Office Quandries
Peter Rachleff
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PUNCHING OUT page 2 of 3 | |||||
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Weekly Answers to Office Quandries |
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Professor Peter Rachleff |
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There are a lot of important issues raised by your story that go beyond your friend's immediate predicament. In the first place, why is it that employers in the 1990s think they can get workers to work for free? We all need to look into that one. Maybe we need to criminalize such behavior. After all, it is a form of theft. We sell our time in order to earn money to pay the bills. If employers steal our time without paying us, that's theft. Employers think they can get away with this because so many workers are "happy just to have a job." But with the drop in the unemployment rate in the last two years and the tighter labor markets, most of us are able to find another job just as crummy as the one we leave. We need to act on this more often. And we should band together to demand local laws that criminalize employer theft of workers' time and publicly humiliate those employers who take from us. History is full of stories of workers, consumers, and citizens coming together to demonstrate at "unfair" employers' businesses. Why not dust this practice off, get it off the historical shelf, and bring it into our communities?
In the second place, your friend's story should alert us to the lack of respect afforded health care in our society. This is especially true of the treatment received by women and men in nursing homes and receiving home health services. Disrespect for the service translates into disrespect for the service providers. We all have an interest in insuring quality care and dignified treatment. These are our parents and grandparents who are on the receiving end, and someday it'll be us! We can't continue to look the other way. We need a grassroots movement to make quality care a RIGHT for all of us. Period. |
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