[spoiler]Panel 1
Large lettering shows the title: Ten Reasons We’re Against Unions!
Below the title lettering, a group of picketing workers can be seen. Most are just silhouettes, but three people in the foreground are drawn in more detail, and their signs can be read.
SIGN 1: Workers United Against Workers Uniting
SIGN 2: I Prefer Having No Power!
SIGN 3: I (heart symbol) Bosses
Panel 2
WOMAN 1: Unions just want to line their own pockets!
WOMAN 2: Unlike bosses, who have only our best interests at heart.
Panel 3
Man counts off points on the fingers of one hand. The hand has seven fingers.
MAN: Other than weekends, lunch breaks, overtime pay, parental leave, pension plans, higher wages, and sick leave, what good have unions ever done?
Panel 4
Rosie the Riveter, in her traditional showing off the bicep pose, but she’s inanely grinning.
ROSIE: I deserve less pay than men.
Panel 5
Two men with work-uniform vests on. The first man is missing teeth, and an ear, and an eye, and has a hook replacing one hand. The second man has a wooden peg instead of a head.
EYEPATCH MAN: I wouldn’t want the company wasting money making my job safer!
PEGHEAD MAN: Heck no!
Panel 6
Professorial type with glasses and pipe holds up a crude drawing of a face with fangs and horns, labeled “unions.”
PROF: Speaking objectively, all unions are evil! Eeevviilllll!
Panel 7
CHEERFUL WOMAN: I want the “right to work!” Along with the right to be arbitrarily fired!
Panel 8
White woman speaks in foreground, oblivious to the two Black folks in the background who look annoyed by her words.
WHITE WOMAN: Who cares if unions reduce the pay gap between non-white and white workers?
Panel 9
A businessman flies high in the sky, riding on a giant packet of cash, his necktie flapping in the wind.
BUSINESSMAN: It’s wrong that unions spend money influencing Congress. Only business should get to do that!
Panel 10
Young woman, brimming with confidence, speaks in the foreground. In the background, three other people, one carrying a box, one typing at a terminal – also speak. All four are wearing identical hats and short-sleeved shirts – they’re clearly co-workers.
YOUNG WOMAN: One day, I’ll get rich, and I’ll be the boss. Once that happens, I won’t want some union getting in my way!
COWORKER 1: I’m also gonna be boss!
COWORKER 2: Me too!
COWORKER 3: Me too!
Panel 11
Woman shrugging.
WOMAN: Who’d want more power at work?[/spoiler]
Re: panel 5, I do not smoke a pipe or wear a bowtie and my hair is usually a little bit longer than that. Other than that, spot on, and my lawyer would be in touch if I wasn’t a huge believer in intellectual piracy.
I’m sorry you mistook Mr. #5 for yourself, Robert, when he is obviously a spitting image of George Will.
Not my fault that George Will is just a huge copier.
No: but bosses are predictably acting in their own interests and against the interests of employees. Unions are putatively acting in the employees’ interests, but they often don’t. That’s a pretty important difference; it’s akin to the distinction between “opposing team” and “your own teammate who throws the game.”
Yup. If you don’t have a job, and if the union is preventing you from getting one, this can be a perfectly rational statement. Mocking the jobless is beneath you.
Most folks. “Reducing the effects of social racism” isn’t what unions are FOR (see your first panel.) The effects are admirable…. but forcing people to pay union dues in order to have a job, so that the union might enact a given racial balance policy, is a problem. Pity you don’t see it, though.
Panel 6:
That is the flip-side of the right to arbitrarily quit. When I started my own business, I walked into the company meeting on a Saturday morning and informed my bosses that I resigned, “effective yesterday.”
That is the whole concept of at-will employment; it is a voluntary relationship. I can’t force them to employ me and they can’t force me to work for them. They can fire me for (almost) any damn reason they want (even stupid ones), and I can quit for any damn reason I want (even stupid ones).
Seems fair to me.
-Jut
Oh Crap!
I cut and pasted the quote from Panel #6 from g&w, who misquoted it.
Bad Gin and Whiskey (as if there were such things)!
