Desuetude--Law Nonenforcement--Hurts People

Saturday, November 11, 2006

"Those who seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers call this a new world order. It is not new and it is not order."
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue."
La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680),
Sentences and Moral Maxims, 1678, Maxim 218

The 109th Congress was the most corrupt in history. The November 7, 2006 elections signal the disgust of the American people with corporativist policies that make fools of us all. Nonenforcement of worker protection and environmental laws must now be investigated, with subpoenas issued by House and Senate Committees and Subcommittees.

Hurricane Katrina revealed the truth. Where working people are concerned, your federal government is slow, ineffectual, incompetent and lacking in compassion -- government in inaction. The results of a deliberate lack of will and skill in government are producing preventable death, disease, unemployment, poverty and suffering. The electorate saw that on November 7, 2006.

Not unlike the slow and ineffectual government preparation and response to Hurricane Katrina -- with funds for levees neglected -- worker rights have been neglected for a quarter century. The result is felt in workplace death, disease and discrimination.

Twelve dead miners in West Virginia in January 2006 are the latest carnage, a synecdoche (a part that stands for the whole). The twelve dead miners are a symbolic part of the Butcher's Bill for the Department of Labor's desuetude (nonenforcement) of worker protection laws.

President George W. Bush's Appointment of anti-regulatory corporate lawyers like Eugene Scalia to be Labor Department Solicitor (never confirmed by the Senate) was not unlike Lincoln's Civil War appointment of unqualified "political generals" -- it helped get people killed.

President Nixon's White House counsel, John Wesley. Dean, III wrote that the Bush Administration is Worse Than Watergate and it is true. Worker rights are a major casualty of Bush's crony capitalism.

The billionaire who controlled the coal company that killed the twelve miners specializes in buying bankrupt companies and stripping them of their contingent liabilities (which you and I would call pension rights and health care plans. The son of a judge, billionaire Mr. Wilbur Ross likes to brag that "our only girlfriend is our IRR (Internal Rate of Return)."

The Bible teaches that "the love of money is the root of all evil." Moneyloving corporate miscreants are literally heating up the planet with their machinery, placing all life at risk with Global Warming, while they incineate worker rights at home and abroad.

The law may be a "jealous mistress" but Mr. Ross' "only girlfriend" line is the perfect metaphor for money-hungry corporate criminality.

Slowdancing together, Big Government and Big Business are destroying our country and our planet, from worker rights to environmental destruction. The mindless pursuit of profit is killing workers -- 2.3 worldwide annually.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the middle class is being destroyed.

Are these the new Dark Ages? In 1349, when the English "Statute of Laborers" was enacted, has a government attacked workers with such a vengeance. In the wake of the "Black Death," the British government banned workers from relocating or receiving higher wages. British "poor laws" remained an regressive anti-worker force for centuries, inspiring Marx to sit in the British Museum, plotting revenge.

In 1937, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld minimum wage regulations, rejecting its own earlier precedents. This "switch in time that saved nine" was a tribute to Franklin Roosevelt's genius in his courtpacking plan, which would have added a new Supreme Court justice for every justice over age 70 (making up for anti-labor mossback votes).

The genius and humanity of Franklin Roosevelt was in proposing peaceful change to protect workers.

The genius and depravity of Ronald Reagan, Edwin Meese, III and their successors was in destroying those peaceful changes while getting working people to vote for them.

One of the great equalizers between wealth and poverty was once worker protection law.

Since Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981, a new day of Social Darwinism has dominated government. The President, Congress and Supreme Court have presided over the slow undoing of worker rights laws. legislation intended to Enacted since the New Deal -- and in the Great Society and even in Richard Nixon's administration -- those laws were designed to protect workers from workplace death, disease and discrimination while guaranteeing their rights to organize and engage in collective bargaining.

We have all heard about the "Benedict Arnold corporations," the declining moral values of American employers, their "downsizing" and massive layoffs, their lack of loyalty to longtime employees, and their sending jobs abroad.

For 25 years, the only "labor policy" demonstrated by the U.S. Government has been appeasing employers and ruining workers, exporting jobs -- "a race to the bottom" as Lou Dobbs has said on Cable News Network (CNN). Both Republicans and Democrats in public office share the blame for these rotten policies.

