I know that's true, Aunt Sam, and it's outrageous, but what struck me yesterday was how much I wanted to do to get them the money the government promised they were entitled to, and how little, in the end, I could do, given these particular circumstances.

I looked up all the info needed to make a case, and I could have done something, I know.  At least got the ball rolling.  I know a union leader down here and I was tempted to call him and ask him what I should do, but in the end I did nothing. 

Because this is a small local company we're talking about, and these guys need these jobs.  If I had raised a stink and the company was forced to do something about it, I know for a fact it would have come out of the workers' hides.  They would either lose their jobs outright or would have to make concessions in order to pay for the fines that likely would have been imposed.

In my need to become hyperbolic over this, given how angry I was yesterday, I equated those workers to slaves, but really--that's not the case.  They like their jobs.  They sing, they laugh, they kibitz.  But they've also been conditioned to accept the fact that nothing the government does to make their jobs better is going to work when jobs are at a premium and the employers have the upper hand.

So, of course, we had to come back to the need for unions everywhere.  Without representation, workers will always be screwed.  A strong union would never have let this happen.  From the start, the union bosses would have let the company know there were laws about these things and they would have to live up to them, or else. (One major reason why management fights so hard against unions.  Another well-known but useless fact.)

The only kind of company transparency a worker can hope for is the kind of transparency that comes from outside threats to expose them.  They won't do it otherwise.  We need unions, but as much as we need them today, they're anachronisms--dreams of the good old days.

I felt useless and impotent yesterday and once again I recognized how little my yodeling here means when push comes to shove.  Just talking about these inequities will never be enough, yet when I had the chance to do something about it, I couldn't do it.

  There's not a doubt in my mind that if I had put that protest into motion nobody would have been hurt by it as much as the guys out there on that scaffold.  We can speak out about those abuses generally--which rarely has any long term effect--but trying to help people in real-time, every day situations is something else again.  Which is why I said I didn't know what else to say.  I really don't.