Back in 8th grade Social Studies, when I was just a wee little redhead, Ms. Welter required each of us to bring in an article from the newspaper with the important information highlighted and summarized. This was the pinnacle of my interest in current events. This was during the Gulf War, so I got to read stories about the cool helicopters that they used; or at least I would have if the war had not ended approximately three minutes after it began. Anyway, since then my awareness of the events around me has gone the way of the appendix: I know it's there, but I'm not sure why and I'm always afraid it may blow up and kill me someday. I don't feel that I should be held entirely responsible for this lapse in my character. The media hasn't been doing such a bang-up job lately themselves. As far as I can tell, the media has basically turned into USA Up All Night: shallow, unbelievable characters that talk about sex but with all the interesting stuff cut out.

Anyway, out of a sense of guilt and to avoid doing anything productive, I will, from time to time, actually make a cursory attempt to find out what's going on in the world. My grain of knowledge today was provided by America "Crappy Service at a Crappy Price" Online, which told me that a federal judge ordered American Airline's 9,400 pilots to fly today, ending a four-day "sick-out" (I'll get to that later). Now call me crazy, but doesn't anyone else think it's a bad idea to force someone to to fly a 184,000 lb vehicle carrying 188 passengers? I've been in the car when my brother drives angry and that was scary enough, thank you very much.

So what's a sick-out, anyway? Well, apparently federal laws prevented the pilots from striking, so they all had to organize a big old high-school style ditch day, or ditch weekend, as the case may be. This in itself raised a couple of questions in my mind. First off, why can't they strike? Air travel may well be considered a vital industry, but American doesn't have a monopoly, especially after this weekend. If all their pilots want to strike then there are plenty of other airlines to fill in the gaps.

The second, more important question is why they wanted to strike in the first case. Well, American's given them plenty of reasons before, but this time it was because American's newly acquired Reno Air, Inc. was employing pilots at about half the salary of American's other pilots. The pilots considered this a danger to their current wage scales. Now lets set things straight here, the average American pilot salary is in excess of 100 grand, so we're not talking minimum wage here. But American did not agree to integrate Reno with its other pilots leaving differences in wages and other union practices. All the pilots are doing is trying to hold on to some job security, without the threat of cheap(er) labor starting to take over.

This is an unacceptable for any company. To compete, everyone's got to cut corners here and there, but you don't take it out of your workers. Now I'm not saying everyone should get a nice Michael Eisner $300 billion salary with tropical island bonuses, but once you start devaluing your employees you dehumanize your business. Nike paying its third world country slave laborers with the shavings of pennies is just one more sign of the apocalypse. That's not good business sense, it's soul-less inhumanity. Slave labor is a somewhat ironic moniker, because in my mind its worse than slavery itself in most respects. At least slaves are provided with food and housing. Slave laborers get their handful of dirt and are sent out to provide for themselves. At least with slavery, there's no illusion of freedom. "Hey, we're not forcing them to work here." Sure, they have the choice of starvation.

So what do we do about it? You can try to avoid every product produced by slave labor, but that's not as easy as it sounds, and trying to get any significant percentage of Nike's market to boycott would be as hard as getting a pro wrestler elected to office, maybe even harder. Actually, your best bet is Congress. Of course that would actually involve voting. And that's another issue altogether.