Even airline pilots are not safe. The news that United Airlines can dump its pensioners in bankruptcy court will lead to countless imitators. Meanwhile, Social Security is not even safe, as the Bush II administration seeks to throw workers' savings into Wall Street "private accounts," with fat fees for campaign contributors.

I am writing a book about American employers and polluters and the United States Government collaborating to create sweatshop conditions in America, declining real income, preventable death, disease and misery in the workplace, discrimination without remedies and employees without hope, working multiple jobs, while our environment is destroyed.

Fair warning: it will likely, shock, disgust, anger and depress you. Consider it a call to action. As countless Americans before, we can work together to change history.

For decades, American employers have sought to deprive workers of the protections that the New Deal and Great Society promised -- the rights to safe workplaces, to free speech in the workplace, and freedom from fear and discrimination.

Millions die throughout the world due to unsafe workplaces. Few employers ever pay any kind of price for their recklessness, whether in America or in the Third World. "Globalization" has a horrible price -- the devaluation of human life and the downsizing of human rights.

As Robert F. Kennedy said, "Millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich." Today, the income inequality is as bad as it was in the 1920s. The 2004 Presidential election was as shocking as if Herbert Hoover were re-elected in 1932.

Working conditions and worker protections decline as experienced government workplace safety and anti-discrimination regulators retire. Disgruntled employers are coddled and employees are treated as disposable objects.

In law school, one is taught that preventable deaths due to recklessness are "depraved heart" or "depraved indifference murders," or "criminally negligent homicide" -- a felony with tough prison terms.

Congress and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) have another label for thousands of such deaths, every year. Congress and OSHA call them "misdemeanors," with a maximum of six months incarceration IF the death is classified as being caused by "willful" violations of OSHA law, which happens infrequently, as the New York Times has shown.

In all states but California, an employer killing a worker faces at most a slap on the wrist, a maximum of six months in prison.

Under current laws, a harmless trespasser at a Florida construction site faces far harsher penalties than a reckless employer who kills workers at that same site. Under current priorities, some 100 law enforcement personnel converged at one Maryland housing development construction site to investigate arson. Meanwhile, when workers die in the workplace, OSHA does not care.

Construction workers are constantly being killed in trench collapses, preventable at the tiny cost of shoring lumber or a trench box. Fines for killing workers in such "accidents" approach zero, with local news media often indifferent to the suffering of low wage workers (often immigrants with limited English skills). Few ask, "why?"

Workers are increasingly at risk due to the actions of government and employers.

People are killed, maimed, disabled and get occupational diseases daily, increasingly due to short-sighted employer economic decisions.

The government turns its back on these victims. David Barstow and Lowell Bergman reported in the New York Times that OSHA, EPA and DOJ have teamed up to prosecute workplace deaths, a response to the Times investigation that won it a Pulitzer for Public Service awarded in 2004. Now we must watch to see whether large employers are prosecuted and executives imprisoned, or whether the new "policy" is merely PR response to investigative reporting.

For decades, Republican Presidents have helped union-busting lawyers turn the NLRB from watchdog into lapdog. In an increasingly anti-union environment, these scabrous lawyers have won litigation, legislation and administrative decisions that make it more difficult for workers to organize and easier for employers to fire workers.

Meanwhile, worker rights adjudications drag on, with some retaliation and discrimination cases brought by union members, whistleblowers, women and minorities taking as long as 10, 13, 20, 21 and 27 years in administrative agencies and federal courts.

Alleged victims of retaliation and discrimination wait far too long for their day in Court. "Summary judgment" and other devices deprive workers of their day in Court, an increasing trend documented by Harvard Law Professor Arthur Miller.

In September 2004, Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-Ga), Chair of the House Workforce Protection Subcommittee, said on the House floor, "so many problems have to be solved by judges and courts. That is not what labor law really ought to be about...." Unlike his colleagues, Rep. Charlie Norwood had the candor to admit the agenda of American employers. Rep. Norwood has let the proverbial "cat out of the bag." They want to take away Americans' rights of access to the courts.

As United States Department of Labor Associate Chief Judge James Guill and I wrote in the Judges Journal in 1989, there is a "rush to unfairness," with alternative dispute resolution schemes being foisted off on Americans.

