Recently at work we learned that one of our maintenance workers was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. His doctor gave him only six months to live. Those closest to him began to take up a collection to send him on one last trip to fulfill a dream of his, watching a NASCAR race in Daytona, FL. Our machine shop pays the lowest wages in the area, with most workers making between $10 and $15 per hour in one of the most expensive areas in the country to live. But the workers in the shop stepped up, donating what they could. They raised the needed funds in less than two weeks.

Even though this was a modest dream and this maintenance worker had given more than five years of his life to this company the bosses could not find it in themselves to donate a single penny for this man’s last vacation. After initially claiming that they would allow workers to donate through paycheck deductions (something that would help people who live paycheck to paycheck) the company went back on that, claiming that it simply wouldn’t be possible.

Meanwhile you can buy merchandise from the company store and hockey tickets via paycheck deductions, but the cost of having the payroll department process these donations would just be too taxing for the bosses. The most they could find themselves moved to give was to simply allow the collection to be taken up during all shifts.  

This is, of course, nothing new. When the current depression hit in 2008, food banks emptied and charitable organizations that aid the poor and homeless were hit hard as donations declined. The decline revealed a startling truth, that despite overly publicized charitable donations from the capitalist class, it is in fact the working class who make the overwhelming amount of donations to organizations that aid the poor.

A recent study in August by the Chronicle of Philanthropy confirmed that the vast majority of aid to the poor is collected from working-class neighborhoods. The capitalist media tries to portray the wealthy as our benevolent caretakers, but as recent events at my shop have demonstrated, the capitalists are only interested in bleeding the working class dry.

As a final indignity for this maintenance worker he gets to spend his final months not with his friends and family, but at work. Without going to work he loses the meager health care that our job offers, something that would surely bankrupt his family as they tried to pay for his care. Besides, the company would not want to set any bad precedents by keeping him on payroll while he stayed home. This is not a world fit for the working class to live in.

Red Beard