No Bounds

ONE IN FOUR AMERICAN workers gets no vacation, according to reliable statistics. By this is meant "paid" vacation time. Presumably, anyone with a job who wants to take a vacation can do so, providing the person is willing to pay for it without employee assistance of any sort, and also willing to return to work to discover that he or she has been replaced.

Those fortunate seventy five percent who do get paid vacation time don't get much. The  american vacation on average is two weeks, or less. IN europe, tehe average is four to six week,s and anyone with a job is blessed with paid vacation time, mandated by government, in good old socialistic europe.

the mere fact that three out of four americas does get a paid vacation clearly indicates that american society considers paid vacation time to be acceptable, and, dare one say, prescribed.

WE americans don't pay our workers all that well either. Even with minimum wage now raised to something like seven twenty five per hour, it seems paltry, inadequate, behind the economic times of real life economics, dare one say, "exploitational".

Partly because of this,in free market businesses all over america, profits, benefits, and wealth, which always begin at the bottom, are sucked upward by the management and owner powers that be, the middle class shrinks by the year, and the gap between rich and poor is greater than it has ever been, in the united states, or anywhere else.

But believe it or not, things have improved, greatly. The federally mandated forty hour work week has been with us since the nineteen thirties. Overtime pay, health care insurance provided by employers, and safer working conditions are all twentieth century phenomena.

The best place to get an idea of what workers had to endure in the nineteenth century is the groundbreaking novel "the Jungle", by upton sinclair. It was published in 1905, was a popular success, and later that same year the government initiated, for the first time, labor reform, amid strenuous corporate opposition. (all labor reforem manifests amid strenuous corporate opposition).

If you were employed in the chicago stockyards meatpacking factories in 1904, you were worked to the bone, overseen by booses whose job was to speed you up while you cut the guts out of slain cattle, or shoveled meat into containers along with dead rats, often in extreme heat or bitter cold, and crippling or fatal injuries were run of the mill. If you dropped dead on the job, your body was either swept casually aside, or added to the lard buckets.

the pay was pennies per day, there was no vacation time, days off, work days were twelve hours and up, uion organizers were brutally beaten by thugs hired by millionaire owners, and anyone with a family trying to work in a place like this went hungry. Child labor was commomplace.

So we have improved conditions for workers, but only at gunpoint, by federal legislation. Just so you'll know; we still need more federal legislation, more protection for workers against exploitation, and more organization by workers. The alternative is to return to conditions as they were a hundred and twenty years ago. Don't think our corporate masters wouldn't want this.Greed knows no bounds.