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Course ReaderEnglish 101Fall 2015Professor Jesse SchwartzCourse Reader for Fall 2015 English 101Table of Contents:The School Days of an Indian Girl3“The Banking Concept of Education,” from Pedagogy of the Oppressed13The New American Slavery22Growth in the ‘Gig Economy’ Fuels Work Force Anxieties36New Economy, New Social Contract40I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave56Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace69Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs79On Goldman Executive Greg Smith’s Brave Departure81On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs83Nickel and Dimed Excerpts86The School Days of an Indian Girl By Zitkala-saChapter One???There were eight in our party of bronzed children who were going East with the missionaries. Among us were three young braves, two tall girls, and we three little ones, Judewin, Thowin, and I.???We had been very impatient to start on our journey to the Red Apple Country, which, we were told, lay a little beyond the great circular horizon of the Western prairie. Under a sky of rosy apples we dreamt of roaming as freely and happily as we had chased the cloud shadows on the Dakota plains. We had anticipated much pleasure from a ride on the iron horse, but the throngs of staring palefaces disturbed and troubled us.???On the train, fair women, with tottering babies on each arm, stopped their haste and scrutinized the children of absent mothers. Large men, with heavy bundles in their hands, halted near by, and riveted their glassy blue eyes upon us.???I sank deep into the corner of my seat, for I resented being watched. Directly in front of me, children who were no larger than I hung themselves upon the backs of their seats, with their bold white faces toward me. Sometimes they took their forefingers out of their mouths and pointed at my moccasined feet. Their mothers, instead of reproving such rude curiosity, looked closely at me, and attracted their children's further notice to my blanket. This embarrassed me, and kept me constantly on the verge of tears.???I sat perfectly still, with my eyes downcast, daring only now and then to shoot long glances around me. Chancing to turn to the window at my side, I was quite breathless upon seeing one familiar object. It was the telegraph pole which strode by at short paces. Very near my mother's dwelling, along the edge of a road thickly bordered with wild sunflowers, some poles like these had been planted by white men. Often I had stopped, on my way down the road, to hold my ear against the pole, and, hearing its low moaning, I used to wonder what the paleface had done to hurt it. Now I sat watching for each pole that glided by to be the last one.???In this way I had forgotten my uncomfortable surroundings, when I heard one of my comrades call out my name. I saw the missionary standing very near, tossing candies and gums into our midst. This amused us all, and we tried to see who could catch the most of the sweetmeats. The missionary's generous distribution of candies was impressed upon my memory by a disastrous result which followed. I had caught more than my share of candies and gums, and soon after our arrival at the school I had a chance to disgrace myself, which, I am ashamed to say, I did.???Though we rode several days inside of the iron horse, I do not recall a single thing about our luncheons.???It was night when we reached the school grounds. The lights from the windows of the large buildings fell upon some of the icicled trees that stood beneath them. We were led toward an open door, where the brightness of the lights within flooded out over the heads of the excited palefaces who blocked the way. My body trembled more from fear than from the snow I trod upon.???Entering the house, I stood close against the wall. The strong glaring light in the large whitewashed room dazzled my eyes. The noisy hurrying of hard shoes upon a bare wooden floor increased the whirring in my ears. My only safety seemed to be in keeping next to the wall. As I was wondering in which direction to escape from all this confusion, two warm hands grasped me firmly, and in the same moment I was tossed high in midair. A rosy-cheeked paleface woman caught me in her arms. I was both frightened and insulted by such trifling. I stared into her eyes, wishing her to let me stand on my own feet, but she jumped me up and down with increasing enthusiasm. My mother had never made a plaything of her wee daughter. Remembering this I began to cry aloud.???They misunderstood the cause of my tears, and placed me at a white table loaded with food. There our party were united again. As I did not hush my crying, one of the older ones whispered to me, "Wait until you are alone in the night."