FLASHDUNCE

I used to work. I mean really work. Right out of high school, before college, I got a job with General Dynamics as a grinder. I was either so good or so bad at pneumatic hand tools that they sent me to welding school. Subsequently, I qualified as a MIG welder on 2 different machines and in 3 positions (insert your own joke here). But, I gave all that up eventually, because it was work.

Working as a welder was hardly like the Jennifer Beals movie, "Flashdance" where she sparked the acetylene during the day and danced the lap at night. I rarely knocked off work to go to the ballet with my boss. They didn't even have a ballet in Goose Creek, S.C. Welding was dirty, hot, bad for the eyes and even embarrassing on the occasional days that a random spark would burn my clothes and me down to near nudity. I learned then that rarely do employers care more than the bottom line or the bare minimum of OSHA requirements.

When it comes to working today, it's even worse and I have some advice; it's time for a revolution. If it is taking you 50 or more hours a week to do your job, something is wrong. I say 50 because I know most of you are now thinking, "I wish I was only working 50 hours a week!!" Seriously, there is something wrong in business today. With computers and technology our workload should be reduced, yet employers are dangling more and more carrots to more and more mules. If they get away with it, it is our fault, not there's.

So many businesses complain that it's hard to find good workers out there today. Show me a company that says that, and I will show you a company that has used up all it's good employees. Now they are just scraping the bottom, living off the few workers left that have the low esteem that it takes to put up with slave conditions, treatement and wages.

Admittedly, I only bring up this subject because of the horror stories that my friends and acquaintances tell me. And I also know there are companies that don't fall into these categories. But overall, would it really hurt business or this country to allow employees to earn their employers their millions at a little slower pace? 40 hours at a time rather than 60?

So much has been said about the breakdown of the family recently, due to crime and drugs and other obvious social problems, but our country's dirty little secret is that most of our problems come from the fact that we ARE capitalist pigs, as other nations like to describe us. We have traded in our kids, our spouses for a fat paycheck, for that promotion, for that feeling that we crushed the competition. Drugs can hardly hold a crack pipe to the high that our "salaried" nation is living off of.

The General Dynamics building where I used to work is gone now. The plant closed and the structure was actually blown up for the movie "Die Hard III." I will kiss Bruce Willis one day for that one. I did learn something from those years in the 300 amp trenches though: Don't expect too much out of a job where your boss eats chicken livers out of a lunch pail and with the right temperature and conditions, even boxer shorts become flammable.

Work hard, play harder and remember, mules chasing carrots will walk right past a hundred fields of grain.

Billy Murphy - 5/11/99