Consent_Withdrawn- Posted on Monday, June 19, 2017
To all potential union bashers who vote to protect banks whilst trolling victims of banking misconduct:
SERIOUSLY?
Where do you folks get off, having a go at us most likely because you're involved in business and you're almost as afraid of Bill Shorten as the banks are?
Let me give you a little perspective - unless you're just doing it for the lulz. Go troll a right wing page or something if that's the case.
I've been an employer, I've been self-employed and I've also busted my arse working for others on plenty of occasions. I learned to put I could into it until overwork, mental health problems (which I did not ask for), some bad luck and hard times put me out of the race. I know something of both sides of the employment line.
In this case I will speak first for bank victims, many of them are workers too. Many employers are probably bank victims, but if they're more worried about unionists they're walking off a cliff blindfolded.
I don't know Bill Shorten personally. I was raised working class and a Labor voter. One day I questioned things more. I even stopped voting Labor for a while. Not now though. I would vote for him even if I was still an employer, because he is the only political leader who has promised to bring the banks to heel and the only one who has a chance of doing so at this time.
The entire country should see the importance of that point. The money system underpins almost all that we do. Only people who do what they do out of passion can see beyond those bounds. I am also one of those.
But you people can only see as far as your own picket fences I think. You've trolled the wrong crowd here.
You might think it's okay to rub our faces in it because you don't want stronger unions or something along those lines.
Why do unions exist in the first place?
Only ONE reason.
It is because employers have more power in this world than the people
whose sweat often earns them less than it does for their employers. That imbalance of power has seen a gradual erosion of workers rights. There's no way in hell that that is ever going to fly with those who run your machines and offices!
I get that you have a right to expect some value for money. No problem there, I've paid others to do things for me plenty of times too. I know that some people don't pull their weight. I've been there too. Some people still fail doing the best they can. They deserve better than your pitiful contempt!
So until employers can start paying their workers a little more and themselves a little less, and until workers see a real benefit for giving up their priceless time to build YOUR businesses for the pittances which many of you would prefer to pay them, unions will not be going anywhere! Stop whining and start thinking.
Your best bet might even be to give up on tightening the screws entirely. Over the course of my working life I've seen horror stories like "Work Choices" (choices for WHO exactly?!) besides a gradual erosions of workers' rights and let me tell you once you've been served the rough end of the pineapple on that continuum you certainly have a clearer picture of where the power lies in the average workplace relationship.
So here's the olive branch in my message:
Many workers understand that their employers can only go so far towards meeting them somewhere in the middle. We aren't all completely stupid. Many of us have been frustrated by such a dichotomy for long enough to ask deeper questions of the so-called powers that be. Most employers never had to look that deeply and many of those answers do not become apparent until you dig deep enough into how the system works. It was never meant to be fair, and you (quite deservedly in many cases and often after a long trial and error process) have found yourselves on the greener side of one fence.
Workers are entirely justified in wanting protections, and ANY HALF-DECENT HUMAN who employs others would ABSOLUTELY support workers' rights to the very end. Workers have a right to be angry at bosses in so many cases, and many have decided that it's not just a case of us vs them - because they feel there is some common ground. They have looked beyond the immediate struggle for their rights because they see that you too are subject to exploitation.
It turns out that in the bigger picture both employers and employees are very much squeezed by the system in an almost identical fashion. We sit on either side of a line in which people strive to provide goods and services to the community in order to provide themselves an income.
I'm old and wise enough not to begrudge anyone any wealth which they've come into via legitimate means, but there has always been a perpetual bunfight between those who do the actual work and those who employ them. I won't be drawn into some proletarian debate about who is more deserving because my point is that both parties are losing to a third.
That is a class of people who care little for provision of goods or services, social cohesion, peace or harmony, or indeed anything beyond amassing wealth without giving anything in return or being held accountable.
Those people have milked the rest of us for generations, and now they've been caught playing dirty. Most of the wealth they have has been taken from others who earned it. That's a no-brainer! Now people like yourselves are putting your own circumstances ahead of something which affects us all.
If something isn't done about this stuff in the very near future it won't matter whether you own a business or not. Either way you're going to be exploited beyond your imaginings in the end. You have no idea.
So how about having the integrity to drop your fight against the unions who protect the class of people that business needs in order to perform its collective tasks, and stop subjecting the most belittled, overworked, systemically injured, downtrodden people of all in this country to prolonged misery and a crime which threatens ALL of us just for the sake of an easier ticket to higher profits?
How about it because I can promise you two things right now if you don't.
1) if this situation (and I mean very much the bigger social picture here) does not markedly improve VERY soon, the workers of this country WILL revolt sooner or later. It'll be a massacre.
...and many of us will be there to fight alongside them. Workers might wear a smile everyday but they don't forget.
2: without the downtrodden working class of this country to support your businesses, you will fall upon harder times yourselves and then you'll see just how much the bankers value YOU.
It might be then that you will remember the people of this page and others like it.
So go ahead and keep defending a class of thieves just because you get bigger crumbs from them than you give to the people whom YOU need to keep you in business.
OR JUST GROW UP, and grasp the idea that people who put their time and wealth on the line (which is both the employers and the employees) are up against those who don't, because you're all looking like wannabe bankers, and if you knew how that makes you look to the rest of us, you wouldn't even bother embarrassing yourselves on here with such poorly thought-out gibes towards the people who had no choice but to have your backs.
You've been in your privileged position and some of us have had a different experience. Believe us when we say: we didn't want to be in this situation, we never planned to, and god forbid if you ever find yourselves in this position, you'll realise just how arrogant and callous your attitudes feel to those whom you would never wish to join, and if so I can promise you that it won't be because you wanted it that way.
It doesn't matter how much integrity you have, how good or charitable you are, how hard you work or any of that. It all comes down to this: if absolutely everything were at stake would YOU trust somebody you don't know to run it all without any accountability?
I hope you will at least give it some thought.