I'm Employed! Wait! I'm Not!

I’m pretty sure that I’m becoming insufferable.

You see, this is my therapy. And I really, really need therapy. So if you feel an eyeroll coming on and need to click that white ‘X’ in the upper right-hand corner of your screen, I'll understand. No offense taken.

This has been a brutal year. A brutal, unforgiving year. I find myself wondering what it is I did. Did I swindle money from helpless and lonely old ladies? Did I rape? Murder? Vote Republican?

I ask these questions because life is beginning to feel like punishment.

Let me explain.

Last week, I found work. My relief was immeasurable. The compensation sucked, as did the hours. But it was a job. A paycheck. Something to plug the nasty employment gap on my resume.

I was ready to sing. Let God on high be praised!

But like all things 2009, it was too good to be true.

I submitted applications to two stores in a Texas-based chain specializing in used books, music and movies. After a year of joblessness, I was asked to interview at both locations. I don’t think the savviest bookie in Las Vegas could have calculated the odds.

It was off the charts. It seemed like a perfect fit, and I was thrilled.

OK. So what’s the problem? you ask.

I accepted an offer for temporary employment because it was the first one offered. (Yes, I'm that desperate.) Then a second offer followed. It was for permanent employment. Caving-in to my selfish desire to remain clothed, housed and fed for as long a period as possible, I then accepted the permanent offer.

Since all my fine china and stemware is in storage, I never entertained the idea that both interviews would yield job offers. Not me. Not in 2009. But they did.

In my view, this was an entirely understandable and acceptable decision. Especially in the revolving door that is retail. But retail isn't retail at Half-Price Books. This was an act of romantic betrayal tantamount to treason. One which demanded only the swiftest and most-severe punishment.

I first detected the foul odor of payback when the start date for the permanent position was postponed.

The next day I received a phone call from a district manager. He berated me for “exhibiting poor judgment”, explaining how I had maliciously played one store against another by interviewing with the second store while in the employ of the first. How I had deviously concealed from the manager at the first store where I was headed.

Firing squad being presumably unavailable, the offer for permanent employment was withdrawn.

As I had yet to even set foot in the first store when I interviewed with the second, I’m confused how I was in its employ. And while under the influence of ignorance, I also don’t understand if I never mentioned store A to store B and vice versa, exactly how did I pit one store against another?

In my admittedly limited experience, the sort of manipulation I was accused of required the disclosure that a second party was involved, which indicated increased demand for a particular commodity, which in turn enhanced one’s bargaining position.

But what do I know? I just write here.

The unemployed are told to remain positive in the face of evidence to the contrary. We are told to look forward, not back. And above all, we are told not to take unemployment and rejection personally. It’s just business.

Yet when the delicate sensibilities of a store manager are offended by an employee choosing a permanent position over a temporary one, it’s not just business. It’s personal, and someone must be made to pay.

Is Rambo available?

It doesn’t matter that the manager had a two-inch stack of applicants from which to choose a replacement. It doesn’t matter that the employee actually showed up for his final shift and even offered to work the following day if it would help minimize subsequent schedule changes.

It also doesn’t matter that the employee expressed genuine remorse for the short notice and explained in detail that his financial situation didn’t allow any other choice.

What matters is that a manager who was angry with herself because she awarded the permanent slots to a couple of dolts while she tossed the temporary slot to the keeper won’t have to bear the humiliation of seeing that employee work for a competing store.

What matters is that her shaky self-esteem has been soothed. What matters is that her out-sized ego has been stroked. That’s right—you’re still in control. If you can’t have him, no one will!

Her ruffled feathers have been smoothed.

Yes, I’m guilty of interviewing at two stores and choosing the best deal. But I’m fairly sure that’s what we do every day at the grocery store. Or the mall. And I’m fairly sure it’s what business does when it shops for a supplier.

It’s even what business does when it (ahem) shops for a prospective employee. It’s—dare I say—just business.

