At 08:37 AM 3/27/2004, you wrote:
><...> to neither bitch nor sympathize with the general bitching raises
>suspicions that you're either (a) appalling enough to have genuinely
>bought into whatever condescending corporate morale campaign is
>currently being pitched; or (b) consciously identifying with the
>boss's p.o.v. in anticipation of reward. Either way the offending
>party cannot be trusted.
Word.
(b)is probably primary. I once asked my ex-fiance, a delivery truck driver, why he worked so damn hard. He confided that he hoped that maybe someday someone on his route would offer him a better job or recommend him to someone else.
The fast food worker friend I mentioned? Her daughter got an after school job in a law office. She jokingly said, "Hey, maybe he'll see how great you are and take an interest. Pay your college tuition or something." It was a joke, but I think it was a serious hope/wish.
People believe that merit will be rewarded--that rigging the game otherwise is wrong. They believe in this very strongly. You have to. To believe otherwise is to admit you are fuxored.
If you believe in merit, then doing anything to mess with that merit system--like sucking up to mgmt--is going to be sanctioned. This is bolstered by the anti-management sentiments: schmoozing is seen as how "they" operate, so it's important not to act like "them" --or at least to imagine you don't. Jay MacLeod's _Ain't No Makin' It_ documents this sort of thinking about two groups of poor boys, one black and one white.
I was recently asked if I could explain the data/results from an Ethical Survivor game that is being held at schools across the country. The person who hosts the games was flabbergasted when he realized that it was only among poor kids that the sentiment was: thieves, liars, cheats, people out for themselves, etc. were voted off the island immediately.
By contrast, it was students at middling and well-to-do public schools where the cheaters, liars, etc. were the most popular. Anyone who wanted to follow "conventional ethics" was voted off the island right away.
If you take the work of MacLeod, Willis, and others into account, you can see why. Poor kids are much more attached to "it's WHAT you know, not WHO you know." They have to be--they don't KNOW anyone. :)
<...>
><...> And recall the
>controversy over cult studs championing workplace resistance and
>agency - so what, if organized revolt's been defused?
:) do I have to recall that?
>OTOH, if
>maintaining your own self-respect on the job is a struggle you know
>intimately, anyone who suggests that you're a wholly-determined cog is
>a boss, or some other kind of enemy.
Word. It's great to read someone here that gets it!
>Also a potential enemy is anything that tempts you to make your hopes
>less guarded.
Can you expand on this? I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean. I think I do, but...
One of the things I find interesting about hopes is how hard it is to deal with structural analyses.
Fr'instance, when Nunya and the Walmart workers say, "there are no jobs," I suspect that some folks thought, "They're not really stuck. There are jobs at better paying retailers. If only people would leave the places that treat them poorly, then the competition would force firms to treat them better." Ehrenreich puzzles over this phenom in _Nickel and Dimed_. While she has some reasonable explanations, she doesn't quite 'get it.'
For Walmart workers, going to another retailer is not really a better wage or better life. IT's just SOSDD--and it could be even worse elsewhere. A .50/hr or even $2/hr increase in wages doesn't get them out of low-wage work.
Leaving Wally Whirled for another retailer is too uncertain. Things could improve elsewhere, but it may just get worse.
Changing jobs means you lose the time you clocked at Wally Whirled for the meager bennies that you do get. Losing just a few months, let alone years, of tenure means losing first dibs on the coveted shifts, the more interesting tasks, and the leg up you've accrued simply be/c of the high turnover, and very important is probably losing "family" that you work with.
So, when those workers responded to Michael, they said, "There are no jobs." Nunyua said, "We're stuck".
What they're really saying is "Yeah, there are jobs at McDonald's or Home Depot. But leaving Wally Whirled means starting all over again and losing what little I've gained at Wally, for not that much more at another place that is basically the same thing. it's not better, not appreciably enough to make it worth the effort.
