Corporate America sticks nose into workers' lives

Since this is Labor Day, it's only fitting that we run an article about how workers' rights are pulverized, and how the government sits on its immobile ass and doesn't do anything about it.

According to the Los Angeles Times, employers are now starting to dock "overweight" workers' pay unless they lose weight (and trying to brainwash employees to accept it). In 2009, for instance, Clarian Health Partners, an Indiana-based hospital chain, will start charging workers up to $30 fortnightly if they fail to meet weight and medical guidelines. This will be one of the most extreme policies anywhere in the nation. (According to Hoovers, Clarian Health Partners is a nonprofit corporation, however.)

I know you're asking if this is even legal. Well, guess what? It ain't. But the law is never an obstacle to Coprorate (sic) America's control freak ways. You have to wonder why the workers are even going along with this, when similar policies have already been ruled illegal: Airlines have already been ruled in violation of the law for firing employees because of their weight.

Aon Consulting's Joe Marlowe says companies are doing this now "because they've run out of other options." Options to do what????? Options to try to keep employees in suspended animation even when they're not at work?

It isn't just corporations (for-profit as well as nonprofit) but also right-wing governments involved in this totalitarianism. In Benton County, Arkansas, workers suffer discrimination regarding their health insurance costs depending on their body mass.

But this may be nothing more than an official admission of what was already an unspoken policy of pay discrimination. A Stanford University study says "overweight" workers are paid an average of $1.20 less per hour than other workers. The report deduces that companies secretly adjust employees' wages to accomplish this discrimination.

Employers' view of workers as company property isn't entirely new. This policy is the progeny of older forms of labor exploitation and servitude. However it's gotten worse again in recent years. Drug testing was bad enough, but this shit has gotten out of hand.

The biggest excuse that Corporate America conjures for this discrimination is that the cost of health insurance is going up too fast. Well, Corporate America is generally against any and all government regulation of the insurance industry (a fact that is obvious from the political candidates it finances), so whose fault is that?

The discrimination and interference in workers' lives is illegal under federal law, but this year, dictator Bush's Department of Labor practically encouraged companies to violate the law by instituting these policies. The verdict against airlines' weight discrimination was confirmation that it's illegal. Since employers' new rules cover a wide variety of conditions that may be classed as a disability, they're also violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, which says companies can't discriminate on the basis of health status.

Naturally, the Los Angeles Times (a paper with a history of union-busting and right-wing bias) only interviewed workers who supported having their rights violated.

(Source: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-obese29jul29,0,6468472.story?coll=la-home-center)