View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
I don’t know if it’s crazy-guy germs or just bad luck, but a couple of days later I come down with a nasty cold/flu and have to call out of a few shifts. Candela is less than pleased, but because this is San Francisco, I can call out sick without fear of losing my job. If I’d been working there a little longer, I’d even have been able to call out sick without losing the day’s wages.* But the next schedule after I call out sick, I only get fifteen hours instead of my usual thirty to thirty-five.
Cutting someone’s hours is a common punishment in fast food and retail—and the subject of an important class-action suit currently in the works against McDonald’s. In 2014, the National Labor Relations Board brought seventy-eight charges against McDonald’s and some of its franchise operators for punishing workers who’d participated in Fight for $15 protests by, among other things, cutting their hours.
That puts me in good company. According to a 2015 survey of thousands of US fast-food workers by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, 79 percent had been burned on the job in the previous year—most more than once. And not everyone got off as easily as I did.
“My managers kept pushing me to work faster, and while trying to meet their demands I slipped on a wet floor, catching my arm on a hot grill,” said Brittney Berry, whose forearm was severely burned, to the point of nerve damage, at the Chicago McDonald’s where she worked. “The managers told me to put mustard on it, but I ended up having to get rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.” A third of fast-food workers surveyed had been told to treat burns with condiments like mustard or mayonnaise.
“One of my coworkers and I have to empty the grease trap without protective gear, and since we were never given the proper equipment or training, we just dump the hot grease into a plastic bag in a box of ice,” said Martisse Campbell, who works at a McDonald’s in Philly and whose hand was severely burned by boiling grease from a fryer. He was also familiar with condiment-as-salve suggestions—“Once, my coworker got badly burned, and our manager told him, ‘Put mayonnaise on it; you’ll be good.’”
what the acutal fuck????
Businesses used to accept Wanda’s inefficiencies as a necessary part of their workforce—humans sometimes need to socialize, go to the bathroom, take sick days, drive Mom to a doctor’s appointment, attend funerals, stay up until four with the baby.
But at this moment, techno-Taylorism, the decline of organized labor, automation, and the ongoing destruction of shark-cage worker protections have tipped the balance of power in the workplace way, way in favor of employers. It’s gotten so out of balance that even many workers seem to truly believe that the things that make them less efficient than sharks or robots are weaknesses—moral failings, like original sin.
So millions of people battle millennia of evolution every day, desperately trying to be something fundamentally different from what we are. And when we inevitably fail, we torture ourselves with guilt over not being born a shark, or at least able to plausibly imitate one.
Fuck that. You’re not a shark. You’re a human being. It doesn’t make you a bad person if your family and friends and dignity are more important to you than some job. That makes you normal. The true outliers are the Taylors, the Fords, the Bezoses, the Ayns—people whose work is their life and life is their work. People who thrive alone in the cold ocean. People who can’t or won’t understand that almost all other humans have very different values, needs, and priorities. People with massive control over how stressful our day-to-day existence is.
So why is America so crazy? It’s the inescapable chronic stress built into the way we work and live. It’s the insane idea that an honest day’s work means suppressing your humanity, dignity, family, and other nonwork priorities in exchange for low wages that make home life constantly stressful, too. Is it surprising that Americans have started exhibiting unhelpful physical, mental, and social adaptations to chronic stress en masse? Our bodies believe that this is the apocalypse.
And on top of that, people with power seem totally blind to how dire life has gotten for much of the country. The state of the union is always strong. GDP is up. Unemployment is low. Everything’s fine. They’re so insulated from the real world that they don’t or can’t understand that, for most people, our current system is obviously broken. That’s why Make America Great Again caught on while Clinton’s counter that America Is Already Great didn’t—people aren’t stupid. They know something isn’t right.
All the rat has to do is climb the wall to the other side and she’ll be free. Rats B and C will figure this out and clamber over to the other side pretty quickly; so will any random sewer rat.
But Rat A’s entire life has been nothing but unpredictable, inescapable suffering, and it’s crippled her capacity to imagine anything better. So Rat A will just sit there getting electrocuted forever, even when relief is a short climb away. It’s a phenomenon called “learned helplessness.”
Rat A is so tragic because her despair makes sense. All evidence in her life so far supports her idea that everything just sucks, forever, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. When she assures you that climbing the wall is a waste of energy, she’s genuinely trying to save you the pain she knows firsthand.
The director picked me up from my house at 10 p.m., the standard time for nightly meetings among UNITE organizers, though I did not yet know it. We went to a bar on Fourth Avenue to drink beer and talk about UNITE, about the ambitious industry-wide laundry campaign they wanted to run in Arizona as a test to see if it was possible to organize low-wage immigrant workers, most of whom were women, many of whom were undocumented, in a deep-red state. We both laughed a little and shook our heads at how fucking hard it would be, how much of a war, but then she told me more about the industry, about the conditions in commercial laundry factories; the way managers remove or disable machine safeguards in order to run production faster, the number of workers who get injured and sick and killed. By the start of the second beer, I already had a fire in my gut.
