Pretty Sure This Is America
Somewhere in America today a single middle-aged man who works in the financial sector parked somewhere to scarf down a quick lunch while skimming the news of the day. He was confronted by headline after headline telling of a polarized public and a mosaic of disparate, fractured Americas struggling to understand one another, and he wondered aloud to himself what the source of this confusion could be. “It sure seems like things used to be simpler,” he thought, “I would like to think we could just sit down and find a solution that works for everyone. I know one thing for sure though, I never would have thought to complain as much as this generation when I was younger.” He was feeding from a wrapper with a Taco Bell logo on it, and gave no thought to the place his lunch was made as he pondered the current state of the country he called home. Where were all these dissatisfied people he kept hearing about, and what were their lives really like? At this moment the man could not recall the faces of any of the working class people he had spoken to that day, even though they had made his breakfast, lunch, and coffee, and washed his car.
I recently took a gig at Jimmy John’s in an even smaller town just North of Coeur d’ Alene. I am planning to relocate to Las Vegas in about 1.5 months to make some real music, money, and art -related moves, and I need some extra money saved for the move. I am working five days a week as a cook at a downtown restaurant right now, which I like, but it’s just not enough money to fund my immediate endeavors. I decided to bite the bullet and get yet another retarded corporate job to fill out my schedule. I mean, I applied to some pretty cool places, but due to the time frame I basically had no choice but to take the first thing that came my way. This place didn’t even interview me.
“Hello?”
“Hey yeah I do need someone for mornings on Wednesday and Thursday. So just come in at 10, we’ll have a shirt for you and stuff. But there’s two training videos you have to watch, they’re like two and a half hours each-”
“Wait a minute, I’m sorry- who is this?”
“Sorry, my bad. This is Justin from Jimmy John’s.”
“Oh, good to hear from you!”
“Yeah, we just had someone leave and I’m actually tryna bring on two new people. So, you can come on down really anytime between now and then and watch those videos. I know it’s shitty but you get a sandwich for doing it and you also get paid so...”
“Yeah man, sounds great. At the latest I’ll be by at 7:30am on Wednesday.”
“Haha. Alright buddy.”
click
When I got there Wednesday morning Justin looked tired and his face was red and puffy. “I’ve been out sick for two days, man. Today was the first day I had to wake up to an alarm clock again. Fucking sucked. Anyway, let’s get you set up with this video.” He wasted no time pulling out a Samsung tablet and setting it up on the table, where I watched my new owner personally explain how to uphold the Jimmy John’s brand for over 145 minutes. I was full of coffee and broke up my piss breaks to make the video go by faster.
In every city there is a working-class underbelly composed of various spheres of fast-food workers, dishwashers and cooks, low-rent security guards, parking attendants, and other people working in marginalized industries, barely or not quite making ends meet while at the same time trying to get to a better stage in their lives. In different cities these circles overlap and mix to different degrees, but combined this working-class, service-industry group often comprises the largest single sector of the economy by number of employees. In Coeur d’ Alene the service industry contingent is particularly diverse, lively, and tight-knit. You’ve got some local cooks and bartenders who have been at it forever, some hardcore burnout kids from the surrounding areas, inexperienced waiters and pretty 19-year old servers who are more likely to be middle class, from out-of-state, and/or attending classes at NIC, literally anyone who had a kid at an economically disadvantageous time and just needs a steady job, and my favorite, the rotating cast of misfits, cluess 18-year-olds, tweakers, and lost souls who staff our local fast-food restaurants, chain stores, and corporate entities with the absolute laxest hiring standards and highest turnover. I’ve been embedded with this cohort since moving to Coeur d’ Alene, and I’ve had the chance to interact with people from across the spectrum. While I mostly try to work slightly higher-wage, less-corporate line cook jobs, work is somewhat spotty in this town and I’ve ended up working whack ass places both on accident and out of desperation. In turn, many of my friends work for Hagadone Hospitality, the owner of the massive resort I refer to as Dracula’s Castle, and my long time girlfriend Katie was a manager at McDonald’s. My point being, I’ve been taking notes.
