Hocking workers just trying to keep their jobs, not increase their salaries

To the Editor:

You're fired!

To "lay off" a worker is an old production term. A widget company makes 10,000 widgets a week but the next week has orders for only 5,000. Some workers are laid off until the next month, when sales orders increase, and more workers are needed to produce 12,000 widgets a week.

The laid-off workers return and even work overtime to produce the extra 2,000 widgets. The company remains efficient and the workers cooperate for the greater good. "Laid off" should not be a euphemism for "you're fired!"

Hocking College workers are not fighting for higher wages, but are merely trying to keep the work and jobs they have. To cut costs, Hocking's bosses want to hire scab labor and then fire their own workers, whose work will then be done by "sub-contractors."

A subcontractor is a new kind of legal strikebreaker and is worse than an old time scab worker. A "subcontractor" negotiates with the college to do the job at a cheaper rate than what the college pays its current workers.

The subcontractor hires local labor at minimum wages and little to no benefits, does the job as cheaply as possible, and makes as much money as he can for himself. The subcontractor uses his workers up, and throws them away as quickly as they ask for medical benefits and safety measures.

Loyalty means nothing when unemployed workers are plentiful, broke and fighting each other over gay marriage and illegal drugs, while hopped up on legal drugs, and deep in debt to the 1 percent who think they own us.

Hocking College is showing its students what to expect when they graduate – deep in debt, seeking a "college dream" perpetrated by bankers who make exorbitant interest and fees on college loans that pay college administrators excessive wages to represses workers, and who enslave our youth to a life of never-ending debt and corporate rape and pillage.

Bankers don't go to jail, but they can go bankrupt after stealing your money to the Cayman Islands. Students and their family got suckered into "college loans" — as if they had the Seal of Good Government Approval — when they were really the work of devil moneychangers who rigged the game so students cannot go bankrupt. 

Students at OU, and all students, should join the picket line with workers at Hocking College and "occupy" the 1 percent running monetary con games on all of us.

Beware of Paper Gods — US$666 — "In God We Trust."

Ron Linker
Millfield