A few days ago it was revealed that the Labor Department of the Bush administration was advising company managers how they could sandbag their employees and deprive them of overtime pay.

This was the Labor Department of the United States of America, which was created to watch over the interests of American workers.

It was the kind of disclosure that should have aroused howls of anger around the country. Apart from some union protests and a sigh of pain from a commentary here and there, no thunderous sounds of passion were heard. Why should they? The Labor Department’s conduct had the same character of slink and stealth that we’ve come to expect out of Washington for three years. The policy was a standard gimmee to the people whose money elected the George Bush. In the news menus of the day it was just another callous act of devaluing a voiceless people. As news it has been easily outgunned by Iraq, Mars and photo ops of Bush distributing presidential crumbs and head-pats and the incense of forgiveness on Mexico and Canada.

Somebody asked “when is America going to wake up and see what’s happening to it?”

Yes, when?

When I was a kid growing up in northern Minnesota, the industry was mining; the culture was mining; our lifeblood was mining.

Men worked like moles 1,500 feet underground, trying to carve out a future for their children in the midst of the worst economic depression in the country’s history. My father was one of them. The history of mining in America until then had been a numbing saga of exploitation. Men died because safety rules and laws were flimsy or ignored. The workers’ attempts to protect themselves and to achieve decent wages were met by union-busting militancy mobilized by their corporate paymasters.

But the depression brought with it Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which never quite rescued America from is jobless traumas of the 1930s and early ‘40s until World War II. But it did liberate the country from the corporate stranglehold that had ruled the workplace and American society until then. It did this in part by invoking a new code of rights for the country’s workers, and by paving the way for others. Among those were the 40-hour work week and the principle of time-and-a half for overtime work if the workers hours were extended beyond 40.

A few years ago you could drive through the towns of Minnesota’s Iron Range and see billboards, paid for by the unions, announcing rather proudly that it was the union movement that gave the family weekend to America. It probably had some help. But there was a certain comfortable symmetry to those numbers—40 hours of work, 150 per cent of normal pay if the employe worked more—that for millions of working families in America meant two days of free time they had never before experienced.

Cosmic changes have overtaken the country and the workplace since then. Millions of people no longer work 40 hours. For millions of others the work place is no longer an assembly line or a steel mill. For more millions of people, the job is no longer a source of of shelter and security. It’s a throw of the dice. It’s here today. It might disappear tomorrow along with the company and, not long after, the pension and health care. There aren’t many safeguards or comfort levels left. Unions have been systematically dismantled and rendered almost voiceless by the shifts from manufacturing to service, the vanishing of the smokestack industries, the arrival of the computer chip, by the export of of American jobs to places where corporate America makes billions of dollars by paying cheap labor.

As a practical matter, it’s useless to shed tears in the face of those transformation. It’s just as useless to decry the merciless trend toward corporate consolidation that this week produced this headline in the New York Times: “$58 Billion Deal To Unite 2 Giants of U.S. Banking.” J.P. Morgan Chase agreed to acquire Bank One for $58 billion in stock. Prominent in the ensuing story was this line: “J.P. Morgan said it expected to eliminate about 10,000 jobs as part of an effort to save $2.2 billion over three years.”

It’s pointless to cry (although the 10,000 and their families may not agree) because this is life in working America today. It’s the equation that lubricates the concentration of economic and political power in America today. Workers intrude on the business of making money. Somebody has to figure out a way to keep the profits acceptable and the shareholders happy. The problem is not hard to solve. Fire a few thousand workers, replace them with voice mail and computers, export the real jobs to Costa Rica and China, and glow in the booming economic recovery.

If the suddenly cashiered American employe gets another job paying less, be sure not to pay overtime. If you’re in doubt about how to do it, call the Labor Department.

On the same front page of the New York Times appeared this lead-in to a story inside: “Andrew S. Fastow, the former chief financial officer of Enron, pleaded guilty to two felonies…”

He pleaded guilty at the suggestion of prosecutors. They need his testimony to dig out more evidence of fraud and theft at the highest levels of a corporation that ripped off thousands of stock holders and ultimately millions of taxpayers, partly because the corporation felt it had political cover. It might have if somebody in the chain didn’t blow a whistle.

This is the quality of life that American commerce has achieved since it was emancipated from the idea that America can be powerful and rich and still be decent to the tens of millions of its citizens who have been overwhelmed and spit out in the money machine’s surge toward new wealth and less competition.

The Bush government wants to change the rules about overtime. Those sly, over-the-transom signals to employers by the Labor Department can mean loss of overtime to hundreds of thousands of low-income wage earners struggling for a living. But it gets worse. The Bush administration wants to change the overtime rules that affect millions. The Senate and House appeared to intervene with amendments that would protect the overtime claims of most workers.

The administration then muscled that amendment out of the bill. But as Congress prepares to go back into session, the Bush people want to do and end run around the lawmaking process and block those overtime payments by administrative writ.

It’s that bad. The Bush government claims its changes will make 1.3 million more low-income workers eligible for overtime pay and won’t affect other workers nearly as harshly as the critics claim.

But a non-partisan think tank, according to the Inter Press Service, says the government’s new rules would remove overtime pay protection from eight million people by reclassifying their roles and positions. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions says the United States now has “a serious record of continuing rights violations involving some of the world’s best-known companies, such as Wal-Mart.”

Which of these claims do you believe?

The answer to that question ought to tell you if it’s time to stand up and start yelling about what’s happening in the American workplace today to millions of defenseless people.