Inside, Jimmy John’s was a sterile, mechanized assembly line for the conversion of offsite manufactured product into end-sale revenue, with the elimination of individual thought, habit, and work style as an incidental byproduct of the corporate auditing process. In this regard it was pretty similar to Subway, Domino’s, Jamba Juice, or any one of these interchangeable corporate-shell companies that make up at least half of the world’s food economy now. Remember that people in America’s towns and inner cities live and die in these chain stores, feeding their children with paychecks stamped with beaming logos. I don’t take this corporate homogenization lightly. Our work is our life. Don’t let them take it from you.
College dropout who prepared for an economy that wasn’t there, Retiree returning to work because his savings wasn’t enough, inner-city single mother who just doesn’t have a better way to fund the upbringing of her child...
If you step outside today in most populous areas of the United States the world looks rather shitty. There’s a McDonald’s, Wendy’s, or Carl’s Jr. on every block, at least one, and people are rushing between working shitty jobs and spending their money on shitty things. A person’s life is made up of their time, money, and actions. The world we inhabit is made up of human lives. When jobs are shitty, lives are shitty.
Working-class life in Coeur d’ Alene is in some ways a microcosm of the dystopian future that I fear may soon await most of the country. The inequities would be almost comical if it weren’t causing palpable suffering to thousands of people every day and stifling untold human potential.
The huge influx of outside money necessitates a massive service industry, but the work is highly seasonal. People at the bottom, most often the people born and raised in the area, are reduced to fighting over scraps; rents are relatively high and no establishment pays more than they absolutely have to, especially since Idaho’s minimum wage of $7.25 sets the bar pretty low. Middle management positions that offer some tentative financial security are a far off dream for most, and those who attain them are forced to guard their status to the point of assholery, bullying subordinates into submission and withholding valuable knowledge. The huge amount of property tax revenue enables the right wing government to fund a massive police force. The town’s drug subcultures remain extant, but are kept in check by a police and court system that actively preys on the underclass for revenue and to justify their salaries. This is the American Police State 101: There are more than enough businesses paying more than enough taxes, so the availability of public funds isn’t an issue. What these businesses require, however, is an endless supply of cheap labor, and the police fill this need by maintaining a permanently marginalized population of people who are not housing secure, people of color, people with substance abuse issues, and anyone who has to miss work because of court appearances or fail a background check. These people, who society blames for their own problems, are continually re-arrested for suffering from the afflictions of poverty and thereby kept in a state of economic desperation. All in all, ordinary working brothers and sisters are largely prevented from sharing in the leisure opportunities and scenic beauty of Coeur d’ Alene that bourgeoisie tourists from around the world come to enjoy, all because of the false promises of economic justice that are so pervasive across the United States.
I will give you a specific example. I have what would be considered a pretty good job for this area and I make $12.50 an hour. Extrapolated to one year, that’s $26,000. However, I made barely over $18,000 last year, I know because I just did my taxes. That’s like $1,500 a month. Rent on an apartment like mine is $1,000, though in my case I was splitting it with somebody. And in reality I worked over 5 jobs, some of them weird tip jobs like delivery driving, and never knew quite how much money was coming in. Needless to say nearly all of it was sucked up by bills, paying to fix shit on my car, and court expenses. These are the harsh realities of working class life in America.
Jobs like Jimmy John's shouldn't exist as we currently know them. If a college kid or a single mother needs to get an entry-level job at a place like Jack in the Box or Wal-Mart because they have limited options and need to fund important things in their lives because they are adults, then they can be paid $15 a goddamn fucking hour or some kind of meaningful indexed minimum wage that enables them to actually do those things. Like eat, for instance, or acquire further training. If prices go up on prepared foods and service industry-based luxuries- fuck, it astounds me that people talk like that would be the worst thing imaginable. Have you seen our cities? This country has become an absolute corporate shitscape. These dumb corporate jobs, these cheap simulations of luxury, there needs to be less of them, they need to pay their employees better, they should probably be a little more expensive, and they need to provide at least a hope of a better future for everyone involved. Why anyone would oppose accomplishing that through legislation is beyond me. These companies have become the most profitable firms in human history off the labor and hard-earned money of ordinary Americans, and they have only used their profits to further decimate the working class. Money has to stay circulating for the economy to work. It moves upstream through consumer spending, and it moves downstream through paychecks. Right now the paychecks aren't big enough to keep the whole population in a state of healthy economic activity. Capitalists aren't going to start paying out more on their own. It's their job to protect their bottom line. The people need to use a combination of collective bargaining and legislation to protect their interests and to force more money out of the corporate machine. Because our government is now owned by corporations through legalized bribery, this will necessarily entail rooting out corruption from the Federal level down and making the bribery of representatives illegal. Not an easy task, but nothing worthwhile is. What are you gonna do, sit on your ass? How pathetic would that be.
