Froth Slosh B'Gosh

Orange Crushed

This is insanity.  Fourteen law firm employees lost their job for wearing color coordinated shirts.

Employers asked the employees to a meeting room, asked them whether it was some sort of protest, to which all replied in the negative, and then the firm fired all employees found wearing an orange shirt.

According to the workers, some employees began wearing orange shirts to work on paydays as a way to self-identify when they hit the bars to celebrate the beginning of the weekend.  The practice had been going on for months.

I tried doing the Google to see if the color had any connection with protest activities.  All I could find (other than other stories on this particular incident) was a site that encouraged gays and lesbians to wear orange on St. Patrick's Day to protest being excluded from New York's St. Patrick Day's Parade.  It seems like a pretty far stretch to connect that to a protest in Florida, espcially as the sacked employees wore orange on Fridays for some time prior.  Perhaps orange has some other protest connection I'm unaware of, but such a connection would be pretty obscure.

Its stories like this one though, that make me glad I belong to a union.

Union Busting

Looks like the entire roster of the Pittsburgh Power arena football team was fired this week in an effort to break the player's union.

One of the team's owners is former Pittsburgh Steelers star receiver Lynn Swann.  During Swann's playing days, he was represented and protected by a union that looked after his interests, in an era where professional football players didn't make the kind of money that they do today, and injury could (and still can) end a career before it ever gets started.  Thanks to Swann's union, he enjoys a comfortable pension.  I guess it makes a big difference though when you're writing a check of $400 dollars per player per game!  How DARE those ingrates ask to be paid as much as $1600 a game! (that, sports fans, works out to less than $30,000 per player for an 18 game season, compared to the $7,200 the players were making).  They should feel lucky that their Galtian masters allow them to get the snot beat out of them for 400 bucks a game while charging from $20 to $170 a ticket!

Something Is Not Adding Up

This article in the P-G detailing the Turnpike's plans to go to an all-electronic toll collection system and eliminate toll booth collectors to save money doesn't make sense.  The PA Turnpike wants to spend $320 million dollars to set up the system, which would cost $83 million dollars a year to operate.  This would eliminate the need to spend $65 million dollars for the salaries of toll collectors. 

According to my calculator, that means the automated system costs $18 million dollars more per year to operate, along with the $320 million dollar startup costs.  How does that save money?  I suspect the real reason isn't to save money, but to eliminate more union jobs.

Paging Mr. Dickens, Mr. Charles Dickens....

Just when I think things can't get any more looney, along comes the New Hampshire GOP.  Now they want to eliminate lunch breaks.

Wage Theft

Pretty sure that even if the perps are identified, no one will go to prison.

Such so-called wage theft - a term that state regulators avoid - can occur in a variety of ways. They include: workers who are paid below the minimum wage; workers who aren't paid the overtime they are owed; workers who aren't paid at all or are only paid part of what they are owed; and workers who don't receive their final paycheck after they depart from a job.
In the state and across the nation, wage theft is more prevalent in low-wage industries such as retailing and restaurants, according to the Justice Center.
It's a growing problem in North Carolina. The amount of money employers short-changed employees rose by 21 percent in fiscal year 2011 compared to the previous year; the number of employees who were shortchanged rose 37 percent.

Just another reason to belong to a union!