Tonight, the weight of all my yesterdays and tomorrows seems awfully damned close; all the worse for there being more of the former than the latter. It’s funny how that one sneaks up on you – one day you are 25 and have the world by the tail, the next your arm hair is turning white. White? Traitors! Anyway, I am kind of standing around, throwing lids, feeling like, “how did I get here?”
Of course, by “throwing lids”, I mean doing my night job, which in this case, tonight, means feeding the machine that supplies the lids to the filler downstairs – or, rather, down ‘man-lift’:
Who uses stairs when you can ride a conveyor belt through the floor? On a good night – and this is a good night, much better than yesterday, when the Alvey (our palletizer) went down, shutting down our start-up so cold we almost had to re-sanitize the filler station – any way, a good night is us running near the 4,000 30-pack cases of Coors Light an hour rate. I mean, we are flying; just a little arithmetic shows that you need 120,000 can lids an hour to do that, so the machine needs attention. In this case, me, methodically slamming paper sacks of stacks of lids at 600 lids a sack, pulling off that paper, and making sure everyone is right-side-up, throwing away the paper and moving on.
OK, look, repetitive work, yeah, nearly hard work, yeah, but not mentally that challenging. You mind can wander off the track just a bit, as long as you stay focused on the job at hand. If you don’t, you get the joy of having a sack of lids hit the deck – a mess I can never have again and still have it be too soon. I am afraid tonight I am wondering really close to home – that is as to how companies use and treat contract employees.
Obviously, the big attraction to contract, or “temp” workers is multifold: you can fire them with no fanfare; they do not show on your “personnel costs” line; they are somewhat cheaper, in that they do not cost you the same in benefits (although, typically, the salary is the same, just that their company gets a share of it, not the worker); and so on. The problem is that “temp” workers are not always so “temporary” – I have personally known contractors who worked for years at IBM. In fact, many companies have gotten in trouble by treating temps basically the same as regular employees, which causes the government to ask questions like, “aren’t you basically lying to us?”. Which is uncomfortable for businesses. And LOTS of companies got caught a few years back for just that – de facto employees being paid differently, accounted for and reported differently, and all in all being a tax dodge.
In my experience, there is a not-quite-but-almost abuse of temporary employees by regulars – not all regulars, but lots of them. You are just a temp in their eyes, and it really doesn’t matter if you have equivalent experience or training, you are somewhat less. Which is how it should be, at least as far as the IRS is concerned. When it is you who is “less”, well that feels a bit different. The truth is, though, in this environment, you don’t say anything about it, because you are just glad to have a job. Even if the job is, by need, one of two or three jobs you have to have to make ends meet. Because, truth is, you gotta make those ends meet, somehow.
I keep seeing news pieces and advertisements about how we (the US) are “coming back”, and maybe so. But, I look at the people who have jobs now, and you know that their Walmart/Burger King/Contract Job is not really a career move – it is an act of desperation. There are a lot of desperate people out there, hoping that they can make it through the year, keep their house, feed their kids. And all the glad handing, back slapping, grits eating politicians wearing their jeans to show just how much like us they are don’t change a damned thing about that. Somehow, we have to get to the point where people are not in survival mode, and get them to a point of hope. I do not see how we can do that without our politics and social environment getting beyond finger pointing and get back to working together.
the forking path 