Crown Thy Good

An oasis of yellow light
Adrift in an endless lead sky
Fading to restless night,
Not black in the city,
But dark enough to thoroughly
Smother the day and clouds.
This lone light in a lone building
Where a lone woman sweeps a screen
With tired squinting eyes,
Right hand jotting crooked notes
On a lined pad with scratching pencil.
This lone woman all alone,
Just like the other people
At their desks on her floor,
All around her, alone.
It is eight o’clock and another
Twelve-hour day is in progress
For nearly the entire department;
Few have gone home or are about to.
Salary employees, they get no extra pay
For extra hours worked and
The company works very carefully
To make sure they get no overtime.
The woman pushes her glasses higher
With her free hand and continues to
Push the pencil with her right.
Her associate finally quit and was not replaced,
So now she does the work for two
And gets paid for three-fourths of one.
That is called increased worker productivity.
She scribbles into the night,
Knowing that her husband will be asleep
By the time she gets home,
For the third time this week.

Hundreds of miles away
The last American factory
Still grinds gears and produces
Something you or I could hold.
The evening shift doesn’t get a break
Tonight, as another order has come in,
So the foreman said two hours ago.
Still, this man needs a cigarette and smokes
At the bathroom window,
Though it could cost him his job.
The company has already moved the plant
South to North Carolina to dissolve the union,
But the whispers are that they’re ready to
Keep going all the way down to Mexico
Where they can pay even less and the laws
Don’t have to be lobbied against
Because they don’t exist.
For now this smoking man has a job,
But for how long is anybody’s guess.
He doesn’t have health benefits
Or a wage that allows him to take
His daughters to the movie theater,
But apparently he is a weight on the
Company’s profits that must be shed.
That is called globalization.
It’s been four minutes,
So he flicks his butt
And goes back to work.
He has the right-to-work,
But not to a job,
Nor really to much else.

Back at the corporate headquarters,
Several stories above the still squinting woman,
Behind frosted glass on the top floor
Sits the CEO with a spreadsheet before him.
He has increased profits by slashing benefits,
Decreasing the head count and increasing
Demands on the workers’ time
Among the people literally and figuratively below him.
The union was tough and strong in the old plant,
Five miles away, so it was his idea to move south,
To put a thousand out of work and cut costs in half
With six hundred, “non-union non-complaining
Rednecks to do the job for now,” as he told the board.
Running the numbers, they tell him China instead
Of Mexico for the next trip.
“Chinks are cheaper than wetbacks,” he chuckles
To himself as his fingers pound the keyboard.
Profits are through the roof since he hired the right
Lobbyist to make sure they secured more cost-plus
Contracts from the government than ever before;
Profit built in, with more to be made by overcharging the
Taxpayers, the chumps that actually pay part of their income,
Unlike him or the company, who are above such silliness.
Profit dictates action and that is what he does.
Numbers are his world;
They justify the fact that he is paid
Four hundred and twelve times the smoking man
And two hundred and two times the squinting woman.
He makes the hard decisions.
And so his bank account ticks upward with every sigh
Of despair that escapes from the lips of his workers.
That is called laying the foundation for a growth economy.

Thousands of miles away
In a pre-dawn strike,
One of the company’s products
Streaks down from the cold navy sky,
A small moving part in a missile
That obliterates a sleeping house
For no discernable reason
(that is called bad intel)
In a lonely mountainous land.
The mother of four young children
Was already awake and tending to the goats
While they, her husband and his parents
Remained in bed for a little longer
Or rather, forever.
Her dusty screams pierce the still reverberating air
As she stumbles to her feet and lunges toward
The smoldering rubble of her life.
Ignoring the frightened, scattering animals
And the abrasions on her bruised body,
She throws herself down, digging with her bare hands.
The numbers man could tell you that he makes
Twenty four thousand times what this woman earns in a year,
But he could not tell you anything
About the anguish and terror
In her rasping voice
As she sobs, “Allah! Allah!”
For he can not hear her
From his seat at the summit
Of his concrete peak.