Tag: worklife

Categories
Work Life

Denizens of Retail

Retail Worker
Retail Worker

Buying and selling things is the heart of economic systems. Most people I know would rather be on the production side of the equation, yet someone has to do the selling, and there is a living to be made as a salesperson.

When we lived in Indiana, one of my employees’ spouse worked in sales for a precious metals company. His job was to convince large companies to sell them spent catalysts containing platinum. In a year he had to make only a couple of sales to support his lifestyle of constant engagement with purchasing managers and key executives of Fortune 500 companies. He played a lot of golf with customers.

In another corner of the economy, there are those who work retail sales in low wage jobs. Many retailers pay more than minimum wage—they have to to attract workers. Instead of wages, they offer positions such as “team leader,” “shift supervisor,” “crew chief,” and the like. None of them pay a living wage, far from it. It is all hourly work designed to stock shelves, staff cash registers and generate sales from a corporate-designed supply chain that pays the lowest wages the market can bear. Retail workers don’t play a lot of golf.

Retail workers have more than their share of problems. Health, access to health care, relationships, transportation, housing, security, disability, abuse—you name it, problems come in almost every area of life. Financial problems are rife, and the reason many take a job in retail, but low wage workers don’t always make good decisions about jobs. The financial equation is stacked against them before they even leave the house.

This is where I part ways with people who promote increasing the minimum wage as a solution to working poor.

Discussion among low wage workers is seldom about wages, but how to sustain a life. While “extra” money would be nice, and well spent, nice doesn’t make it very far in the tough lives of retail workers. Those who advocate for an increase in the minimum wage do so from a position of privilege most retail workers don’t share. Increasing wages doesn’t get to an essential problem.

With the drive to employ part time workers with less than 30 hours per week and no benefits, a retail worker’s earnings potential caps out around $15,000 per year. In today’s environment, that’s barely enough to buy health insurance, let alone pay bills. Add a 25-mile commute, an older car with high maintenance expense, expensive banking services, physically demanding work, and other complications of working poor, and retail workers enter a trap from which there is no escape. As others have written, it is expensive to be poor.

There will always be a need for workers at the low-wage end of the scale. A system that recognizes all kinds of work and rewards it with the ability to sustainably live an honorable life is lacking. Money can’t solve that problem, even if it makes some feel better about themselves.

Social justice will take more than giving alms to the working poor, including the denizens of retail.

Categories
Work Life Writing

Next Chapter

Honey Locust Grove
Honey Locust Grove

It seems like a month since I’ve taken a breath.

The Honey Locust trees are in bloom all around Big Grove. Apples and pears are forming in our small stand of fruit trees. Nature’s relentless cycle advances, ready or not.

There is pressure to keep up with a diverse life during spring. It increases these last days before Memorial Day. The main thing is not to freak out.

While we live there is always a next chapter to write. For the moment, it is enough to keep my mind and hands busy—and enjoy the Honey Locust trees while I may.

Categories
Work Life

Time to Find Franklin’s Hand

Tomato Blossoms
Tomato Blossoms

The sinusitis mentioned in recent posts has taken a toll. The yard work is set back, with seedlings standing tall, waiting transplant. I have a full basket of news stories to write and prospects of other work. There is a lot to do.

Yesterday I called off at the warehouse due to incessant coughing. I returned the coolers from Thursday’s CSA delivery and stopped at the pharmacy to find medicine used long ago to relieve sinusitis that proved incurable when we lived in Indiana.

I couldn’t recall how to spell it so I wrote what I knew on a piece of paper: chlor ________ maleate. The pharmacist recognized it, chlorpheniramine maleate, asked me a few questions about my health, and found a box of 24 tablets for $3.99. Within a few hours the medicine began relieving my symptoms, and in another day or so I’ll be as back to normal as it gets.

The morning after I’m sore and tired, but ready to mount the steed of a life built here in Big Grove and ride.

The meaning of songs like Stan Rogers’ “Northwest Passage” has changed with global warming and the ongoing re-discovery of the wreckage of Franklin’s vessels. Nonetheless, Stan Rogers didn’t live long enough to see these things, and occupies a unique place in music history. As I pick up my journey where I left it some three weeks ago, I recall these words from Rogers

For just one time I would take the Northwest passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.
Tracing one warm line through a land so wide and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.

