Workin' For The Man

One of the greatest challenges for almost any person is finding employment that sustains life and spirit. In my case my needs have been simple – make enough money to stay alive, stay healthy and maintain my dignity. It was never easy. The hardest part was maintaining my dignity. Most jobs are crap. No need to convince anyone of that. In almost every work situation I had either the boss was an overbearing jerk, a wage cheat or an incompetent. With coworkers it was a mixed bag. I tended to be a dissenter, and standing up to management didn't always go over so well with coworkers, even when I was in a union. I often was a one-man union.

A good example was a summer job I had during my college years. A friend of my dad owned a gas station in town, and he hired me to wash school buses that he was buying and selling. Washing the outside was relatively easy, hosing them down with a soap mix, scrubbing, then rinsing them. The inside, though, was hot and humid beyond belief, and in the confined space I would get soaking wet. in the summer heat. Being in that level of heat and humidity for hours bordered on life-threatening.

The owner, whom I'll call Elmer, since that was his real name, was a slave-driver, giving me no breaks and demanding harder, faster work. When it came around to paying me, he cheated, and not by a little. He was one of those phony-friendly guys, who greeted customers with a lot of fanfare and praise, but when he looked under the car's hood would curse them under his breath.

One day an oil tanker showed up to fill the underground tanks, and I noticed that it had no name painted on the trailer, though the station was a Shell Oil franchise. I asked Elmer about this, and he said kind of out the side of his mouth that "when you do a lot for someone they look the other way sometimes." Or let you get away with things. In other words, he was selling off-brand gas as Shell, which in those days meant something, due to the additives that were put in the gas, chiefly lead.

I quit the job soon after that, and about a month later was driving past the station, and noticed it was no longer a Shell station. It had become "Sinclair." That only lasted a year-or-so. Sinclair also booted him, and his station became a no-name gas station. He had to sell his off-brand gas as off-brand gas.

One night my parents had Elmer and his wife over for dinner, and he made the big (for him) announcement that he had joined the John Birch Society, the "right wing" crackpot organization of the time that was fanatical about the perceived threat of communism. Neither of my parents said anything, but my dad never had anything to do with Elmer again – never stopped at his gas station, never called him for any reason, and for sure never had him over for dinner. He never mentioned Elmer again.

Elmer was a jerk, a cheat, a crook, a phony and an overbearing, overworking employer. He hung on for a few years, but his business declined, and he sold it and retired, dying soon afterward. And soon forgotten.

I had many jobs throughout my life. Some were worse than this, some better, but the thing they had in common was disrespect of one form or another. I wouldn’t put up with it for long, so quitting was a fairly routine occurrence. Sometimes, though, the job was so distasteful that I quit out of disgust. Like cleaning lathes in a large machine shop in Ann Arbor that made parts for the auto industry. They could only be cleaned when everyone else was gone for the day, so I was alone on a large shop floor using an oily leather glove to pick shards of metal from oil-filled catch basins of about twenty lathes. Cleaning toilets, which I have also done, was far more preferable than doing this. I wasn’t treated badly. I wasn’t treated at all. I didn’t see one person in all the time I did this job, which wasn’t for long. A few weeks.

My first job when I moved to Hawaii in 1983 was breaking up ice at the Blaisdell Center after a show by the Ice Capades. I was one of about 25 men who used sledge hammers, dropping them vertically over-and-over. It was relatively easy, took about four hours. We were paid in cash.

One job stands out, though, in both short duration and in disgust. In 1996 I quit my distasteful job installing TV cable because I was diagnosed with basal cell skin cancer on my face. I wanted to quit anyway, so this gave me a handy excuse.

The cable job wasn’t the one that stood out, though. After quitting the cable company I started working for several temp agencies in Madison, and I developed a pretty good relationship with one of them, Norell, which likely no longer exists. One day the agency contact person called me, and said "I have a job for you. You don’t have to take it if you don’t want to, and we won’t hold it against you if you don’t, but it’s telemarketing for the Republican Party. It isn’t calling new people, just previous donors, for the presidential campaign, taking money from one Republican and giving it to another" She was always real nice to me, so I told her I would do it. I wonder what ever became of her, so decent, so respectful, always finding me work. I never worked for the agency again, finding a more permanent job not long after this fiasco.

But back to telemarketing for the Republicans. Surreal doesn’t begin to describe the experience. I reported to the Republican headquarters on Madison’s near-east side the following morning to begin training. It was a small office, with room for about ten phones, no partitions between them. A file cabinet in the office had a bumper sticker pasted diagonally that said "Life’s a Hillary." Even then she was the devil incarnate to this gang.

There were about four other temp workers in the training group – a middle-aged African-American woman, a female university student, a "white" housewife, and an African-American guy in his 20s. At one point I turned to the African-American woman and said "I never thought it would come to this." She answered with "Ahh know," as only an older African-American woman can, with such resignation, such disappointment, such weight of experience.

The training lasted through the morning, didn't amount to much, just some dos and don'ts, verbiage, procedures, some information about the campaign. It was the 1996 presidential campaign – incumbent Bill Clinton, the Democrat, versus challenger Bob Dole, the Republican. The manager was a nice guy, enthusiastic, cheerful, somehow thought we were all Republicans, and let us go for lunch, expecting that we would all come back for the evening shift.

