Tennessee: Trickle Down Employment
I’ve had the unfortunate job life, moving from employer to employer, job to job and have concluded that work hampers people, beats them down, humiliates them to the point of disinterested cynicism. It’s a game. You learn to play at it until you either master the job-game or become an easily persuaded pawn. The masters, ultimately the pseudo-Nietzschean elite, claiming the conventional control, power, the typical qualities of a bossman, lean over the proles while they sweat and labor for eight hours and possibly overtime. But that’s my opinion of the vicious worker struggle, what about people that don’t bother with the critical aspect of thinking beyond the mechanical work-pay-die rubric? I speak namely of people in my home state of Tennessee, where the protestant work ethic is in full, pendulous, swing. And, mind you, anyone challenging the current employee-employer verbal agreement of non-bargaining can fuck-off. Simple as that: you threaten union participation at any factory, store, or business, the business has the legal right to lock those employees out and carry on as if nothing ever happened. The businesses have in return promised fair-wages, profit shares, and other amenities. Or have they?
I’ve recently spoken to a good friend of mine, a long time employee of a major fiberglass maker. The factories in my hometown have an initiative that seems fair enough to the untrained eye: temp-to-hire. A process that pits the ordinary new hire against the rigorous, rote abuses of physical, mental, and emotional bending. Those that don’t make it through the temporary period are not considered a part of the larger picture: being a part of the company . . . family, perhaps. Once the cream rises, you’re in. You are welcomed into the fold, given yearly wage increases, a pension, free/reduced healthcare, paid sick/vacation time, and a job until your body gives out. Well, that was true until recently. My friend, who often glorifies corporate-controlled labor, tells me that his factory is outsourcing the ordinary work to a third party employment agency. These are not “temp-to-hire” positions. No one working for this staffing agency is being considered for full employment under the umbrella of the corporation; instead, the third party agency manages the hiring/firing process, and washing the corporation’s hands of human resources, pensions, time-off. Essentially, my friend’s job is to train the new hires while doing his own work. I tell my friend: You’re training your replacements. The endgame of this practice is a completely outsourced labor pool that is easily replaceable. And Tennessee is the ideal setting for an expendable workforce.
Tennessee is swarming with corporations wanting to take advantage of cheap labor. Tennessee’s conservative-republican majority has insulated corporate welfare projects since the Reaganomics era, creating a vast cradle where corporate tax is minimal and the wage cap is generally left up to corporate lobbyists. With the national minimum wage hovering around $7.50 per hour, supplemented with iron-fisted right-to-work legislation, corporations have found an Eden in a America, a veritable third world country with a third world labor force within the borders of Tennessee. In an area where hard work and lack of bitching about a sore back is seen as honorable, there is a cult motif of eager, self-flagellating, under-educated, liberal-hating corporate apologists willing to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and get to work. And they do, existing to pull their load, make more children, die, go to heaven and tell Jesus about their calluses, sore muscles, bruises, cuts and scrapes, and get a pat on the head. I guarantee that’s what most of them strive for. The regular folk are as fixated on getting into heaven as the tribal regions in Afghanistan. The corporations know this, and they also know that these Tennessee workers will claw through miles of shit just to lick a CEO’s boot.
“History repeats itself: first as tragedy, second as farce,” Karl Marx said. Few remember the tragic strife of farm workers tilling the Tennessee soil, losing fingers, hands, arms, sometimes lives, dealing with stillbirths, dying from appendicitis, tetanus, rickets. Then the industry settled in, became a mainstay, helped a population struggling to survive, building hospitals on farmland. Lives improved, but cultural mindsets didn’t improve. In the long run, the “work like a sweating mule” mindset became the most regressive element of Tennessee’s existence. A sort of mediocre hubris reigned supreme. The politicians bathe in the philosophy. The former Tennessee senator, Fred Thompson, the John Wayne of politicians, could tell you that he pulled up his sleeves when he was around workers and promised them the jobs. This display of bravado underscores the ironic triviality of the rough-knuckled worker. The politicians pay lip service to the matter-of-fact personality of the impoverished worker instead of changing the attitude that weeps like a rotting wound. Tennessee is in its second round of history, repeating the nonsense of rugged individualism practiced in the early Twentieth Century and leaving them impoverished in the Twenty-First.
My friend contents himself with tongue-in-cheek witticisms that ease the discomfort of possibly losing his job to a staffing agency. He repeats the same deflated response when I empathize with his current situation: “They won’t fire me. I can’t lose this job, who they going to train with my certification?” The farce comes as a fantastic display of multi-layered excuses as to one’s own work ethic. But the Tennessee worker, no matter the skill set, no matter the capitalist-championing attitude, no matter the “no whiners allowed” sloganeering, no matter the biting the corporate bullet, will submit; they will fall in line and become the disposable; they will blame the brown people for taking their jobs, just like they blamed the black people fifty years before; they will never look the problem in the face for what it is. History repeats itself: First as tragedy, second as farce, third as blind acceptance.
