Ever notice street workers standing around a hole looking bored at the task at hand? I know what you're thinking. Four guys standing around looking at some torn up concrete, must be a government job. I have done my share of concrete removal over the years so I know what it's like and I'm here to tell you it's no picnic. Most street workers are lucky to make it to 60 before age and disability stop them. Breathing in concrete dust for years on end does wonders for the respiratory system too. So how do they manage. One cubic foot of the average concrete weights 100 lbs. So in order to get your roads and sidewalks back to their pristine uncracked state 4 or 5 worker will take turns hammering and wrenching the old material out of its' resting place. You can only work for ten or fifteen minutes at a time because the pain of such labor is so great. And by rotation the work gets done and usually ahead of schedule in most cases. So the next time you see a group of hard hats leaning on their shovels give a wave because I know that if it was you out there you'd be whining like a baby after hour or two.
I'm a bit perplexed. There's a call for a general strike on Nov. 2. by OWS. This seems a bit early. I know it is in response to events in Oakland but to try and organize such an event in such a brief period is at best impossible. So I'm not expecting anything major to happen next Wednesday but then again I didn't think the movement would spread as fast as it did. We will see...
bank fails later
One bank failed this week in IL
And on that topic I just went to a local credit union to start the process of moving my money out of one of the big banks. To my surprise there were 25 people ahead of me doing the exact same thing. And even the elderly gentleman behind me was doing the very same thing. As I said before this isn't fooling around. People are pissed and they aren't going to take it any more.
November 5 is "Move your money day".
6 comments:
What an excellent point. Having done several different kinds of work over the years, I long ago learned most people, myself included, imagine others' jobs are simpler and easier than they really are. Go to do those jobs yourself and you quickly realize there's more to it than you imagined.
Re: Mr. cat in the photo. He looks like he's ready to tell someone what they can do with that silly plastic hat.
They use machines to cut up and machines to break up things like that now. These days the workers are just standing around to do a little clean up shovel work, if they are worried about dust they can wear masks.
Way back in the 60's I broke up concrete for a while in underground tunnels, if we had masks they wasn't much.
A lot of union people should just be happy to have jobs, there's others that will do nasty work for half what they make and be happy to have the work.
No Bill believe it not much of the work is still done by hand with brute force. Ask any laborer.
I remember when I was a wee lad and I had a summer job working for my burg and one week, we had to rake out the freshly-poured blacktop before the roller did its work. No heavy lifting, just raking steaming hot blacktop in 90° heat. And *that* sucked. So yeah, folks, like most of us I presume, whose job entails sitting on your ass punching a keyboard, be happy you're not doing actual labor.
I watched them resurface the highway and break up and put in a lot of new sidewalks and curbs this summer and NO ONE was having to work very hard.
Most of them were using big machines.
I hope tens of thousands, maybe millions, of people will take part in this bank transfer movement. It's the only language the big banks will understand.
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