Reading George Orwell’s other works got me to thinking about the dreadful state of “working” in this society. Read “Down and Out in Paris and London”! The struggle of the main character to get and keep work is horrifying yet hilarious at the same time. Ordinary people go through this all the time in America. The freaks, of course, held me down and did not let me ever have a job that paid more than subsistence wages. After my harassment got worse, even those lousy jobs dried up and the little work I got always ended up in me getting fired. It’s almost humorous the misery I had trying to find and keep work from the time I was barely out of diapers until I gave up and took the dole almost a decade ago. Taking the dole might be the worst thing I could do but I had no choice. I could not get a job with regular full time hours much less a job with health insurance. I did not have the physical or mental endurance (especially with the harassment) to work 2 or 3 jobs to survive, either. My job experiences during the first 6 months out of the hospital were much like what I had in the future after that. One low paying no skill job after another.
It’s not as if I didn’t try. I finished college with a useless degree but intended to use it to get an entry level job in the civil service. No dice. I tried the Federal, State, and Local governments. Nothing. I applied all over town: nothing. I had to settle for “temp” work that was demoralizing and low paying and very easy to get fired from. I went back to “school” 3 times to get “skills” but nothing there. A couple of those times I got a very entry level job after the “training” finished to keep it a short while then nothing after that! The good jobs people got with benefits, regular hours, meaningful duties, and a living wage forever eluded me. I suppose I could divide the “jobs” I got into 3 categories: temp work, mcjobs, and casual labor.
The temporary job consisted of signing up with a temporary agency, filling out tons of forms, taking all kinds of aptitude tests, being told you were brilliant, then going home and waiting to be called for a job that a monkey could do. My temp jobs never lasted long with a few exceptions because the client (the one offering the job) always found something wrong with me and I was fired many a time. They are cruel beyond words when firing a temp: they save up all their anger and pettiness for temps. Nothing was off limits to the client as they told the agency what you “did” to get fired. It could be the way you were dressed, going in a few minutes late, being sick, etc…in essence, you were disposable. One job, they did not have enough for me to do so that was a reason for getting fired. The way the agency felt they owned you was funny, too. If you lost a job with a client they did not have to call you back at all for any job ever. If you quit a temporary assignment, however, they acted sooo insulted like they had done this huuuge favor for you getting you a job a a much lower rate of pay than you would ordinarily get at that position. The agencies make a mint on sending “human resources” all over town to almost every company in town that is too lazy and cheap to make a commitment to a real employee. The client company pays a high rate to have you as their temp but you only see a humiliatingly low wage. The client would rather “hire” temps at a high rate of pay to do a monkey’s job than make a commitment to a real employee and give him/her a living wage, benefits, and training. This is the mindset of the greedinators that run society now. By the time I got out of school the “temp” system was well into place. When I was trying to support myself, Manpower was the biggest employer in the country.
The most common type of job–I kid you not–I got with the “temps” was this horrible job of pasting paper to paper..like make work for retards. It was “preparing” documents to be microfilmed. Another type of job I got was filing, of course. If monkey level office positions weren’t available, they’d send me to a nightmare called “light industrial” which involved working in a FACTORY. The regular factory workers hated the temps and treated you like shit. In a factory, the lines never stop so you are expected to keep working without a stop until a loud noise sounds for lunch and clocking out for the day. I felt like an animal. Here I was, with a degree, doing THIS for nothing more than minimum wage, not the union wages the regular workers got.
I had other enlightening positions such as cleaning rooms in a flophouse hotel, and opening magazine subscriptions all day and putting them in a huge pile. Only one job ended up as a permanent job and I was kind of sorry it did. I got a “job” with the local shoe conglomerate, on call, to remove tissue paper from shoes, stick the prices on, put on security sensors, put them on a cart and give them to sales people to put on the shelf. The only benefit I got out of that job was I was the first to see the new shoes come in and I got a substantial discount. That was the only year of my life that I had a bunch of shoes.
The other type of “temp” labor I did was for jobs primarily in food service. I almost always got a dishwashing gig and/or the dreaded “banquet server” where you served covered plates at banquets, set up and tore down the banquet before and after, and polished silver, etc. This was the worst job because you were required to buy and wear a penguin outfit of a frilly shirt, bowtie, and black pants. I once spent 30 bucks on a pair of black pants to have them tear in a week. Never were jeans allowed. Not even black jeans. I had a cashier sort of job at the airport where my shoes always set the detectors off. Everyday I would be going through security in my holey socks I could not afford to replace! I kind of even liked that job. I lost it, of course.
The second type of job, the mcjob, is sort of self explanatory. It was a “permanent” job but at bottom wage and without benefits. Most were in food service but I did have a retail job ONCE. In every job I never was promoted and only given token raises. I mostly did prep cooking, busing tables, and cashiering. Never was I trained for a higher position or skill level. On mcjobs, I had to suffer with petty managers, psychopathic perpy coworkers, and part time hours. Heaven FORBID I would work 40 hours. I never had benefits and had to show up at work sick or miss hours, and could not afford a doctor so a “cold” would drag on for 2 months sometimes until I gave up and paid a fortune to a walk in clinic for a 3 minute consult with a doctor and antibiotics.
The third type of “job”, casual labor, was the WORST. I never lasted in these jobs. Like any other job, you’d have to fill out all the paperwork but then there was no job. You came in in the wee hours of the morning and SAT. If you were lucky, you’d get “called” for a job, usually for only a day, and at bottom wages. The other people were of the scummy sort, mostly alcoholics druggies and other people who did not have it together. I seemed to fail at every one of those jobs. Once, I was taken to an empty apt that was being cleaned for the next tenant and spent all day on the floor with a toothbrush scrubbing grout. Another time I waited 4 days to get 4 hours of work at a potato chip factory: no callback.
Every time I lost one of these wretched jobs and went to get unemployment these shysters would fight against me. I had to go to at least 2 “hearings” with a spiteful employer on one side and unemployment worker on the other to get what little was coming to me.
Finally, after over a decade of struggle I gave up and applied for the dole. It was a relief at first, not having to look for work. I had a few part time jobs with Voc Rehab at first but it was not necessary I keep them. I was harassed even at these jobs, some of them “sheltered”, whatever that means. The idleness gets to be a burden, however. You have nothing to fill your days. Essentially, I was declared insane to get these “benefits”. I did not know you would get labelled for life this way. Of course, after my teenage adventures in the mental health system I already had a LABEL.
