Shit Jobs
Since the Old Country doesn’t have the
dole, and family can sometimes prove unreliable sources of sustenance, the
system there has served up industrial temp agencies, which are like corporate
work-for-the-dole schemes for the truly desperate people the system hasn’t
found a way to enslave in prison jobs yet. The businesses that hire industrial
temps do pay the legal minimum pittance of a wage, but the industrial temp agencies
take one-third of that as a commission.
Miserable-looking people – many of us
parolees and undocumented aliens – show up before dawn, smoke cigarettes while
waiting around with no sense of camaraderie, and then get shunted like livestock
into buses taking us to pay-by-the-day unskilled jobs.
I’ve been there.
Maybe the first one I ever had was as
a punch-press operator. My boss, an interchangeable type in white shirt,
unmemorable tie, and no jacket, informed me that what I’d be doing was vital
for the construction of key-and-message slots behind the desks of hotels and
motels worldwide, and then instructed me, without demonstrating, in the art of slipping
little strips of metal into a groove on a machine and then pulling a lever that
brought down a hydraulic smasher that bent the metal into an L-shape for me to
reach in, remove, and replace.
Over and over and over and over again for a
couple of hours between breaks – I’m sure that by now it’s a job for robotics –
but despite the repetitiveness I had to keep up a keen level of concentration
or it’d be bye-bye finger.
They usually made a big deal about how
doing a good job could lead to permanent employment, but Mr Bland and I knew
that this was gonna be a one-day experience for me.
My deepest industrial-temp
relationship was with a technical correspondence school that gave distance
instruction in all manner of trades. The comb-over fellow in the cheap suit
explained to us that we were hired until the other workers held a vote about
joining a union. We wouldn’t be voters. I didn’t know if this made us scabs or
not. The union organisers among our fellow workers may have strongly disliked
the management tactic that had brought us there, but they realised that we
ourselves were badly exploited brothers and sisters and the overall atmosphere
was warm if not welcoming.
Cheap suit assigned us at random to
the various departments. I started out on the assembly line. About two dozen or
so of us sat around a conveyor belt that ran in a complete circuit. All the
items for each of the lessons would come down from the upstairs warehouse and
we would each get a bucketful – of a single electronic component or lathe tool
or diesel-mechanic wrench or whatever. Then the conveyor belt would start again;
empty cardboard shipping boxes would start rolling by and we each placed one
item from our buckets into each box as it passed. Quality control was by
weight. The boxes left the conveyor belt at a scale. If any of us missed a box
or put two items in one the scale would make a signal and the box was shunted
aside away from its journey to its next destination in the shipping room.
They could tell by the size of the
weight discrepancy who on the line had fucked up, and a supervisor would remind
that person of his or her responsibility. Too many fuckups had paycheck
consequences.
The conveyor belt rumbled and rumbled.
The cardboard boxes rolled by just a bit too quickly, one after another after
another. A large clock hung high up on the wall opposite my seat. I’d never
seen a clock that moved that slowly. My mind would become fixated on images of
the distilled spirits that awaited me in my clammy basement flat.
Outside in the parking lot during the
lunch break the union people talked among themselves. I ate my
cooked-that-morning cheeseburger straight from the food warmer in the mobile
lunch wagon by myself. As I remember, I liked it more than I’d thought I would.
At the end of the workday they told us
to be back the next day. I wondered how long my nerves could take it.
I think I did another day or two on
the assembly line – please forgive my hazy memory here, but it was a blur –
before they moved me upstairs to the warehouse. Working the warehouse wasn’t a
shit job at all, except for the one-third commission to Manpower, so tales of
the warehouse days belong somewhere else.
A couple of years later and half a
continent away, being a barrel-handler involved unstacking mostly empty, but
rusty and tar-filthy, 50-gallon oil drums from the bed of a railroad flatcar on
a siding in an industrial jungle in Gretna, just west of New Orleans, rolling
them on their rims to end of the car and down a ramp to the bed of a flatbed
truck, stacking them, riding with them in the back of the truck to the
recycling building, taking them off the truck, and rolling them to an opening
at the side of the building.
Inside the recycling building numerous
extraordinarily noisy devices washed, scrubbed, de-tarred, paint-stripped,
de-rusted, and otherwise scoured those suckers until they rolled out another
opening, clean as a pastor’s joke in church, where we grabbed them, rolled them
to another truck, and so on back to a waiting flatcar. We accomplished all this
in that special southern Louisiana
When I finally got home the woman with
whom I was living was dismissively unsympathetic as she took the cash,
commented on how filthy I was, and sent me to the bathtub, showers being an
innovation that had yet to make it to old houses in that part of New Orleans.
From the vantage point of being old
and retired on a decent pension, I wouldn’t judge those industrial temp jobs,
as shitty as they were, as the shittiest jobs I’ve ever had. When it comes to
sheer unmitigated horror in the capitalist job market, nothing is worse than
commission-only sales. Of anything.
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