While we do have a pretty decent Family Leave act that offers a tiny bit of protection to working mothers, allowing them a couple of weeks off if they have a baby, it isn’t really a humane amount of time and it doesn’t even bother including normal sickness at all. How many people do you know who show up to your office, sick as a dog, blowing their snot all over the place and coughing into the coffee pot, because they can’t afford to miss work because they’re sick? And we all know what happens next. The rest of us all get the same miserable cold and the whole business suffers. It’s counterproductive and inhumane. And the piles of used tissues are gross.

Since the bosses will only give some of us some sick days, we need a law to make sure that we all get sick days to protect ourselves from infectious diseases entering the workplace from those who don’t have them. We need sick days because everybody needs a day off every now and then. We need them just from the stress of dealing these modern jobs that involve computers crashing, software upgrading, and technology always advancing. The stress of technology needs to be addressed by sick days for anyone who has to deal with a stupid computer ruining his life. And why? so that the IT department can protect their jobs by driving us crazy and then swooping in to save us from the problems they created in their obsession with constantly changing technology.

With a guaranteed amount of sick days for every member of the paycheck party you will be able to go buy a burger without worrying that the guy who flipped it for you might give you a disease. And they should accumulate year after year to reward the healthy and to give us plenty of days for those inevitable medical emergencies that tend to arise in our later years.

Once sick days worked much like the paycheck party is proposing here. If you ask your parents, or someone who works at a place that hasn’t quite switched over to the new, more efficient way of everyone working all the time no matter what, they will tell you. Of course, they’ll also tell you how afraid they are to actually take a sick day, too.

Many of us will wonder how on earth the poor bosses will cope if half of us are home in bed watching re-runs and soaps whenever we have a cold. Obviously, the bosses will have to staff up, which is always a sweet place to be if you’re in the paycheck party, because staffing up means salaries go up, too. All of the ideas of the paycheck party should be about figuring out how to make the bosses’ lives more difficult for them. Believe me, they can afford to hire the best minds in our country to figure out a way to cope with this, but in the end, it’s all going to boil down to one simple fact: They’re going to have to make less money and spend a lot more or else they will have nothing. And that will never happen. The bosses will never quit making money off us, no matter how hard we can make it for them, or else they’ll have no way to make money at all. Because he bosses would be strictly worthless as members of the paycheck party.

Everybody who works for a living is also approaching a point where they will have to retire. If any of the paycheck party ideas influence the politicians and get us some relief from the crushing burden of boss greed, our jobs will get marginally better. And with a minimum wage anyone can live on, switching jobs will be far easier than ever before, since you can always choose to do something you love, since it will pay enough to provide for a normal life. But we will still long for retirement as we sit in our cheap office chairs drinking burnt coffee and wishing our backs would stop aching and our feet stop hurting. Even the power of the paycheck party will never be so complete that we will be able to lay down on the jobs and do nothing.

The 401k plan is something the bosses dreamed up for enriching themselves at our expense while pretending to give us a benefit. They thought of it because they love indulging in their favorite pastime, of gambling on the stock market, and they probably thought we’d like it too. So it became the preferred benefit offered in place of the pensions that they once offered our fathers. A pension is a guaranteed, inflation-adjusted salary for life that entails no work at all on our part other than cashing the checks. A 401k is an opportunity for us to put money in the stock market for our bosses to use to boost CEO and Board of Director’s salaries to ever-greater heights. And it either sinks into nothingness without a trace, or else we have to manage it, by trying to out-guess the stock market, which is the biggest racket the bosses ever dreamed up and completely unfair to the little guy, namely us. You might be able to win at it, but it will take a lot of work. And a lot of luck.

So it seems that our fathers were much smarter than we seem to be about getting their fair share of the value of the companies they helped grow and prosper their entire working lives. The 401k plan, for the information of those of us in the paycheck party who don’t have one, is a kind of a mutual fund or saving account that isn’t protected by any kind of guarantee at all. Most of them, it is true, offer some kind of semi-guaranteed savings account or money market account as part of the range of confusing options they offer, but they come with pages and pages of carefully-worded disclaimers so complicated and incomprehensible that any chance of them actually meaning anything in a court of law is probably a matter of who has the most expensive lawyers and the money to continue arguing it, which means, as usual, you, the normal paycheck party person, will totally get screwed if you dare to enforce it if the managers of the 401k so choose.

Here’s another chance for you to understand the power of the idea of the paycheck party, if we are able to spread it far and wide and get it into the hearts and minds of all of us who work for a living: looking at anything from the standpoint of how it will benefit the bosses will always reveal how they are screwing us if you don’t pay any attention to the endless stream of lies they have their public relations geniuses spin for them. Take, for example, the reaction of the paycheck party and most of the tiny segments of the American people to the recent escalation of the 401k scam to include our Social Security benefits. Everybody totally hated the idea of allowing them to make Social Security a little bit like a 401k, because we all know that the stock market is a big casino with the wheels all rigged to benefit the bosses and all their little buddies. The payouts can be nice when and if they happen, sure, but so are the payouts in the casinos. but that doesn’t mean anyone thinks it’s a good idea to bet the goddamned farm on the caprices of chance, either.