That's why Nunya said, "See, alot of us don't have collage degrees... so we're stuck." College degrees would probably mean a surefire path to a better life, right? Moving to another retailer isn't a surefire path to a better life; it's just a path to the SOSDD.
But you know, the thing about college degrees is this: If every last "po' muthafuckah" got a college degree, there'd just be college-degreed "po' muthafuckahs" working at Wally Whirled!
This is something that you understand if you've moved up and out or if you've watched others do so. _YOU_ may get out, but your family and friends are still there. And even if all your family and friends get out, there will just be mo' po' motherfuckahs to take their place.
It's right there, we have a wedge, in that space. But it's a damn depressing space that has to be negotiated pretty carefully!
>Probably the patron factor offers the retail/food service employers a
>useful tool to divert or defuse worker disaffection.
I don't think mgmt uses it purposefully. It's just there. The ease with which workers see patrons as enemies depends a bit on who the clientele are. In Vicki Smith's research, it was photocopy center workers. Their patrons were lawyers. The degradation they experienced at the hands of lawyers--for whom there is wider cultural antipathy already--was what made them side with mgmt. They already saw themselves as at war with the lawyers. Mgmt demands about how to do their jobs providing the psychological space to say, "there, take that. I got my orders. Your fancy suits and degrees and big words don't mean nothing against that!"
Similar findings are revealed in Robin Leidner's _Fast Food, Fast Talk_ a study of McDonald's workers. Leidner finds that workers protect themselves from the demands of their patrons by disengaging and taking on their role, actually enjoying routinized scripts because they protect them from the demands of patrons.
This has always interested me because it's a micro-level analysis of how the material conditions of one's daily labor shape consciousness. Not determine it; shape it. One of the things Marx noted about alienation was this separation between the worker and the product of her labor. That was true for factory work. It's not for service work: you aren't separated from the people who consume the product/service you create.
><...>
>
>There's also the compensating pleasure of doing a job well, or doing
>it quickly, or efficiently, beating the clock or a personal best.
Word, brother, word. This is how you can feel that doing your job well is so important. It's a MATERIAL analysis of the microlevel conditions of one's labor and how it shapes consciousness! THank you Thank you Thank you! It's not just sucking up. It's not just identification. It's survival. It's creative. It's about your dignity!
this is another reason why I think it's important not to denigrate people's work or sneer at the idea that they get pleasure out of it.
> But
>here's another potentially self-defeating survival tactic; you'll
>probably attract more responsibility for yourself, while raising the
>bar for co-workers - who will rightly hold you accountable for it.
heh. As a kid, I worked for a newspaper, delivering papers but also manually inserting the circulars into the paper. I would deal with the monotony by seeing how fast I could do it. I was quickly told to slow it down! I was ruining it for them! They needed the hours! ooops
<...> During my one real serious effort at
>organizing, there was still plenty of mistrust to go around, and had
>anyone among the small coterie of supporters burned me, I wouldn't
>have been entirely surprised. But had they done so cunningly, for
>personal gain, I would've been shocked.
absotively posolutely can't agree more.
<...> I can only go by the couple of Walmart workers I know, but they mock the whole rah rah siss boom bah Wally Whirled foists on them. It's a joke. Something they just go through to get through.
I learned last night that a friend of my son's gf is going to move from a drug store job to one at Wally Whirled. She's doing so because her old mgr at the drug store is now a mgr at Wally Whirled. Anyway, we were visiting the old 'hood. The Wally Whirled thing came up-- I'd indicated that someone I knew wondered why people worked there if the wages stink. Unanimously, the response was, "They do. They pay the worst."
funny thing is, contrary to Ehrenreich's claims, these kids _do_ know who pays better and who doesn't. E.g., Taco Bell is know to pay the best fast food wages. Wally the worst retail wages. Etc.
