Living proof that April can be kind

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T.S. Eliot said April is the cru­elest month. I sup­pose it is for the dead, those who can no longer enjoy the lilacs. But most of us aren’t like Eliot. We don’t sym­pa­thize with the dead. We choose to stay in our own shoes, glued to one per­spec­tive, and maybe in that regard we resem­ble the inanimate.

This past week­end, I got to spend three lively days with artists, musi­cians, and writ­ers at a place called the Rens­ing Cen­ter in Pick­ens, SC.

Because I’d expe­ri­enced a few early-month stres­sors, I didn’t know how much help I could be — I was going to be voted in as a new board mem­ber — and when I left for the 5-hour trip on Thurs­day, I wasn’t eager to go. Yet, as soon as I got out of my lit­tle car and onto the farm porch of a sis­ter board mem­ber and close friend, I knew I would be fine. After a glass of wine and a long con­ver­sa­tion, a few tears and a lot laugh­ter, I real­ized the week­end would barter hon­or­ably: It would give me what I gave.

I tried to give it my best with­out forced enthu­si­asm.  In return, I met and fell in love with a dozen peo­ple, from 10 months to 92 years old. An artist com­mu­nity is what we are pas­sion­ate about build­ing, with res­i­den­cies and work­shops among other events, but we  are an artist com­mu­nity already as evi­denced by our three-day com­mune where we cooked local food, talked about our art, hugged babies, cleaned a lot of dishes, moved a stu­dio, drank, dis­cussed the envi­ron­ment, books, film, love, the­ater, pol­i­tics, houses, reli­gion, and music.

We made plans that didn’t hap­pen. We didn’t have time to make a bon­fire down in the pas­ture or play a game that Mari cre­ated as a clever spin on Pic­tionary. We didn’t hike to the water­fall and we didn’t weed the gar­den.  In those ways we inad­ver­tently empathized with the dead.

But we did smell flow­ers, chop veg­eta­bles, sing, laugh (even at my mis­er­able lit­tle stres­sors), stayed in the moment and did a lit­tle planning–mainly for meals and dur­ing the board meet­ing. For my non-heroic “best” I received per­spec­tives from a Chicago pho­tog­ra­pher, two Port­land sculp­tors, a writer from Boul­der, a Charleston com­poser and an Atlantan wood­worker who makes the occa­sional boat.

Like an excit­ing spring­time affair after a lover long gone, I came back feel­ing alive, cre­ative and ready to take on this month that began with unem­ploy­ment and a patch of skin can­cer — each of which can be fixed and soon forgotten.

Spring is kind when you’ve traded your wor­ries for a red pair of Toms or some­thing dif­fer­ent you find in the new grass. They don’t even have to fit.

A Degree of Joy at Work

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The fact that Philip Levine is our new Poet Lau­re­ate tends to reas­sure me that not all is bro­ken in Amer­ica. Through (despite?) his expe­ri­ences as a working-class, phys­i­cal laborer in Detroit, he wrote.

In ref­er­ence to his many poems about the grit and grief of fac­tory work, Levine has said: “I believed even then that if I could trans­form my expe­ri­ence into poetry I would give it the value and dig­nity it did not begin to pos­sess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to under­stand it; I believed that if I could under­stand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an ele­ment con­spic­u­ously miss­ing from my life.”

It is in this spirit that I share with you a beau­ti­ful poem by Jo Taylor.

 

WORKDAY DREAMS

by Jo Taylor

 

The bell shrieks, announces

the end of her shift. Carmen

steps out of the stiff gray uniform

into her skirt, a fiesta

of swirl and pri­mary colors.

 

She aban­dons the belch­ing machine

for the clat­ter of fla­menco heels

on an oak floor. After a night

of danc­ing, salsa glances,

and the twitch of her skirt,

 

Car­men is doomed to the starch

of the next day’s shift,

her only conversation

with belts and oily gears,

dia­logue in an intri­cate plot.

 

Each morn­ing the fac­tory clock

blurts cha-chunk—swal­lows

her time like greasy food

for hun­gry cogs and wheels.

She dons the gray trousers

 

of the uni­form, slogs within the steel

music of the work­day, dreams

the twirl of her har­le­quin skirt,

gui­tar and cas­tanets, tapping,

clap­ping, Olé! Olé!

