3 poems for Labor Day

The first poem below arrived while I was working at the now defunct Border's Books & Music chain. A girl around seven or eight came up to the register, slid a CD across the counter. I picked it up: The World's Most Beautiful Melodies! Sure, it was one of those cheesy repackaged CD's by some fly-by-night label, but I immediately thought what could they possibly be if it were true? All for only $3.99.

 

For The Girl Who Came to the Cash Register with the CD Entitled The World’s Most Beautiful Melodies                     

     What can they be?

                      The record of a sea-creature,

                                          half-woman, half turtle, floating

                      in the surf, tuning it’s eyes to the sea?

                                             

                        Or the rain,

                                     drumming the branches of a tulip tree,

     in a forest long gone, torn down, locked

                                                                    inside the mind of a poet

             walking an empty corner of the Paris Metro, lost.

                                                                                   

                                                                                     Or the scrape

      of beetle legs against cardboard

                     (song of cement-dust falling softly onto clay tile:                              

                                                                                    jagged stones

            coupling on the bank of a jagged stone river,

                                                                        no water in sight).

                                                           

                                                                                  And there is a man

                       putting a dead sparrow out to dry in the sun,

              waiting for the ants to eat their way down to the source.

            When they are done,

                                      he will take up the paper-light wing bone,

                          cut three holes in it with a grass blade,

                                                                                              and blow…

***

 

Sure, it's an odd choice of what 'beautiful melodies' might be, but being odd is the joy of being on this earth, yes? Revel in it. 

The second poem arrived during a blizzard year in Iowa. I had a crap car. To make sure that I got to work in the morning when the temperature dropped below zero (Fahrenheit) I had to start the car up around 3AM. It's about work and time. Why are most of us trained to accept that the natural order of things is to spend most of our lives doing something we don't want to do?
 
I think it's apt to quote William Morris here:
 
"It has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself; a convenient belief to those who live on the wealth of others."

  

Cold

                                                                             three AM, four AM Time

                                       to lace up the boots, creak of powdered snow

                                                                under the soles five dollars an hour, six

                           dollars an hour seven Force open the frozen car door,

                                                                slip behind the wheel eight hours a day, five

                       days a week Through the crystal windshield

                                                       a hooded figure moves porch to porch, clutching

                           a plastic bag to pass through these hours, so desperate

                                             for them to end Can’t shake this dream. Turn the key

                               there is a life out there, there is a life  –

                                                                    the way the dandelion releases its seed

                                                      when you whisper the right word    The car

                                         moans to life. Come dawn, I can make it to work.  

    (previously published in Hanging Loose Magazine)

  ***

All true. Hooded figure included. No symbolism required. 
The last poem is one of the first I ever wrote. It may be the first, writ back in the foggy ruins of time, Northeast Philly, when the world was young and pretty. I think it's self-explanatory.

Work

  

Old man beckoned with an index finger

Wandered across his yard

Boots sunk in wet grass

Said he needed help

In his dark garage lifted a bag of cement

He thanked me

Left his driveway

Left wet boot prints

Never said a word

Never saw him before or since

Most honest work I ever did

(previously published in Lilliput Review)

The Service Economy (or, F@#$ You Very Much), Part 5

 "If work were so pleasant, 

the rich would keep it for themselves" 

 - Mark Twain

In the previous four installments, I use the story of a bookseller in a ridiculous customer service situation as a frame to talk about the fate of those working in the service industry (1/3 of the economy), eventually expanding my ire to most work in general. Section 1: (What is a real job?) can be found here. Section 2 (the customer is always right?) can be found here. Section 3 ( the insidious happy customer service mask that hides the truth of work in the US) can be found here here . And Section 4  is the end of the bookseller’s story, along with question about the sustainability of an economy that treats so many workers like waste.  Holy crap, this should be a book. Or a Michael Moore-ish type movie.

And so, onwards and upwards…

Strikes, New Fights

There’s hope! There have been numerous strikes and protests at Walmart and McDonald’s in the last few years. This last Black Friday – November 28, 2014 – was the third consecutive year that Walmart employees stood outside stores, demanding higher wages, more hours, and associated benefits. 

Because of this, in mid-February of this year, Walmart announced “a new wage structure for hourly associates in Walmart U.S. stores and Sam’s Clubs. This new initiative, including training and educational programs, will affect current and future hourly associates in the United States.” (Walmart Fiscal Report) They raised the wage of those earning $7.75 an hour to $9.00 in April and $10.00 next year. (Fortune article) Why? Fear of unionization across the entire chain. You can read more about last year’s Black Friday protest here.

Whenever you hear about small victories like this, you have to keep in mind that quite a number of workers were harassed, demoted, and fired just to get to this point. These are people who put their jobs on the line to help raise the standard of living for others.

Kshama Sawant

The movement to raise the minimum wage is growing by leaps and bounds. The poster face for the movement right now is Kshama Sawant, the socialist on the Seattle City Council. “Since joining the council in January of 2014 she has helped push through a gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Seattle. She has expanded funding

for social services and blocked, along with housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle Housing Authority to allow a rent increase of up to 400 percent. She has successfully lobbied for city money to support tent encampments and is fighting for an excise tax on millionaires. And for this she has become the bête noire of the Establishment, especially the Democratic Party.” (From an article  in Common Dreams by Chris Hedges, one of the best journalists in the world today. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.)

