Only boobs aren’t anticipating labor strife throughout the current United States. Working Americans must endure an anti-labor administration soiling the Oval Office. No American should be so blind as not seeing how “the malefactors of wealth” have snuggled up against a sociopathic megalomaniac.

So next to no redress for dangerous working conditions, unfavorable judgments in pay decisions, and additional chutes in the maze that is what employers and insurers will further bestow vis-à-vis health benefits. Working people must understand they’ll have to take back that which had been theirs but purloined through courts, complacency, and their own inattentiveness.

What’s barreling down the pike has a good chance of reviving the spirits Joe Hill and other labor agitators from our nation’s nascent Industrial Era. Laboring Americans have had it comparatively cushy these last 80 years. So swell that the forces seeing enormous profits solely as its pie have only recently supercharged efforts to slice pieces thinner while sharing less of them.

Had they been anymore obvious, the thieves would’ve sold advertising. The true crime may’ve been that Americans weren’t observant in the least.

If American history was truly taught in our schools, students would know what lifted their Industrial Age forebearers. If they were now astute, should they graduate into the workforce during these next four years, they may discern the regression of the past four decades. Without efforts to brake it, the descending path must invariably return to the start of the labor movement.

From today that view will seem primordial.

Since the 1980s bosses have made steady assured progress in clawing back decades of workers’ rights, benefits, and wages. A lesson many hourly and salaried will learn is what advances they’ve lost, what they’ll lose in the future, were never given, and never will be.

All that wrested away.

No boss ever raised his employees’ wages from kindness or recognition their efforts jammed his pockets with loot. No management board ever voluntarily improved working standards. No chairman ever understood that healthier happier employees produced more, therefore increased profits. No one crushing seat cushions in a boardroom or corner office ever had any notion that to better keep the cogs humming and whistling and spinning further productivity could be incentivized with perks like more days off and bonuses.

If anyone laboring today could be bothered to reach for a book whose subject is labor in the United States, he or she would learn all the above emerged through agitation, picketing, and strikes. Eh, some gunfire and dynamite, too. The only results initially received were lumps and bruises, sore feet, and time specific losses of income.

However, eventual rewards were immense. These expanded and lasted through generations. The middle class grew and itself prospered. Added expenses aside, companies realized profits unimaginable during the previous decades of maintaining heavy upper hands over employees.

Yet here American laborers are on the cusp of our nation’s Second Gilded Age. They’re one day closer to hearing a murder of bosses tell them how lucky they are to even have jobs.

My father, a product of the Depression, had that ringing in his ears until he was inducted into the army a few months before Pearl Harbor. After being demobbed, he and countless other men who’d been marginalized during America’s economic turmoil, never heard it again. But they kept the memory close. Not as reminder so much as motivation. Though circumstances vastly improved throughout postwar America, the thought they could be snatched back to hard times and hard work that hardly paid never wandered far from their minds.

Too bad fewer and fewer of such people remain among us. They could relate with urgency their experiences to 21st century workers. Clockwatchers now have little inkling of the past. They have zero awareness of what their earnings and benefits and dignity bosses will declare unjust and excessive.

Then swipe.

Father’s and my Boomer generations shared a lengthy economic upswing. This period included the prestige of having honest jobs that amply sustained as well as lightened our lives. All indications now are the pendulum will crash backwards. And this viciously.

Witnessing the first act play out in Washington inspires no confidence in this generation of workers. As of now, they’re easily being rolled by guys faking authority. Out of the hundreds of thousands of federal workers, nobody has called them out yet.

The feds have the numbers. Those herding them don’t even have cattle prods.

What should be distressing is the public’s reactions. Currently this is all spectacle. Just over half of all Americans believe none of what’s occurring on rarefied others’ behalf, not for the good of the people nor that of the nation, will only impact them in the slightest.

Also, it helps federal bureaucrats are being assailed. For now. Word to the wise – once government workers have been undermined and undercut, the same processes will be turned against private sector employees.

In the decades since President Ronald Reagan decertified PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization), Americans have done a terrific job of letting work be denigrated. All honest work is dignified. However, societal influences and cultural perceptions have taken the prize of dignity and awarded its luster to prestige.

Donald Trump, a felon presently soiling the Oval Office, has a prestigious job. But he is without dignity.

Since our society has become shallower and more superficial, the notion of steady unglamorous work has taken a hit. While everybody wants to be a star, there are only so many stages on which perform. Besides, without behind-the-scenes crews, pit personnel, and house staffs, no star will burst far or brightly for long.

In our age of Anglo male dumb and dumber, bureaucrats make a good target for the lazy to attack. Though their work is out of sight, it has vast effect on multitudes. And yet none of them take curtain calls.

The likeliest image of bureaucrats within the small narrow minds of Americans seeking resolve lives which have left them uninspired is some know-it-all know-nothing squirrelled away in an office of an enormous nondescript edifice formulating plans to make the simple lives of simple people harder. Or better, shoving this pile of papers to that side of a desk then pushing that same pile of papers again across the desk. He or she will repeat this process throughout an eight-hour shift.

Hey. The above could be the basis of a They Might Be Giants video.

Common a view as it may be, those disparaged have conducted and will conduct vital processes for the American public. Not all bureaucrats are clerks. Sizable portions work beside professions and industries that keep our food, medicines, and ourselves as safe as possible.

Others oversee industrial or commercial workplace conditions. They limit hazards created by carelessness or neglect. Plenty make sure consumer products haven’t been slapped together in slipshod fashions which might render them dangerous. The rest? Know that claim or approval of paperwork that will reward or improve lives? Bureaucrats are the ones who may unearth documentation which can verify or deny, approve, or return the claim seeking more information for proper validation.

The faceless hundreds of thousands of government employees Elon Musk and his pasty-faced hackers are demeaning make our systems function smoothly. See the ultimate goal of the Afrikaner and his Generation Whatever Nabobs as this – to replace as much of the human element as they can with artificial intelligence. At one time such may’ve been considered “innovation.” If it was just machines interfacing other machines, our AI concern might be negligible.

However, as his Lost Boys and the South African Peter Pan himself haven’t and may never grasp until they grow up – as if! – is human problems require human solutions needing humans to apply them. When it comes to dealing with people actual humans will always be superior to AI.

That’s just how we’re wired. Humanity is one day closer to a jam only nimble minds may see us through rather than some befuddled non-sentient AI program stuffed to its constipated gills with recycling algorithms. And won’t that make us reconsider tools we’re wrongly striving to make indispensable?

© 2025 Copyright by Slow Boat Media LLC