-Jut
Jutgory – the right to quit and the right to fire people are not the same right. Here in the UK, an employer cannot stop an employee from quitting (excluding certain contracted cases but that’s true in the US as well), but in many cases, it is illegal to fire an employee arbitrarily.
They are both the right to terminate an agreement unilaterally.
I’m not saying that the two are entirely dissimilar. Just that you can have one without the other (it’s also possible to have systems where an employer can fire you but you cannot simply quit when you feel like it. Most militaries work under that system, at least for soldiers in active duty).
While pedantry is having its moment:
#1: Jake is planning to burgle your house, as he does every week. Jane hears of this plan and decides to burgle the house through a different window simultaneously, hoping that your supply of ticked-off Charleses with rejuvenated senses for the importance of property rights is limited. Your dislike of Jake is well-established; is your sudden distaste for Jane irrational or incomprehensible?
#2: Weren’t most of these good things achieved years, decades, or even centuries ago? Yes, unions had a big role in getting those things…just like big strong alpha men had a big role in killing off all the sabertooth tigers. You would mock a proponent of big-strong-alpha-maleism for defending the supremacy of his kind with an appeal to tiger murder that happened long before either of you were born.
#3: Don’t unions have a very troubled history of oppressing women and keeping them out of certain jobs? It’s great that they have changed course recently, in response to the previous behavior having become unpopular, but is “this engine of social change works to free women when that is popular, and to oppress them when that is popular” really a reassuring thing to know about the engine of social change?
#4: Google searches show research taking both sides, that union shops are better or are not better at safety. Since everything costs money, and since money spent on making an already-safe workplace marginally safer is money not spent on wages or capital equipment or direct benefits, is it always irrational for a worker who, with his or her first-hand experience of the full range of occupational dangers, including personal brushes with death and severe maiming, to take a different view of the relative benefits of greater safety than, say, the view taken by a cartoonist whose primary job hazard is getting a shock when he touches the doorknob to his shared studio in the wintertime? Is it pro-worker or pro-minority to imply that the experienced worker of color who is taking this different stand is stupid, ignorant, or deluded?
#5: My GOD that is a handsome man. And so very wise.
#6: Covered ably by others.
#7: Covered ably by others, and parallel to my comments on #3. Yay, your heroic bastion of white supremacy in the labor market stopped being that way when it was no longer working for them! That’s moral courage, that is.
#8: Do you believe that corporate/collective entities spending money to influence the political process is inherent evil and corrupting and damaging, or do you not believe it? If you do not believe it, then kindly stop your fairly regular rhetorical assaults on the free speech of *one type* of collective body. If you do believe it, then this panel is akin to saying “sure, unions sometimes disappear people who make too much trouble, just like the corporations do, but if the corporations are gonna do it we have to keep up”.
#9: Around 1 in 6 Americans currently own their own business, large or small, a record high. (It’s closer to 1 in 10 in a regular economy; in a bad economy, as the dysfunction of old neoliberal economic policies like a huge, inefficient, unionized middle-class made up of semi-skilled industrial workers becomes more and more apparent, on the order of slightly more than half of Americans at any given time are thinking of starting one.) Given that a majority of the country has ambitions or aspirations in this direction, is it really pro-worker or pro-minority, to posit that men and women of color, as well as white men and women, who are planning to be one of those entrepreneurs are stupid or irrational or delusion to desire a state of affairs in that happier future where they are not burdened by a union legacy?
#10: Is it your belief that all human beings, in order to be happy or fulfilled in their economic aspirations, must be seekers after power? Although I agree that a certain irreducible minimum of self-determination which can be coded as “power” in economic rhetoric is generally benign, the answer to the woman’s question in the final panel is “every rational human being with faith that they work for a competent management and who is not so psychologically diseased that they must seek out and grasp ever minim of personal authority they can clutch in their greedy Smeagol claws”.
