Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Slip-Sliding Away

 

Paraphrasing Paul Simon...

We work our jobs, Collect our pay; Believe we’re gliding down the highway When in fact we’re slip slidin’ away.
But if you work for a BP contractor, you don't even always collect your pay. From Dahr Jamail, truthout:
BP oil disaster response workers are reporting endemic problems, such as not being paid on time, low morale, rampant sickness, equipment failures and being lied to regularly.

"Yesterday was a catastrophe," one worker, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Truthout. "People are waiting 2-3 hours for their paychecks to be brought to them and I know for a fact three people that didn't get paid and no reason was given."

The woman has been working as a clerk for Gulf Asphalt Contractors (GAC) ,,,

...

Read the rest. But finish your breakfast first. It's pretty disgusting.



(Correction to Paul Simon lyrics made after initial posting. I had mixed the two versions of the last stanza.)

3 comments:

  1. And Mr. Duff wonders why we don't like BP...

    They bring in out of state contractors, most of whom seem to be fly-by-nighters with no ties to the area, and wonder why people are upset with them.

    These contractors create single project corporations that will evaporate just before the end of their contract, and no one will ever see their last paycheck.

    It happens all the time down here.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bryan, I still feel a desire to stick a corkscrew in Mr. Duff in some unpleasant part of his anatomy, but I have also come to note his amusing aspect. When he suggests doing something to someone else which he would never tolerate if done to himself, I know he's inflicting his idea of humor on us. To appreciate it, all one must do is transform oneself for a moment into a radical right-wing nut-case.

    Not seeing the last paycheck... that happened to me once when I was working for one of the oldest and largest institutions in the Texas Medical Center. They had a high administrative official who disapproved of hiring contractors for any reason, so his solution was to use his power to interfere with their being paid. (Apparently, the idea of not hiring them in the first place never occurred to him.) I eventually got my money... six months late, and with no interest for my pains. That's when I realized that IT professionals really, really need an effective union.

    ReplyDelete
  3. BLOGGER TEXT EDITOR BUG: Does anyone find this bug familiar?

    You enter and publish a post. In the usual Blogger convention, you use an empty line as a paragraph break... the doc tells you to do that, and the system does that by default. You do this inside and outside of BLOCKQUOTE tags.

    Later you edit that post. The moment you type the first character of your change, again, inside or outside the BLOCKQUOTE, you lose all paragraphs within the BLOCKQUOTE... they get wrapped into a single paragraph. Let me tell you: it's great for rhymed, metrical poetry. [/snark]

    I have tried to find this problem in Blogger "Help" (I use the word because they do, not because there's really any help available), to no avail. As it is, I'm going back and sticking P tags in every place I want an empty line. Sometimes that works; sometimes not.

    Any ideas?

    ReplyDelete

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