Business interests have their collection cases against average citizens handled speedily, thanks to their financial political influence -- as when landlords sue tenants or hospitals sue patients whose insurance did not pay the entire bill. When workers sue large organizations, there are built-in headwinds and delays that make a mockery of the law.
One ethical oil company lawyer waited 20 years while his environmental whistleblower case was litigated, only to see the U.S. Department of Labor eviscerate its own precedents to rule for the oil company in February 2004. Employers love "activist judges" -- as long as they're in their pockets.
Some 1000 women at Honeywell in Minnesota waited 22 years for DOL to rule on their sex discrimination case.

DOL gave orders not to issue timely decisions in environmental and nuclear whistleblower cases.

Some 2000 cannery workers in Alaska waited 27 years for the federal courts to consider their race discrimination case.

What's going on here? Workers are conned into electing mossback candidates by right-wing preachers who use Gays as targets for hatred and abuse. Meanwhile, real wages decline and worker rights are shredded.

More religious figures now interpret "pro-life" to mean pro-worker and anti-disease, anti-poverty and anti-discrimination.

In the name of God and country. "Enough.". Jesus asked, "How long, oh Lord, how long?"

Like the huge long lines at many Ohio voting places in the 2004 Presidential election, the delays in worker rights cases seem perpetual and intentional. People walk away in disgust, abandoning their rights, whether they are forced to wait for hours to vote (or years for their day in court) even though the Courts have long recognized that, "Justice delayed is justice denied".

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) collaborating with unscrupulous employers, targets honest employees for abuse and persecution.

The DOL even seeks to bar outspoken lawyers from representing whistleblowers and other workers "globally," for criticizing the rampant delays and insidious unfairness.

Does the government respect the First Amendment?

Does it spend too much fighting ethical employee "whistle-blowers?" Do the political parties give lip service to free speech in the workplace, preferring to play "PACman" with employers.

During the 1980s, the Medical Director at the Department of Energy's Fernald, Ohio Feed Materials plant was a veterinarian -- which makes sense only if you treat the workers like animals, exposing them and surrounding farmers and residents to airborne uranium.

During the 1990s, the Medical Director at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge, Tennessee operations directed that workers not be told the had been exposed to cyanide and not to use the word cyanide -- the meeting was disciplinary in character. Some sixty workers fired medical incident reports showing high levels of cyanide in their bodies.

Nuclear weapons, asbestos and other toxic industrialists for decades have craftily delayed telling their employees about their own occupational exposures, preventing their doctors from practicing preventative medicine. In Oak Ridge, workers were even forbidden to use the word "mercury," which was a classified national security secret when half the free world's mercury was in Oak Ridge, being used to make lithium deuteride for hydrogen bombs. Workers were forbidden to tell anyone (even doctors, spouses, lawyers and clergymen) about the exposures. When union leader Charlie Robinson bought a new car, his co-workers asked what kind, and security regulations required that he bought a new "solvent" car (solvent was the codeword for mercury).

This secrecy kept nothing from the Soviets (who already used mercury) but to prevent litigation. Until my small weekly newspaper in Clinton, Tennessee won declassification of the mercury pollution inside and outside the workplace in 1983, workers could be prosecuted for talking about health problems. At the nuclear Navy's Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory (KAPL) near Schenectady, New York, General Electric workers were threatened with life imprisonment, $100,000 fines and loss of security clearances if they dared speak about miles of friable (crumbly) asbestos, nuclear reactors without containment vessels or core catchers.

Mr. John Henshaw, the Bush II Administration's first OSHA Administrator (formerly Vice President of Monsanto) forbade telling some 200 current and retired OSHA administrators of their occupational exposure to beryllium (when even the Department of Energy agreed to notify DOE and contractor workers of their exposures). When OSHA's Denver Regional Administrator complained about failure to protect OSHA employees, Henshaw had his henchman transfer him that very day.

Is spending $100 million on nuclear weapons plant contractors fighting whistleblowers' cases too much when the operators of those plants have sickened and killed our countrymen?

Should government pay its weapons contractors' legal costs when employees try to protect the public and speak the truth to power?

Do government contractors show contempt for the rule of law, causing workers harm or deaths because of government non-enforcement of labor law standards?

Do government contractors and other recipients of government largesse like Lockheed Martin (recipient of a government loan guarantee in the 1970s) owe anything to their workers in return for that largesse?