???It was very little I could swallow besides my sobs, that evening.???"Oh, I want my mother and my brother Dawee! I want to go to my aunt!" I pleaded; but the ears of the palefaces could not hear me.???From the table we were taken along an upward incline of wooden boxes, which I learned afterward to call a stairway. At the top was a quiet hall, dimly lighted. Many narrow beds were in one straight line down the entire length of the wall. In them lay sleeping brown faces, which peeped just out of the coverings. I was tucked into bed with one of the tall girls, because she talked to me in my mother tongue and seemed to soothe me.???I had arrived in the wonderful land of rosy skies, but I was not happy, as I had thought I should be. My long travel and the bewildering sights had exhausted me. I fell asleep, heaving deep, tired sobs. My tears were left to dry themselves in streaks, because neither my aunt nor my mother was near to wipe them away.Chapter Two???The first day in the land of apples was a bitter-cold one; for the snow still covered the ground, and the trees were bare. A large bell rang for breakfast, its loud metallic voice crashing through the belfry overhead and into our sensitive ears. The annoying clatter of shoes on bare floors gave us no peace. The constant clash of harsh noises, with an undercurrent of many voices murmuring an unknown tongue, made a bedlam within which I was securely tied. And though my spirit tore itself in struggling for its lost freedom, all was useless.???A paleface woman, with white hair, came up after us. We were placed in a line of girls who were marching into the dining room. These were Indian girls, in stiff shoes and closely clinging dresses. The small girls wore sleeved aprons and shingled hair. As I walked noiselessly in my soft moccasins, I felt like sinking to the floor, for my blanket had been stripped from my shoulders. I looked hard at the Indian girls, who seemed not to care that they were even more immodestly dressed than I, in their tightly fitting clothes. While we marched in, the boys entered at an opposite door. I watched for the three young braves who came in our party. I spied them in the rear ranks, looking as uncomfortable as I felt.???A small bell was tapped, and each of the pupils drew a chair from under the table. Supposing this act meant they were to be seated, I pulled out mine and at once slipped into it from one side. But when I turned my head, I saw that I was the only one seated, and all the rest at our table remained standing. Just as I began to rise, looking shyly around to see how chairs were to be used, a second bell was sounded. All were seated at last, and I had to crawl back into my chair again. I heard a man's voice at one end of the hall, and I looked around to see him. But all the others hung their heads over their plates. As I glanced at the long chain of tables, I caught the eyes of a paleface woman upon me. Immediately I dropped my eyes, wondering why I was so keenly watched by the strange woman. The man ceased his mutterings, and then a third bell was tapped. Every one picked up his knife and fork and began eating. I began crying instead, for by this time I was afraid to venture anything more.???But this eating by formula was not the hardest trial in that first day. Late in the morning, my friend Judewin gave me a terrible warning. Judewin knew a few words of English, and she had overheard the paleface woman talk about cutting our long, heavy hair. Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy. Among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards!???We discussed our fate some moments, and when Judewin said, "We have to submit, because they are strong," I rebelled.???"No, I will not submit! I will struggle first!" I answered.???I watched my chance, and when no one noticed I disappeared. I crept up the stairs as quietly as I could in my squeaking shoes, -- my moccasins had been exchanged for shoes. Along the hall I passed, without knowing whither I was going. Turning aside to an open door, I found a large room with three white beds in it. The windows were covered with dark green curtains, which made the room very dim. Thankful that no one was there, I directed my steps toward the corner farthest from the door. On my hands and knees I crawled under the bed, and cuddled myself in the dark corner.???From my hiding place I peered out, shuddering with fear whenever I heard footsteps near by. Though in the hall loud voices were calling my name, and I knew that even Judewin was searching for me, I did not open my mouth to answer. Then the steps were quickened and the voices became excited. The sounds came nearer and nearer. Women and girls entered the room. I held my breath, and watched them open closet doors and peep behind large trunks. Some one threw up the curtains, and the room was filled with sudden light. What caused them to stoop and look under the bed I do not know. I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly. In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair.???I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit. Since the day I was taken from my mother I had suffered extreme indignities. People had stared at me. I had been tossed about in the air like a wooden puppet. And now my long hair was shingled like a coward's! In my anguish I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me. Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.Chapter 3A short time after our arrival we three Dakotas were playing in the snow drifts. We were all still deaf to the English language, excepting Judéwin, who always heard such puzzling things. One morning we learned through her ears that we were forbidden to fall lengthwise in the snow, as we had been doing, to see our own impressions. However, before many hours we had forgotten the order, and were having great sport in the snow, when a shrill voice called us. Looking up, we saw an imperative hand beckoning us into the house. We shook the snow off ourselves, and started toward the woman as slowly as we dared.Judéwin said: "Now the paleface is angry with us. She is going to punish us for falling into the snow. If she looks straight into your eyes and talks loudly, you must wait until she stops. Then, after a tiny pause, say, 'No.'" The rest of the way we practiced upon the little word "no."As it happened, Thowin was summoned to judgment first. The door shut behind her with a click.Judéwin and I stood silently listening at the keyhole. The paleface woman talked in very severe tones. Her words fell from her lips like crackling embers, and her inflection ran up like the small end of a switch. I understood her voice better than the things she was saying. I was certain we had made her very impatient with us. Judéwin heard enough of the words to realize all too late that she had taught us the wrong reply."Oh, poor Thowin!" she gasped, as she put both hands over her ears.Just then I heard Thowin's tremulous answer, "No."With an angry exclamation, the woman gave her a hard spanking. Then she stopped to say something. Judéwin said it was this: "Are you going to obey my word the next time?"Thowin answered again with the only word at her command, "No."This time the woman meant her blows to smart, for the poor frightened girl shrieked at the top of her voice. In the midst of the whipping the blows ceased abruptly, and the woman asked another question: "Are you going to fall in the snow again?"Thowin gave her bad password another trial. We heard her say feebly, "No! No!"With this the woman hid away her half-worn slipper, and led the child out, stroking her black shorn head. Perhaps it occurred to her that brute force is not the solution for such a problem. She did nothing to Judéwin nor to me. She only returned to us our unhappy comrade, and left us alone in the room.During the first two or three seasons misunderstandings as ridiculous as this one of the snow episode frequently took place, bringing unjustifiable frights and punishments into our little lives.Within a year I was able to express myself somewhat in broken English. As soon as I comprehended a part of what was said and done, a mischievous spirit of revenge possessed me. One day I was called in from my play for some misconduct. I had disregarded a rule which seemed to me very needlessly binding. I was sent into the kitchen to mash the turnips for dinner. It was noon, and steaming dishes were hastily carried into the dining room. I hated turnips, and their odor which came from the brown jar was offensive to me. With fire in my heart, I took the wooden tool that the paleface woman held out to me. I stood upon a step, and, grasping the handle with both hands, I bent in hot rage over the turnips. I worked my vengeance upon them. All were so busily occupied that no one noticed me. I saw that the turnips were in a pulp, and that further beating could not improve them; but the order was, "Mash these turnips," and mash them I would! I renewed my energy; and as I sent the masher into the bottom of the jar, I felt a satisfying sensation that the weight of my body had gone into it.Just here a paleface woman came up to my table. As she looked into the jar, she shoved my hands roughly aside. I stood fearless and angry. She placed her red hands upon the rim of the jar. Then she gave one lift and a stride away from the table. But lo! the pulpy contents fell through the crumbled bottom to the floor! She spared me no scolding phrases that I had earned. I did not heed them. I felt triumphant in my revenge, though deep within me I was a wee bit sorry to have broken the jar.As I sat eating my dinner, and saw that no turnips were served, I whooped in my heart for having once asserted the rebellion within me.Chapter 4Among the legends the old warriors used to tell me were many stories of evil spirits. But I was taught to fear them no more than those who stalked about in material guise. I never knew there was an insolent chieftain among the bad spirits, who dared to array his forces against the Great Spirit, until I heard this white man's legend from a paleface woman.Out of a large book she showed me a picture of the white man's devil. I looked in horror upon the strong claws that grew out of his fur-covered fingers. His feet were like his hands. Trailing at his heels was a scaly tail tipped with a serpent's open jaws. His face was a patchwork: he had bearded cheeks, like some I had seen palefaces wear; his nose was an eagle's bill, and his sharp-pointed ears were pricked up like those of a sly fox. Above them a pair of cow's horns curved upward. I trembled with awe, and my heart throbbed in my throat, as I looked at the king of evil spirits. Then I heard the paleface woman say that this terrible creature roamed loose in the world, and that little girls who disobeyed school regulations were to be tortured by him.That night I dreamt about this evil divinity. Once again I seemed to be in my mother's cottage. An Indian woman had come to visit my mother. On opposite sides of the kitchen stove, which stood in the centre of the small house, my mother and her guest were seated in straight-backed chairs. I played with a train of empty spools hitched together on a string. It was night, and the wick burned feebly. Suddenly I heard some one turn our door-knob from without.My mother and the woman hushed their talk, and both looked toward the door. It opened gradually. I waited behind the stove. The hinges squeaked as the door was slowly, very slowly pushed inward.Then in rushed