have the money” to give Social Security recipients a cost of living increase next year (while commodity and food prices continue to soar)

We are facing the inevitability of more of our jobs being shipped overseas once our corrupt Congress passes the treasonous, sovereignty-destroying TPP

Obamacare penalizes poor people who can’t afford the program’s “affordable” health insurance by levying an unconstitutional tax/fine (taxation by citation)

No money is allocated to fix our crumbling infrastructure or to insulate our unprotected power grid (which means we will be knocked back into the Stone Age when, not if, we are hit by an EMP or solar flare)

I can go on. All things considered, should the refugees be our top priority? I don’t think so. Where is the public outrage over the issues I just outlined?

John Oliver recently went on a clever rant on his show about our “irrational fear” of allowing Syrian migrants into our country; he pointed out that they are thoroughly vetted. All I could think of while listening to him go on about the six or seven layers of scrutiny these people face is, why are we spending our money on this? When I think of the needs I list above, it’s downright criminal.

Not too long ago, Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the (globalist-sponsored) Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, published a piece in the Washington Post that argued for allowing the migration; he said it would even help our country.

He sought to ease the concerns of U.S. taxpayers who don’t support bankrolling the welfare and government programs these migrants will undoubtedly require if they are allowed to come. Nowrasteh proposes that Americans and charities (like the Cato Institute?) sponsor them, and in return, the U.S. government should lift all quotas and restrictions on work permits “without complicating regulations.” Really? Can you guess whose jobs they’ll need to take once their sponsors get them situated?

Even our most socialist-leaning president to date, Franklyn Roosevelt, closed our country’s borders during the Depression. He was focused on restoring the economic health of the country and helping to create jobs for U.S. citizens. It would be nice if Obama dedicated his rhetoric and actions in support of the Americans he was elected to represent, like Roosevelt did. Instead, he lobbies for job-destroying initiatives like the TPP and cheap labor through migration.

We are also repeatedly told the lie that migrants only take manual labor jobs that Americans don’t want. When I was growing up, I could easily get one of “those jobs that Americans don’t want.” They helped me save money for college and taught me how to be a responsible young adult; the crappy work and low pay of these jobs also served as an incentive for me to pursue higher education, so I could get “better” jobs.

These days, kids can’t get so-called “crappy jobs” easily, so they continue to depend on their already financially stressed parents for spending money, or they turn to crime. And now that our government has privatized prisons, kids who get caught committing crimes often find that their lives are essentially over before they’ve even begun.

The lie about the “jobs that Americans don’t want” has a counterpart in “the jobs that Americans can’t do.” Silicon Valley ushered in the era of the H-1B visa under the pretense that there aren’t enough trained U.S. workers to handle the volume of tech jobs they create. This has become an egregious tool of domestic economic cannibalism.

Fortune 500 companies like Disney and AT&T took that loophole and drove a truck through it, by importing low wage foreign workers by the thousands to replace qualified U.S. workers. As I write this, 1,200 displaced U.S. Disney workers are in New York training their foreign replacements.

A bipartisan Senate bill banning the replacement of U.S. workers with H-1B visa holders was just introduced. Hopefully, it will pass.

Lastly, there is the “we are all children of immigrants” argument. While that’s true, let’s take a closer look at that. When my grandparents legally migrated to this country after World War II, it was long before the banksters took over our republic and made it a plutocracy; the U.S. was truly a land of growth and opportunity. They wanted to come here sooner, but Roosevelt had closed the doors during the Depression, as I mentioned earlier; too many Americans were out of work….like now.

My grandparents came here to assimilate: they learned English, they pledged allegiance to the American flag and they built their businesses without imposing on American taxpayers. Now, in these times of PC psychosis, we must accommodate every culture to the point that we have become the national equivalent of the tower of babble.

As for those who support leaving our borders wide open by using the example of the Pilgrims coming to America, has anyone asked the Native Americans how that migration worked out for them? I didn’t think so.

Opposition to Syrian refugee migration is not about racism or hatred; it’s about economic feasibility. And, yes, there is some fear involved. After all, we just witnessed a handful of ISIS terrorists kill or injure close to 500 Parisians in less than an hour. It doesn’t take an army of people to take a country hostage.

Our focus needs to be on fixing our country and restoring our middle class. We can no longer afford to turn our backs on struggling U.S. citizens or to overlook the fact that we no longer manufacture anything. We also can’t continue to allow transnational companies incorporated here to ship U.S. jobs overseas at will or to import “migrants” who will work for much less.

Trying to distract us from our very real problems by promoting cost-prohibitive, altruistic global outreach doesn’t help anyone. We are not the prosperous country we were 50 years ago; we are a nation in rapid decline. That, Mr. Obama, is unfortunately “who we are” now as a nation. Charity begins at home, Chief, so do us all a favor and re-prioritize and get busy before it’s too late.

We are one year away from the 2016 presidential election, yet we are already a full year into the campaign. The memes are pinging both sides of the political aisle, cleverly goofing on Trump’s ego or comb over, Bernie funding his social programs with pixie dust, or Hillary’s endless email server boondoggle.

Lost in the meme-ification of our thought processes, however, is deep thought and action. We are prone to McNuggeting our political acumen in 140 characters or less or through memes, which is why it comes as no surprise that most of us don’t get off our asses and call or email our so-called elected representatives and tell them to stop running for president long enough to walk through some legislation that will help boost our stagnant economy and improve our ability to make a living.