 

 

 

 

 

Rethinking Us Versus Them This Labor Day

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A cou­ple days ago I read What’s the Mean­ing of Labor Day? Its author, Leslie Hendry, is not the first to sug­gest that there’s noth­ing to cel­e­brate and much to lament nowadays.

It’s easy to explain the obso­les­cence of Labor Day by point­ing out how dif­fer­ent our world was then. When Labor Day became a fed­eral hol­i­day in 1894, New York had been cel­e­brat­ing it for twelve years and more than half of the states that then con­sti­tuted our coun­try already embraced an offi­cial Labor Day. Labor unions were still fight­ing for legit­i­macy; there were no labor laws, no equal pay act, no Title VII, for exam­ple. The Pull­man Strike had crip­pled the rail­roads in 1894, but busi­ness and gov­ern­ment quickly worked together to put a stop to strikes and boy­cotts by thou­sands of workers.

But what is eerily sim­i­lar between these two dates — 117 years apart — is that the unem­ploy­ment rate in 1894 was around 10 per­cent… and ris­ing. The depres­sion of 1893 was one of the worst on record (save The Depres­sion), fol­lowed by another one two years later. Unem­ploy­ment got as high as 12 per­cent that decade, accord­ing to one source. Oh, yes, and Europe was in bad eco­nomic shape. Sounds sort of familiar.

I guess I want to know why Labor Day is not more impor­tant in 2011. Amer­i­cans have been known to inno­vate, change with the times. We have a day that rec­og­nizes us as work­ers and although most of us are not union­ized, don’t con­sider our­selves labor­ers (those blue-collar or immi­grant types), the truth is we do labor. Most of us work damn hard to have some qual­ity of life after our 40 to 70 hours of work each week.

Unem­ploy­ment remains some­where just under 10 per­cent. This fig­ure doesn’t count the under­em­ployed and those who have decided to quit try­ing. Var­i­ous stim­u­lus pack­ages don’t seem to be turn­ing the cor­po­rate body on or maybe it’s tit­il­lated but hold­ing on to its cash like a stingy patron at a strip club. Unfor­tu­nately labor and employ­ment laws intended to give us humane treat­ment and a level play­ing field do not guar­an­tee us jobs that will put fresh food on the table or pay for depre­ci­at­ing houses, help us send our kids to even a mediocre col­lege or retire, hope­fully, someday.

Regard­less of what you think about labor unions, there should be more of us ask­ing the ques­tion: Is this it? Is this what we work for? Is this what we want to work for (when we don’t have work)? My hus­band and I were talk­ing about the achieve­ment gap in schools a cou­ple weeks ago. He said some­thing that I con­tinue to think about. “You know, even if we could do it, if we had the solu­tion to give every kid what he or she needed to do well in school, do we want them to end up like us?”

Labor Day was ded­i­cated to the social and eco­nomic achieve­ments of Amer­i­can work­ers, accord­ing to the U.S. Depart­ment of Labor. About one per­cent of us is doing quite well, eco­nom­i­cally. A very, very large major­ity of us is not.

Labor unions have some­how become anti-American. I don’t agree with this, but labor unions can’t save us. I don’t have a solu­tion, but here’s a start: Think about work today. Thanks to the Labor Day Sales extrav­a­gan­zas, many of you are work­ing. What do you do that adds value to the econ­omy and/or soci­ety? If you stay home with your kids, you add value. If you clean toi­lets, bal­ance accounts, man­age projects, draw blood, sell hot dogs, you add value. Through our work as human beings we are con­nected. That’s a huge net­work of brains and brawn, energy and innovation.

Hendry points out: Most work­ers are dis­mayed by what hap­pened on Wall Street and how it affected their lives…Now income dis­par­i­ties are at an unprece­dented gap and work­ers are out of work. Employ­ees left stand­ing are doing jobs of two or three peo­ple, stretched thin and paid noth­ing more. Teach­ers, fire­men, and other work­ers haven’t had proper raises in pay. The Amer­i­can worker has learned how not to enter­tain progress.

How did we get here? National hol­i­days should hold some sig­nif­i­cance for the unity of its cit­i­zens. At best, peo­ple orga­nize bar­be­ques and get-togethers to eat, drink and for­get about going to work the next day. Since the aver­age Amer­i­can has lit­tle to spend, we’ve even lost the con­sumer edge so preva­lent in our recent past. What does this say about our country?

