America really needs more white-collar unions, for a bunch of reasons.

First, obviously, is that they’d be good for white-collar workers. If you’re a computer programmer and the bosses say there’s a big deadline and you have to work 80 hours a week for the next two months, you want a union that demands that you at least get paid time and a half for giving up a big extra chunk of your life, rather than being a ‘professional’ whose time after the first 40 hours each week is a free resource to teh company.

Another is that if white-collar workers had successful unions, they’d feel a lot more kinship with blue-collar workers who need the unions even more than they do.

A third, and the one relevant here, is that white-collar folks are the pundits’ real audience. And if that audience was full of people who could speak from firsthand knowledge in pointing out why The Village’s anti-union bias was so ridiculous, the feedback might force them to change their tune.

Totally spot on!

And as a painter I hate, hate, hate it when idiots people look at a painting and say “I could do that”.

A friend of mine, also an artist, hears that now and again and his response is: “But you didn’t.”

Shuts ‘em up every time.

“The did not say they wanted it good, they said they wanted it by Thursday” God I hate quoting Ronald Regan, but then again it was some writer who rit dem wrds.

First, obviously, is that they’d be good for white-collar workers. If you’re a computer programmer and the bosses say there’s a big deadline and you have to work 80 hours a week for the next two months, you want a union that demands that you at least get paid time and a half for giving up a big extra chunk of your life, rather than being a ‘professional’ whose time after the first 40 hours each week is a free resource to teh company.

Another is that if white-collar workers had successful unions, they’d feel a lot more kinship with blue-collar workers who need the unions even more than they do.

A third, and the one relevant here, is that white-collar folks are the pundits’ real audience. And if that audience was full of people who could speak from firsthand knowledge in pointing out why The Village’s anti-union bias was so ridiculous, the feedback might force them to change their tune.

I guess it was because I put up with this my whole childhood. My father was a college professor. And not just that, in humanities. Worthless, in rural Oklahoma, where hunting and guns RULED. Too many would comment on his profession, without knowing a single thing about it. (And one Art teacher in Jr. High School acted on this. He held up a picture of a great art work (but not common, like the Mona Lisa) and said, “I painted this in college, and I got a C!”) You can say about anything to too many Americans, and get away with it.

A megacorporation is looking for business to snap up and buys a dairy. They know nothing about dairies, but so what. Naturally, they want to find a way to squeeze more profit out of it. The money guys go in there and figure out they can save money if they don’t feed the cows such expensive food. When the dairy business fails because the milk is no good, they blame the cows.

Isn’t this about the studios paying the writers one time and reaping income from the writings forever without any further compensation to the writers? I never got that from the NTY article.

Every contract computer programmer knows the feeling. You write a program and they use it over and over and over and you only get paid once.

How many jobs are like that?