ihatemyjob

Four days ago, the employees of Republic Windows & Doors on Chicago’s North side were given three days notice that the factory (where some of them had worked for over 10 years) would be closing its doors because sales were down due to the severe recession and access to credit to tide the plant over had completely dried up. This meant no more jobs for the employees and oh, yes, no severance pay or owed vacation time would be paid out either, due to lack of access to funds.

The employees decided to stay at work until the company paid out what it owed them.

They are still there.

Yesterday, Jesse Jackson showed up with food for the workers. Congressional Representatives Jan Shakowsky and Luis V. Gutierrez showed up to encourage and meet with them. Even President-Elect Barack Obama came down on the side of the workers, making a public statement that the company should pay the dismissed workers what it owes them.

Company representatives argue that they cannot get the money because Bank of America, a recent recipient of $25 billion in TARP funds, has decided they are a poor credit risk due to recently reduced sales.  Bank of America says that the company’s employee problems are not their affair. And yet, Bank of America received taxpayer money to insure it would not withhold credit it precisely this sort of situation.

Support is growing for the workers, who are quickly becoming emblematic of the plight of Americans all over the country who are being let go without warning as major banks continue to hold onto federal funds (provided by us, the workers and taxpayers) instead of using those funds to thaw the credit freeze and keep businesses afloat.

A federal law requires 60 days notice of a plant closing or lay-off, but the three days notice the employees at Republic Windows & Doors received are three more days than many workers get.

I admit I cheered when I heard of the plant takeover. My partner Bill was given a one week notice of the shutdown of his plant last month–after working there for 20 years. He had a little less than a single week to decide whether to take a buy-out based on seniority and be unemployed, or get in line for a job at a location with the same company–at a different city or a different state.

Because he is 5 years away from his earliest possible retirement date, he chose to commute 60 miles to a city north of us to continue working. Twenty other employees there did not have enough seniority to be given that choice. After twenty years of work, he now is by no means assured of retiring from this company, which may or may not survive the current economic downturn.

What really stands out for me in all of this is that a fairly vicious double standard is being maintained when it comes to workers and upper level management. You may or may not remember Richard Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers who, the week his bank folded, was earning approximately $17,000 an hour. Fuld appeared before Congress to defend his right to this salary, even though under his leadership Lehman tanked and took the U.S down with it.

Other corporate CEOs have been granted huge ‘golden parachutes’ upon leaving companies they ran right into the ground, while the workers, who worked every bit as hard (harder actually, given productivity statistics) under bad management as they did under good,  are given short notice or no notice.

The last two corporations I worked for closed departments with no notice, zero. The employees went home thinking they had jobs, and when they showed up the next day the doors were closed. Some had the option of accepting lower paid positions in the corporate call centers of these corporations, most were just let go without warning. The CEO of the bank I left in October retired last November with a $120 million golden parachute.

That very same month the bank’s stock plummeted 80%.

In mid-November of this year (two weeks after I left) the U.S. Treasury denied the bank’s request for TARP funds and used the funds instead to sell the bank to a bigger bank–which didn’t want to buy our bank but had to in order to get the TARP money for itself. So now all those jobs are history, not just mine, and our own tax dollars helped to eliminate them.

We are coming off an era of heady laissez-faire, idealistic capitalism that embraced the insane idea that they system always self-regulates, that greed is good, that human beings at the bottom are dispensable and are responsible for their own situation anyway. The people at the top hold self-justifying positions within their organizations. Because they are at the top, they argue that proves they deserve to be, no matter what their actual performance is. Meanwhile, workers at the bottom are held accountable for corporate policies they had no hand in creating.

What surprises me is not that the employees at Republic Windows & Doors are occupying their plant and demanding pay they were promised. What surprises me is that it took this long to happen somewhere in America. I hope this trend continues, and grows, and spreads.

The obscenely rich have had their day. Let’s not go too quietly into that good night.

Cause it ain’t gonna be that good. Or that quiet.

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