Not Phantasy Star Zero

Yeah right now I really really want to be playing that game cause it is frigging awesome. However, I'm starting to suspect that it is becoming a bit of a problem so off to blogger land instead! I'm on the home stretch for my novel, if all goes right I'll hit 50k by friday! Then I'll be back to my normal blogging schedual including a nice big indepth blog on the whole ups and downs of the novel writting process.

What I am instead going to talk about is why do Americans work the way they do. It's interesting really. If you don't know, go look up the amount of vacation time you'd get in England or France. The rest of europe follows suit. On top of that they are expected to stay home when sick, they get holidays off, and all sorts of other crazy things.

I don't want to focus to much on that though. Even if Europe doesn't excist the average worker is pretty crazy here in the USA. White Collar wise they work 40 hours minimum. They are oftentimes expected to take their work home if it isn't done by the end of the day, come in on weekends, and all with no additional financial benefit. That's the fucked up thing about salaried empolyment, you get fuck all in terms of over time compensation and you end up working a lot of it. It is kind of insane. The worst insident of this I've ever seen with my own eyes happened back when I was working help desk a place called Supra Telecom. They were doing major upgrades to the network. So they had a team of contractors come in over night to do the job. My boss, the network administrator, gets to work at about 7am or so. He works the whole day, stays over night to help out with the crew doing the upgrades, and then he works until 12 the next day when he finnally decides that he is going mother fucking home. To give you a little history 5 years ago this guy was fresh off the boat from Greece of all places and working in a warehouse. He's a man who took the time to educate himself so that he could make a better life for him and his family. He deserves better.

Leaving white collar and IT behind minimum wage jobs, and blue collare employers are actually even worse about abusing their employees. I'm talking unpaid over time, unsafe working conditions, or skirting the bare edges of the employment laws to squeeze the most out of each and every person until there is nothing left. This all isn't from person experience either. Nor is this an unfocused rant. I... okay well I lost the link that has all the numbers. Wait no I found one! I am doing this at lunch so my time is somewhat limited. It has european numbers too! Woop!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/samuel-h-williamson/why-do-americans-work-so_b_362111.html

Anyway. They ask why do we work so hard. It's an article with an open question that I will attempt to answer now that the whole framing part of the blog is done. The answer is two fold, American employers are dicks, and there is absolutely nothing from stopping them from being dicks. Historically speaking America has always had a large influx of immigrant population to make things happen. In the north around the civil war time we had the irish. Lots of irish who were fleeing a potato famine. There was no hope back home, work here, and as the maxim goes there are more where you came from so you will put up with whatever horrors we inflict upon you otherwise we will just do it to someone else. In the south we had slavery which is basicly the same thing as the irish except we paid their life time salary up front to someone else. I'm half joking put the damn rocks down. We made the chinese build our rail roads, cause you know they came over here and, well they might as well. The list doesn't go on much further though, unless you want to count the Mexicans doing every shit job ever, which you should.

With the miners we saw the first organized reisitance which coincides with some of the most apalling working conditions ever seen and easy access to dynamite. I don't think people really understand that in order to get mine owners to not be such massive collective mother fucking ass holes they literally had to engage in terrorist actions to make them stop. They blew up bridges, mine shafts, rail lines, all sorts of things. Of course back then they were called Anarchists, but in order to wrest back some basic human rights that should be a part of our consititution, lots of people had to die.

We also had to go to war with ourselves to make ourselves stop using slavery. I really do hate the whole states rights part of the civil war thing. Blah blah blah federal government this and that. NO motherfucker you can not use black people as disposable labor and going neener neerer not part of your country anymore isn't going to save you. Put your rebel flag down.

Rants aside. Blue collars, thanks to the anarchists have unions to hell and back as a result most of the blue collar work went overseas. Its funny, why wait for immigration to happen when we can just go to them? Its cheaper and their countries have less laws. Or we started abusing our white collar workers.

I think I am going to make this a two parter.

Anyway! So yeah employers are dicks. Why is it better in europe? Well they had royalty. They had empires, and they understand that it is important to treat your population with care and respect, not only that but to make sure that other people treat them with care and respect. That is kind of how that works. I mean saying a blanket statment about europe is retarded because there is so much to it and so many diffrent overriding factors. But this is one that paticularly stands out. One thing that makes them very diffrent than us. I do think it is one paticularly critical diffrence between them and us. There is also the historical idea that many of our ancestors came over here to get away from monarchy.

I'm not saying europe is perfect. They had all the same human rights violations we did. THey had them worse in some cases. But they also didn't go to war over stopping with the slavery, and they don't ride their empolyees like we do here now. So something is certainly diffrent.