When Lockheed Martin (world's largest arms merchant) is found responsible for six racist murders at a hostile working environment in Mississippi -- without losing any of its lucrative government contracts -- is immorality firmly in control of both employers and government regulators?

When upscale Neiman Marcus killed a worker in a Ft. Worth, Texas trash compactor, escaping any OSHA criminal prosecution, fines or penalties, hasn't OSHA's ineptitude paved the way for the next worker to die?

When truck drivers are run ragged, deprived of proper rest, called to work at all hours of the day and night under "forced dispatch" systems, pressured to drive unsafe equipment at unsafe speeds, is it any wonder that 5000 people die in truck wrecks annually (only 800 of them the truck drivers themselves)?

Ten people died in one Texas truck wreck in 2004, the result of a driver taking three kinds of medication illegally. When truck drivers call upon OSHA or the U.S. Department of Transportation for assistance, they are treated as nuisances, greeted with voicemails, and told to go away.

When Congress orders a study on how to strengthen whistleblower law enforcement, and the Department of Labor has still not delivered it over four years after it was due, is it any wonder that employers brag that they can blacklist employees raising safety concerns, knowing that there is nothing that OSHA will do about it?

At work, is the worth and dignity of the individual human being compromised by what Jack London called The Iron Heel and what Frank Norris portrayed in The Octopus?

Do powerful forces mock moral values and make cowards of us all? Do corporations with chemically contaminated workplaces have a right to demand that women employees be sterilized, rather than make workplaces safer? Do the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission and Judges Bork and Scalia have it right when they say that the OSHA Act was not intended to protect women employees from mandatory sterilization policies? Should women have to sue for sex discrimination rather than call OSHA?

Do companies like American Cyanamid, Johnson Controls and Olin Corporation know what they have admitted by demanding sterilization of female employees? If manufacturing plants aren't safe for pregnant women, how safe are they for men? Is that why factories are being exported, along with pollution and worker deaths?

If manufacturing plants are not safe for Americans, how in good conscience can we let those plants be packed up and sent to Mexico, Vietnam or China?

If corporations don't stop at attempts to control employees' minds but seek to control women's reproductive organs, what is to be done?

As long as oligopolists (shared monopolists) pony up huge "campaign contributions," purchasing anti-regulatory politicians, nothing will change.

Albert Gore, Sr. said on election night in 1970, "the truth rise once again." It did on Election Night 2006, with Democrats winning in rural places where people are disgusted with government corruption and pollution.

As a trial lawyer with 134 trial-days defending American employees, I am disgusted with myself and other worker advocates for not adequately conveying to the American people what is being done to them and their cherished civil and constitutional freedoms.

On November 2, 2004, 72% of Florida voters approved a $1 increase in the minimum wage, rejecting employers' anti-minimum wage propaganda.

That same day, social conservatives gave Florida's electoral votes to George W. Bush, elected a conservative U.S. Senator, and voted to place limits on contingency fees in medical malpractice cases - all by the slimmest of margins.
The only "mandate" that day was to protect worker rights.

The mandate of November 7, 2006 is to protect worker rights and the environment, which are not mutually exclusive.

For years, employer lobbyists have stymied increases in the minimum wage at the national level. Yet Floridians stomped the employer lobbyists and ad copy writers, who predicted an economic disaster if Florida voters approved the measure, using scary TV commercials comparing Amendment 5 to the four Florida hurricanes that had just swept across the State. Floridians voted almost 3-1 to raise the minimum wage, which their money-hungry state and federal legislators had prevented for a decade.

The 2004 Florida election was decided by the slimmest of margins, with the usual flummery, including suspect undercounting of African-American votes, with defective election machines (or not enough machines) placed in precincts where minority and student voters were expected to turn out for Democrats. Some Ohio voters waited in line over eight hours to vote in 2004 and the Rolling Stone article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. eloquently established that the Ohio election in 2004 was stolen.

We must learn from the persistence of those Ohio voters who waited in line for eight hours. Democracy belongs to those who show up. We must help educate our fellow Americans about what the next elections will mean for them and the rest of our country.

Polls show that 60-70% of Americans see themselves as environmentalists and don't like their jobs. The vast majority of Americans are willing to support measures to protect workers from death, dismemberment, disease and impoverishment.