#N: Not appearing in this cartoon, and yet a vastly superior justification for union-disliking, would be panels covering:
* distaste for criminal- and incompetent-shielding unions that would rather see taxpayer money go to keep obvious horrors on a nominal but lucrative dole, than accept as a premise that the management of an enterprise must be able to relatively easily rid the enterprise of its worst actors
* distaste for antiquated and onerous work rules that stifle creativity and innovation and absolutely murder in its crib any desire on the part of the enterprise’s workers to come up with new processes or work towards successful end, because of the sure knowledge that the shop steward is going to come along to drop a huge and rocky turd into the soup
* a belief that one’s own work ethic, skill set, cognitive or other professional competence is above the expected group mean, and thus a recognition that accepting collective bargaining on compensation is likely to punish one’s economic or vocational progress in the enterprise, in the service of ensuring that people who are worse at the the job than you won’t be paid less
* an awareness that globalization and increasing democratization of computer technology worldwide are constantly reducing the useful lifespan of work processes or industrial designs, coupled with an awareness that the ability to nimbly shift resources, to abandon or open entire lines of business at a moment’s notice, and to reduce overhead of non-contributing employees at any particular moment in time are all increasingly critical not only to the success, but to the very survival, of the enterprise, with the result that the addition of a process-vomiting, contract-demanding, but-we-negotiated-this-20-years-ago-why-cant-we-still-do-it-this-way union to the workplace environment has the same impact on probable success as would a military alliance with France.
* the increasing prevalence of unions in government, where the traditional and quasi-legitimate justification of the need for collective bargaining against the wicked market power of the capitalist vanishes, leaving us with an increasingly privileged set of civil servants leading protests to rally public support for the right of the people at the top tier of compensation in an industry to levy taxes on people earning less, to preserve the privileged flow of resources to the greedy fuckers
* the fact that unions are eeeeeeevil, eeeeeeeeee…oh sorry my bad, you did get that one.
With respect to Roberts penultimate point – I have no problems with unions in private business, as the need for their employer to make a profit to stay in business provides a countervailing force. But in government there is no such countervailing force, and you end up with a negative feedback loop between the political influence of the union and the policies their captive politicians pass that land the government in such straits as the State of Illinois sees now and that Detroit is suffering through.
Should unions receive the same level of cynicism that businesses and government do?
A higher level, since they can be and sometimes are motivated by idealism. Relatively few people will engage in moral atrocities in order to sell more pizzas, but lots of people will engage in (or justify) moral atrocities to achieve some great good. Ergo, we need extra cynicism directed at the “great good” idealistic claims of union motivation, so as to be clear-headed on net.
Robert, you seem to be channeling C.S. Lewis – who also passed on Nov. 22nd, 1963. He said this in his work God In The Dock: Essays on Modern Theology:
This statement is only true if you ignore the entire history of abuse of workers, child labor, etc.. I don’t know about pizza, but many ordinary consumer items today are manufactured by workers who are treated horribly and have few effective rights.
Have you LOOKED at the average pizza place’s menu these days? Did you know that they are trying to sell pizzas with low-calorie mozzarella? With Jamacia Jerk Chicken? With – God help us – FRUIT?!!!
And I won’t even talk about gluten-free pizza crust. Gah!
Oh, no, no.
The prime reason against unions is that it gives workers too much power, which competes with the demands of the corporations, thus hindering profit and capitalism. Why do you think China outlaws unions? Because they’re not stupid.
Your rationale: Uh..uh… but that’s mean!
So?
In general, I’m totally with you in having disdain for any pizza that’s not what they put on pizza when I was a kid. But I like chicken pizza a lot.
I also like chicken on pizza. Barbeque chicken is exceptionally good. Sue me.
Amp, yes there’s a long history of worker oppression; guess what, a lot of that oppression was done by people who knew it was but thought a greater good was operating. My point wasn’t that a majority of the harm is always going to be done by the good guys, it was that those who saw themselves as motivated by noble concerns can more easily rationalize naughty behavior.
Real world example: we have mutual friends who work for the SEIU. For about twenty years, the SEIU fought for workers rights to unionize all over the place. For the same period of time, the SEIU office staff (which was horribly treated y management) tried to join an officeworkers local. The SEIU brass sided aggressively with all but 20 union organizing campaigns during that time period. The reason? “The work we do is too important – we can’t be hindered in it by having to treat people fairly.”
Robert, definitely agree with you that “the greater good” is a common rationalization.
But it’s also very common for people to do evil because they’re just plain greedy.
Amp @20:
And Union management is not immune from that impulse, either. See Panel #1.