the devil! He was tall! He looked exactly like the picture I had seen of him in the white man's papers. He did not speak to my mother, because he did not know the Indian language, but his glittering yellow eyes were fastened upon me. He took long strides around the stove, passing behind the woman's chair. I threw down my spools, and ran to my mother. He did not fear her, but followed closely after me. Then I ran round and round the stove, crying aloud for help. But my mother and the woman seemed not to know my danger. They sat still, looking quietly upon the devil's chase after me. At last I grew dizzy. My head revolved as on a hidden pivot. My knees became numb, and doubled under my weight like a pair of knife blades without a spring. Beside my mother's chair I fell in a heap. Just as the devil stooped over me with outstretched claws my mother awoke from her quiet indifference, and lifted me on her lap. Whereupon the devil vanished, and I was awake.On the following morning I took my revenge upon the devil. Stealing into the room where a wall of shelves was filled with books, I drew forth The Stories of the Bible. With a broken slate pencil I carried in my apron pocket, I began by scratching out his wicked eyes. A few moments later, when I was ready to leave the room, there was a ragged hole in the page where the picture of the devil had once been.Chapter 5A loud-clamoring bell awakened us at half past six in the cold winter mornings. From happy dreams of Western rolling lands and unlassoed freedom we tumbled out upon chilly bare floors back again into a paleface day. We had short time to jump into our shoes and clothes, and wet our eyes with icy water, before a small hand bell was vigorously rung for roll call.There were too many drowsy children and too numerous orders for the day to waste a moment in any apology to nature for giving her children such a shock in the early morning. We rushed downstairs, bounding over two high steps at a time, to land in the assembly room.A paleface woman, with a yellow-covered roll book open on her arm and a gnawed pencil in her hand, appeared at the door. Her small, tired face was coldly lighted with a pair of large gray eyes.She stood still in a halo of authority, while over the rim of her spectacles her eyes pried nervously about the room. Having glanced at her long list of names and called out the first one, she tossed up her chin and peered through the crystals of her spectacles to make sure of the answer "Here."Relentlessly her pencil black-marked our daily records if we were not present to respond to our names, and no chum of ours had done it successfully for us. No matter if a dull headache or the painful cough of slow consumption had delayed the absentee, there was only time enough to mark the tardiness. It was next to impossible to leave the iron routine after the civilizing machine had once begun its day's buzzing; and as it was inbred in me to suffer in silence rather than to appeal to the ears of one whose open eyes could not see my pain, I have many times trudged in the day's harness heavy-footed, like a dumb sick brute.Once I lost a dear classmate. I remember well how she used to mope along at my side, until one morning she could not raise her head from her pillow. At her deathbed I stood weeping, as the paleface woman sat near her moistening the dry lips. Among the folds of the bedclothes I saw the open pages of the white man's Bible. The dying Indian girl talked disconnectedly of Jesus the Christ and the paleface who was cooling her swollen hands and feet.I grew bitter, and censured the woman for cruel neglect of our physical ills. I despised the pencils that moved automatically, and the one teaspoon which dealt out, from a large bottle, healing to a row of variously ailing Indian children. I blamed the hard-working, well-meaning, ignorant woman who was inculcating in our hearts her superstitious ideas. Though I was sullen in all my little troubles, as soon as I felt better I was ready again to smile upon the cruel woman. Within a week I was again actively testing the chains which tightly bound my individuality like a mummy for burial.The melancholy of those black days has left so long a shadow that it darkens the path of years that have since gone by. These sad memories rise above those of smoothly grinding school days. Perhaps my Indian nature is the moaning wind which stirs them now for their present record. But, however tempestuous this is within me, it comes out as the low voice of a curiously colored seashell, which is only for those ears that are bent with compassion to hear it.Chapter 6After my first three years of school, I roamed again in the Western country through four strange summers.During this time I seemed to hang in the heart of chaos, beyond the touch or voice of human aid. My brother, being almost ten years my senior, did not quite understand my feelings. My mother had never gone inside of a schoolhouse, and so she was not capable of comforting her daughter who could read and write. Even nature seemed to have no place for me. I was neither a wee girl nor a tall one; neither a wild Indian nor a tame one. This deplorable situation was the effect of my brief course in the East, and the unsatisfactory "teenth" in a girl's years.It was under these trying conditions that, one bright afternoon, as I sat restless and unhappy in my mother's cabin, I caught the sound of the spirited step of my brother's