Regard­less of the jobs we do, our eth­nic­ity, edu­ca­tion, race, reli­gion, we live within this Amer­i­can sys­tem, as bro­ken as it is. Maybe if we could get over an ingrained, imag­i­nary class dis­tinc­tion, more of us “non-laborers” would rec­og­nize that we share way more in com­mon with “labor­ers” (and vice versa) than we pretend.

Then imag­ine what’s possible.

The work of terrorists, madmen and Amy Winehouse

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I wake up this morn­ing to remem­ber that Amy Wine­house has died. The head­line con­firm­ing the end of her 27 years—she’s one year younger than my old­est daughter—is beside the Oslo Nor­way bomb­ing and labor youth camp slaugh­ter on Utoeya Island: at least 95 peo­ple killed by at least one right-wing, “anti-multicultural” extremist.

Huff­post World quotes an offi­cial who says the attack “is prob­a­bly more Norway’s Okla­homa City than it is Norway’s World Trade Cen­ter.” This sound bite smacks of a fee­ble spin to stall the other side (mul­ti­cul­tural extrem­ists?) from pos­si­ble revenge.

I don’t know much about Tim­o­thy McVeigh’s life and I know noth­ing about a 32-year-old named Anders Behring Breivik who is being held for the Nor­way mur­ders. Easy com­par­isons are noted, namely: “a madman’s work.”

Two unre­lated thoughts, simul­ta­ne­ously, nag at me:

  1. I’m not con­vinced that either McVeigh or Breivik is a mad­man – not in the psy­chotic sense. (I am con­vinced, how­ever, that I should call my friends Shani and Sandee to res­ur­rect some form of study cir­cles on race and eth­nic­ity in the Wake county schools.)
  2. It’s too bad that peo­ple who are look­ing to end their lives, prob­a­bly Amy Wine­house was among them, can’t vol­un­teer as tar­gets for the McVeighs and Breiviks of the world.

I’m sur­prised by these thoughts, because I believe that life is the only sacred thing we have. But I also know there’s dan­ger in mis­la­bel­ing all mur­der­ers as “mad men” and the folly of believ­ing we can stop those who are deter­mined to take their own lives.

Last week, I returned from my aunt’s memo­r­ial ser­vice in Indi­ana. She fought can­cer for three years. She’d have the hell zapped out of it, allowed poi­son into her veins, and refused to feel the least bit sorry for her­self. When it hid in remis­sion, we cel­e­brated, briefly, before the moth­er­fucker came back for more. Almost every­one I know has a story like this. Which makes me con­tin­u­ously won­der why peo­ple try to kill them­selves and/or oth­ers when so many of us are try­ing so des­per­ately to stay alive.

If my per­spec­tive is naïve, I could give a damn.

When my hus­band and I watch war doc­u­men­taries or cre­ative non-fiction like The Tudors, a well-worn con­ver­sa­tion ensues as soon as I absent­mind­edly mut­ter why?– often with tears drip­ping onto the sofa, but some­times I’m too angry for tears. My hus­band seems gen­uinely wor­ried about my dis­tress. He’ll say, I don’t think you’re ask­ing ‘why’ but you are say­ing that you hate vio­lence and mur­der. You know that power cor­rupts and that killing in the name of God is not new. Right? And then we have a long dis­cus­sion that cen­ters around whether hominids have evolved at all.

The easy answer is that we are ani­mals. Ani­mals have instincts and emo­tions and bio-evolutionary research about why we do the won­der­ful and stu­pid things we do is pretty con­vinc­ing. I’m a believer in evo­lu­tion and an agnos­tic when some­one needs to put me in a box, but I’m also a paci­fist who believes in mir­a­cles, the great­est being being alive. It’s a hell of a lot of bio­log­i­cal work and tim­ing and luck (and many would say God’s will) just to be here and to grow into a viable organ­ism that makes its own choices.

Why would any of us want to kill a miracle?