-Jut
Yes and no.
The major benefits of unions are ancient. But there are still some things which unions are doing now.
It would be nice, though, to have a bit more honesty here on the part of the union folks. As of recent polls, a majority (or perhaps even a supermajority) of the US supports raising the federal minimum wage. If you turned every state into “right to work,” this would not change. Similarly, a majority of the US supports child labor laws. A majority (probably a vast supermajority) of the US supports weekends and a work week which approaches ~40 hours. People everywhere will sue for their right to go to church instead of working. Nobody is going to put 3 year olds in mineshafts if you enact “right to work.”
I don’t know about unions, but “keeping people out of jobs to maintain benefits for the existing union members” is WHAT UNIONS DO. Imagine that RJN decides he wants to teach junior high school English, and takes a quick certification course. Assume that he would be an outstanding professor–better than any other junior high teacher in the school system. The union would exist to PREVENT him from “taking” someone else’s job, even if he’s better at it and even though it would benefit the students.
It’s not always irrational, but it may be immoral.
If I offered you the choice of “work your fingers to the bone for $1/hour or starve” it would be rational to accept but not moral, so we have a minimum wage.
If I offered you the choice of “trust in this cheap mask to protect you from lung cancer in 25 years” it would be rational to take the job but not moral, so we have OSHA. And so on.
Yes.
In theory, both are equal.
In practice, corporations had such a head start for various social reasons that there’s a large degree of regulatory capture, so it is unequal.
If you formed a new society on the Moon without any existing infrastructure you could reasonably argue either for “no expenditures allowed” or “allow all,” but in the US today they are not equivalent.
No. That said, most self employed people are not subject to unionization since their jobs are too small.
Eh, sort of. They support it for themselves. Not necessarily for the people who work at the businesses they want to patronize before or after work, or on the weekends. I heard plenty of people talking about how awful it is that stores were making people work on Thanksgiving, but there were a whole ton of people shopping at those stores, too. Not too many people are willing to give up their $4 t-shirts so that someone they’ve never met who works in some factory somewhere can have better working conditions.
Well, of course. The concept of a weekend does not, obviously, apply to those business which are designed to be open on weekends. What, you expect people to ask McD’s and the corner supermarket to run m-f, 9-5?
Yes. Which makes me question why folks are so sure that they want to protect people from the evils of earning money on TG that they would require stores to close even in light of the millions of folks who want to shop there. The sensible thing isn’t to require closures, it’s just to require a higher rate of pay, i.e. “you must earn 2x pay for all hours worked on thanksgiving, and 2.5x pay if the worker isn’t eligible for benefits.” I mean hell, working on TG has never been a life ending affair for all the nurses and cops I know. they just celebrate TG on Friday or Wednesday instead. It’s not any more life-ending if you’re working at Walmart.
Relatively few of the people who are producing those $4 t shirts (at least in the US, which is all we are really talking about here w/r/t this cartoon) are working more than 40 hours, because almost all such employees would be eligible for OT under the FLSA. Employers don’t like to pay OT, so they very rarely permit low-wage workers to go over 40 hours.
Sure, if you want to talk about USian awareness of other countries’ labor standards that is a much more complex conversation. And the answers are not obvious, or simple:
Would you pay a quarter more per garment if you knew that all of the money would go to the poor worker who made the garment? Yeah, sure, most of the time: that’s not much money for me and it’s a lot of money for them. That said, for the people who are buying $3 t shirts off the sale rack out of need, that quarter/garment represents a 1/12 price increase, which ain’t peanuts. More to the point this is a nonexistent option.
More realistic is this: Would you pay $1 more per garment in order to give each of those workers an additional $0.01-0.05 per garment, with the remaining $0.99-0.95 going to middlemen, corporate profits, etc? Probably not, at least for me. And that would be a 33% increase for the poor folks who need cheap shirts for their kids.
Would you want to enact laws that restrict the company’s ability to assign payments where it wants, so that you can ensure that the workers get a quarter without causing problems for cheap goods here in the US? No–mostly because those laws rarely work.
It’s complicated.
