none of my biz-ness

You should probably be worried about job security when your boss tells you the company can't afford to give you business cards.

Unless you work in my office. Then it's just standard operating procedure.

Instead of providing new employees with basic tools for communication, the company makes workers beg for such bare necessities as voicemail, email, and those all-important business cards. It's like the bosses think we're going to use these things for nefarious purposes.

So the trouble, of course, is that employees feel like they aren't valued or trusted. Nevermind that it doesn't reflect well on the company when employees have to scribble a Yahoo address on a napkin, explaining that the company is too cheap and bureaucratic to provide lowly workers with such simple things.

It took over six months to get my boss to sign the paperwork so I could have voicemail. It took over a year to get another boss to sign the paperwork so I could have a company email address. I'm still working on the business cards.

One of the biggest hurdles has been the condescending questioning, including this classic: "Well, why do you need that?"

Um, so other people can recognize me as a legitimate employee of this company? So I can represent the company in a positive and professional manner? Because I don't live in a bubble and I might actually meet people who, say, want to do business with the company?

Or at least they did before I scrawled my personal email address on the back of an ATM receipt for them.

crumbling to the ground

Everyday there's a news article or few about another U.S. corporation that's laying off its workers, cutting its budget, and struggling to turn higher and higher profits each quarter. The problem, of course, is not that these companies aren't making money, but that the companies aren't continually increasing their revenues. But it doesn't take an economist to figure out that there's no infinite amount of demand to continue to drive profits up. And when you continue to give raises to executives who make four-hundred-and-some times as much as the average worker (all the while when the stocks are falling), well, who's going to be able to afford the products? The system's about to implode despite all their efforts to stay on top. Like dwindling supplies of natural resources, there's no consideration to fixing the problems (okay, so "fixing" here would really mean abandoning the capitalist system) and taking preventative measures to protect the earth and the majority of its inhabitants...a real struggle for survival is going to emerge. So the people at the top are starting to round up the people they think might be troublemakers - better to jail them before anything drastic happens. Better to get that PATRIOT Act into permanent effect, better to make sure those air marshals shoot to kill. Better to make sure the majority of the people in society are scared and asking to give up their rights in lieu of the illusion of security.

make the bosses pay

After attempting to read some of the actual proposed healthcare legislation (Health Care for All has all the necessary and updated reading) as well as news coverage, something strikes me as interesting: how employers play into all this healthcare discussion.

You see, businesses that provide employees with healthcare will get some perks, and businesses who don't provide healthcare will have to pay a tiny bit of money to the state. All this after a lot of lobbying and politicking, of course. But it appears we're only talking only about employers who provide healthcare to full-time employees. This is significant because people who work in retail often would glady take the company health insurance - but the bosses prohibit them from working over 39 hours and thus keep them in part-time status, denying them benefits they deserve. Of course, this means big corporations that provide heathcare to their few full-time employees and otherwise carefully plan ways to keep everyone else classified as part-time would be exempt from paying money to the state to cover all those uninsured workers ... those uninsured workers they created.

healthy appetite

Finally, a story that addresses what Massachusetts residents might actually get from any one of the mandatory healthcare plans being discussed at the statehouse ("Is a $200 policy for healthcare realistic?" Boston Globe, 11/2/05).

Anyone living in Boston knows that the federal poverty level is laughably out of touch with the actual city poverty level. And I'm skeptical the state's subsidies will be enough. People whose income falls between the 200 percent to 300 percent FPL range are barely scraping by in Boston. I know because that's where I fall. After payroll taxes, student loans, rent and utilities, I barely have a total of $200 left for the month - let alone $320 to cover the premium that would be provided under the House plan. Those subsidies would have to be amazing, because when it comes down to weighing the decision between eating (and maybe having enough left over to see one show or movie that month, if I'm lucky) or paying for a healthcare plan (and one I can't even use because the co-pay would put me over-budget and in debt), the choice is simple: I choose food. It certainly has nothing to do with feeling invincible, it's just practical.

unaffordable housing

The U.S. dollar has lost a lot of buying power over the years; the value of wages has declined, and still we have nowhere to look but at a continuing downward spiral.

One piece of this ever-widening wealth gap is housing. "Affordable" housing is not really affordable if you're a family (or an individual, for that matter) supported by someone working full time at minimum wage. This is self-evident if you use the federal standard: Using more than 30 percent of your income toward rent and utilities is considered unaffordable. But of course this "standard" is meaningless in the context of other federal standards: the poverty line, food stamp eligibility, welfare eligibility, the minimum wage, et cetera, et cetera. These figures are all based on national averages, not on calculations of the cost of living in the particular place where a person is living.

Also, housing can be deemed "affordable" when it is affordable (by the 30 percent standard) for people who earn 80 percent of the median income in that particular area, which completely excludes the people who have the most need for genuinely affordable housing.

This may all seem pretty obvious to anyone who cares to think about it, but of course people in positions of power either don't think about it, don't do anything about it or know that they have to keep people in poverty to retain their power and wealth.

In today's Boston Globe, there was an article about a study on the cost of living across the United States. In Massachusetts, a wage slave needs to earn $21.24 an hour at a full-time job to afford a typical two-bedroom apartment and pay utilities there (based on the 30 percent standard, of course). The minimum wage in Massachusetts is $6.75.