No, we’ll just laugh create or laugh at the memes that depict the ugliness of today’s American economic landscape and let someone else do the heavy lifting. Disney is laying off qualified employees to import cheap overseas labor? There’s a meme for that. Robots are replacing workers at Lowe’s? There’s another meme. Uber is calling its driver employees contractors? There are plenty of memes dedicated to that…and on and on…

While you’re meme-ing, here’s what you’re missing: For close to a year, a handful of “sitting” members of Congress or governors have been running for the highest position in the country, CEO of the North American Union (I’m upgrading the title, because I’m sure the TPP will pass before the election and that is what the presidency will ultimately become).

These tax payer-funded, elected representatives are taking a two year paid break from their day jobs to lobby billionaire sponsors to bankroll their almost certain failed run for president.

Outside of Marco Rubio, some may show up once in a while to vote for a bill that their corporate lobbyists wrote, and there’s a slight chance they may even read the legislation before they propose or vote on it.

They definitely show up to vote for some bills, like the Keystone Pipeline bill (nine or 10 times? I lost count), or legislation that supports expanding the surveillance state, military spending or other issues of importance to their transnational sponsors. No love for the average American worker though.

On occasion their corporate “handlers” help them out by instructing them NOT to read or reveal details of certain legislation, as was the case with Obamacare, or as is currently the case with the totally toxic, job- and economy-destroying TPP. Why are we paying these guys, again?

Not one of these candidates has taken a break from the campaign trail long enough to draft legislation that will help the working stiffed in this country now. Actually, when was the last time any member of Congress wrote a bill themselves? The seventies? Again, why are we paying these guys?

We’re told to wait until they’re elected president a year from now and then they will miraculously persuade Congressional members from both parties to support their vision for a better America…yeah, right. What’s the definition of insanity? Doing (or voting for) the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

We elected these people to serve us now. I’m talking to you, Marco, Rand, Bernie, Ted and Chris. You say you’re worthy of the presidency? Show us. Don’t tell us what you’re going to do a year-and-a-half from now, while you spend your days looking for campaign money and kissing babies; write and propose legislation that can help the struggling American worker now…today.

I’m already “feeling the bern” and can’t wait for 2017, and neither should you. There’s a meme in there somewhere, right?

I like a good scary story as much as the next person, but I can’t think of any piece of horror fiction in recent memory that has frightened me more than last week’s New York Times feature article about Amazon.

Anyone who has had a white collar job within the last 10 years is familiar with some of the workplace hazards alluded to in the article:

the annoying coworkers who like to email people at 2 am on weekends to prove/time stamp their dedication;
others who show up at the office at the crack of dawn and/or stay late;
the busybodies who like to provide unsolicited “feedback” (usually negative) about colleagues to superiors; or
colleagues who feel that humiliating you in meetings will spur you to achieve workplace excellence (this is usually the public explanation; the real reason is they either resent you or don’t like you).

Individually, these behaviors are annoying, but when they are ALL part of a company’s corporate culture…even codified in the employee handbook (check out Amazon’s 14 leadership principals), then you’re hitting horror story territory.

Bezos responded to fallout from the Times article by saying that he wouldn’t want to work for a company like the one described in the article. One can argue that he doesn’t, really, since as CEO, he isn’t subjected to the annual “culling” of staff, and no one in their right mind would dream of submitting secret feedback about him via the company’s Orwellian Anytime Feedback Tool (a widget in the company’s directory that employees are encouraged to use to submit praise or criticism about colleagues to management). Of course, Feedback Tool submissions are factored into the decision-making at the annual culling of Amazon’s overworked herd. Double-plus ungood.

Bezos likes his Feedback Tool so much, he’s invested in an HR software company that makes a similar product. So, in the near future, if you find yourself on the wrong end of a crappy performance review and lose your job, it may just be because the office psycho who doesn’t like you colluded with other office misfits to funnel tons of real-time negative feedback about you to your boss. Creepy, huh? Get ready; it’s coming.

So, is Bezos a driven visionary…a textbook bipolar CEO…a sadist…or all of the above? Who can say for sure? What is obvious is that, in his infinite, algorithm-loving mania, Bezos (whose name literally means “kisses” in Spanish) has reworked the KISS principle (Keep it Simple, Stupid) to mean, Keep it Stressful, Stupid. His fiefdom is truly a Darwinian dystopia on steroids.

I guess while we wait for the robots to take our jobs, corporate overlords like Bezos are going to bide their time by making us work like robots. That way, they can literally work us to death and we won’t be around to complain about losing our jobs to C-3PO in the near future. A recent study shows this isn’t that farfetched a concept.

A stroke of bad luck?

In recent years, we’ve been hearing more and more about uncharacteristically young people…folks in their thirties and forties…having strokes. Why, we wondered? Well, it turns out that Amazon’s top performers aren’t thinking long term when it comes to embracing the 80-hour workweeks that are the hallmark of Amazonian excellence.

Less than a week after the Times/Amazon article appeared, the London Guardian reported that scientists at University College London found that if you put in more than 55 hours a week at work, you have a 33 percent higher stroke risk and a 13 percent higher risk of having a heart attack than “slackers” who work only 35-40 hours a week.

What I want to know is, if you stroke out at your desk at Amazon, will Bezos offer you free shipping to the funeral home of your choice?

Category: Work

American Workers are Less Productive: No Job Security, No Motivation

A Casualty of the Gig Economy: My Life in the Brave New Workplace

Employee Wellness Program Privacy: Biometric Screening Tyranny

American Workers Thrown Under the Omnibus Spending Bill

Psychic Ability: The Best Skill a Freelancer Can Have

Pew! Something Stinks: the Disappearing American Middle Class

The End Justifies the Memes: Candidates Run for Two Years as U.S. Workers Feel the “Bern”

No Bezos (kisses) at Amazon