On topic, at least for $ t shirts:
http://consumerist.com/2013/12/04/8-things-we-learned-from-planet-moneys-cotton-seed-to-t-shirt-project/#more-10144997
I read this a few days ago, and I think that it was why t-shirts were the product I thought of in the first place. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/business/that-made-in-usa-premium.html
And, while we’re linking to things, a Q&A with a woman who works at McDonald’s. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/05/mcdonalds-fast-food-worker-strike-wage
Ah yes, the woman who wants more hours, but declines a promotion to management because it would be too much stress, who is unhappy that raises are a nickel or a dime, but says that the 50-cent bump for going into management training just isn’t worth it, who has had four children and feels put-upon that she has to ask the father of the children for emotional support.
Argh. Economic support.
BRING BACK THE EDIT FUNCTION YOU CHEAP SOBs!
Robert and Amp:
I bet you two heathens put ketchup on hot dogs too, don’t you?
This doesn’t sound bad. Generally, eating before you go to work is what most people do.
OK. Cross training! That’s probably why they pay her considerably more than minimum wage.
Seriously?
Promotions don’t just pay immediate dividends ($1000/year in this case, which isn’t much) but they pay ENORMOUS dividends in exponential raises over time. That’s a $0.50 raise TO START, sure. But you need to be a manager to become a store manager, and so on.
She thinks she’s worth more. And she’s been there 5 years. But how much can you really be worth if you’re not willing to be in a position (like a manager) where you can put your added skills to use? What you DO, not who you ARE, defines what you earn. If Alan Dershowitz worked for me and refused to do anything but dust the bookshelves, he’d only be worth minimum wage no matter how much he knew about law. He’d need to put that knowledge to use in order to get more money. Same with this woman.
Also, she’s asking for a $15/hour wage, without a change of position. If you think that makes sense: How much should the managers make, if they are managing people who are paid $15/hour? Do you think she considers how much the cashiers can demand before that McDs will install some automated cashiers?
What she describes as “tough” is what most people describe as “normal.” if she takes her own kids to school in the AM (rather than leaving them at home or with a nanny) and if she works less than 40 hours/week (see below) then her work/life balance is, probably, objectively within the acceptable range. Since school is generally shorter than eight hours and since work is generally eight hours or so, most people can’t simultaneously drop their kids AND pick up their kids AND work a normal job AND make a lot of money AND manage to support their kids AND decline higher-paid options.
Ruchama, would you think this was good? I mean, people aren’t supposed to work more than 40 hours, right?
McD’s employees are not “tipped employees” so they’re eligible for time and a half, in most cases. There’s a good reason that McD’s won’t let them exceed 40, and that McD’s keeps a bit of a cushion.
Not incidentally, this is a “hidden cost” of the FLSA and of various state laws affecting mandatory benefits. The laws which say “nobody can work over 40 hours without time and a half” and “nobody can work over ___ hours without benefits” have predictable consequences. Since a lawsuit for violation is incredibly expensive to defend (trust me on this one; this is my field) most companies will keep a cushion. They keep a cushion so that they can be in the safe “straight pay no benefits” zone even if there’s a minor error in a pay issue.
There are almost no jobs which accommodate a school schedule, since most schools are less than 8 hours long. And yes, it’s hard. Being a single parent is hard; all the single parents I know (which is a lot of them!) have a shit time of it at least until their kids start being pretty self sufficient. I feel sympathy for her. But since McDs did not create this situation, I do not turn that sympathy into blame for McD’s. Sure, we could require McDs to give her a shift from 8:30AM-2:30 PM M-F so that she could be with her kids for the remainder of the time and still make her hours. But that would screw over everyone else.
I hope she finds time. If she doesn’t have time it would be odd to blame McDonalds, though since there are lots of hours in a week and she’s only working for 25-30 of them. Don’t get me wrong; there are people who are working 60-70 hours at two jobs and who really have no time. She’s not one of them, though.
I don’t think she’s necessarily made the best decisions about everything. I do think that, for the amount of work she does, she deserves to be paid more per hour than I was paid for babysitting in 1996.