I return to the news. The politi­cians and police repeat the “men­tal ill­ness” the­ory to make us feel bet­ter. But there are prob­a­bly mil­lions of McVeighs and Breiviks, peo­ple who firmly believe that the only way to stop an ide­ol­ogy or a pol­icy is to kill oth­ers, even if it’s 19 chil­dren on the sec­ond floor of an Okla­homa City fed­eral build­ing. These mad men don’t hear voices, they’re not strung out on drugs and they know exactly what they’re doing.

As McVeigh once said: “To these peo­ple in Okla­homa who have lost a loved one, I’m sorry but it hap­pens every day. You’re not the first mother to lose a kid, or the first grand­par­ent to lose a grand­son or a grand­daugh­ter. It hap­pens every day, some­where in the world. I’m not going to go into that court­room, curl into a fetal ball and cry just because the vic­tims want me to do that.”

Among the self-enders, so many are smart and tal­ented peo­ple who built the impos­si­ble, crafted the exquis­ite, solved the arcane, and cast light on a once-dark mys­tery about our human con­di­tion. I think about Amy and I feel sad­ness for those who loved her. I wish that she hadn’t killed her­self, but she did. If she’d been one of the 95 in Nor­way, one per­son who didn’t want to die would still be here.

Where there’s free will, there’s always trou­ble. Chris­tians and I can agree on that.  What Amy Wine­house or Ernest Hem­ing­way was think­ing at the end died inside of them or is now between them and their maker.

“Mad­men” aka reli­gious or anti-religious fanat­ics who end oth­ers’ lives should be made to serve the fam­i­lies of those they killed. If they would rather take their own lives than this kind of rec­om­pense would be their choice. Naïve or not, I could give a damn.

 

 

Does art inhibit life?

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Today, one of my face­book friends reposted a clever tweet by come­dian Andy Borowitz: Upside of social net­works: more ways to tell peo­ple what we’re doing. Down­side: we are no longer doing anything.

The tweet is iron­i­cal and close (enough) to the truth, two ingre­di­ents of funny. Another rea­son I like it has to do with a poem I started this morn­ing about Joe Ver­sus the Vol­cano. You never know where a poem is going to take you: some­times to a dead end, other times it idles in limbo, wait­ing for a muse to deem it wor­thy of res­ur­rec­tion, and if you’re lucky, patient, atten­tive and hum­ble, some­times a poem will be more than you ever hoped it could be. (Mine is kind of hob­bling around right now, look­ing for one of Zeus’s daughters.)

I thought the Joe v. Vol­cano poem was going to be about how most of us die a lit­tle every day when we don’t get to work at what we love. But some­how it began to write to Mr. Spiel­berg, direc­tor of this Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan cult clas­sic, and warn him against the dan­gers of too many good movies. The dan­ger, as I lib­er­ally infer from Mr. Borowitz’s tweet, is that when we watch a movie about some­one who escapes his crappy job and mediocre life, we some­how — vic­ar­i­ously is the term — feel less badly about our crappy job and mediocre life. We haven’t done any­thing but watch a movie, yet some­how our voyeurism tides us over. We no longer have to deal with our unlike­able or unbear­able job, at least until the movie magic wears off. Maybe in order to jus­tify our unhap­pi­ness and to put off change for a few more days (weeks/years), we sub­con­sciously think one of the following:

1. My job isn’t nearly as tragic as Joe’s/ my boss not quite the ass­hole dolt as is Mr. Waturi.

2. My job is as tragic as Joe’s but it’s the devil I know. (Same with the ass­hole dolt boss.)

3. My job and every­thing about it is tragic but why change my life when I can watch other peo­ple do that in 1 hour, 52 minutes?

I think they all have merit but after hear­ing my hus­band tell me that peo­ple who watch Hell’s Kitchen and Iron Chef are the least likely to actu­ally cook for them­selves, I think there’s a lot to be said for vic­ar­i­ous living.

And then again, maybe the vic­ar­i­ous the­ory is all wrong. Maybe it’s just that lit­tle bit of a happy end­ing we need to believe that Zeus’s daugh­ter is right around the corner.

 

 

The Hardest Job

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In 1977, I thought I knew what hard work was. In rural Illi­nois, corn detas­sel­ing, mow­ing grass and shov­el­ing snow were not odd jobs—they were necessary.

Going to col­lege was not nec­es­sary. But I was deter­mined to go and nec­es­sary became less about mother nature or buy­ing a car and more about the green I’d need to become some­one new.

