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Can You Just Stop Working Me?
A long time ago, when I was a young driftglass, I worked for a large, red insurance company in downtown Chicago. At that time, many of America's biggest industrial unions were in steep decline and the union movement was aggressively trying to make inroads with clerks, secretaries, assistants, stenos, mail room stoners and every other species of desk jockey which once used to roam the wide open office spaces of America, as common as IBM Selectrics.
Of the many wounds from which Big Labor was bleeding during that period, one of the more notable was mostly self-inflicted: the longstanding, very ugly and very public association that some prominent unions had with the mob. This made organizing office peons like me -- who labored in air-conditioned comfort, and already enjoyed (thanks to unions) weekends and holidays off, decent benefits, a 40 hour week, paid overtime and relatively safe working conditions -- an even more uphill battle than it otherwise might have been.
When it came down to choosing sides, on the one hand, I knew any number of union guys who were lazy, overpaid, racist assholes. On the other hand, I came from a union home and knew first-hand how much good the labor movement had done for my family specifically and the middle class generally. So I let both sides make their cases, which is the point at which management lost me entirely.
Why?
Because they wouldn't stop working me.
They wouldn't stop exaggerating. They wouldn't stop lying. If we signed up with the union, "Big Tuna" Accardo would be my boss. I'd be jacking cars before the year was out just to keep my job. The mob would rough up my parents. Make my brother a junkie and turn my sister out to work the streets!
...
You want to lose me in a hurry?
Then keep working me as if I were an easily-frightened halfwit.
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2013/09/can-you-just-stop-working-me.html
Of the many wounds from which Big Labor was bleeding during that period, one of the more notable was mostly self-inflicted: the longstanding, very ugly and very public association that some prominent unions had with the mob. This made organizing office peons like me -- who labored in air-conditioned comfort, and already enjoyed (thanks to unions) weekends and holidays off, decent benefits, a 40 hour week, paid overtime and relatively safe working conditions -- an even more uphill battle than it otherwise might have been.
When it came down to choosing sides, on the one hand, I knew any number of union guys who were lazy, overpaid, racist assholes. On the other hand, I came from a union home and knew first-hand how much good the labor movement had done for my family specifically and the middle class generally. So I let both sides make their cases, which is the point at which management lost me entirely.
Why?
Because they wouldn't stop working me.
They wouldn't stop exaggerating. They wouldn't stop lying. If we signed up with the union, "Big Tuna" Accardo would be my boss. I'd be jacking cars before the year was out just to keep my job. The mob would rough up my parents. Make my brother a junkie and turn my sister out to work the streets!
...
You want to lose me in a hurry?
Then keep working me as if I were an easily-frightened halfwit.
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2013/09/can-you-just-stop-working-me.html