24 Years At The Colorado Employment Service Shaped My Views [View all]

[TheMastersNemesis]

My views on labor were shaped by my 24 years as a labor specialist. I worked with welfare to work, the homeless, the unemployed, in the unemployment division, ex felons, veterans and the general population. What I saw was that most people I interviewed about 20,000+ during my career wanted only one thing. THEY WANTED LONG TERM JOB WITH ADVANCEMENT POTENTIAL WITH BENEFITS AND JOB SECURITY. Most of them did not want to get insanely rich. They just wanted to be able to live a decent life and be secure in old age. On the whole they were not slackers and they were not lazy.

Ronald Reagan, the GOP, big business and its allies took all that away from American workers. Watching the carnage day in and day out for all those years was just disgusting. And each and every year our job got harder. By the time I retired there was little that I could do to help. The job banks got worse and worse, the number of good jobs declined and the outsourcing and the insourcing became epidemic. Employer demands got more ridiculous all the time. And eventually what employers demanded got unreasonable. And our funding just kept going down. We were told to do more with less until there was nothing to do less with.

Credit ratings, drug testing, outlandish experience demands, invasion of privacy etc are all things that do not have anything to do with the job. Now things are completely out of control. And the reason employers are not connecting is THEIR FAULT.

Anyone working in my field would understand immediately how employers with the help of the GOP have pretty much destroyed the labor structure of our nation. Unless we find a way to get that back it will only get worse. Continuing to be anti union, anti labor and anti regulation in the labor arena will relegate workers into almost "no pay" peasants.

Based on what I have seen older workers are going to be finished by 45 if they already aren't. There was a time when a person's highest earnings were just before retirement.

Voters can blame Obama for this catastrophe, but the game was already set up by Bush long before Obama ever came on the scene. Ronald Reagan told everyone what he planned and as a nation we let him set his plan in motion.