I applied to all of the sum­mer jobs listed in the Decatur Her­ald. The most important-sounding one at Tay­lor Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals was the one I was lucky enough to get. Min­i­mum wage was $2.30 and this job paid $3 an hour. Forty hours a week. With my stu­dent loans, I would be rich enough to attend Illi­nois State by the end of the summer.

I don’t remem­ber the require­ment of a uni­form. Just to be there before my 7 a.m. shift, which I knew would be the hard­est part. But it wasn’t.

My high school had two study car­rels, both reserved for juniors and seniors who could lis­ten to either John Den­ver or Bach­man Turner Over­drive on head­phones. At Tay­lor, about 100 mostly middle-aged women didn’t lis­ten to any­thing but the clinks of glass vials as we lifted them from their cor­ru­gated nests stacked in boxes, inches from our right arms.

These car­rels’ inte­rior walls were painted white and black. A naked light bulb lit up the box so that we could detect “for­eign par­ti­cles” in each vial’s sus­pen­sion. How ani­mal, veg­etable or min­eral ended up in a tube of tetra­cy­cline was the most inter­est­ing thing about the job, but we were not to ask.

The job required noth­ing but decent eye­sight, which was not tested. You picked up a vial, shook it and held it up to the light against the white wall and then the black one. If you could see a chunk of some­thing float­ing around, you put it in the reject pile. If the specks were small enough, it passed.

My future col­lege room­mate Mary and I worked the same shift, and expe­ri­enced that first morning’s 15-minute break together. As we watched all the women walk out into the sun­shine, pulling Marl­boro and Salem packs out of their pock­ets, we looked at each other. One of the women came over: “Well, was it what you thought?”  She chuck­led, but the skin around her grey eyes didn’t crin­kle. Her eye­balls just sat in their nests of dark cir­cles. Mary and I must have smiled and said no or that it was alright. The last thing I wanted, I thought, was to be seen as an uppity col­lege girl.

When the woman walked away, a con­ver­sa­tion between my room­mate and me seemed redun­dant. We stood together under a tree for what could have been an hour or 10 more min­utes.  In the dis­tance, I watched a farmer mow a pas­ture. I thought I heard Takin’ Care of Busi­ness on his tractor’s radio. Mary said some­thing about remem­ber­ing to bring cig­a­rettes tomor­row as we slowly walked back inside to what was now required.

 

Work Identity: Always Come Back to Class

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When we find a career we think we’ll enjoy, per­haps invest­ing years of edu­ca­tion and train­ing to do it, that work role soon becomes a part of us. When we decide or are forced to change careers, who we per­ceive our­selves to be can get fuzzy. Work iden­tity (how much someone’s per­cep­tion of who they are is tied to what they do) doesn’t neatly end or sud­denly trans­form into a new one.

Work iden­tity research fas­ci­nated me in grad­u­ate school. Over that last few years, work iden­tity has become per­sonal. I’m not a uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor any longer, I’m a writer, I tell myself. But it’s not that sim­ple. I’m still inter­ested in much of the con­tent that I once taught. When­ever friends or acquain­tances tell me about their work, ask for advice about approach­ing their boss about a new idea, a pay raise, a dif­fi­cult co-worker, tips on change man­age­ment, diver­sity… I’m all ears and eager to share my views. I some­times won­der if my work iden­tity has its own split per­son­al­ity or atten­tion deficit disorder.

Enter a new, help­ful voice: Jo Bar­bara Tay­lor gra­ciously sent me this short piece about her work expe­ri­ence last week. And I fell in love with it. I hope you will, too.

Class Iden­tity

The year I left my class­room at Phillips High School, my junior stu­dents flat­tered me by sug­gest­ing that I come back just one more year. Seniors said they expected me to be there when their own kids came to school. For the last half of my 21-year teach­ing career in pub­lic school, I was com­pletely set­tled into the role. I knew my mis­sion, I knew my pur­pose. I so iden­ti­fied with my work, that teacher was always the first word I used to describe myself. Leav­ing the class­room was a scary prospect. Would I find my place in the world, a place to fit in? Would I be able to sup­port myself? What would I do when I grew up? The most wor­ri­some thing was this: What would I call myself when I was no longer the teacher?