In 2006, Congressional Republicans attempted to tie raising the federal minimum wage to a repeal of the estate tax on wealthy persons' fortunes (which Republicans call the "death tax.") Those efforts were unavailing, holding working people hostage to more tax expenditures on the wealthy and powerful.

Meanwhile, Americans believe that our environment is being destroyed. Like Howard Beale in the movie "Network," are we "mad as hell and not going to take it any more?"

The lesson: there is a growing national consensus for workplace and environmental protection. Even with a majority in Congress, the Republican Party felt the need to raise minimum wages, if only to use working people as hostages to increasing tax privileges for the wealthy.

It is long past time that we move workers rights to the top of our national agenda and not as hostages.

It is a question of right and wrong, good vs. evil, and providing remedies for rampant immorality. The American people must provide an answer to the Tennessee government supervisor who said to State employees, "You're the State's for 7 1/2 hours per day and if I tell you to jump off the roof, you jump off the roof,"

At the Department of Labor's own headquarters, a roofer was killed, falling off the roof, due to government and contractor negligence. It's our roof, they're our lives and it's our country. It is time to take our country back.

It is long past the time that we must ask political candidates where they stand on issues that matter to workers and families.

Let us no longer take the phrase "moral values" as about someone obsessing on other peoples sexuality.

It is past time to change the workplace from the most regimented, degrading and brutalizing place in American life. It is time to enforce the rule of law to make workplaces safe and nondiscriminatory -- a place where human life and dignity are respected and upheld.

In Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning film, Schindler's List, the Nazi concentration camp Commandant is told by a woman engineer that the walls of the new building they are constructing are crooked and are not being constructed properly: to enforce discipline, he shoots and kills her on the spot, then orders that the building be torn down and reconstructed consistent with her criticisms.

From our earliest days in elementary and high school, we are prepared for such "industrial discipline" with regimentation and rigidity, taught to be "team players," and not to question authority. Employees who think for themselves and express their views are hounded as "troublemakers," fired and blacklisted. These employees ask only that organizations obey their own principles and comply with the law and moral principles. Psychological tests are devised to keep these employees from being hired. Lawyers are paid to help management fire them and keep them fired.

Too many employers desire a docile workforce that will not join with other workers to demand rights and join unions.

It was Richard Nixon in the Oval Office who said that a whistleblower was "not a team player," ordering that A. Ernest Fitzgerald be fired for telling the truth about Lockheed's cost overruns on the C-5A aircraft (billions of dollars of overruns).

Whistleblowers in every phase of American life know this organizational psychosis, paying for it with their lives, careers, marriages and families. What politician today stands up for ethical employees?

In February, 1990, the American Bar Association (ABA) House of Delegates passed a resolution for real reform of whistleblower laws, covering all government and business employees who reveal any violation of statute or regulation (not just safety and health), with a one year statute of limitations (not just 30 or 180 days, as under current federal laws). Despite the mandate of the ABA, no one in either the Senate or House of Representatives would push for such a law.

Rather than protecting the environment and the public, the Congress and President are protecting employers. For decades, Presidents have named the Secretary of Labor, the Solicitor of Labor and others at DOL from among the ranks of corporate directors and lawyers. President George W. Bush's first Solicitor of Labor, 37-year old scion of a Supreme Court Justice, had never represented a worker in court in his life. While the Senate never confirmed Eugene Scalia, was he supposed to be the most qualified lawyer in America to represent workers? Or was he his appointment a signal insult to American workers -- an indication that they should just go away?

Under truck driver whistleblower laws, the Department of Labor Solicitor's office is empowered to represent truck drivers. The Solicitor very rarely does so (when it does, it has done at best, a mediocre job, with a Dallas DOL lawyer once candidly admitting "we're sort of representing" a Spanish-speaking truck driver.

Meanwhile, workers have the greatest of difficulty finding any lawyer to represent them in discrimination and retaliation cases against powerful employers that are aided and abetted by the government.

Our founders -- and generations of Americans -- pledged their "lives, their fortunes and sacred honor" to protecting human rights against monarchists. Today, tinpot Napoleons in the workplace thwart, foil and thumb their noses at First Amendment values, firing employees "at will" and frustrating enforcement of workplace free speech rights.

