Like most people, I’m not enamored with alarm clocks. They are a brutal necessity, most definitely not a brother. The routine of finding oneself half-awake and staring at the clock a few minutes before its scheduled assault on your ears and nerves, wondering as best one can in such a condition whether getting up now and getting it over with or engaging in a futile attempt to seize the five minutes between now and the siren’s unholy mechanical song commencing for additional sleep, is one with which we’re all familiar. All too familiar, to be precise.
I mention this because of a moment this morning. The alarm went off at 6:00 AM. I turned it off and stared at the clock, it returning the favor. I spent the next few minutes drifting between slumber and semi-awake, thinking during the moments I was conscious it was time for me to get up and prepare for departing the hotel my wife and I had resided at the previous few days and head homeward. At 6:15 this was no longer a voluntary decision.
On the sidewalk beneath our room a labor demonstration commenced. This involved a great deal of shouting and general noise making via beating drums and blowing horns. The thinking behind this, although it should be noted referring to this as somehow involving actual thought is probably stretching it mighty thin, was apparently raising such a ruckus the guests would immediately petition management to give these people whatever they wanted so they could get back to sleep. Um, sure.
Irritation factor notwithstanding, it was more than a little amusing to hear one of the call-and-response chants repeated many times: “What do we want?” “Respect!” One can almost hear the thought process going into this: “I’ve got it! We’ll make a huge fuss to inform everyone of our plight! They’ll immediately support our cause! BRILLIANT!” Either that, or make staying at the hotel such a miserable experience no one will want to so management’s hand will be forced by falling room occupancy to… lay off a bunch of workers. What, you thought they’d hand over the keys to the kingdom?
I’m not averse to people earning a living wage and appropriate benefits for honest work. It’s how they go about it that’s the concern. At its beginning, the union movement in this country was a needed defense against abuses in the workplace — wages, working conditions, you name it. However, as the decades rolled by these abuses were gradually addressed by legislation. In more nanny state-oriented places such as San Francisco (surprise, I know) sick pay and healthcare benefits are mandatory for most all businesses. Unions have been rendered irrelevant, yet they persist via their promulgation of the myth that unionization equals strength against ‘them.’ It would be nice if both sides would occasionally remember they work for the same company and need each other to do their jobs in order for both to continue receiving paychecks. Regrettably, this is seldom the case. And so we have scenes like this morning.
Next time the alarm clock goes off I won’t dislike it quite so much.
