Greg's Corner

Is anybody really looking out for employees?

It wasn’t too long ago in our country’s history when employers would take advantage of their employees to the point where it was just a step above slavery conditions. This resulted in the rise of labor unions where workers could collectively fight for better wages and working conditions. Thanks to the unions we now have provisions that are considered standard in many workforces such as 40 hour work weeks and weekends off. However, over the years, many unions became corrupt and bloated rife with nepotism and cronyism where the unions in question would make outrageous demands from management. This corruption resulted in some states passing legislation that made it illegal for anyone to be forced to join a union if they didn’t want to. These states are now called ‘at will’ states which is intended to mean that employees could work at will but along with that choice employers were given the power to fire employees at will. Now, most of the country’s workforce are stuck in situations where they are forced to sacrifice much of their personal lives in order to keep working.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC2c6a1E67g]

For example, mothers who work at Amazon are asking the company to provide backup daycare services for their kids. While not many employers offer this kind of service it shows how little some employers value their staff. Some reports even state that some female Amazon employees will hide the fact that they have children from their coworkers as not to be seen as ‘distracted’. It’s to the point where mothers at Amazon allegedly feel like they have little to no recourse if they are admonished for wanting to take care of their family. This is just one company’s example of how the workforce is being treated in our country. In other company’s employees don’t even have the benefits of an Amazon job. Healthcare benefits have eroded immensely over the past few decades as has paid time off.

Labor laws and regulations need to be reexamined for today’s workforce. There has to be a happy medium somewhere between a labor union that could keep you out of work for weeks on strikes or keep you low on the union totem pole since you don’t know the right people and the at-will states where workers constantly worry if today is the day where they’ll be released for no apparent reason other than as a cost-cutting measure or they didn’t kowtow to the corporate culture at the price of their family. For our country’s workforce to thrive there needs to be equal give and take between employer and employee but right now it seems that the workers are the only ones doing any giving.