So it’s a safe bet that most of us already have a certain bias against the 401k plan, even as we anxiously watch it grow, far too slowly for most of us, hoping against hope that we will be able to actually cash out with enough money to live on when we reach retirement age. The 401k plan,like any other form of gambling, can consume us with stressful worrying. It can fool us into bad decisions, and give us sleepless nights and distract us from anything pleasant and dignified about working as we watch our worth sink and inch upward and sink again. Lots of us can laugh about it now, because we are young, but anyone getting within a decade or so of retiring isn’t laughing much at all.

So we need a nice Minimum Pension Plan law that gives every single member of the paycheck party a guaranteed pension that they can take from job to job without any particular dependence on any one company going under. Think of it like Social Security, except the bosses pay into it instead of us, as a way of rewarding us for doing all their work for them while they were out playing golf with their CEO buddies. And the bosses can’t touch this money, they can’t claim it as their own asset, they don’t get to do anything with it but pay into it, just like Social Security is for the rest of us. The monkey business that bosses got to do with their pension funds in the past is all we need to know to clinch this important part of the law. If a bunch of bosses get together and run your company into the ground, they won’t be ale to drain the pension fund while they’re doing it. Not any more.

Here’s an area where the bosses have taken the easiest way out and screwed us over for decades now. Because of the system the bosses invented and fostered, the health care system in this country has turned into a huge costly mistake that can only be corrected if the bosses are forced to deal with it out of their own pocketbooks, instead of our paychecks.

The bosses have created a monster in the health care insurance industry, haven’t they? And because their fellow bosses run the health care industry in the usual rapacious, scorched-earth, profits-before-everything manner, it only stands to reason that they gouge businesses for every thin dime they chisel out of them, right? That’s the beauty of the market. The holy, wonderful free market our bosses all worship. The theories we all blindly believe about the free market are all about making or growing things and selling them to each other, though. These theories don’t ever mention Granny laying in a hospital bed sucking money through a hundred tubes while we all choke through our tears and tell the hospital we will pay anything, any price they ask, just for five more hours of Granny’s time on earth. Adam Smith never even mentions this.

There are thousands of idiotic theories about how to fix this mess. Most of them have to do with the same old tired liberal idea of the government paying for everything. As the paycheck part well knows, the government pays for everything with tax money. The tax money is largely comprised of the portion of our salaries that the bosses say is ours but that they gave to the government instead of to us. Whether that withheld money actually belongs to us or not is a matter of custom and semantics, true, but either way, it is the height of inefficiency to take it from the bosses just to pay for things the bosses could easily pay for directly, and far more cheaply.

What would work more directly would be to have a minimum health care law for every member of the paycheck party? What would make it work would to ensure that everyone who works gets the same benefits, from the CEO to the lawn staff. All of the exclusions, restrictions, coverage limits and everything else would apply equally to all workers. Gat a cold? Need to go to the doctor? Get a part time job for a few weeks and go to the doctor.

Everybody who works for a living should get health care from the bosses. How they pay for it is really not our concern. The politicians and the bosses will figure something out, since they love to get together and make simple things complicated. But the issue is clear: If you work, you get free health care and drugs, and no money is taken from your paycheck to pay for it. In order to prevent the bosses from destroying the quality of our health care in their insatiable need to make everything cheaper, the law has to include parity and prohibit excluding any doctor, drug prescription, procedure or service that is available.

The bosses will be forced to solve the problem they created; they will need to figure out how to make health care more cost efficient without ruining it. The four hundred dollar plastic tube that cost thirty five cents to make will become a laughable memento of a forgotten age of health care insanity. And it won’t cost the paycheck party a dime.

Liberal College Professor Cecil B. Bloatbudget begs to disagree with the paycheck party on this issue.

“As a card-carrying member of the Eastern Liberal Elite, I must beg to differ with the unwashed masses of the paycheck party on this point. Obviously the only way to solve the health care problem is to dissolve all the insurance companies, throw the hundreds of thousands of people who work for them into the streets to starve, and make the government provide free health care for everyone who is too lazy to work.

“It will never work to make the bosses pay for all of this. The minute the bosses find out that we intend to make them pay for it, they shall close all of their businesses and move to South America to sulk in self-imposed exile.

“Then we will all be forced to make the government pay for all the health care of all the jobless ex-paycheck party enthusiasts out there.

“I have prepared this simple chart to show you how scientific and indisputable my projections are. Two of my most attractive graduate students stayed up all night doing it, because none of us have ever worked a real job in our lives but we do know how to put the paycheck party in their place. Why did you know the whole thing was thought up by a high school drop out? It’s really quite absurd!”