Work. Underpaid? Bereft of benefits? No job security? Work. Be thankful to be working. Work harder.
Work ‘till you drop. Stop. Drop. Get up. Do it again.
Give quality time – not to the growing children, but all to work. Keep bills paid. Years pass. Chances pass. Lucky, work you have. Be glad. Thank God.
Work ‘till you drop. Stop. Drop. Get up. Do it again.
Get older. Get scared to work less hard. Work harder. Prove you still can.
No time for neighbors, community, friends, or the laziness of leisure. No riches. No home left.
Work ‘till you drop. Stop. Drop. Get up. Do it again.
No savings. No pension. All spent staying barely healthy enough to work harder.
Holidays a time for silent desperation. Of work deprivation. Why stop?
Work. Don’t stop. Drop. Get up. Do it again.
Or maybe go to sales at the stores where workers are working ‘till they drop, reminders of just another working day. Don’t be sorry for them. They work. You don’t. Envy them.
No job here. Work somewhere – sweat to your last drop in Saudi, Dubai, Bahrain, even in war-torn Libya and Yemen. Work in any way – nanny in Singapore, caregiver in London, domestic in Hong Kong and Malaysia, duped to be drug mule to Indonesia. Do anything. Stay alive. Keep the family back home alive.
Work ‘till you drop. Stop. Drop. Get up Do it again.
Rich people and bosses have no guilt about holidays, no fear in a nap.
Workers have no need for holidays, all fear in a wink.
Work ‘till you drop. Stop. Drop. Get up, get up, get up, get up. Do it again.
Pay your taxes. Pay your bills. Pay their taxes. Pay their bills. You’ve lost everything that you valued anyway. Loser. Loner. Lazy. That’s how the power class sees us all. We are tools of their greed, and the fools who lost all dreams.
They are far, far smarter than we. Whoopee.
Labor Day?
Why are you not working? No job? Lost it?
A day off? Why are you not working? At least, with the little left in your pockets – if any – go buy something that will swell the profits and power of those who find us all so pliable, so pitiful, so useable, so exploitable, so workable. Listen for the call. It may be the need for profits calling. If so, get up. Now.
Work ‘till you drop. Stop. Drop. Get up. Do it again.
Then stop. When you finally expire – literally and figuratively. Unless the wealthy and the powerful figure out a way to prolong our lives a little longer to make a few more pesos as they inject us with pain killers and tranquilizers so we cannot even scream on the way out of their profit-making agendas. Physically, emotionally all spent. No savings. No pensions. No hope.
Labor Day?
That’s all day, every day, in every way.
The Philippines is a country of holidays – special, national, local, working and nonworking. But certainly not for workers or those who wish they were. We labor for the wealthy and the powerful to have their holidays, every day.
Aye, we are their holidays.
(By Donna Smith, executive director of the Health Care for All Colorado Foundation. Published on September 05, 2011 by Common Dreams.org. With minimal alterations/additions by this columnist to fit into Philippine setting)