But don’t you try it.

La Piazza Gancio's Guide to Unemployment

The Emotions

At first, unemployment feels like some much-needed time-off from the stress and numbing routine of the workplace. No alarm clock. No rush hour. No performance reviews. It’s actually quite pleasant. Liberating, even.

But beware—this first phase is usually short-lived. Depending on your financial situation, it may not be lived at all.

Accompanying the realization that it’s taking just two or three minutes to peruse the job listings is a vague unease. This soon turns to mild panic as the resumes and applications you submit are met with a stony, impenetrable silence.

Extended periods of silence intensify and heighten the panic.

The good news is that this eventually congeals into a thick, lard-like resignation, unless preceded by internal organ failure.

The Application

Beyond the buoyant joy one receives from listing name, address, education and work history over and over and over again are the unusual questions you encounter on the job application.

Answering these questions soon becomes an exercise in the opening of Pandora’s Box as your inner cynic soon supplies surly and unprofessional responses to even the most benign questions.

For example, an innocent query such as What’s your biggest weakness? will provoke the sarcasm of “Differentiating late-period Etruscan pottery from early-Hellenic pottery is sometimes an issue for me.”

Another potential land mine is Why do you want to work for the _______________ company? Care must be taken to avoid being “smart”.

Who among us hasn’t wanted to respond that “It is my considered opinion that employment with the ______________ company is preferable to a painful, lingering death by starvation, exposure or some combination of both.”

Now who, exactly, has this helped? That’s right—no one.

The Career Counselor

At least that’s what the counselor at the job center tells you when you arrive with just a couple hundred dollars in your bank account and half a tub of very yellow margarine in the fridge.

Being gainfully employed, the counselor has no idea of the deep well of resentment that lurks within you. Or of the eye-rolling disgust you feel when you’re told “the most-important thing is to stay positive.”

It briefly lifts their spirits when you remark that “I’m positive I feel like a bird when I’m job-hunting, because nearly all of the available jobs are beneath me.”

But when your thinly-veiled insouciance becomes apparent, their face hardens like plaster of Paris.

“You shouldn’t take this personally. This isn’t anything against you.”

You try telling this to your landlord when the rent is late, but for reasons that remain unclear to you he doesn't see it that way.

Which is the funny thing about unemployment. It is an ironic state-of-being fraught with contradictions. While no one is legally obligated to hire you, you remain liable to your creditors.

Unemployment requires a kind of magic. Alchemy. Even without rain, you must keep the cash stream flowing. Or, depending on one’s landlord, utility, department of motor vehicles and telecommunications provider, even increase its flow.

And while you shouldn’t take impending bankruptcy, homelessness and starvation personally, business will consign your credit rating (and you) to sub-prime hell if you can’t pay a thirty-dollar phone bill.

It’s only fair.

Banned Books Week

Acting on a suggestion from her friend Melissa, Laura recently celebrated Banned Books Week by reading one and posting a review.

I, too, wanted to participate, but being in the middle of a book and being a molasses-in-January kind of reader, saw there was no way I’d finish my current read and complete another by week’s end.

So I've done the next best thing. (Those of you who know me well will likely roll their eyes.) I have an album of an Allen Ginsberg poetry reading, which includes the famous ‘Howl’.

So in honor of Banned Books Week, I have listened to a record. Admittedly a bit off the mark, but under the circumstances the best I could do.

A bit of backstory: Allen Ginsberg was one of the leading lights of beat poetry. In mid-fifties San Francisco, Ginsberg, along with Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, railed against the social strictures of the day, fueled by be-bop jazz, illegal sex and narcotics.

This literary rebellion contributed directly to the civil rights rebellion of the early-sixties, and the anti-war protests of the late-sixties. It is no stretch to say that the beat poets lit the fuse that exploded “Leave It to Beaver”-land.

Didn't know the sixties started in the fifties, did you?

