Iain Levison - A Working Stiffs Manifesto: A Memoir

Copyright 2002 by Iain Levison
All rights reserved.

Published by

Soho Press Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

eISBN 978-1-56947-920-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is available in the office of the publisher.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

For Marion

Id like to thank (in alphabetcal order) the following people who gave me either encouragement or beer money during the writing of this book Andrew Langman, Matt Lewis, Faith Manney, Betty Mizgala, Patti Pelrine, Kate Pennell, Larry Platt, Mark Scepansky, Graham Weddington, and, of course, my mother.

Its Sunday morning and I am scanning the classifieds. There are two types of jobs in herejobs Im not qualified for and jobs I dont want. Im considering both.

There are pages and pages of the first typejobs I will never get. Must know this, must know that. Must be experienced in this and that, for at least six years, and be fluent in Chinese, and be able to fly a jet through antiaircraft fire, and have SIX YEARS experience in open-heart surgery. Starting salary $32,000. Fax your rsum to Beverly.

Who is Beverly, I wonder, and what does she know that I dont? She knows shes getting a paycheck, for starters. She cant do any of the things required for the job, Im sure, or she would be doing them, instead of fielding phone calls. If I knew Beverly on a personal level, could I get a job doing something at her company? Is that why they dont put Beverlys last name in there, to discourage would-be stalkers like me from schmoozing up to her in a bar? From finding out details of her personal life and bumping into her on the subway, after waiting for four hours, then asking her out for a drink; then, after a night of passionate sex, offhandedly wonder if they were hiring for anything down at her firm? I continue on down the column, learning more and more about skills I dont have, about training I will never get, about jobs needed in fields I never even knew existed.

Sometimes the Jobs-I-Cant-Do sections contain a hidden morsel, though. The words WILL TRAIN always trigger a Pavlovian slobbering in any qualified bullshit artist. If theyre going to train you, what difference does it make what you used to do? COMPUTER PROGRAMMER, WILL TRAIN. I know what a computer is. Its one of those TV things with a typewriter attached by a cord. If they want to train me to program it, fine. Then I keep reading. This is an ad for a computer school, where they teach you all about computers for $2,500, then get you a job data processing, also known as typing, for nine dollars an hour. I keep looking.

Today, all the WILL TRAINS are for jobs I dont want. MOVERS NEEDED, $8/hr. to start. WILL TRAIN. Guaranteed overtime. This ad is of the second type. Moving furniture isnt so bad. Its hard work but it has its perks, one of which is you never need to work out when youre doing it because your muscles are torn to shit at the end of every day. Eight dollars an hour is low for New York. After taxes thatll leave about six. Still, I can deal with that. The problem is the guaranteed overtime. They are obviously understaffed and are trying to make it look like keeping me at work for fourteen hours a day will be doing me a favor. Theyll think because I answered this ad that Im going to be enthusiastic about showing up on Sundays and holidays. You wanted overtime, theyll crow, isnt that why you answered the ad? I move on down the page.

FISH CUTTERS NEEDED, $12/hr. to start. This is a combination of both types of jobsa job I dont want and a job I cant doall wrapped up in one neat little package. I worked for two years as a fish processor in Alaska, so I know a thing or two about fish, but I cant cut them and I dont want to. But I can talk fish with just about anybody. I can bullshit my way through an interview no problem, and by the time they realize I cant cut, Im already on the payroll. Then theyll either have to teach me or fire me, and firing me will involve admitting a mistake, so teaching me it will be. Twelve dollars an hour. Im set. Rent will be paid.

Theres a definite trick to applying for jobs for which you are not qualified. Knowing something is key, even if it is just one little fact that you can throw out. You can usually get these facts by listening to boring people. I once spent five hours on a train down to Florida listening to the guy in the next seat ramble on about the woes of house painting, and two days later I was painting houses in Miami after wowing the interviewer with a verbatim rendition of the speech I had just heard. So, with fish Im set. Just a few mentions of salmon fishing in Alaska, and Im in.

Another fact about interviewers is that most interviewers just want to hear themselves talk. In the average job interview, Im usually lucky if I can get a word in edgewise. Interviewers have a captive audience who want something from them, so they can babble away uninterrupted about their restaurant, their business, their life, their opinion of the president, or any subject on their mind. Whos going to disagree with them? Its the perfect dictators forum. No, sir, actually I think the Presidents doing a fine job, and my application is ripped to shreds the minute Im gone. Ive sat quietly while interviewers tell me facts about their wives, their careers, their golf handicaps, even their first sexual experiences. And they rarely ask anything about me.

I go down to the fish store and we talk fish. This is a high-end fish store, catering to the eclectic needs of housewives from the best areas of New York, I am told. The manager, John, needs someone with a good attitude, who is presentable. An ass-kisser with a good haircut. Its the same thing everyone wants, every business from IBM to the local transmission shop. I happen to have a good haircut, and I am relentlessly polite, at least for the first five minutes I meet someone. He tells me to come back tomorrow for orientation, wearing khaki pants and a blue shirt. No questions about fish cutting ability are ever asked.

I have a job. Here we go again.

In the last ten years, Ive had forty-two jobs in six states. Ive quit thirty of them, been fired from nine, and as for the other three, the line was a little blurry. Sometimes its hard to tell exactly what happened, you just know it wouldnt be right for you to show up any more.

I have become, without realizing it, an itinerant worker, a modern-day Tom Joad. There are differences, though. If you asked Tom Joad what he did for a living, he would say, Im a farmworker. Me, I have no idea. The other difference is that Tom Joad didnt blow $40,000 getting an English degree.

And the more I travel and look around for work, the more I realize that I am not alone. There are thousands of itinerant workers out there, many of them wearing business suits, many doing construction, many waiting tables or cooking in your favorite restaurants. They are the people who were laid off from companies that promised them a lifetime of security and then changed their minds, the people who walked out of commencement with a $40,000 fly swatter in their hands and got rejected from twenty interviews in a row, then gave up. Theyre the people who thought, Ill just take this temporary assignment/bartending job/parking lot attendant position/pizza delivery boy job until something better comes up, but something better never does, and life becomes a daily chore of dragging yourself into work and waiting for a paycheck, which you can barely use to survive. Then you listen in fear for the sound of a cracking in your knee, which means a $5,000 medical bill, or a grinding in your cars engine, which means a $2,000 mechanics bill, and you know then that its all over, you lose. New car loans, health insurance, and mortgages are out of the question. Wives and children are unimaginable. Its surviving, but surviving sounds dramatic, and this life lacks drama. Its scraping by.