Categories
Living in Society Social Commentary Work Life

Seafood for Thought

Memory of Apple Blossoms
Memory of Apple Blossoms

The silence on the story of human trafficking connected with slavery in the seafood industry is deafening.

Margie Mason of the Associated Press reported Tuesday that Indonesian police arrested seven suspects in an ongoing case.

“Five Thai boat captains and two Indonesian employees at Pusaka Benjina Resources, one of the largest fishing firms in eastern Indonesia, were taken into custody,” wrote Mason. “The arrests come after the AP reported on slave-caught seafood shipped from Benjina to Thailand, where it can be exported and enter the supply chains of some of America’s biggest food retailers.”

But for the investigative reporting by the Associated Press, these instances of slavery and human trafficking would have gone unnoticed, especially in the Western Hemisphere at the end of the global food supply chain.

American consumers don’t want to hear what goes on at the far end of the food supply chain. Using slave labor to fish is particularly egregious, and most people I meet don’t want to hear any of it. The focus is on the box, can, bag or piece of fruit or vegetable in front of them. Few want to dig very deep into where it comes from. We are the less as a society because of this prevalent American value.

I’m not a person who sees cause for alarm everywhere I look. I’ve been inside enough manufacturing and production operations during the last 40 years to know it requires oftentimes difficult work to make things we use every day. In most cases, there is a human impact with the means of production.

In the slow walk away from union representation since the Reagan era, much of what we learned about worker treatment has been abandoned by companies whose business model is to outsource or use subcontractors. That’s the immediate defense of Pusaka Benjina Resources: their subcontractors were responsible for any human trafficking and slavery. It is really no defense.

One should appreciate that the Associated Press is still willing to invest substantial resources in breaking stories like the slavery on Indonesian fishing vessels. Few others seem willing to do so as news organizations struggle to carve out a viable business niche, and as news and information gets blended into a vast soup of engaging, but largely irrelevant bits and packets transmitted with the speed of breaking news.

What’s a blogger to do? We begin like a fisher, setting sail on the sea of posts, articles, books, emails and letters that exist on electronic media. Waiting for what is relevant, what is news, and importantly, what matters. Not what matters to me, but what matters to all of us on this blue-green sphere.

What comes next is up to each of us.

Categories
Home Life Kitchen Garden Work Life

Hacking Through

Peas
Peas

It’s been a tough couple of weeks complicated by a lingering and persistent impulse to void the rheum of excess mucus. I don’t feel ill for the most part, but the coughing has been terrible.

Missing work without sick pay means less income and a further exploration of the life of low wage workers. Well into the experiment in alternative lifestyle, I don’t see how people can make ends meet, even working three jobs as I have been doing this spring. That said, I won’t give up and expect to continue hacking through this rough patch—literally.

I picked lettuce, spinach and radishes from the garden the last two nights and made a frittata for dinner with greens from the CSA, spring garlic and onions. It was satisfying served with a salad, and there were leftovers. Already garden production is worth savoring. Between now and Memorial Day, the focus is on getting the spring planting done.

For the moment that’s all there is to say except change is coming. To make this life more sustainable, to improve our economic base. How change will look is an open question. I look forward to seeing how it comes together.

Categories
Work Life

Spring Rush to Memorial Day

Garden View of Lake Macbride
Garden View of Lake Macbride

April has gotten very busy. There are dozens of tasks to do at home and farm work has kept me busier while my warehouse work and newspaper writing continue at the same level. It seems impossible that I had eight jobs at one point last year. Working three jobs fills the time if it doesn’t produce enough money to get ahead.

Farm work has been planting, planting and more planting—in the field, in seed trays, in the high tunnel. Yesterday was lettuce greens and broccoli. The day before onions and soil blocking. Today, I will seed some trays before cleaning up to head to the warehouse.

The challenge is to find time for our own garden. When I receive next week’s work schedule a priority will be setting aside a home work day.

A livestock farmer spent yesterday preparing his fields to plant corn. His planter is maintained and ready. Another spread fertilizer, complaining of a sore throat because he had the tractor window open.