Do power-mad dictatorial employers, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce have more in common with dictatorships than with the Founders? Is our democracy going the way of Imperial Rome?

On November 7, 2006, Americans said we're a liberal democracy, not a theocracy and not a fascist dictatorship.

The President, 109th Congress and Courts are not adequately protecting the American people from workplace calamities. Not even Congressional pageboys were safe from the likes of Rep. Mark Foley, with Speaker Dennis Hastert indifferent to employee rights (even of teenagers).

Perhaps workers may seek refuge in the Courts, "the last resort of the common man," as Justice Felix Frankfurter said. Carved in the marble over the Georgia Supreme Court's bench in Atlanta is the ancient Latin motto: "Fiat justitia ruat coelum" ("Let justice be done though the heavens fall").

Will the next President appoint judges who will rule fairly on working peoples' cases? Or do we face "more of the same?"

If you are an employee, learn your rights and don't tolerate cruelty.

If you are an employer, learn to treat your employees as your equals, not serfs.

Will "We the People" take the law into our own hands and pass state law initiatives, local referenda and constitutional amendments?

Washington State's Constitution has guaranteed safe workplaces since 1898, the only state to do so. Will we let juries decide worker rights cases, or trust them to a bureaucracy that acts not at all, or if it acts, acts in geologic time?

President John F. Kennedy said, "God's work here on Earth must truly be our own."
Working people can't leave it up clergy misled by the putatively "Christian Coalition," and other groups that have joined the National Association of Manufacturers and Chamber of Commerce in opposing progressive reforms. A Tennessee worker once told me she was supporting "tort reform" (really tort deform) after hearing her minister speaking about how it would enable transvestites to sue for the cost of sex change surgery. Although a tort victim, she thought tort reform was good for her.

DEDICATION

This blog is dedicated to my parents, the late Edward Slavin, Sr. and Mary Elizabeth Donlon Slavin. Both were union organizers.

In Lincoln's words, "all I am or ever hope to be I owe to my Angel Mother" and to my father. Mr. and Mrs. Edward A. Slavin, Sr., were both labor union organizers whose sacrifices helped make possible rights that Eugene Scalias of the world seek to decimate in the Department of Labor.

Mary Elizabeth Donlon Slavin (b. Wilmington, Del. 1919), organized her secretarial and custodian co-workers at Camden County College in Blackwood, N.J. for the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE)(winning them pay for the week they were on strike, a victory that only occurred one other time in U.S. labor history).

Edward A. Slavin, Sr. (b. Philadelphia, Pa., 1913-2003), was blacklisted by the Pennsylvania Association of Manufacturers (PAM)(one of Eugene Scalia's clients) as a young man, before enactment of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) -- on advice from a sympathetic company manager, he was obliged to change his name (from Slawinski to Slavin) so as to avoid the pernicious PAM blacklist. (He went on to be an 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper in World War II and won three Bronze stars, jumping into Normandy at age 31, when younger troopers called him "the old man.")

Today is Veteran's Day. Let us honor the veterans of our wars as well as the veterans of our workplace, killed and maimed worldwide in record numbers due to desuetude -- nonenforcement of worker protection laws.

DESUETUDE --
"Disuse, cessation, or discontinuance of use -- especially in the phrase, to fall into desuetude. Applied to obsolete statutes."
Black's Law Dictionary
"The state of being no longer used or practiced."
Random House College Dictionary

In the words of a great American poet:

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free....
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
--- Langston Hughes

In the words of the patron Saint of the City of St. Augustine:

"An unjust law is no law at all."
-- St. Augustine of Hippo

In the words of Robert Francis Kennedy:

"Each time a [person] stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, [he or she] sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
-- Robert F. Kennedy, Day of Affirmation, South Africa, 1966


Until workers and Congress and Presdidents alike learn the facts and are educated about the injustices being built into the workplace, we will continue to see thousands of workers killed and maimed due to worship of the Almighty Dollar, the only true God in the pantheon of the narrow-minded universe of the Bush II Administration.

What do you reckon? You will help decide the future of employment in America -- are we a free people? Or are we free only once we leave work for the day?

Ed Slavin
P.O. Box 3084
St. Augustine, Florida
EASlavin@aol.com
November 11, 2006