Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America (3 page)

You Get What You Pay
For

A
s far as I’m concerned, I earn my wages with my scars. Anything above and beyond that is me doing my employers a favor. And I’m not inclined to do favors for people who treat me poorly. See, we work in insane conditions. Dangerous, even. Most kitchens in the middle of the summer are intolerable, with temperatures well into the triple digits. I’ve seen people sent to the hospital with heatstroke. A lot of us will run into the freezer for a few minutes until we cool down. I’m not a doctor and I can’t say for sure, but I’m fairly certain that going from overheated to a minus-5 environment can’t be healthy.

My arms and hands are covered in scars from the fryers. Oil at nearly 400 degrees doesn’t tickle when it hits your skin, and you can’t avoid the spatter entirely. I’ve burned my hands
because the oven gloves had worn through and the owners were too cheap to spring for another pair. I’ve sliced my fingers open nearly to the bone when knives have slipped. I’ve dropped equipment on my feet because it was so busy I didn’t have time to wash the grease off my hands. I’ve hurt myself in more ways than I can count because that was how I got my seven or eight bucks an hour.

Stuff like that is unavoidable; it’s the nature of the work. We know and understand that when we take the jobs. Any dangerous job is like that; we’re not stupid. The point is more that the risk is devalued—that our injuries, rather than being seen as a sign of our willingness to literally bleed for our employers, are seen as a liability.

The kitchen scars are more dramatic, but the emotional toll of retail is the worst. The conditions are patently impossible. I’ve been expected to spend three hours per shift stocking in the back, while also being told that the register was never to be left unattended. I’ve been told to always have coffee ready for customers and that it should always be fresh, and in the same breath been told that I was going through too much coffee. My section of the store is always supposed to be neat, but there’s only one of me and over three hundred square feet to cover, and there are shoppers everywhere and not enough racks for all this shit to begin with.

My shoe size actually changed with the quality of the jobs I’ve had. The better ones let me sit down sometimes. At the not-so-nice ones, I’ve stood for eight to ten hours, and my feet have gotten so swollen that my shoes don’t fit.

The mandatory cheerleading is why I never worked for Wal-Mart. Apparently this has changed now, but during employee meetings, they used to require their people to actually cheer. With pelvic thrusting. (Go watch the YouTube videos. It must be seen to be believed.) In those not long ago days, if you didn’t wiggle your ass with sufficient vigor, you’d find yourself on the wrong side of management and then brought to the front to lead the cheer yourself. Sure, give me a W and an A and an L and a squiggly (or I guess now it’s an asterisk since they rebranded), and I will happily shove them straight up your ass. Friends of mine will swear that they never got demerits until after they upset management by lacking enthusiasm. (To be fair to Wal*Mart, my friends weren’t actually let go because they wouldn’t wiggle enough. They can’t prove causation. It’s just that they didn’t start getting demerits until they stopped wiggling.)

At work, I’m often told what words to say, and I will be written up if I deviate from the script or combine two steps to save time. In retail, we must acknowledge a customer who comes within a set radius of us with a certain tone and tenor in our voices. In telemarketing, our every word might be scripted. In fast food, we’re typically given three greetings to choose from. At one large fast-food chain (let’s call it LFC for short), the choices were these:

1) Welcome to LFC, how can I help you?

2) Welcome to LFC, would you like to try a delicious chicken meal today for only $4.99?

3) Welcome to LFC, what can we make fresh for you today?

The company even sent in undercover customers to make sure we stayed on script.

All of our actions are carefully dictated to us. I assume this is because employers think we have monkey brains and are incapable of making decisions. This means that they’re paying me to pretend I’m not me and also that I care about you.

And as long as we’re on the topic of insane things your bosses can do, you should be aware that you have no legal right to take breaks in America. Go ahead, Google it. Some states mandate breaks. Some farmwork has a federal break mandate. But overall, you’ve no right to demand a lunch break or a break at all. That’s all at the discretion of your employer.