Among the frank sexual imagery, ‘Howl’ is the song of the ostracized, looking up the skirt of staid, conservative and capitalist nineteen-fifties America. Half a century later, it’s easy to forget that copies were impounded as obscene, and that publisher Ferlinghetti was arrested for the distribution of obscenity.

It took a court to decide that the publication and distribution of ‘Howl’ wouldn’t destroy the moral fiber of America.  

That would require a cabal of our captains of industry and elected representation.

This Just In--Democrat Grows a Pair!

Oh my. Did this really happen? It did, didn’t it? Please tell me it did.

After a summer of being brutalized and battered, of remaining mute even as the most outrageous lies were being told, did a Democrat actually make a fist and hit back?

Yes!

Alan Grayson, a freshman congressman from Florida, inflamed and outraged House Republicants while addressing health care reform. In his presentation, Grayson had the chutzpah to lay bare the Republicant idea of health care, whose essence--in Grayson's words--is 1.) Don’t get sick and 2.) Die quickly.

When asked by Republicants to apologize, Grayson took the floor and apologized to everyone who has died because of insufficient health care. Then he apologized to their families. Then he told Republicants they need to give a damn about people--even after they're born.

Ha!

Republicants are indignant. Indignant because Democrats have been meek and obedient lap cats this long hot summer, and done everything in their power to give the impression of being, if not spineless, then neutered.

Grayson’s behavior must be a terrible shock to them.

Congressman Grayson, wherever you are, thank you. Here’s hoping your chutzpah is an airborne contagion which spreads rapidly throughout the House and Senate.

The Stop Light

Ordinarily, I would welcome the distraction of colored lights. I would revel in their ephemeral, continually-changing array, and delight in the sense of whimsy they brought to the hard urban landscape.

But I don’t. I hate them. They are my sworn enemy.

It doesn't matter whether they're mounted on the ground or suspended in the air. They make my upper lip curl in an Elvis-like sneer. They just can’t win with me. I hate the long ones and I hate the short ones

And how the hell do they always know to turn red as I'm approaching, anyway? It's motion detectors, right?

I’ve lost track of the times I’ve seen two-dozen drivers on an enormous, six-lane boulevard come to a stop at the scrawny driveway of a dilapidated strip mall only to stare at an empty intersection. What end does it serve? What point does it make?

I’m convinced traffic signals are set by an evil consortium of brake pad manufacturers and oil companies. That or strip mall land lords.

But that's not all. I hate how they keep traffic compacted into a tight little knot until the next light. It’s like a rolling pressure cooker. Lane changes require elevated levels of testosterone.

The kid subjecting his car to death via hip-hop is invariably next to you. And if you couldn’t assume the next light was red, you wouldn’t be able to see it for the lumbering SUV in front of you.

Aside from making a powerful argument for Libertarians and insuring that our trips take as long and contain as many stops as possible, I really can’t think of a good use for traffic signals.

Maybe I should call Martha Stewart. She might know how to turn them into planters. Or mailboxes.

Anything would be more useful.

For Labor Day

For the balance of human history, workers were employed at the whim of their employer. There were no rules governing working conditions or compensation or time off. The terms were whatever suited the employer, when it suited the employer.

And workers suffered accordingly.

With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the imbalance only worsened. For the employer, mechanization meant greater output and greater profits with lower production costs.

For the employee, it meant exhausting days under gruesome conditions. Children were enlisted to feed industry’s insatiable appetite. Six-day work weeks with ten-hour days were typical. At its worst, seven-day work weeks full of fourteen-hour days devoured the lives of men, women and children alike.

Reform eventually began with children, and with the rise to power of the union soon extended to adults. Workers at last had a say in the conditions and terms of their employment, putting an end to the exploitation enjoyed by the nation’s employers.

And this was a good thing.

