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. 

 

The Service Economy (Or, F@#$ You Very Much), Part 2

In the previous segment, I began the story of a hapless bookseller as a frame to talk about the sad fate of those working in the service industry (1/3 of the economy), about how those behind the counters are perceived and treated. The first part can be found here. It includes the beginning of the bookseller’s story, along with ruminations on my former union organizing days, and the reigning corporate concept of service work as not being real work. 

And so, the story continues:  

The Customer is Always...

The bookseller behind the register doesn’t look up at the couple, just keeps ringing up the large stack of books. When he finally does look up to tell the couple their total, the Jokester’s eyes are wide – with hatred, rage? Just plain crazy? The bookseller doesn’t know. He tells them their total and Jokester throws his credit card at the bookseller.

           

This is not an unusual event. People do this all the time. Why? We’re back to the ubiquitous perception that those working in the service economy are just bottom-feeders who cannot – or simply will not – pull themselves up by their own bootstraps in this great land of ours, and so they deserve our contempt. But there is something else that has been added to the mix over the years, an insidious corporate concept that makes this obnoxious behavior okay: The customer is always right.* The one behind the counter is seen as someone who must do whatever the customer wants, no matter what.

           

What this does is make all "service" employees into servants. Not workers, but servants. If you look up the word servant online, these are the synonyms: “Domestic, cleaner, lackey, flunkey, minion, housemaid, valet, manservant, drudge, menial, and slave.”  (I am not putting down labor as an actual domestic servant here. I'm trying to point out that there are unconscious associations that go with the word servant, and that those associations are different for the words worker or employee.)

          

Here in the US, it’s clear that the many synonyms for servant are what flicker unconsciously through many a customer mind whenever they address anyone employed in the service economy. The bookseller knows this, but right at that moment he is only concerned with getting through the sale. What the hell, he has two minutes left on the clock. He swipes the credit card and slides the receipt across the counter for Jokester to sign. Jokester signs and leaves, obviously disgruntled. The bookseller doesn’t give it another thought and clocks out.

           

Ah, but when the bookseller returns to the store two days later, he’s pulled into the back office by the boss. Apparently, disgruntled-jokester-guy chewed over his “humiliation” at the hands of a mere bookseller for about an hour, then came back into the store, and complained to the boss that the clerk was rude and unprofessional. His words: “He looked right through me.” Jokester had not been SEEN and he had come into the store to be SEEN. Jokester wanted satisfaction. He wanted the bookseller fired. If the bookseller was not fired, then he threatened to never return to the store.

           

 Another typical day in the service industry.

            

 To his credit, the boss did not fire the bookseller. But that was probably only because the place was seriously short-staffed. Instead, the boss played the chummy old game of “It’s us against them, I know, comrade...and I’m on your side, really...but....” He calmly explained that he told Jokester that the bookseller was a bit distant, yes, but not rude...and, oddly enough, many customers actually liked him…even praised him for his helpfulness and book knowledge. The boss then gave the bookseller a sympathetic smile. But there was something else in the eyes that didn’t quite fit with the smile: anger. The boss was angry that he had had to deal with a complaining customer. Someone was at fault for this inconvenience, someone’s to blame, and it certainly wasn’t the boss. In the service economy, there’s always someone to blame, and blame bumps down the chain of command, eventually landing on those at the bottom.

                       

Now, as with many corporate managers or small business owners, this boss was rarely out on the floor and pretty much had no idea what went on out there. The extent of his participation was to make the rounds every once in a while to make sure that no two booksellers were standing together and talking. Sometimes the booksellers were talking about the weather, about books, about politics, about customers...but mostly they were talking about work – you know, passing actual information back and forth about what was going on in the store so that things went more smoothly. The boss was paranoid (from excess drink) and so interpreted every gathering of booksellers as either a conspiracy in the making (what kind, no one could say), or that they were simply slacking off. He was a firm believer in the motto: “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.” Of course, because the boss was never out on the floor, he had no idea what the booksellers or the baristas actually did all day.

                       

Oddly enough, most of the time they were working. Remember, they were short-staffed, so they were busy all the time. The store functioned smoothly because of the dedication of the staff.  They didn’t do this because they felt any allegiance to the boss (he’d lost that long ago with his periodic firings and drunkenness), but because they loved books and wanted to get the right book into the right hands, and – this is key – because they didn’t want to screw over their fellow workers. They had what Linda Tirado, in her recently published book, Hand to Mouth (an insightful, wonderfully angry, and much-needed book about being poor in America from the actual point of view of a working poor person), called siege mentality. 

           “I will kill myself for my co-workers,” Tirado says. “A lot of us do that. When we work through fevers and injuries and bone weariness, it’s for the money but also because if we don’t, we know that we’ll be leaving our co-workers holding the bag. However bad the shift is, with a man down, it’ll be that much worse on whoever’s left. There’s a siege mentality in the service industry in particular; you go through hell together. If you tap out and go home, you’re leaving your co-workers to deal with more customers with even fewer hands. And that means that they’re more likely to get fired themselves – because if customers start complaining about the service, the boss doesn’t really care that you’re covering for someone who’s out sick.” (pg 22 of Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America)

           

The boss continued: “I know everyone has their off days, their off hours, but it’s important to look everyone in the eye and smile.” The boss then went into a small lecture about greeting customers when they first walk in the store and how that was the key to making people feel welcome. It was a lecture for someone who was sixteen. At the time, the bookseller was in his mid-forties. 

 The policy of the customer is always right always ends in humiliation for the worker. It means that all the psychically wounded, the nut-jobs, and the viciously cruel, can walk into a retail outlet and put someone down without any repercussions. So, in the end, abusive people get better service than the nice ones.

Next Installment:

“So Why Do You Need Me to Pretend That I’m Happy to Serve You?”

   

      *Apparently, the phrase "The customer is always right" was originally coined in 1909 by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge's department store in London. His life has been dramatized on PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre's Mr. Selfridge. The story of "how a young American upstart entrepreneur taught England how to shop." (PBS promo language, not mine) You betcha.