Some people have the luxury of asking themselves whether a job fulfills their career hopes and ambitions. I’ve got my own metric to gauge the fabulosity of a job: Does that job require me to keep my boss informed of the inner workings of my gastrointestinal system, or am I allowed to go to the bathroom at will? It’s physically uncomfortable to hold it forever, and it sucks to stand by for the okay like a dog waiting for someone to open the door. But for me, the indignity of the whole thing is less about the potential bladder infections. It’s more what the requirement for that kind of notification reveals about the tone of the place. In my experience, the jobs where the boss regulates your urinary tract also tend to demand a bunch of other degrading stuff.

—

We all know that a lot of folks think that poor people are lazy and incompetent. They think we get fired from jobs because we don’t know how to behave, or we’re always late, or we just don’t care. But what rich people don’t realize is how unbelievably easy it is to get fired. And a lot of times what gets you fired is that you’re working more than one job.

Whenever you are working for the kind of place that has a corporate office, you’re typically given the fewest possible hours—definitely less than full-time, because then they’d have to pay you benefits. (Full-time is often in the twenty-eight- to thirty-two-hours-a-week range, to boot.) But even though your employer might schedule you for twenty hours a week, you might wind up working ten, or thirty. It depends on how busy it is—when it’s slow, they send you home, and when it’s busy, they expect you to stay late. They also expect you to be able to come in to cover someone’s shift if a co-worker gets sick at the last minute. Basically, they’re expecting you to be available to work all the time. Scheduling is impossible.

At one chain, I was required to sign a contract stating that I was an at-will employee, that I would be part-time with no benefits, and that if I took another job without permission, I would be subject to termination because the company expected me to be able to come in whenever they found it necessary. And yes, this is legal in the United States of America.

It’s unavoidable; even I have had to admit the impossibility
of this system and let people go, one an employee that I actually liked very much. Competent, friendly, good sense of humor. But her other boss simply would not post the schedule far enough in advance for me to give the woman any hours. If the workweek started Monday, the schedule at her other job went up Sunday night. I tried to do my scheduling a week or more in advance, and when I called the other restaurant to discuss the issue, the manager told me that she didn’t actually feel any need to change her routines and that it was my problem to deal with. I simply had to let the woman go, because her other boss wanted the availability.

How is that legal, you ask? Well, a huge number of jobs in this country—and a crazy high percentage of the jobs that poor people hold down—are considered at-will. Sometimes you’ll sign a paper stating that you understand what that means, sometimes not. It depends on the sophistication and size of the business hiring you. What “at-will” means is that your boss can decide that your eyes are too brown one day and let you go on the spot. As long as they’re not in violation of civil rights law, they don’t have to give you a reason, and they can decide that anything is a fireable offense. I’ve been fired because my boss made a mistake on some paperwork. I’ve been fired because I had the flu. I’ve been fired because I wouldn’t sleep with someone. I’ve been fired because I
did
sleep with someone. I once saw a stripper fired because she couldn’t afford breast implants and the club manager didn’t find her natural breasts alluring enough to dance topless for drunken construction workers.

So let’s break this down: You’re poor, so you desperately need whatever crappy job you can find, and the nature of that crappy job is that you can be fired at any time. Meanwhile, your hours can be cut with no notice, and there’s no obligation on the part of your employer to provide severance regardless of why, how, or when they let you go. And we wonder why the poor get poorer?

Of course not every firing is part of an intricate plot by the plutocrats. I’ve also been fired for calling off work too much (“calling off work,” for those unfamiliar with the vernacular, just means that you call your boss to say you’re not coming in). Usually I’ve called off because I was legitimately sick, because I rarely miss work more than I can help. But sometimes it was because my car wouldn’t start or because I just couldn’t face it. It doesn’t matter what you say, and your boss doesn’t care; the point is whether you do it too much, not whether your reasons are legit.

I admit it—I’ve been fired for doing some stupid shit. I’ve been fired for consistent tardiness because I simply didn’t care, and more than once because I gave my boss the finger. And as a manager, I’ve fired people for being dumbasses—stuff like showing up to work too hung over to stand up straight. Once I had to fire a guy because he went and got knuckle tattoos. I’ve even fired someone for relentless creepiness. That was the one time I thanked God for at-will states. He wasn’t a terrible worker, and there was nothing to point to, but he did brush his groin with his hand once too often while looking at the girls up front.