Frankly, I think companies spend money on this crap, not so they can secure loyalty, but so they can imagine that they are "good" employers. It's as much for themselves as audience as it is for labor.
<...> It was meticulous and clever,
>it made our unbearably tedious jobs almost thrilling; it was also
>stupid and reckless, if you weigh the considerable risk. But it was
>based on a shared hatred for how the company was treating us.
Yep. One guy I know says they call it "Aggravation Pay." I sat here with him one night, figuring out how much the restaurant rakes in from 5 pm to close, how much they pay labor, overhead, etc. What they're ripping off would be about the equivalent of giving everyone a $1 raise an hour every week.
So, as an addendum to Wojtek: Just bullshit on "it can be argued that it hurts consumers." Would you argue that if it was about a mandatory minimum wage increase of $1/hr? (Mind you, it's still a vicious circle, but the theft is quite minor given what these joints rake in. And, if my experience and the lit on theft in the workplace is any indication, it's often tolerated by mgmt. IOW, in the restaurant industry, mgmt _knows_ it goes on and, as long as you stay within the bounds of "reasonable theft," you won't get in trouble. It's the people who cross the tacit line that get in trouble.
Years ago, I was a sales rep/banquet mgr at a Holiday Inn that did swift business as an adjunct to ski resorts. As "mgmt" I had to work the "Meet the Mgr" shifts at the bar during happy hour, late nights on Friday/Sat, and early morning breakfast with the businessmen. (In hindsight, it must have been amusing that a 21 year old was 'mgmt'. HA!)
I sooo remember the night the owner stood in the far corner of the bar, ostensibly watching the Sat. night show--some lounge band we hired on a regular basis. He turned to me and said of the head bartender, "See that! Fuckin' theives. Y'all steal from me."
He was referring to the tarbender practice of taking money but not ringing the sale into the cash register. When they cash in their tips and count down the drawer, they just take the overage. Usually, then, about $5-40/night, depending on sales.
John never got fired. No one did. Everyone knew not to take too much. They had an idea of what typical sales were; they knew not to take too much. They also, with a little though, knew _exactly_ how much a drink cost, compared to how much the hotel raked in for the drink. Why wouldn't they: this was the stuff our Monday morning meetings.
The owner, btw, was ripping off the government. He was head of the local mafia. Instead of paying us taxed wages, he'd pay us part taxed wages/part cash. E.g., you'd take home a paycheck of $300, plus $100 cash.
The accounting dept, paydays, was a hoot. Desks shoved together, all laden with piles of cash. They were duly figuring everyone's wages, counting out the cash, and stuffing it in envelopes. Now, I don't think PT, the owner, actually saved a whole lot of money doing it this way. What he rec'd was worker loyalty. By ripping off the tax system, he gave them a minor bennie: more cash in their pocket each week, since he didn't actually pay them more than they could get at competing restaurants/hotels. But probably more important to this guy was ripping off the government. I'd bet he actually spent money for the pleasure.
PT owned two resorts in Alexandria Bay, three restaurants in town, two hotels, a bakery, a laundry, and dog know what else. We were all paid this way, and our little accounting office doled the cash this way every week.
No one rattted him out--and we had the opportunity since he was under investigation for violating labor laws. Someone _had_ ratted him out about not paying for breaks and lunches. Still, we were all interviewed, and none of us said anything. I was tempted, spending a few sleepless nights prior to my interview. I couldn't bring myself to ruin everyone's sweet deal. Why? Because if they were to go elsewhere or new mgmt were to take over, they'd just deal with the same asshole practices and maybe even worse. Chain-style mgmt orginating out of the Holiday Inn home office would upset a lot apple carts, including (at least temporarily) the organized theft among wait staff, cooks, bartenders, and housekeeping.
He was behind bars for awhile, though, since they did nail him for ripping off the sales tax system. Even so, his mistress did get out of town with a load of cash and set up shop in Miami area, waiting for him to get out of the fedpen.
Kelley