Not Done With Working
"There are cases where the job possesses the man even after quitting time...it may affect his attitude towards all life. And art." - Studs Terkel, 'Working'
But first, your weekly Vine: Monday was Chapter 22: “Outbreak Part Three.” Tuesday was Chapter 23: “The Butler House.” Today is Chapter 24: “Absence.” We also have a bonus podcast, doing Outbreak Parts Two & Three, released this morning. Regular podcast and newsletter (sign up for the Vine newsletter!) schedule back this Friday.
Never have I ever been the best note-taker while I read. When I’m in the mood for it, reading itself is the focus—I’m trying to get lost in a book. That’s why I’m always saying moron stuff like “man I just let that poem wash over me” on The Line Break. Real life isn’t good enough, transport me into text!
Grab a book, grab a comfy seat, get reading. That’s all you need. Therefore, I’m bad at having something with me with which to take notes. Well, that’s a bold-faced lie, isn’t it? I have a phone. Problem there? Remembering where I wrote my notes. Anyway, I came across some notes I was taking when I was reading Studs Terkel’s Working a few weeks back. Some quotes:
Dolores Dante graphically describes the trials of a waitress…They are compounded by her refusal to be demeaned. Yet pride in her skills helps her make it through the night…“When someone says ‘How come you’re just a waitress?’ I say, ‘Don’t you think you deserve being served by me?’”
Peggy Terry has her own sense of grace and beauty…“What I hated worst was being a waitress. The way you’re treated. One guy said, ‘You don’t have to smile; I’m gonna give you a tip anyway.’ I said, ‘Keep it. I wasn’t smiling for a tip.’ Tipping should be done away with. It’s like throwing a dog a bone. It makes you feel small. (Introduction, xii-xiii)
There’s so much infuriating here. First off, amen to Dolores’s “don’t you think you deserve being served by me?” Like, fuck you, guy, for eating at a restaurant and saying “just a waitress.” Second, Peggy. Dude. Don’t get mad at the concept of tipping (though I’ll grant that jagoff was being an asshole). Get mad at your miserly bosses and the system in this stupid country that allows them to pay their workers substandard wages!
Get mad at the right people, please.
We have such a warped sense of what counts as a dignified job in this country. Every shady loan underwriter that contributed to the 2008 housing collapse, every serial pervert producer in Hollywood, every murderous cop—they probably all have mothers who are proud of them. Every record store clerk, every public school crossing guard, every Subway sandwich artist—they probably all are getting yelled at, right now, as you’re reading this. Who do we really think deserves a higher salary, the librarian or the absentee landlord owner of a Subway?
Hey Chris, why do you keep bringing up Subway?
Subway franchisees John and Jessica Meza (name and shame these scumbags), owners of 14 Bay Area sandwich shops, were ordered to pay $1 million in back wages after being found guilty of wage theft. They also can’t open a food franchise of any kind for three years. H/T to The Press Democrat and Phil Barber for the reporting.
The Mezas are more typical of small business owners than people probably want to think, human ticks (not the blue kind) who care for nothing in their professional lives except for being petty tyrants lording over teenagers and unhoused people while extracting the cost of a six-bedroom exurban mansion and a cruise to the Bahamas from their community one $6 footlong sweet onion chicken teriyaki at a time. Their greatest joys are not lilac gardens, or ska shows, or petting a cat, or running into The Tamale Guy. Their greatest joys are telling 16-year-old girls they have to work a closing shift alone or challenging 15-year-old boys’ masculinity when they chafe at being asked to unload a supply truck at 6 a.m. on a Saturday. John Meza already spent 120 days in jail for two felony counts of tax evasion in 2011.
They ain’t learned no lessons, as they say where I come from.
In my adopted hometown, we’re moving toward getting rid of subminimum wages for tipped workers. Obviously, I think workers should get all they can. That said, I can’t say whole cloth that I think this will be a good thing—prices will go up (making middle-class people who just want some pizza delivered on a Saturday night suffer), places will close, and bosses will use this as an excuse to be even bigger jagoffs. Honestly, I can even sympathize with a small business owner already operating on thin margins having the rules changed like this.
The problem is that everything with the way we price things in this country is already broken. Food is both too expensive and too cheap. There are a lot more steps we have to take toward an equitable food culture. I’m not gonna sit here and propose to have all the answers. All restaurants should be worker-owned collectives? Honestly, why can’t we try it? I bet more restaurant workers could do the owners’ job than owners could do a line cook or server’s job.
You might say that all business owners are in it to make money, that the Mezas are just a perverted outlier. I think it’s more important to focus on how much the Mezas and their ilk are incentivized to do wage theft. This is the stuff we talk about when we talk about capitalism being poisonous. More and more I’m starting to think we underrate how people made of their responses to stimuli. Maybe there’s a gene for “scammer” or “too proud to accept tips,” but genes get switched on and off. We shouldn’t have a society set up like this, where everyone feels on such razor-thin margins all the time but also feels like they have to maintain dignity and line go up. We should have a society where owning a chain of sandwich shops is an artisanal point of pride and allows for comfortable living. Not a society of mesh polo-ed MBAs watching teenagers count down registers on surveillance cameras from the comfort of their hunting lodge in Montana.
This is why I think I liked Working so much. It’s a book that looks at jobs from a human perspective. A book that talks about working as something more what you made last quarter. A book that makes you think, “hey, everyone has a part in making this place go” rather than “hey, putting that person on their asses makes your jet go faster,” which is what I assume most business textbooks teach.
Anyway, it’s not Friday, but I can’t emphasize this enough: service workers, may you clean up in tips, this and every day.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
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