The wealthy were loathe to admit it, but the rise of the union (and with it the middle-class) only enriched them, as it meant more people with more disposable income. It was a far cry from the Marxist redistribution of wealth America’s captains of industry had feared. But the equilibrium couldn’t last. A handful of unions began to amass enormous power.

The United Auto Workers union (UAW) was the most-powerful.

America’s auto manufacturers had a near-monopoly on what was easily the world’s biggest market. And General Motors controlled fifty-percent of that market. The other half was essentially divided between Ford and Chrysler, with a handful of smaller automakers and imports fighting for whatever remained.

And the UAW controlled one-hundred percent of their labor.

The UAW was phenomenally-successful at extracting generous terms for its membership. Even as domestic automakers began to lose market-share, UAW members continued to receive lavish contracts, with salaries and benefits disproportionate to their skill and education levels. This was the fruit of a corpulent corporate culture that would soon be receiving a lap band.

As America’s industrial might migrated overseas, its manufacturing-based economy was replaced by a service-oriented one. These were typically lower-paying jobs in offices, not factories. They were also rarely unionized. The convergence of increasing consumer unhappiness with domestic automobiles and an increasingly white collar workforce changed the perception of unions.

Unions were held-up as shelters for wildly-overcompensated, lazy and incompetent workers. The workers at Chicago’s McCormick Place were exposed to public derision for the terms of their union contracts; contracts which drove and rewarded unproductive behavior.

Then-president Ronald Reagan was widely-praised when he smashed the air traffic controller’s union. Unions had become overripe fruit. The social pendulum had reached the end of its labor-friendly swing, and was now beginning a move in the opposite direction.

As the seventies became the eighties and the eighties became the nineties, union membership continued to fall. Where they still existed, unions were mere shadows of their former selves. Members routinely made concessions in return for having a job to report to.

Mercury Marine (an outboard motor manufacturer in Fond du Lac, WI.) recently demanded that union members either accept a seven-year wage-freeze and a thirty-percent wage-cut for laid-off workers (called back to work), or face losing their jobs when the company opened a proposed non-union plant in Stillwater, OK.

Additional concessions would reduce vacation time and affect both health care and pension benefits.

Faced with having a job versus not having a job, workers voted Friday and reluctantly accepted the company’s offer.

The gulf between America’s richest and poorest continues to widen. An ever-increasing percentage of America's wealth is held in fewer and fewer hands as income inequity continues to soar. CEOs make hundreds (hundreds!) of times what their employees do.

Yet America’s workers are told they must concede to remain competitive in the new global marketplace. Curious that executive compensation continues to rise amidst all this belt-tightening and globalization, isn’t it?

On the one-way street that employment has become, it is clear that unions are once again the best path towards restoring two-way traffic. In a country with an economy which is two-thirds consumer-driven, even the short-sighted and the self-serving that pass for corporate leadership need to acknowledge the importance of a viable middle-class.

And that begins with viable unions.

It's time to give the pendulum a shove in a new direction.

Political Science Project

Copies of the following were sent to all 39 Republican senators (Mel Martinez (R-FL) vacated his seat in early-August) and the Milwaukee 'Journal-Sentinel'.

I'll keep you posted as to what--if any--responses are received.

Dear Senator ___________:

Since their epiphany last January 20th, Republicans have issued repeated and dire warnings about the horrors of big government. With this in mind, I would like to take this opportunity to respectfully submit that government downsizing begin with you.

By resigning your post as U.S. Senator, you enable the Republican Party to position itself as the party that not only stands behind its beliefs, but as one willing to sacrifice for them. While one party speaks of change you can believe in, Republicans offer change you can see.

By leaving the senate, you say “small government starts with me." It is leadership by example. It is standing tall by getting small. And in these economically-challenged times, imagine the credibility your party stands to gain with America’s legions of unemployed.

It is the kind of “win-win” PR firms only dream of.

It is my hope you will take this under consideration.

Sincerely,

La Piazza Gancio