Two days later, someone from the New York office did call. He told me to pick up a rental car at the Tucson airport and drive the three hundred miles across the state of Arizona to Lake Havasu City. Now, he said. Right now. A laundry there had caught fire, and the workers had walked out. They were standing on the sidewalk in front of the factory.
When I got there six or so hours later, three other organizers had already arrived, from Phoenix and California. The factory was still smoking. An iron had caught fire, which happens regularly in industrial laundries, where machinery is often poorly maintained. The manager told the workers to keep working—to continue operating washers and presses and folding machines, even as the smoke grew thick around them. He stood between them and the door when they tried to leave, but one of the workers dipped below his outstretched arm and made it to the door, and the other workers, nearly one hundred of them, followed her. When they got outside, one of the workers said she had a cousin who worked in a union laundry in Las Vegas. She walked the few blocks home, called her cousin to get the union’s number, then she called UNITE through its 1-800 hotline.
You worked in soil sort, you said. I asked if you would describe your work—I still had no idea what “soil sort” was, or what you were required to do with your body there for ten hours a day. You rose from your chair to demonstrate, maybe because you could tell by how poorly I’d asked the question that I didn’t speak much Spanish, and maybe because laundry work is difficult to explain without miming the motions of the massive machines that fill the factory. When you stood up, I was surprised by how tall you are, which I hadn’t noticed when you greeted us at your door.
You showed us how huge bags of linen—up to three hundred pounds, you said—are pushed off the backs of trucks in rolling carts. The carts are pushed into a “dumper” machine, which, like a garbage truck, picks them up with metal arms and turns them over in the air. You reached up to show us how the linen is supposed to fall on the soil belt. A person is stationed there who is also called a dumper. On your shift, that person is Santiago, you said. You bent forward to show how he tugs open the bags of soiled hospital laundry with his thinly gloved hands. You showed how he pulls each bag’s mass of sheets and gowns and towels apart. You said, The company doesn’t replace the gloves every day, so we have to rinse and reuse the ones they give us. Sometimes the gloves break open, and we have to keep using them anyway. You said this in Spanish after turning to me and saying, Sorry, no English in English, and I, in return, waved my hands, awkwardly, I imagine, and said, No, don’t worry! in English, which Manuel then had to interpret.
We talked about the “blitz,” which was key to our model of organizing. As groundwork we needed to build a list of all your coworkers: their names and shifts and departments and phone numbers and, most importantly, home addresses, Manuel explained. We would build a map of when they worked and where they lived, and then many organizers from UNITE’s staff and workers from union laundries in California and Las Vegas and Chicago and New York, who had been trained in this kind of organizing, would come to Phoenix, and we would visit everyone—all 220 or so of your coworkers—over the course of a single weekend. That was our best shot, because even though your factory operated 24/7, most of the supervisors and the main manager and the HR representative were away from the factory from Friday evening until Monday morning. And though they would certainly get word of our organizing from the first house calls on Friday evening—because someone would call their supervisor, out of fear or to curry favor, and the supervisor would call the general manager, who would call the corporate contact he and the other managers of Sodexho’s more than thirteen thousand worksites had been trained to call at the first whiff of a union—they might not be able to react in a concerted way during that slim stretch of time. In this way, your coworkers could decide whether or not they wanted to form a union in a space, however momentary, that was free from the company’s intimidation.
These were not the words we used in your living room. You did not need for us to tell you that winning a union in your factory would be hard or that the system is rigged in favor of the company. People don’t work in industrial laundries unless they have to. And there is no real space or time that is “free from intimidation” inside the dynamic of trying to build power to be used against your boss at a job you need in order to live. You already knew the company was going to fight. They’ll probably fire all of us, you said, with the hard crack of laugh that I was hearing for the first time and can still hear now.
When we’d finished eating, I asked if anyone had a final question or announcement, guessing someone would respond with another joke or an exaggerated call for me to just wrap it up already. For a moment, no one said anything, and then you raised your hand, Alma—a formality that brought a sudden seriousness to the room. You asked a question that stays with me still, though I don’t hear it in your voice or even in Spanish anymore—it comes as a memory of my own translation. You were wondering about the will to fight, a phrase I had used in my story about the shirtwaist strikers in 1909. Las ganas de luchar, I had said, and those were the words you used, too, when you asked. You wanted to know what drives some people to fight while others don’t, or don’t want to, or can’t. Everyone is afraid, you said. So what is it that pushes some people across the threshold of fear? Is it all rage? you wondered. Is it courage? Are the ones who fall down in their fear too afraid or just not angry enough?