Sherpas are the people who live at the foot of Mount Everest. You hire them to take you up the mountain. They carry the tents and baggage and, if you make it back down, you pay them and then you write a book about your "conquest" of the mountain.

Which is how it goes everywhere.

When 16 Sherpas were killed in an avalanche last month, I found the time to slip into a church for a minute, though I'm not sure why.

"You knew them," I said to the statue of the calm-eyed saint. "You knew them all."

During my three decades as a reporter, I've covered the deaths of a number of people who died on the job:

A window washer who fell six stories. A cop shot to death. A guy who fell off the back of a trash truck and opened his head up on the asphalt street. A young man who died in a hummus factory after catching an arm in some grinding machinery. Two construction workers down in a trench who died when the walls collapsed. A man who died when the forklift rolled over on him. A trucker who jackknifed. A couple of commercial fisherman who drowned when their boat sank. A firefighter or two.

You work like hell to get the job, and sometimes the job kills you, a statement not supported by anything you'll find in the employee handbook.

I've been working for wages since I was 14. I have a keen wariness of work, which always delivers you less than you're worth, which places you sometimes under the supervision of fools and which takes little nicks and whittles out of you until you look like a piece of wood gnawed by rats.

You work construction until the cartilage is gone and your knees are bone-on-bone. You work 60 hours a week on an oil rig — some of the guys get through the double shifts on coffee and tobacco, but you smoke a little crystal meth to keep going. The boss pretends not to notice until he has to, and you get fired. You go down fast after you lose that job.

And these things tie you to the Sherpa with the load on his back, hearing the dreadful roar as the avalanche roars down the mountain. That tie is there if you work in a coffee shop or a dollar store or a law office.

The Republican party, most recently filibustering against an increase in the minimum wage, is driven by a contempt of working people. A contempt so great that it can only be expressed by driving as many of us as possible into poverty, into the peeling-paint, shotgun-shack, flour-sack dress, bigoted, loves-you-some-Jesus poverty characteristic of the American south in the 1930s.

They can't see the Sherpa in you.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's book of Pulitzer Prize-nominated columns, "Between Wealth and Welfare: A Liberal Curmudgeon in America" is available for Nook and on Amazon.com.

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