Sweatshop: Bangladesh

What would be incredible is if the burgeoning new labor movement in the US could connect up with movements around the world. Envision a bridge between the people in Indonesia, China, Thailand, and Mexico (the list is endless) who make the box store consumer goods and those here that sell it. There would be power in that link-up. And maybe it would create more of an understanding of how the entire system works. It is a system of waste: a waste of limited resources – pumping out endless crap for quick consumption, to be thrown away for newer pieces of crap – and also a waste of people, their unique talents and gifts.

Why such monstrous waste? 

So a limited few can accumulate wealth beyond imagining. 

Is this a fair trade-off? 

We all know the answer to that one.

Imagine: 
Moving Beyond the Service Economy

"It has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself; a convenient belief to those who live on the wealth of others."

-- William Morris, Useful Work vs Useless Toil

Long before I worked organizing a union in the Border’s chain, I imagined a world that could move beyond the call for safe work at decent wages. Yes, fighting for better wages, for better working conditions, is important work and needs to be done – people’s lives depend upon it – but, in the end, I found that this fight ended the same way:

more money = acceptance of the status quo

Tick, tick, tick...

Here's the thing: no one really wants these jobs. How many people do you know who actually like their job, are fulfilled by it? It’s an important question because we spend most of our lives at these jobs.

When we limit the fight to higher wages, we end up seeking solutions from the same system that has created this incredible waste of human potential in the first place. We’re working inside the same paradigm. Yes, raise the minimum wage, demand benefits, health care, etc. – but we also need to have an eye on where this is all going, what we actually want from our lives, what we want the world to look like – what we truly want.

As I keep saying, ad nauseum: most of the jobs out there are wasting our creative potential. They are time killers, soul killers. We do them for most of our waking hours. No one I know woke up one morning when they were ten years old and announced to their family that they had a desperate urge to become a cashier at Target when they grew up.

What would an economy look like where most people were fulfilled by their work – not fulfilling menial, and mostly useless, services for others? What would the world look like where all work had dignity; a world where no work contributed to the destruction of the planet.*

Impossible? It’s not like Capitalism appeared out of the natural cycles of the earth. It was originally imagined and implemented out of a European male desire for power and wealth (women were mostly kept out of the process for the first 500 years).

Jesus & Dinosaur

Many people, over the last five centuries, imagined this current economy. Look at the crap box store architecture all around you, the suffering that is entailed in making consumer crap, and the suffering entailed in selling it – it didn’t spring into existence as part of the evolutionary process (or, if you’re insane: it didn’t come into existence 6000 years ago when the Christian god created the earth). It was created by those who wanted to line their pockets with gold. And gain power. Some of them, to this day, believe that Global capitalism can still bring the world out of poverty, create a better life for all.

You can’t eliminate poverty in the current economy because the economy requires a certain percentage of poor people, a certain percentage of the world toiling at mindless, humiliating jobs. This is a world of finite resources. There’s only so much to go around. It’s easy to do the maths. When all wealth flows to the top, it leaves less for everyone else. A kindergartener can look at pie chart and figure this out.

Why not imagine an economy where all of us can feel fulfilled, have dignity, and contribute in a meaningful way? What would that kind of economy look like?

Ever the anarchist, I leave you to imagine a new economic model yourselves. There are plenty of models to choose from and most can easily be found online. The first requirement in the search is abandoning this belief: for some to benefit, others have to suffer. The second requirement is harder - an open mind - and the question: what do I truly want from work? Then, the final question: how do we get from here to there?

  There's a good article, an excerpt from The Capitalist Papers: flaws of an obsolete system by Jerry Mander (the author of In the Absence of the Sacred), that gives a brief rundown of the problem - how to get from the chaos and suffering we have now to something more..well...humane: Jerry Mander article on Alternet.

A good - but long - article on the history of labor in general and analysis of modern wage-slavery by the Anarchist Federation UK (on the libcom.org site) can be found here.

  

Me, 
I’m thinking that in a more fulfilling economy everyone would have to clean their own goddamn toilets. 

After that, 
the rest would slowly - oh so slowly - begin to take care of itself.

*

Here’s a great poem by Gary Snyder about workers and the destruction of the world:

Dillingham, Alaska, The Willow Tree Bar

Drills chatter full of mud and compressed air

All across the globe,

            Low-ceilinged bars, we hear the same new songs

All the new songs.

In the working bars of the world.

After you done drive Cat. After the truck

            Went home.

            caribou slip,

            front legs folded first

            under the warm oil pipeline

            set four feet off the ground –

On the wood floor, glass in hand,

            laugh and cuss with

            somebody else’s wife.

            Texans, Hawaiians, Eskimos,

            Filipinos, Workers, always

            on the edge of a brawl –

            In the bars of the world.

            Hearing those same new songs

                        in Abadan,

            Naples, Galveston, Darwin, Fairbanks,

            White or brown,

Drinking it down,

the pain

of the work

of wrecking the world. 

From the book Axe Handles.