I left because I knew it was time to write poems, paint flow­ers on fur­ni­ture, and read all the best books twice. I wanted to go to school, be the stu­dent, not the teacher. All my ques­tions have not yet been answered, but (always a teacher), to the many won­der­ful stu­dents I have known, I have penned a few famil­iar max­ims: When you are there, remem­ber, “All the most impor­tant peo­ple are here.” When you do the wrong thing, “Be sorry enough to stop.” When you are dis­rup­tive or dis­tracted, “Come back to class.”  Always come back to class…

Jo Bar­bara Tay­lor grew up in Indi­ana and now lives out­side of Raleigh, NC. She taught Eng­lish in pub­lic school for 21 years. Her poems and aca­d­e­mic writ­ing have appeared in jour­nals, mag­a­zines and antholo­gies. Her book One or Two Feath­ers was pub­lished by PlanB Press in fall 2010.

Learning on the Job by Joe Mills

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In my neigh­bor­hood, when you were young and wanted money, you looked to the sky. Sum­mer rains meant lawns to mow, and when snow came down, it looked like dol­lar bills.

One win­ter, after years of watch­ing my older brother go out in the morn­ing and come back at night with a roll of bills, I decided to scoop up some cash myself.  I got up early, buck­led my boots, grabbed the coal shovel from the garage, and tramped into the work­ing world.  Only three houses down the block, I found my first cus­tomer, an old lady who agreed to my rate of two dol­lars if I would do the dri­ve­way as well.

I started the job enthused, but soon slowed.  The snow was thick, the dri­ve­way was long, and hours later, only halfway done, I was try­ing not to cry.  At one point, I looked up and saw my brother and mother car­ry­ing shov­els; I assumed that they were going to earn their own money, but they were com­ing to help.  Real­iz­ing that, I did cry.  After we fin­ished, my brother told me that he charged two dol­lars for a side­walk and ten dol­lars for a dri­ve­way, and more if the snow­fall had been heavy.

I should have learned some­thing about nego­ti­a­tions from that expe­ri­ence, but I didn’t.  I con­tin­ued to make bad deals.  I agreed to keep a neighbor’s dri­ve­way cleared for ten bucks a week; that win­ter, 1979, had the largest snow­falls on record.  I took babysit­ting jobs with­out set­ting a rate in advance.  I helped friends rake leaves and do chores, and after­wards real­ized they were get­ting paid for my labor.

Clearly, I was never going to be one of those Junior Achieve­ment phe­noms who pay for col­lege with a busi­ness run from a bed­room.  I needed to be on someone’s pay­roll, so, at four­teen, I sub­mit­ted an appli­ca­tion to a local donut shop.  You could work that young with parental per­mis­sion which mine were happy to give.  They had started work­ing even ear­lier, and this way at least they would know where I was.

I learned a lot at this job, includ­ing how to make donuts and cof­fee, how to run a cash reg­is­ter, and how to deal with drunks who would stag­ger over from the neigh­bor­ing bar, squint at the huge sign that said “DONUTS,” look at the trays of donuts in the win­dow, and then ask, “You got any­thing to eat here?”  When the bar closed at 2 am, they would come over in groups and indis­crim­i­nately buy sack­fuls, some of which they left on the side­walk as they wan­dered into the night.

I was there at 2 am because my boss also taught me how to keep two sets of time cards: one for him and one for the state which had child labor laws pro­hibit­ing a minor from work­ing in the mid­dle of the night.

The shop did well enough for the owner to drive a new white Porsche which he called a Por-sha, insist­ing the name had two syl­la­bles.  Some­times we would announce our inten­tion to mop the “Floor-sha” or that work­ing there made us feel like “Whore-shas,” but we were care­ful to do this when his son wasn’t around.  Although he often would rip into his father, he didn’t like it when we did.  Some­how the son also man­aged to drive a new car, even though employ­ees made less than min­i­mum wage.  The owner could pay us this way since tech­ni­cally the store was a restau­rant and the­o­ret­i­cally we received tips. No one, how­ever, ever tips a donut coun­ter­per­son, no mat­ter how drunk they are.

One morn­ing, after I’d done a clos­ing shift, the boss called and told me to come in imme­di­ately.  When I got there, he asked why I had left the register’s change sack forty dol­lars short.  I hadn’t.  I had sorted out the usual hun­dred in change, writ­ten “$100,” as I always did, then locked it in the floor safe.  He showed me the sack.  Across from the date, it said, “$60,” but it wasn’t in my handwriting.