I was the only one who returned, forever endearing me to the people who didn’t return. The manager was really happy to see me, figured I was the only Republican, and gave me some more inside info about the campaign. He had me start calling people, and it was immediately bizarre. One Republican after another was angry, even enraged, that Dole would not come to Wisconsin, as if the mere act of visiting the state would ensure victory.

 

I mentioned this to the office manager, and he got agitated too, telling me "Jack Kemp’s helmet is in the Packers Hall of Fame, and even he won’t come to Wisconsin!" Jack Kemp, a former Congressman, was Dole’s running-mate, and he had been a quarterback for the Buffalo Bills AFL football team. Why his helmet would be in the Packers Hall of Fame was a mystery to me, but it apparently was a good enough reason to expect him to campaign in Wisconsin. In another weird aspect of Wisconsin mythology, the Green Bay Packers professional football team organization is the state religion. They won a few titles, so fans statewide brag that the city of Green Bay is "Titletown USA," no matter who else wins every year, which is not often the Packers.

So there I was, calling Republicans, asking them for money, not getting it, and finding the whole experience completely disorienting. One person I called said she was "right wing" trash-talking radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh’s mother-in-law, or some such, and I mentioned this to the office manager. He knew exactly who she was and what fancy condo high-rise she lived in in Milwaukee. She gave no money either.

I only called about 50 people, got no money at all, and after about two hours of this I started getting dizzy, and thought I was going to pass out. I knew I had to get out of there, got up, and staggered towards the door, saying "I’m sorry! I just can’t do this!"

I don’t think I even called the temp agency to tell them I quit the job, and I didn’t get paid anything for my time, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t actually do anything, and I was glad that I was an incompetent at raising money for the Republicans. I felt that I had done something dishonorable in taking the job, and my core inner being was having none of it, forcing me to stumble out the door, almost losing consciousness as I made my way to the street. I remember riding a city bus home, happy with myself for escaping, not caring what came next. Dole lost to Clinton, never having come to Wisconsin. Maybe he should have. I voted for Ralph Nader.

After this I sold Country-Western concert tickets for a couple of weeks for a sleaze outfit that contracted for the Professional Firefighters of Wisconsin. It was a "boiler room" operation, with a cacophony of men making calls in a crowded room. "Hey, we got Haystack Johnny and Corncob Bob out of Sun Prairie! Haw, haw, just jokin’. We actually have John Anderson – I'm Sittin'on the back porch just-a-swingin' (I had to sing), - and Patricia Conroy, a real up-and-comer out of Canada!" To my surprise I got fairly good at it. The absurdity of the situation erased my inhibitions.

The concert was held, and I was out of a job again. Within about a week I was hired by a well-known Wisconsin-based catalog ordering business, and stayed with that company until I retired in 2011. They treated me pretty well. It’s not that way anymore. It is now just another corporation. Not doing as well either.

I was lucky. I barely made it to retirement, and with my temperament and low tolerance for workplace abuse, exploitation and scheming I wouldn’t survive in today’s work environment. I would quit a bad job at almost the drop of the hat. Most jobs are bad jobs.

The tent encampments of homeless people around this country are likely populated by millions who weren’t as lucky as I was. They quit one too many jobs, or got fired. Or they had lower disrespect thresholds. If they turn to drugs and alcohol, or just give up, starting over becomes almost impossible.

Homelessness is of course another topic, but I suspect a major reason, if not the major reason our country does so little to address the calamity of so many people living on the streets is that it is a convenient way of scaring people into conformity and passivity in the workplace. "If you don't like it here, go! The street awaits you!" Shape up or ship out.

___________________________________

Here's a song. Here's another. Johnny Paycheck. Kenny Chesney. I often felt like this after leaving a bad job. Elizabeth Cottten. The Allman Brothers Band. Nashville Jam. Big Bill Broonzy. Woody Guthrie and Sonny Terry. Brewer and Shipley. Roy Orbison. Jimmy Reed. Elvis Presley. Billy Bragg. Sam Cooke. Ry Cooder, Bobby King. Little Village. A few chain gang songs. Po' Lazarus. The Golden Gospel Singers. Harry Belafonte. Leadbelly. The Osborne Brothers. John Lennon. The Silhouettes. The Seven Dwarfs. Dolly Parton. Donna Summer. The Beatles. Billy Joel. Huey Lewis and the News. Iris DeMent. The Grateful Dead. Bob Dylan. Cream. Jimmy Buffett. Bob Seger. Frank Sinatra.
___________________________________

The worker productivity score is the latest attempt by corporations to put workers under pressure. It isn't intended to actually make workers more productive. It is solely for the purpose of cruelty, of lording over workers in order to humiliate them and "show them who's boss." And, or course, to steal their pay. Historian Caitlin Rosenthal wrote a book, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, in which she observes that accounting practices, such as worker productivity analysis, began with slavery. 

____________________________________

Here's a little something I posted to the Cap Times in Madison.