Something for nothing

[Mythsaje]

Referring once again to the tortured logic of Republican types, I once followed my name to that other place (morans anonymous--if you get my drift) and noticed that they were complaining about my anti-corporate rant, with the reasoning that I was a hypocrite because I WORKED for a large corporation.

Uh...okay.

I won't get into which company I work for at this point. Suffice it to say it's a big discount retailer that isn't Wal-Mart and leave it at that.

It's interesting to note what large companies sacrifice to maintain their profitability in hard economic times. I'm grateful that my employer has so far avoided laying anyone off EXCEPT at headquarters. However, the sacrifices made come, as usual, down on the people at the bottom of the ladder. If they have fewer sales floor hours available, the same amount of work has to be done by fewer people. Which means, of course, that the damage is two-fold. First, people aren't getting the hours they need to pay the bills, and the ones who ARE working at any particular time have to carry a work load at least 20% heavier.

See, at my store location, we have gained a reputation for doing more with less. Habitually. Now while it may give one a nice tingly feeling to know one's work is exceptional, it means that one is often called upon or expected to maintain that level of productivity no matter what. If one pushes oneself to one's limits just to do the original job one's called upon to perform, what happens when something else gets added to the mix? Remove one or two employees from the floor on any given shift and expect them to maintain the same standards as a 5 or 6 member sales floor team. Reasonable?

And yet we keep doing it. Oh, something has to give, of course. The store isn't quite as meticulous as it might have been, given an adequate number of folks to do the job right. Carts of product left over from customer returns and the like have to wait for the next day instead of making it back on the shelves that night.

Most people probably don't think of how difficult retail work of this kind really is. We walk an estimated 7 miles a shift. Some of us put a couple extra on it, depending on how obsessive we are about customer service. On any given night I probably cross the store some twenty to thirty times. We had an ex marine and martial arts instructor, a nice older fellow who'd probably retired recently but needed extra money for the holidays. After about two weeks, he told me that he'd been surprised by how demanding the work really was. We do a lot, and most of us are very intent on customer service. Job one is helping people find the things they want to purchase. That's the part of the job that I like the most.

We work on keeping the store looking neat and keeping it safe for customers and employees alike. Things have to be picked up off the floor almost constantly, given the odd penchant many people have for pulling things down to look at and not having the energy to put it back on the shelf. Not to mention the stuff that gets abandoned in odd places all the time. There are times certain areas take twice as long to organize because of how much crap people have dumped there.

Sometimes I want to ask one of them--"hey--where do you work?" just so I can find out if I can show up there and make a mess for THEM to deal with. But it's part of the job and most of the time it's not that big a deal. But you get the occasional customer that seems determined to leave a mess behind him or her no matter where s/he goes and you end up grinding your teeth in frustration. "It's thoughtless and rude to deliberately waste other peoples' time because of your disinclination to show a modicum of consideration or human decency," you find yourself thinking at them.

Then there's the customer who gets angry because we've stopped carrying something, or because something's out of stock, or it's been moved for some reason. I assure you, I am powerless. I might dislike something as much as you do, but there's less than nothing I can do about it.

But despite all of this there are some good reasons to love the job. It can be fun interacting with all those people, and it's occasional flattering when someone wants to flirt with you. I wish I'd discovered it back when I was in my twenties. I would have become far more comfortable with people far earlier in life.

I'm digressing terribly, but the thoughtlessness of people IS one of the rigors of the job, a job that becomes more difficult all the way around when the company begins to look towards its profitability. At this point, the company decides that it must feed off of OUR energy to bolster its sales reports. They want more work for less money, effectively feeding off the lowest rung employees.

That's the way it works, some might say. But don't we hear all the time that the problem with us is that we want something for nothing, a nanny state, some socialist utopia where we don't have to work and can just sit around on the dole or some such shit? More to the point, how fast are they to accuse the lowest rung workers anywhere of "laziness," particularly if those workers are complaining that they're being worked too hard. It rather makes me wonder if Republicans have never felt as though their employers are taking advantage of them. Do they value their own labor so little that they get no sense of being exploited?

Corporations exploit workers. Some worse than others, of course. But clearly when costs need to be cut, it's the bottom that suffers for it. It feels like someone's getting a "something for nothing" deal all right, and it sure as hell ain't us.

And you know, that wouldn't even be so bad if they acknowledged our sacrifices on their behalf. If these corporations understood that it is WE, the workers, keep the company afloat in difficult economic times. OUR sacrifices make the difference between success and failure. It is not the corporation that has to give something up. It's not the people making the decisions who are expected to sacrifice something. It's us. The rest of us.

Most of America is made up of "the rest of us." WE keep everything running. Without us, there is NO movement. We work the cash registers, move the product, move the people. We dig the ditches and sweep the streets. We pick up garbage and drive buses. We grow plants and count money.

Hassle-free guaranteed health care for all of us shouldn't be too much to ask for. So what if we also have to subsidize the health care of some homeless guy as well? Those of us who are out there every day doing what has to be done to keep the economy moving earn it for everyone. We would not lose anything, but instead gain everything just by this simple act of charity on our parts. We would be acknowledging simple human dignity and right to a certain quality of life. And losing nothing by doing so.

No one's asking for "something for nothing." We're asking for a simple acknowledgment of what we the People do to keep this country on its feet and moving forward. That we are as vital as any other part, and that our health and welfare is important.

It's really as simple as that.