“Look,” I said, “the num­ber has been erased.  You can see the smudge.”

“No,” he said, “It hasn’t.  This is a warn­ing.  Don’t do it again.”

I couldn’t believe he couldn’t see the obvi­ous dis­col­oration, but, going home, I real­ized why.  If I had done it, it was a mis­take.  If the num­ber had been changed, it was theft, and that meant it had to be one of only a few who knew the com­bi­na­tion, includ­ing his son. And, of course, it couldn’t be him.  It couldn’t be the son who I had seen giv­ing away dozens of free donuts and, who, more than once, had given friends a twenty with their change when they had paid with a ten.  It couldn’t be the son who never had to close or work the late shift deal­ing with drunks.

I wasn’t sur­prised.  That first time work­ing, try­ing to earn money shov­el­ing snow, I learned that fam­ily mem­bers pro­tect each other.

There was, how­ever, another valu­able les­son here.

At work, write with pen.

 

In addi­tion to a donut shop, Joe Mills has worked in pizze­rias, cof­fee shops, a chem­i­cal waste facil­ity in the Utah desert, a lab­o­ra­tory devoted to cli­mate research, an Indi­ana state park, and numer­ous non-descript offices.  He now teaches at the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina School of the Arts.

www.josephrobertmills.com

 

 

Nothing new under the LED office lights

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There’s noth­ing new under the sun.  Whether you first heard it from the bible, Shake­speare or from your grand­mother, it has power. I remem­ber try­ing to refute it in my head when my mom would say it, off-hand, sort of like “Ka sera sera.”

We tend to think of work as some­thing for­ever changed and made “new” by tech­nol­ogy. And we’ve been pro­grammed in our metric-dependent cul­ture to hitch our tech­no­log­i­cal advances to the upward slope-star of productivity.

I’ve been read­ing David Mont­gomery lately. He’s not on the Times best-seller list, but his books about US labor his­tory, Cit­i­zen Worker,  Work­ers’ Con­trol in Amer­ica, and The Fall of the House of Labor, remind me that with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of the tools we use to do today’s work — the what work looks like and to some extent how it’s done — maybe not that much has changed for the Amer­i­can worker.

Did you know that skilled and to some extent unskilled labor in the 19th cen­tury were moti­vated to union­ize, to give up their indi­vid­ual voices for a col­lec­tive one, in order to direct them­selves? Work rules, the autonomous way that crafts­men did their thing and their very work ethic, was leg­is­lated by union mem­bers within their own unions. Super­vi­sors didn’t know how to do highly skilled jobs and both crafts­men and their super­vi­sors knew it.

With the advent of sci­en­tific man­age­ment — even before Fred­er­ick Taylor’s hol­low “one best way”  – employ­ers enforced stan­dard­iza­tion and con­trol of work and worker alike. It’s not hard to imag­ine resis­tance from men who’d appren­ticed, jour­neyed and mas­tered their crafts, men who were now being told what to do, where to stand, when, how and how often their bod­ies would move, accord­ing to schedule.

Today, we tend to think of labor unions as the antithe­sis of progress, block­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity, hurt­ing free mar­kets and help­ing slack­ers. We grit our teeth when we read that a mere fac­tory worker makes $60 grand plus over­time. We can’t believe that many teach­ers still have a tenure sys­tem that restricts employ­ment at will. And Hoffa’s bloody Team­sters, those com­mie Indus­trial Work­ers of the World… there’s enough “evi­dence” out there to fuel out­rage for another indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion and then some.

But here’s the inter­est­ing thing: so many unions (for­merly called guilds) were eagerly founded, vol­un­tar­ily joined and more active than churches in the nine­teenth cen­tury, despite throngs of immi­grants ready to replace any worker on the spot (unions had not been given legal sta­tus until 1935).  Doesn’t this say some­thing about our human nature? Unless that’s com­pletely changed.

For me it says, “Hey, I get that you (com­pany) want to make the most money you can. But my health and the work I do are not going to suf­fer for it. I won’t kill myself for you. And in return I’ll give you a good product/service, espe­cially if you give me credit: let me use my brain to help decide what, where, when, how and why, then pay me a decent wage to do it.”