Everyone’s busy with spring. That includes me. The garden needs planting before Memorial Day. It’s five weeks away, but it seems like tomorrow.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Back at the Farm

Inside the Greenhouse
Inside the Greenhouse

This week began another stint working at Local Harvest CSA. I’m back to soil blocking, planting seeds in trays and seedlings in the high tunnel in preparation for another season of vegetables. This year the plan is to work until the regular crew arrives in May—a month of physical labor to reinvigorate after winter’s inactivity. I’ll help with the first deliveries to members in two weeks.

The fields we burned earlier in the week look great, and the green up should be spectacular.

The work has been going a lot faster this year. With experience I’ve become better able to move from one task to the next. By the time I get fully proficient, my one-month stint on the farm will be about over.

That said, the rain has kept me out of the home garden where most of this year’s produce will originate. The green up in our yard has begun.

Categories
Writing

Full Moon

Full Moon Through Maple Tree
Full Moon Through Maple Tree

Friday is my Monday as I embark on a substantial project to write several articles for the newspaper before the county seat makes a mass exodus for spring break. The paper expects to be shorthanded, so my editors want articles in the vault.

Today will be gathering information, with four scheduled interview events and a few followups. Tomorrow will be writing the first article and organizing to write the rest.

In part, it’s what being a writer means.

The rest of writing is varied and elusive. It is one thing to write for a newspaper, and quite another to compete for readers in the media jungle where their eyeballs reside. At some point writers decide whether to actively join the competition, or to focus on improving writing by cranking out work as quickly and as well as one can. It makes sense for me to choose the latter, and here’s why. Writing is a craft that requires practice. The only way to get better at it is to do it—often and regularly.

One of my projects is to create an anthology of past writing in book form to sell at public speaking engagements. When I review pieces written 40 years ago, a lot of them are pretty rough. My style has changed, and improved, even since I began blogging in 2007. Even more so since I began newspaper writing last year. The reaction to such editing of the past is to rewrite them all, or to let them stand warts and all. I have been unable to embrace either—the project is stalled.

Here’s the hard part: it’s easier to focus on paid work with an editor because there are specific demands to be met in a fixed time frame. When taking a drink from the fire hose of what’s possible, the rush of project ideas is hard to tame. Combine that with required attention to economic security and it is easy to see why many writers don’t get beyond the idea, outline or draft stage.

In a way, the short piece, around 1,000 words, is a great opportunity to improve stylistically without a big commitment. Writers miss an opportunity if they don’t create in short form because people are simply not reading that many books. According to the Pew Research Center, an average American reads five books per year, with 24 percent reading no books. Why spend the effort to produce book-length work if the chance of finding readers is remote?

Maybe it’s the full moon, maybe it’s threats to economic security, or maybe I’m just arriving, but as we cope with life’s busy-ness, it is important to consider where we’re bound and why. Becoming a better wordsmith to present short, meaningful pieces is never a bad path to take.

Categories
Work Life

It’s Not About Minimum Wage

Garden After Snowfall
Garden After Snowfall

Two bits of news related to minimum wage emerged last week, and neither of them represents a solution for low wage workers.

The Iowa Legislature advanced Senate Study Bill 1151 from a subcommittee to increase the minimum wage to $8.75 per hour by July 2016, with a $0.75 increase July 1 and another $0.75 a year later. The bill is expected to be debated this week by the full Senate Labor and Business Relations Committee. Rod Boshart covered the story for the Cedar Rapids Gazette here. He indicated there is bipartisan support for increasing the minimum wage in both legislative chambers.

On Thursday, Doug McMillon, president and CEO, Walmart, announced a detailed plan to increase wages for its associates. Notably, current employees will receive at least $9 per hour beginning in April, with positions expected to pay at least $10 per hour beginning next year.

“Today, we’re announcing a package of changes in Walmart U.S. that will kick off a new approach to our jobs,” McMillon said in a letter to employees. “We’re pursuing comprehensive changes to our hiring, training, compensation, and scheduling programs, as well as to our store structure, and these changes will be sustainable over the long term.”

As Vauhini Vara pointed out in her Feb. 20 New Yorker article, “working at Walmart has long been a kind of proxy, in conversations about labor practices, for low-wage toil.”

