Back Again, Again

Gone But Have Returned

Well, I’ve been away for some time but now I’m back. I’ve been working 32 hours each week at my part-time job but it is feeling a little full-timeish recently. For instance, yesterday I worked 13 hours to solve a scheduling problem.  I was scheduled to supervise GED testing in the morning but had inadvertently also been scheduled to work with new immigrants (from Burma, Colombia, Vietnam, Haiti, Ukraine, Puerto Rico, Iraq, Syria, and other places) in the evening. No one else qualified to work with the new immigrants was available so I volunteered to work late. This is part-time????

A Job Commonplace

 My original intent in this little job was to offer a service to underserved populations, get back into the work-world a bit, and encounter a slice of life otherwise invisible to those of us living in middle-class suburbs.

Certainly I’ve seen quite a slice of life not experienced before. Every day I talk to immigrants and Americans at the bottom end of the education ladder. In the past I’ve worked and studied with educational elites. If they are the sun of the academic world then I’m now working in the shadows — with dropouts, screw-ups, the vastly underemployed, and, of course, immigrants just taking their first steps in a new world of unfamiliar customs, a strange language, and without the support of nearby family.

 They come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they are attractive and young like this mother and daughter used by Catholic Charities to raise money. But more often they are people who have lived hard lives full of physical labor yielding little in the way of wealth. 

 

But they want to adopt American values and culture, they want to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of America, they want to be part of America and everything positive it stands for.  

I don’t recognize in these people the political attacks made by politicians and cable news talking heads. They want to work hard for success, they want to speak English so they can join the American economic mainstream, they want their children to grow up as Americans. Their attitudes are a tonic to feeling bad about American prospects.

The Impact of Underemployment

If only that was all there was to this job.  As a part-time job with no benefits it does not attract workers in the middle of building a life-long career. Rather, it attracts intelligent people who are in between jobs or have reached a dead end of some kind in their work or people like me — occasional workers with no career aspirations. Underemployment – the employment of workers with high skill levels in low-wage jobs that do not require such abilities –  tends to lead to workers feeling undervalued and often bored.  A bad combination. In the case of the college where I work now these feelings led one worker to needle another worker to the point she complained about a hostile work environment.  The man doing the needling thought I had some part in her complaint (I didn’t, actually) and now he glares hostilely at me most days as well as not talking to me.

I can live with this I suppose but the atmosphere is ridiculously tense and leads me to wonder why we all just can’t get along, to reference another person at odds with his work environment.

Maybe I’ll just go back to being retired.

This poem by Bob Hicok has reflects what seems to be the attitude of several people I work with now.

After working sixty hours again for what reason

The best job I had was moving a stone
from one side of the road to the other.
This required a permit which required
a bribe. The bribe took all my salary.
Yet because I hadn’t finished the job
I had no salary, and to pay the bribe
I took a job moving the stone
the other way. Because the official
wanted his bribe, he gave me a permit
for the second job. When I pointed out
that the work would be best completed
if I did nothing, he complimented
my brain and wrote a letter
to my employer suggesting promotion
on stationery bearing the wings
of a raptor spread in flight
over a mountain smaller than the bird.
My boss, fearing my intelligence,
paid me to sleep on the sofa
and take lunch with the official
who required a bribe to keep anything
from being done. When I told my parents,
they wrote my brother to come home
from university to be slapped
on the back of the head. Dutifully,
he arrived and bowed to receive
his instruction, at which point
sense entered his body and he asked
what I could do by way of a job.
I pointed out there were stones
everywhere trying not to move,
all it took was a little gumption
to be the man who didn’t move them.
It was harder to explain the intricacies
of not obtaining a permit to not
do this. Just yesterday he got up
at dawn and shaved, as if the lack
of hair on his face has anything
to do with the appearance of food
on an empty table.

        ————— from Insomnia Diary, by Bob Hicok