Today, auton­omy to estab­lish work rules might include estab­lish­ing your own work week (if Tues­days are not good for you, work on Sat­ur­day; or work 11 hours on Mon­day, 4 hours Tues­day, 12 hours Wednes­day, 13 hours Thurs­day).  Or, auton­omy to pro­tect your mar­riage or your health. Another 6-month project in Los Ange­les? Mmm, no, not now. (No offense LA.) Or, the right to rest: expec­ta­tions to answer calls, text or email at any hour?

Could Labor Move­ment 2.0 be on its way?

 

 

 

Trading Places with the One Percent

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It’s hard to imag­ine being one of the 1% that takes in about 25% of the nation’s income, the same 1% that con­trols 40 per­cent of our nation’s wealth. I can­not imag­ine wealth of this mag­ni­tude: the cash, land, stock, bonds, dwellings, trans­porta­tion, designer cloth­ing, pet charities—like the House and Senate.

Van­ity Fair puts these fun facts into a longer, even more lop­sided per­spec­tive: Twenty five years ago that 1% took in 12% of U.S. income and owned a third of America’s wealth.  The 1% has seen an 18% rise over the past 10 years.

We in the mid­dle have only seen our incomes fall. Men with high school degrees have lost 12% in the same 25 years. I can only imag­ine what the losses are for more mar­gin­al­ized work­ers like women, immi­grants, African Amer­i­cans, His­pan­ics, for­mer inmates, the over-50-somethings.

I try not to speak for oth­ers, but I’d like to take a stab at col­lec­tive sen­ti­ment right now. Money and cars, bling and crap that super­fi­cially says “I’m some­body” is nice and all, but what the rich have that we REALLY want is:

1. Enough

2. Choice

3. Influence/power

Enough: I have enough. I don’t go hun­gry and I am part owner of a house. I have my own trans­porta­tion and most impor­tantly, my husband’s and my debts are not lever­aged. We keep debt low, except for a mort­gage, because we choose to live the way we do. But I know that many, many peo­ple a) either don’t have enough income to have a decent qual­ity of life or b) are so in debt to have a qual­ity of life that the stres­sors of that qual­ity of life have eroded any sem­blance of a qual­ity of life. I believe that most peo­ple in the lat­ter cat­e­gory want to down­size and live more sus­tain­ably if they had the chance. But they didn’t get any of the bailout money. Their houses are worth less than their orig­i­nal appraisals, their health care costs have sky­rock­eted (along with higher edu­ca­tion for their kids), and their wages have lost a lot of ground. Many of these peo­ple are un– or underemployed.

Choice: Related to “enough,” but dif­fer­ent. I am look­ing for work, but I still can choose not to work for King Burger (although I’d love to say, We do it your way, but don’t get crazy). Back in the day, even with­out a dime of my par­ents’ money, I could choose to go to col­lege. I had decent grades, got accepted to two schools I applied for and received stu­dent loans at rel­a­tively low inter­est rates. Today, the mid­dle class doesn’t have these choices.

Influence/power: You cer­tainly don’t have to be rich to have influ­ence, but if you are rich, you are auto­mat­i­cally influ­en­tial and pos­sess power should you choose to wield it. I don’t have cable, but I’ve heard of a new show about bil­lion­aires who live among the very poor, then sur­prise them with a check at the end of the show. The sad thing is that the 1% have been writ­ing the same checks to gov­ern­ment offi­cials for decades. I guess see­ing the CEO of Cargill give money to a sen­a­tor wouldn’t give us the same warm and fuzzies.

Do you remem­ber Trad­ing Places? It was a bril­liant re-write of the Prince and the Pau­per. Billy Ray Valen­tine (Eddie Mur­phy) and Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd) trade lives. Winthorpe says: I had the most absurd night­mare. I was poor and no one liked me. I lost my job, I lost my house, Pene­lope hated me and it was all because of this ter­ri­ble, awful Negro.

I won­der who we’re gonna blame for an Amer­i­can Dream that’s not merely elu­sive, any­more; it’s vir­tu­ally extinct. And there are no poor, lower-class, peo­ple of color to scape­goat.  Because if there were, you’d bet­ter believe that the 1% and most of us in the shrink­ing mid­dle class would be cer­tain they paid for it.