In higher income neighborhoods, babysitters get paid more because they are usually, among other things:
on demand
unscheduled
no guarantee of future employment
no raises, much less automatic ones
no promotions
unsupervised with high cost of failure
odd hours, and severely limited ones at that
Presumably that is a tradeoff which she has considered, given that she’s not babysitting and is working at McDonald’s instead. And IMO this is a reasonable tradeoff. It’s a bit like my own job: I charge X as my hourly rate, but if you hire me work for you at 50 hours/week and would charge you only 25% or so of X. Babysitters are like me, job-wise.
I don’t mean to suggest that $9.00/hour is a lot of money. It isn’t. But of course job salary comparisons are really weird, at times: if an entry level attorney these days might be working 50 hours/week for $40k / year (which is $16/hour) and an entry level private school teacher might be working 45 hours/week at 30k/year (which amounts to $13.33/hour) then it makes $9/hour to do McD’s counter work seem a bit more reasonable, and the demand for $15 (plus uniforms, free food at lunch, and, presumably, continued raises) seem a bit more odd.
I heard plenty of people talking about how awful it is that stores were making people work on Thanksgiving, but there were a whole ton of people shopping at those stores, too.
Do you have any evidence that there is significant overlap between those two groups of people?
According to this, during the entire Thanksgiving weekend (not just Thanksgiving itself) there were over 141 million unique shoppers, which is less than half the US population. It also says that 37% of “holiday shoppers” were at stores by midnight Thanksgiving night, and only 25% by 8 p.m. Thanksgiving night.
Eh, sort of. They support it for themselves. Not necessarily for the people who work at the businesses they want to patronize before or after work, or on the weekends.
I don’t think that in general, if you ask people if they “support weekends and a work week which approaches ~40 hours” they also mean “bankers’ hours”. You can work 40 hours a week and not always work the day shift, and not have your days off always be on weekends. I mean, you could read “weekends” as “weekend days”, but there’s nothing in that statement that says the 40 hours are day shift, or even that it isn’t four 10-hour days.
Why? Taking care of children – at root, keeping children alive so that their parents can have an evening of sanity without anybody pooping on or near them, unless that’s their thing – is not notably less important a job than is serving people junk food.
There is far less substitutability in the jobs. With the exception of zombies, Hitler, and cannibals, I have zero interest in who, specifically, tops off my vanilla shake or turns my cheeseburger on the grill. If they are clean and don’t spit on any of it, they have achieved sufficient win. My standards for who takes care of my child are approximately 50 million times tighter.
What were you paid for babysitting in 1996, and how did it compare to the wage at fast food places then?
Unless there is some major data tucked away somewhere here of surprising importance, I am not only not agreeing with your statement, but having a hard time believing that you agree with it.
Damn it. That should be “how did it compare with fast-food wages in 1975?”
Amp, make an admin-lite account that can’t touch posts or users, but which can look at your php, and assign it to me, and I swear on the golden forelock of the perfectly Aran baby Jesus that I shall gank no code or hack no node, but that I shall figure out why your comment editor doesn’t work, and either make it work again or announce to the world that I am now an English major, and should be despised as such.
After I fix it, I will of course rename this site “Bob’s Bastardries” and replace every article on economic justice and social change with pornographic paeans to why Ayn Rand was waaaaay hotter than Gloria Steinem, but you know I’d be doing it out of love.
Ron –
No, I do not. Let us join in condemning Amp, who I am sure does. Behold this creature, which looks as a human does and walks as a human does, but is not a human. Behold as it puts ketchup on its hot dog.
Hey, it’s a big tent. As long as you two toast your hot dog buns, we can all get along in peace and harmony.
Neglected to add:
I can’t recall but I think you’re a PhD professor…? If so, then when you were a teenager you were probably more highly motivated, trustworthy, and skilled than many adults. You may well have been worth more as a sitter than you were worth as a burger flipper, either now or then.
On those very rare occasions when I eat hot dogs, I put ketchup on them. Or even catsup. I dislike mustard. I’m not fond of relish on hot dogs. I typically don’t toast my hot dog buns (what’s the point, for a mere hot dog?).
Also, I can’t remember the last time I ate a pop tart (of any flavor), as I don’t think much of them.
I did once eat haggis with a certain amount of enjoyment, though.