A sandwich maker at a chain sandwich shop could easily have a dignified existence. It doesn't have to be a terrible job. Make sandwiches, whatever, talk to people, get paid. As long as you have some sense of autonomy at the workplace, you have a chance to be good at what you do, you feel the people around you want you to succeed, and it enables you to actually live your life, there's nothing wrong with that. One could easily design the job at Jimmy John's so that it doesn't suck. But it would necessarily cost Jimmy John's more money. They wouldn't be able to schedule 8 grown ass men per day to work four hour shifts and weird split shifts, not train them at all, make them sign mandatory arbitration clauses so they can't sue or organize, make them pay for their own meals, no benefits,... your life emanates from your job. If your job sucks, your life sucks. Some conservatives will tell you that that's the point of Capitalism. Life has to suck so that you are motivated to make it not suck; in other words, the economy makes you work to achieve a dignified existence and your work fuels the economy. I happen to think this model is asinine and outdated. Healthy humans are largely self-motivated and they like to do work and make money. These corporations are not helping to train healthy, hard-working humans with these entry level jobs, they are wasting people's time in dead-end positions, systematically devaluing the labor of the working class. People can tell when they are being fucked over and treated as if they are expendable, and they don’t respond well to it. When your life sucks due to a lack of funds and you can't connect the dots, you can't pay a security deposit, you can't fix your car, you can't go back to school even though you want to, that's wasted human potential. Time, work, effort, and creativity are the things that our world is made of. Right now the corporate machine is devouring human life and shitting it into the ocean, and nobody is even saying anything about it. The great lie sold to the working class by the elite in this country is that the market forces of Capitalism will naturally and necessarily create the perfect meritocracy and by extension the perfect civil society. This lie is projected to the individual as "Work hard for your masters and you will be recognized and rewarded with your very own piece of the wealthiest society in human history." It's a perfect swindle, designed to make ordinary people identify with wealth that they don't have. Workers compete for their place in the paycheck stream by putting on appearances and throwing each other under the bus instead of actually working, managers are forced to cut labor costs and encourage high turnover instead of training and motivating existing employees, executives outsource, subcontract, and issue ever-more demanding corporate standards without regard to human life or dignity, and everybody blames the person immediately below or above them for the shitty state of things. THERE ARE BETTER MODELS. Social science has come a long way. THERE ARE THINGS THAT CAN BE DONE. I know what some of those things are but not all of them. I am not a scientist, I am a writer. My main job is to point out how full of shit everyone is. But there are people developing kickass solutions to the things that are making human life suck, and you need to listen to those people. The only people who are definitely wrong are the ones saying that the current system is fine and we don't need to do anything, or worse, that giving more money and power to the corporations is the answer. The corporations, as long as they have the unrestricted freedom to do so, will always find creative ways to staff their buildings that are cheaper than hiring and developing long-term employees who are paid a good salary. The corporations created this backassward world of ours, now the people will have to do something to change it.
A simple place to start would be taking seriously the notion that everyone who has a full time job deserves at least an economy-class ticket to a decent life that offers some degree of choice and autonomy. Say, enough income to comfortably rent an apartment, stock the fridge, and finance a preowned car. You could accomplish this by creating a good federal minimum wage that is indexed against housing costs, alongside a robust social safety net and other worker protections such as standardizing work contracts so that employees who desire full-time employment or consistent hours have some guarantee that their expectations will be fulfilled. That's not really a lot to ask. All the modern western democracies do this, even ones that do dumb shit all the time like Great Britain and Australia. Can we be smarter than Australia, the country that elected Tony Abbott? I guess time will tell.
I hope things get better for the working people of Coeur d’ Alene, and I plan to come back to this area for Barter Faire and shit next year. But I’m not going to spend the rest of my life fighting the impossible uphill battle that it would be to try to bring socioeconomic justice to North Idaho. I hate cops. I hate cops hate cops hate cops. I haaaate cooooops. I’m getting the fuck out of here. I need to get out while I’m ahead and try to make some real money somewhere else. I leave on Saturday. The Desert Cruiser is fully outfitted. See you on the other side.