“Such conversations have received more attention in the past couple of years, partly because they speak to a problem—stagnant wages—that has been acknowledged, even by conservative economists and policymakers, as a serious one,” Vara wrote. “When the recession ended, the unemployment rate began falling to pre-recession levels, and economists predicted that a tighter supply of workers would soon send wages up, too, as has historically happened. But, puzzlingly to some observers, that didn’t happen.”

Walmart, like any business, realizes the value of associates, and adjusted its pay and benefits when it had to.

While in Des Moines last week, I spotted Mike Owen and David Osterberg of the Iowa Policy Project at the capitol. They were working on the wage issue according to Owen.

The Iowa Policy Project is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization founded in 2001 to produce research and analysis to engage Iowans in state policy decisions, according to their web site. One of their topics is minimum wage.

IPP noted the Iowa minimum wage increased to its current $7.25 level on Jan. 1, 2008 in a February position summary. They pointed out that while Iowa was once a leader in minimum wage, it is now a laggard.

$8.75 would be something, but it is not enough.

“Minimum wage doesn’t come close to supporting a family’s basic needs budget at Iowa’s current cost of living,” said the IPP report.

Walmart’s $10 per hour is better but doesn’t get families there either.

What’s missing from this discussion is that few minimum wage earners support a family alone. According to IPP, minimum wage earners contribute 46 percent of their family’s income on average. Which begs the question, how do low-wage earners get by?

We can’t be distracted by the two minimum wage rate developments.

Any low-wage earner today knows there are plenty of opportunities to earn $9 per hour or more if one can do the work. The minimum wage has not been the problem for a long time as companies pay more to attract a viable workforce. Walmart is a large employer and receives a lot of attention. My progressive friends and I debate whether Walmart is or isn’t the problem, and I land closer to Vara—they are a proxy for another argument.

That argument has to do with the changing nature of our society. We have become a place where fairness and equal treatment has given way to pursuit of financial success at any cost. It includes business models that drive out costs, human costs particularly. Our society, through our neglect, and perhaps intent, has led us to a very harsh place. I recall Thomas Merton:

“If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success… If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live.”

All this talk about minimum wage has made us forget something important. Work is not wasted whether it’s paid or not. We must go on living and wages have little to do with that.

~Written for Blog for Iowa

Categories
Work Life

Monday is My Friday

Work Bench
Work Bench

Deeply invested in an economy of multiple income sources, part time work, no benefits and flexible hours, discussions in the national media about job growth, the 30-hour work week, and changing job descriptions  fall upon deaf ears.

I’m happy to sustain a life in a turbulent world, avoiding big jobs like the one left in 2009, and take my chances with what work circulates at the bottom of the rain barrel during a long drought. Most wouldn’t call that making a living, but the easy-money jobs are all gone, if they existed once upon a time. People, including me, do what they must to sustain life.

Things didn’t change this year, or in the last five years. This experience is the result of an intentional movement, one that saw its best days during the Reagan administration.

The truth is we all have to make a life. Even if suicide is painless, it is no option at all.

What matters more, what helps us go on, is the drive ever forward in our lives. Not toward some dark and pearly other world destiny, but with the exercise of free will and intent, toward making the commons a better place. Taking care of ourselves, while important, is not the endgame.

Without good health and economic security, it would be hard to do anything. Some of us are lucky to have a stable, if somewhat precarious platform built on years of hard work, good health and a safe upbringing and neighborhood. If we are one of the lucky ones, it is important to remember John Donne, “no man is an island,” and recognize that unlike the bard, we are of an age.

In my worklife, dating to the 1960s, there have been only rare times when I worked a Monday through Friday day shift job, most notably while at the University of Iowa in the early 1980s. Nonetheless, there is a cultural resonance to “the weekend,” even if I haven’t really had one since those government employment days. Whether with a high paying job or what I’m doing now, work always beckons, regardless of the day of the week.

The saving grace is the brief respite when a workday is followed by one more open. A chance to open a bottle of wine purchased from the discard cart at the grocer, or enjoy a snack from newly bought food from the warehouse club—chez nous.

Tonight, after a shift at a job, grocery shopping and a meeting in the county seat, only then will I succumb to escape, then sleep soundly.

It seems upside down, but Monday really is my Friday and the work goes on with nary a day off. I’m not complaining, just trying to understand life in this turbulent world so it can be sustained.