pony on the road which passed by our dwelling. Soon I heard the wheels of a light buckboard, and Dawee's familiar "Ho!" to his pony. He alighted upon the bare ground in front of our house. Tying his pony to one of the projecting corner logs of the low-roofed cottage, he stepped upon the wooden doorstep.I met him there with a hurried greeting, and, as I passed by, he looked a quiet "What?" into my eyes.When he began talking with my mother, I slipped the rope from the pony's bridle. Seizing the reins and bracing my feet against the dashboard, I wheeled around in an instant. The pony was ever ready to try his speed. Looking backward, I saw Dawee waving his hand to me. I turned with the curve in the road and disappeared. I followed the winding road which crawled upward between the bases of little hillocks. Deep water-worn ditches ran parallel on either side. A strong wind blew against my cheeks and fluttered my sleeves. The pony reached the top of the highest hill, and began an even race on the level lands. There was nothing moving within that great circular horizon of the Dakota prairies save the tall grasses, over which the wind blew and rolled off in long, shadowy waves.Within this vast wigwam of blue and green I rode reckless and insignificant. It satisfied my small consciousness to see the white foam fly from the pony's mouth.Suddenly, out of the earth a coyote came forth at a swinging trot that was taking the cunning thief toward the hills and the village beyond. Upon the moment's impulse, I gave him a long chase and a wholesome fright. As I turned away to go back to the village, the wolf sank down upon his haunches for rest, for it was a hot summer day; and as I drove slowly homeward, I saw his sharp nose still pointed at me, until I vanished below the margin of the hilltops.In a little while I came in sight of my mother's house. Dawee stood in the yard, laughing at an old warrior who was pointing his forefinger, and again waving his whole hand, toward the hills. With his blanket drawn over one shoulder, he talked and motioned excitedly. Dawee turned the old man by the shoulder and pointed me out to him."Oh han!" (Oh yes) the warrior muttered, and went his way. He had climbed the top of his favorite barren hill to survey the surrounding prairies, when he spied my chase after the coyote. His keen eyes recognized the pony and driver. At once uneasy for my safety, he had come running to my mother's cabin to give her warning. I did not appreciate his kindly interest, for there was an unrest gnawing at my heart.As soon as he went away, I asked Dawee about something else. "No, my baby sister, I cannot take you with me to the party to-night," he replied. Though I was not far from fifteen, and I felt that before long I should enjoy all the privileges of my tall cousin, Dawee persisted in calling me his baby sister.That moonlight night, I cried in my mother's presence when I heard the jolly young people pass by our cottage. They were no more young braves in blankets and eagle plumes, nor Indian maids with prettily painted cheeks. They had gone three years to school in the East, and had become civilized. The young men wore the white man's coat and trousers, with bright neckties. The girls wore tight muslin dresses, with ribbons at neck and waist. At these gatherings they talked English. I could speak English almost as well as my brother, but I was not properly dressed to be taken along. I had no hat, no ribbons, and no close-fitting gown. Since my return from school I had thrown away my shoes, and wore again the soft moccasins.While Dawee was busily preparing to go I controlled my tears. But when I heard him bounding away on his pony, I buried my face in my arms and cried hot tears.My mother was troubled by my unhappiness. Coming to my side, she offered me the only printed matter we had in our home. It was an Indian Bible, given her some years ago by a missionary. She tried to console me. "Here, my child, are the white man's papers. Read a little from them," she said most piously.I took it from her hand, for her sake; but my enraged spirit felt more like burning the book, which afforded me no help, and was a perfect delusion to my mother. I did not read it, but laid it unopened on the floor, where I sat on my feet. The dim yellow light of the braided muslin burning in a small vessel of oil flickered and sizzled in the awful silent storm which followed my rejection of the Bible.Now my wrath against the fates consumed my tears before they reached my eyes. I sat stony, with a bowed head. My mother threw a shawl over her head and shoulders, and stepped out into the night.After an uncertain solitude, I was suddenly aroused by a loud cry piercing the night. It was my mother's voice wailing among the barren hills which held the bones of buried warriors. She called aloud for her brothers' spirits to support her in her helpless misery. My fingers grew icy cold, as I realized that my unrestrained tears had betrayed my suffering to her, and she was grieving for me.Before she returned, though I knew she was on her way, for she had ceased her weeping, I extinguished the light, and leaned my head on the window sill.Many schemes of running away from my surroundings hovered about in my mind. A few more moons of such a turmoil drove me away to the Eastern school. I rode on the white man's iron steed, thinking it would bring me back to my mother in a few winters, when I should be