Taking it to the belly of the beast: Occupy the Boardroom

This project--Occupy the Boardroom--is the newborn brainchild of friends, and it is brilliant, having truly taken off, and just in the past week. Even Jamie Dimon has received (and opened) his messages. Limitless greed and malfeasance on the part of Wall Street and the banks have devastated the lives of American families everywhere.


Yes, those are some "1-percenters" in the pic; they're yukking it up while actually drinking Champagne on a balcony over the Wall St. protests.

(I love a glass of good Champers as much as anyone, but I'll never be that, er, classy.)

Here, read just one true story. Then go read the rest and get truly pissed-off. You might even be moved to share your own tale with one of the many "pen pals" OTBR has listed. Or else just share the post itself. Courage!

Tax Breaks Aren't For Offshoring Jobs
From July 1, 2008 until May 18, 2010, I worked for JPMorgan Chase. I was hired through a temp service to do internal IT support over the phone. When hired I was told that if I kept my statistics (first call resolution, and call times) down that I would eventually be hired as an actual employee of Chase. Despite my statistics consistently being in the top 10 of all of the employees in my department, not just the other temps, after two years I was not only not hired, but I was laid off. However during that two years other temps with stats much worse than mine were hired. My reason for not being hired was never explained to me. It could have been the fact that I am in a wheelchair and Chase didn’t want a disabled woman bringing up their insurance rates, or perhaps it is because I am a lesbian and other than myself there was one other homosexual in the department who was actually an employee, but was also laid off at the same time as me.

The whole come work for us and we will eventually give you a great job with awesome benefits was just a scheme. In 2008 Chase received a State tax credit from Ohio and in return they were to create 1200 new jobs within the state. So what did they do? They hired a bunch of temporary employees, got their tax credit, and kept the temporary employees on staff long enough to not only not lose their tax credit, but to also set up their call center in the Philippines. Then two years later they laid off hundreds of people causing the state to lose more jobs than they had gained during that two year period. Other internal IT departments were outsourced to Mexico and the credit card fraud department was exported to India. Though you surely know all of this.

So through a loophole in the system your company caused more people in our state to be unemployed and still took taxpayer money to stuff your own pockets with under the guise of being a company creating more jobs.

-Name Withheld