Grace
I put ketchup, mustard, and sauerkraut on my hot dogs. As long as the sauerkraut is the Bubbe’s brand, which is light-years better than any other brand I’ve tried. And the hot dogs are the Field Roast vegan ones. And they go on the New England style rolls, which don’t fall apart at the seam like the regular ones do.
Hot dogs are considered an art form in Chicago and a unique and essential part of Chicago culture. It was a shock when I moved out here from New England. In Chicago you get a steamed bun – preferably with poppy seeds on it so that you have an excuse when your drug screening comes up positive – with what is normally a boiled/steamed hot dog (vs. grilled) that can have any or all of the following on it:
mustard
chopped tomatoes
chopped onions
chopped cucumbers
pickle spears
something represented as pickle relish but that is colored in a vivid green hue not actually found in nature
celery salt
sport peppers
shredded cheese (or, more likely, shredded “processed cheese food product”)
giardiniera (this is a pepper-based condiment, not a protozoan)
sauerkraut
Then there is the specialized creation, sure to wreak havoc on your digestive system, known as the “chili dog”. This involves taking a perfectly good hot dog and burying it in chili (not to mention cheese, sour cream, etc.). It is reputed to be edible, but after The Incident Of 1986 the EPA has forbidden me to consume one ever again.
Conspicuous by it’s absence from that list is catsup. If you go into a Chicago hot dog place and order a hot dog with fries they will give you catsup for your fries but will refuse – possibly with some slighting remark – any request to put that catsup on the hot dog. Seriously.
I personally prefer an all-beef kosher hot dog with brown mustard, tomatoes, cucumber AND a pickle spear and celery salt in a poppy seed bun. However, I still bemoan the lack of availability of the New England style sliced and toasted bun. Actually, when I was a kid we didn’t toast those buns, Mom spread butter on each side and grilled them.
At U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago, where the White Sox play, a new wrinkle on this was invented last season. You can now get a hot dog – or a Polish sausage – grilled, with a slice of pastrami bacon on it. It’s almost worth the price of a ticket just to be able to go into the ball park and get one or two of these. I was in the ball park at one of the first games they offered this and it was so popular they ran out of the pastrami bacon in the 5th inning.
Ron, so what you basically do is cover your hot dogs with so much crap that you can’t even taste it. Not that some of those things don’t sound yummy, but nonetheless, by my authority as a born New Yorker (New York City outranks Chicago), your claims not to be a food heretic are hereby revoked.
Since the hot dogs come pre-cooked, why not just eat them cold, while you’re at it? :-p
This is a feature, not a bug. You’re supposed to depend on the father of your children for a lot. And a child’s father should depend on the mother of his children for a lot. Parenting is a two-person hands-on job and it is not the proper object of society to change that.
I think it would be nice if your kids’ father lived with you and helped raise his own kids. I see no particular reason why I should be obligated to help you make your kids’ father superfluous.
Supporting yourself was not sufficient incentive to work? How were you able to pay the rent, eat, etc. if you were not working before? If someone who is able to work does not need to work for the necessities of life our public support systems need a severe overhaul.
Amp, I don’t cover my hot dogs with all that crap. As I noted, I’m pretty much mustard/pickle/tomato/celery salt. Which around here is pretty restrained.
Robert,
the increasing prevalence of unions in government, where the traditional and quasi-legitimate justification of the need for collective bargaining against the wicked market power of the capitalist vanishes,
…
Relatively few people will engage in moral atrocities in order to sell more pizzas, but lots of people will engage in (or justify) moral atrocities to achieve some great good.
I suspect there are plenty of managers who think they’re working for The Greater Good in government.
“Who cares if unions reduce the wage gap between white and non-white workers?”
It seems to me that the history of unions in this country has been the opposite. Unions have often racially discriminated and helped keep black workers out of the work place.
That is true, historically. But in the last few decades, union membership is associated with higher wages and benefits for black workers (based on census data). And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Black workers are more likely to be union members than workers of any other race.
That’s not to say unions are entirely free of racism, or are capable of wiping out all racism in unionized workplaces. But the cartoons point was still accurate – increasing unionization would tend to reduce racial inequality in the US, both through better wages and benefits for workers, and also indirectly, for instance by get out the vote drives which push back against GOP efforts to keep non-whites from voting.