Communism is Alive and Well in Alberta

I have a friend whose husband (also a friend) used to be the Editor of our local paper until it was bought out by Quebec-cor, a giant media company that went around buying up small papers a few years ago. While my friend J continued to be the editor of the paper, he was forced to tighten the budget and increase sales of advertising, which meant going from business to business giving the hard sell to get more ads in his paper...He did all they asked...had the best sales and readership in the province...won awards and bonuses...for his efforts but none of that meant a thing when the company decided to streamline the papers...which meant shutting down the small ones and regionalize to bigger centres...so now Mayerthorpe doesn't have a local paper anymore...our news and announcements if gathered, appear in the Whitecourt paper...

J was given 5 weeks notice of the termination of his paper and he was required to break the news to the rest of his staff...he was offered severance or relocation...but since his wife is a teachers special needs aide...and teaching jobs are hard to find...re-location was not the best option... so he took the severance...and kissed the newspaper world good-bye. He had made it his career...working in a small paper in Ontario in his early years and then Grand Prairie, then spent ten years in Fort McMurray as editor of that paper...but when their children left to move to Edmonton and University, he and his wife moved from Ft Mac...to Mayerthorpe, where the company needed an editor for the small little paper they had just bought...and so he had worked for our paper for nearly 20 years...and in my mind, was treated very shabbily...very shabbily indeed.

So, he needed to find work...he's was in his early sixties and didn't want to have to big a commute...so he took a job as meat cutter in our towns local grocery store... a very big step down in stature as far as jobs go but he seemed accepting of it...if it allowed  his wife to keep her job and got him out of the house.  But after two and a half years of kissing ass there... things are coming to a head...

Now, I am appalled to know that our local CO-OP store treats their employees with such mistrust...and J is not the only one I have heard complaints from..as I am acquainted with several people that work there...I even contemplated working there myself at one time...

There are apparently surveillance cameras throughout the store trained on the staff...and someone sits in the upstairs office watching the screens and making notes on staff behavior....and after my friends mentioning in a moment of venting that they are required to purchase a certain percentage of money at the store..(in other words they are pressured to buy all their groceries there or else) I questioned some of these other people I know who work there and found that to be true as well...

So my friend J, works behind a glass window cutting and trimming and packaging meat for the counter...if you need assistance in the meat counters you push a button and one of the meat cutters will (in a minute or so, since they have to remove their bloodied apron and wash their hands) come out to the store and help you...well the person in the office has determined on several occasions (the staff are reviewed every six months...and given letters of assessment) that he spends to much time chatting up the shoppers when he is buzzed for...and that he trims the meat to much...therefore cutting down their profits...and he refuses to take management training ( he applied for a meat cutter position not meat manager position) but the meat manager wants him to perform his job as well as that of meat cutter...and J doesn't want the responsibility...

They have (they being, the meat manager and store manager as well as the regional manager, because Mayerthorpe Co-op is affiliated with Barrhead Co-op.) decided to make  his work life miserable so that he quits... He is belittled, ridiculed, and constantly made to feel like an imbecile... and they then have the gall to review his Co-op share number to see how much money they have spent in the store...he is told he and his wife are not spending the correct percentage of his wages in the store....and that is what finally made me go ballistic...WHAT THE HELL KIND OF COMMUNIST CRAP IS THAT.

As if they have the right to tell you where you can shop....

So I had his wife here last saturday, and boy was she upset, she spent the entire afternoon venting to me and worrying about her hubby...he is so depressed and despondent that she is worried for his health...He is going to be 64 in the summer and she wants him to quit his job right away and apply for early CPP. She wanted to know what I thought if you can imagine....she says she considers me one of the smartest people she knows and wanted my opinion...Huh...go figure...I don't consider myself any smarter than most people but I do know how to read people fairly well...She had a plan and I asked her what it was...she explained her plan and asked what I thought...

I said it would work but the catch was that if she took money from their savings to pay off their personal debt and he took early retirement, that they would have to work hard at not accumulating more personal debt or the whole pay off thing would have been for nothing...and that perhaps he might consider taking a part-time job (you are allowed to earn up to $29,000. per year without it affecting your CPP payout.) to keep from having to dip into their modest savings any more than necessary... I told her about our experience with cashing in my investments to pay off our mortgage during the BSE crisis and that it was worth  it to get rid of the worry of the bank taking the land but that there is no longer that safety net, my investments provided....so now we live from cheque to cheque and when shit hits the proverbial fan, it hits hard... but we will never mortgage the land again...that is the lesson we learned...

So we wait with bated breath to see what they decide to do..but in my mind nearly anything would be better that continuing to work at a place like that... I am so outraged that I have decided to boycott that grocery store which means I will have to drive a lot further to grocery shop...but there is a principal behind that decision....those communistic bastards can choke on my dust...and I am encouraging everyone I know who shops there to do the same thing.

Can you imagine...I can't think what the hell they were thinking...but it is still going on...in our own little towns... even Wal-mart can't make you shop at their store exclusively...as if !!!!!