SBC's CWA union is about to strike. The company has successfully spun the issues of the strike into a fight over introducing copays into the union's insurance-- union members pay no premiums or coinsurance/copays, which is IMHO a pretty sweet deal-- while completly glossing over the company's trend toward outsourcing jobs at a breakneck pace.
Local talk radio in SBC's hometown has, of course, latched on to the "greedy union" meme without a second thought.
This morning at work, I got into a ... discussion ... with a co-worker who thinks that this is all over $30-- the estimated amount of copays per month that union workers would spend, on average, if they accepted the company's last offer.
Leaving aside the "thin edge of the wedge" argument for the moment-- an important principle in this issue-- I am simply astounded by the level of selfishness this claim evinces. The idea my co-worker expressed is, in his own words, that "I spend a lot more than that!"
So, basically, because his life sucks, everyone else's life should as well. Simply astounding.
I tried to point out that if your situation is so upsetting that you're projecting your own latent anger on a group that managed a better deal, why not do something about it? Like, unionize your job and demand a better deal? Instead, he's sucked in to the "greedy union" and "lazy union worker" meme.
Every time I come across this idea, I try to point out that everything we take for granted about our workplaces-- the 40-hour week; overtime (if you're not "exempt"); child labor bans; health insurance; paid vacation time (such as it is in the US)-- is owed to the labor movement of the last century. I further point out the *erosions* of these gains that have happened in the last 30 years have come after a century of systematic weakening of organized labor.
But it's like talking to a wall. The radio told him that unions are bad; the TV told him that unions are bad; he thinks he's being reasonable by claiming that unions had a place once, but are no longer relevant; there's no actual thought, no actual knowlege, no actual understanding of the issues and the history of labor relations in the US.
It makes me sick. It makes me doubly sick as I bend over for yet another corporate reaming: my company's hired HMO apparantly contracts with a bankrupt mental health benefits provider-- so my son can't see the doctors I've dealt with for the last 6 years any more because the bankrupt insurer left them holding lots of unpaid accounts, so they've chosen not to accept it (not that I can blame them)-- and all my HR can say is "Here, you can take this plan that will triple your out-of-pocket costs instead."
Welcome to America. Please check any rights you think you might have at the border. Your Corporate Masters have decided you don't need them any more.
I posted recently about my reading the livejournal of an ex-girlfriend (call her D.) all the way through, primarily looking to see if I was mentioned anywhere. I've been thinking about that over the last couple of weeks. I even discussed it with my wife.
Yeah, you read that right. I don't have any secrets from this woman I share my life with, and I don't see the need to keep any. Of course, I didn't see the need to keep anything from D. either, even though things were kept from me. Yeah, hindsight being 20/20 and all, I knew even then in my deepest part that she never loved me the way I loved her. There was no reservation on my part, even though some part of me knew it wasn't mutual. My roommate at that time described it this way:
"It's like you're looking in a crystal ball watching yourself do stupid things and you're saying 'Don't do that, that's stupid,' but the guy in the ball is doing it anyway."
I know the kind of commitment I give has the potential to scare some people-- I learned that the hard way with D., it was an issue with M. early on in our relationship and marriage, and you read about it all the time-- but to me it's the only way to be and I see no need to change just to avoid pain.
Primarily M. opined that since it was almost 10 years ago, I should get over it. Well, no duh. But it did give me pause to think, and think extensively on the subject: Why am I not really over this relationship?
I mentioned a lack of closure previously. Well, sort of. Did D. and I have a final argument, hissing and spitting and making it clear? No. I did try to seek confrontations but only half-heartedly, and she played some juvenile games to avoid them. When the end came, it was pretty banal; I called her, we arranged a property swap, and that was the end of it. I'd already started seeing M. and D. was still in her relationship with H. But was there closure? I don't think there's a conversation I can point to and say "Here is where it ended;" but all in all I think there was closure.
So why am I still writing about D., ten years later?
I've been thinking about that, and I think it comes down to friendships.
All my life I've had very few close friends. School was always socially very very difficult for me. Do you remember the line from Real Genius, "My teachers disliked me because I was smarter than they were, and my classmates hated me because I blew the bell curve"? Not quite that bad, but you get the picture. It wasn't until High School that I found a peer group, but even then I wasn't in quite the right social set.
College was a whole new world. The work continued to require only minimal effort, but it no longer mattered to my peers that I found it easy. People actually came to me for help-- not the demands that I aid cheating on a test that I had to fend off in HS but actual, honest help. I met people more like me, like H. for example, than I ever had before in my life. Life online-- I was part of the original set of IRC users in the US-- expanded my social set by many magnitudes; in fact, that's how I met D.
It was these people with whom I felt I had real bonds of friendship. This was unusual for me. People I'd known in High School came close, but not like this. This was different, or so I thought.
As far as I can determine with the clarity of hindsight, D. started her affair with H. the very day I left for the Air Force. Which is to say, that's when they started actually seeing each other. The soil was tilled and the seeds were planted long before that day. And I'm relatively sure that the rest of my college social group knew all about it. Except me of course.
And that's the core of the matter. It wasn't just that I was toyed with and discarded; I'd been through that before. Admittedly, it wasn't as intense as this, but I'd still been there, done that. It was that my friends-- indeed, all of my friends-- betrayed the trust I had placed in them. They simply didn't value me as much as I had valued them. As a result, when I departed that relationship I found myself abandoning everyone and everything that was part of that life.
Compound that with the fact that D. and H. were the best friends I thought I had up until that point in my life, and they were in it together.
Since then, I still haven't many friends besides my wife M., whom I count as my best friend. I have many acquaintances, mostly business associates, but only a very small social group and as they're online and my job has changed, I rarely interact with them any more.
So when you get down to brass tacks, I find myself dwelling over this failed relationship simply because I miss my friends and there's no way to get them back. It's not about lack of closure. It's not about wanting to know if I'd affected D.'s life. It's not even about love any more. It's about the only friends I thought I had, and the betrayal that was done to me.