Idiot pranks are risky too. One kid I worked with got bored and built a castle out of cardboard boxes in the parking lot. They fired him a) because it made the company “look unprofessional,” and b) for “time theft.” I’ve seen someone get fired, no shit, because he didn’t want to wear buttons proclaiming him proficient at cleaning and other menial tasks. I barely made it through the day without mentioning TPS reports. (If you don’t know what those are, drop everything and go watch
Office Space
right now.)

Mostly, I’ve fired people because they didn’t care about the things that do matter to me. I’ve never cared any more for the owners of the companies I’ve worked for than they have for me, but I will kill myself for my co-workers. A lot of us do that. When we work through fevers and injuries and bone weariness, it’s for the money but also because if we don’t, we know that we’ll be leaving our co-workers holding the bag. However bad the shift is, with a man down, it’ll be that much worse on whoever’s left. There’s a siege mentality in the service industry in particular; you go through hell together. If you tap out and go home, you’re leaving your co-workers to deal with more customers with even fewer hands. And that means that they’re more likely to get fired themselves—because if customers start complaining about the service, the boss doesn’t really care that you’re covering for someone who’s out sick. So you bet your sweet ass that if you work for me and I see you being dead weight, I’ll get rid of you.

All of this is not to cast myself as some kind of paragon of
work perfection. I’m a terrible corporate manager, every time I tried it. My employees loved me, but I made a lousy guardian of profit margins. My first loyalty is to my co-workers. Then the customers. And then, in a distant third, the company.

For example, when I found out that some of my employees had themselves a fantastic gig pulling the expired salad and bruised or unusable produce out of the Dumpster and taking it home, I started making sure that the food was disposed of
next to
the trash rather than in it. This, you should know, was highly against the rules on everyone’s part.

I figured if I got busted, I’d just say that I was trying to keep track of how much got thrown away to help me order properly the next time. I’m not sure what the company would have done if they’d found out; most companies simply don’t want to know about stuff like that because even they don’t want to be that harsh, but liability exists. No restaurant can knowingly allow anyone to eat expired food, even if it’s obviously still sound. With that said, companies also discourage letting employees eat unservable food because they assume that a worker would have bought food instead of just going without, and heaven knows it’s a sin to lose potential profits from workers! Only, most people don’t buy their food half-off at their own stores; most people just drink more on hungry shifts when they can’t eat. I always figured that my cooks would probably not be doing their best work if they were salivating every time some food finished cooking. And I just couldn’t live with myself letting these guys look longingly at the burgers
they were flipping as if they were Victorian street urchins lusting after a hot roll in a bakery window.

If one of my people was hungry, I gave them food. I’d send parents home with boxes of expired chicken nuggets for their kids. My bosses, of course, generally hated dealing with me. It’s been a pattern. I don’t really blame them—their jobs sucked as much as mine did and I was a huge pain in their asses. One of my favorite bosses once told me that he hated having to explain the
why
of everything to me, but I considered it my job to be able to explain the why to the people who reported to me. If hours were getting cut or pay frozen, I damn well was going to give them a reason that made sense. If we were going to lay off a quarter of the staff, I’d better be able to explain it.

I know a lot of people think that I’m supposed to be a good little worker bee and do my part to help move the wheels of capitalism. I just don’t see what’s in it for me anymore beyond my little paycheck. Think about it this way: At my earning peak, I made approximately nineteen cents a minute before taxes.

So when I go out of my way to work hard, I’m not doing it for my bosses, I’m doing it for my co-workers. There’s definitely a mutual covering of asses going on in the lower classes. (Hey, why should the upper classes do all the ass covering?) I’ve even tracked down babysitters for employees who’d lost their child care and couldn’t afford to lose their shift as well. Instead of letting an employee call off work and winding up shorthanded to boot, I called around until I found a cashier who was more
than happy to babysit for a few hours for some extra cash. I loaned the cook the money to pay the cashier, and everyone got something they needed. We do shit like that a lot.