----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Caughey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2001 12:39 PM
Subject: <toc>-- It's Payback Time, commentary from Yahoo
> Worth reading if for no other reason that Rall
> was able to work in these lines: "Only in America
> would executive arrogance push a $186,000-a-year
> employee into Bolshevism. God bless America!"
> -bill-
>
> Thursday August 02 08:12 PM EDT
>
> http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/uctr/20010802/cm/it_s_payback_time_1.html
>
> IT'S PAYBACK TIME
>
> By Ted Rall
>
> Recession, Bad Bosses and the Art of Sabotage
>
> DAYTON, Ohio -- The weak will never inherit the Earth, but they just
> might blow it up on the way out.
>
> As hundreds of thousands of Americans find themselves downsized,
> right-sized, laid off and plain old fired during this latest economic
> meltdown, some of them are getting even.
>
> "I have been loyal to the company in good times and bad times for
> over 30 years," read an anonymous note to the president of a New
> Jersey-based chemical company. "I was expecting a member of top
> management to come down from his ivory tower to face us with the
> layoff announcement, rather than sending the kitchen supervisor with
> guards to escort us off the premises like criminals. You will pay for
> your senseless behavior."
>
> Pay they did: The downsized/right-sized/laid-off/fired ex-information
> management systems manager deleted his former employer's inventory
> and personnel files from the comfort of his newly unaffordable home,
> causing estimated damages of up to $20 million. The sabotage was so
> extensive that the company had to cancel its IPO.
>
> "I don't recall at any time in history, and I've been in this for 30
> years, where the degree of destruction was quite as high," employment
> attorney Linn Hinds, whose corporate clients are closing factories
> and sending their erstwhile workers to the fiscal hereafter, tells
> The New York Times.
>
> Only in America would executive arrogance push a $186,000-a-year
> employee into Bolshevism. God bless America!
>
> It's been too long coming, but American corporations are finally
> beginning to get what they deserve for treating their workers like
> equipment. Whether they're hacking into data files or stealing their
> own impromptu severance packages -- according to the Association of
> Certified Fraud Examiners, 6 percent of gross corporate revenues are
> stolen by disgruntled workers -- ex-employees are striking back at
> companies that force them to work unpaid overtime, without benefits,
> in cramped cubicles, until their overcompensated bosses let them go
> with little or no severance.
>
> Like the Diggers and Luddites before them, these heroic figures
> understand that government is no longer in the business of protecting
> workers from rapacious bosses. In a world where CEOs aren't stoned to
> death for collecting raises at the same time they're letting the
> people who do the real work go, justice is something you get for
> yourself.
>
> Not everyone who gets laid off has a legitimate grudge. If a business
> isn't doing well, if its executives set dignified examples by
> slashing or eliminating their own pay, if they give workers several
> months notice of problems so they can begin looking for new jobs, and
> if they issue generous -- certainly not worth less than six months'
> pay -- severance checks, the unlucky unemployed should say their
> farewells, forget their passwords and move on quietly. You're not
> getting even, after all, unless you've been done wrong.
>
> But companies that rely on such Gestapo tactics as security guards
> and curt notices of dismissal, those who cut you a two-week check or
> none at all, and particularly those whose senior executives continue
> to collect seven-figure paychecks for their services as failed
> managers, deserve anything they get. In that situation, not only is
> there nothing unethical about deleting a few vital files or diverting
> petty cash, it is an affront to decency for you not to do so.
>
> Corporate America has been violating labor laws and basic rules of
> civility as long as it has because countless millions of
> broken-hearted workers have let themselves get tossed out with the
> morning's trash by incompetent thugs who lined their pockets with the
> fruits of their suffering. The more that victims of corporate
> greedheads hit them in their bottom lines, the more civilized the
> next round of layoffs will be. It may be a free market out there, but
> laissez-faire is a French phrase for anarchy.
>
> "(Dismissed workers') main concern," asserts labor lawyer Jonathan
> Alpert, "is figuring out how to get their lives together, not
> masterminding some sort of retaliation."
>
> Let's work on that.
>
> (Ted Rall, author of the new graphic novel "2024" and cartoon
> collection "Search and Destroy," is based in New York.)
>
>
