If only our workers know and understand the law, if only our workers know how to assert themselves and fight for their basic rights the law protects, and the elite few in our society who run business know that our workers know, the likelihood of their taking advantage of our common Juan who toil day and night, I believe, will somehow decrease.
You have the right to speak; don't let others take that away from you for fear of being branded as a whiner or a complainer or a negative person. If you feel in your heart as your senses tell you that the reality around you is oppressive and that your rights are trampled, do you close your eyes along with it or do you choose to question? I hope that you question instead. You question to the point that it creates controversy that other people who hear your question also think. This is not to create disturbance. This is to genuinely empower people with their own thoughts that they may think freely - freely that it opens up their senses to reality whether such oppression or trampling of rights really does exist. As Emerson puts it, "To believe in your heart what is true for yourself is true to everyone, that is genius." You, the worker, are your own genius because you also know that without your labor, no institution would prosper nor even survive. You are the real power.
In an institution where most people are afraid to speak up to the ones in power, evil is more likely to prevail. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely even the ones who possess it. Unfortunately, the possessor does not see it this way, the possessor sees the ones who speak as a threat to their status quo and to preserve it some of them will suppress your thoughts and make you believe in what Orwell understood to be the solidity of the wind. Some of them will use their charms and their rhetorics and the workers' best defense from this is the pruning of their mind that they may distinguish rock from air.
As I have oftenly rephrased and quoted, "The only necessary thing for evil to prevail is for a few good men to say nothing." And to the oligarchs, and capitalists who serve only their interest in profit, listen to Shore, "The only necessary thing for evil to succeed is to treat everything as business." People are not businesses. They are a part of your business, an inseparable part in fact. Remember there's more likelihood for a business to survive without the few ones on top rather than without the many ones below. Remove the top of the pyramid and the bottom part survives. Remove the bricks below and the top of the pyramid crumbles.
So, fellow workers, know the law, understand it and use it. Speak your minds and assert yourselves. Empower yourselves.
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To all the hard workers, most especially to my co-teachers, happy Labor Day. We choose this profession not so we can profit monetarily but so our future kids can profit from the promise of a brighter future; because we teach the next generation not to be victims of commercialism, not to be victims of profiteering, not to be victims of preachers who cling to flowery words to hide their intentions, and not to be victims of themselves by becoming the profiteers who take advantage of others.
Let's teach our students to open their eyes that they may see what Socrates put above all of us - Truth. Let's teach our students to speak up their minds no matter how their ideas may seem eccentric or unusual, that we may guide them to see what is real, that we may strengthen their senses to perceive reality. After all, God is God of truth, not of lies.
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