grown tall, and there would be congenial friends awaiting me.Chapter 7In the second journey to the East I had not come without some precautions. I had a secret interview with one of our best medicine men, and when I left his wigwam I carried securely in my sleeve a tiny bunch of magic roots. This possession assured me of friends wherever I should go. So absolutely did I believe in its charms that I wore it through all the school routine for more than a year. Then, before I lost my faith in the dead roots, I lost the little buckskin bag containing all my good luck.At the close of this second term of three years I was the proud owner of my first diploma. The following autumn I ventured upon a college career against my mother's will.I had written for her approval, but in her reply I found no encouragement. She called my notice to her neighbors' children, who had completed their education in three years. They had returned to their homes, and were then talking English with the frontier settlers. Her few words hinted that I had better give up my slow attempt to learn the white man's ways, and be content to roam over the prairies and find my living upon wild roots. I silenced her by deliberate disobedience.Thus, homeless and heavy-hearted, I began anew my life among strangers.As I hid myself in my little room in the college dormitory, away from the scornful and yet curious eyes of the students, I pined for sympathy. Often I wept in secret, wishing I had gone West, to be nourished by my mother's love, instead of remaining among a cold race whose hearts were frozen hard with prejudice.During the fall and winter seasons I scarcely had a real friend, though by that time several of my classmates were courteous to me at a safe distance.My mother had not yet forgiven my rudeness to her, and I had no moment for letter-writing. By daylight and lamplight, I spun with reeds and thistles, until my hands were tired from their weaving, the magic design which promised me the white man's respect.At length, in the spring term, I entered an oratorical contest among the various classes. As the day of competition approached, it did not seem possible that the event was so near at hand, but it came. In the chapel the classes assembled together, with their invited guests. The high platform was carpeted, and gayly festooned with college colors. A bright white light illumined the room, and outlined clearly the great polished beams that arched the domed ceiling. The assembled crowds filled the air with pulsating murmurs. When the hour for speaking arrived all were hushed. But on the wall the old clock which pointed out the trying moment ticked calmly on.One after another I saw and heard the orators. Still, I could not realize that they longed for the favorable decision of the judges as much as I did. Each contestant received a loud burst of applause, and some were cheered heartily. Too soon my turn came, and I paused a moment behind the curtains for a deep breath. After my concluding words, I heard the same applause that the others had called out.Upon my retreating steps, I was astounded to receive from my fellow students a large bouquet of roses tied with flowing ribbons. With the lovely flowers I fled from the stage. This friendly token was a rebuke to me for the hard feelings I had borne them.Later, the decision of the judges awarded me the first place. Then there was a mad uproar in the hall, where my classmates sang and shouted my name at the top of their lungs; and the disappointed students howled and brayed in fearfully dissonant tin trumpets. In this excitement, happy students rushed forward to offer their congratulations. And I could not conceal a smile when they wished to escort me in a procession to the students' parlor, where all were going to calm themselves. Thanking them for the kind spirit which prompted them to make such a proposition, I walked alone with the night to my own little room.A few weeks afterward, I appeared as the college representative in another contest. This time the competition was among orators from different colleges in our state. It was held at the state capital, in one of the largest opera houses.Here again was a strong prejudice against my people. In the evening, as the great audience filled the house, the student bodies began warring among themselves. Fortunately, I was spared witnessing any of the noisy wrangling before the contest began. The slurs against the Indian that stained the lips of our opponents were already burning like a dry fever within my breast.But after the orations were delivered a deeper burn awaited me. There, before that vast ocean of eyes, some college rowdies threw out a large white flag, with a drawing of a most forlorn Indian girl on it. Under this they had printed in bold black letters words that ridiculed the college which was represented by a "squaw." Such worse than barbarian rudeness embittered me. While we waited for the verdict of the judges, I gleamed fiercely upon the throngs of palefaces. My teeth were hard set, as I saw the white flag still floating insolently in the air.Then anxiously we watched the man carry toward the stage the envelope containing the final decision.There were two prizes given, that night, and one of them was mine!The evil spirit laughed within me when the white flag dropped out of sight, and the hands which furled it hung limp in defeat.Leaving the crowd as quickly as possible, I was soon in my room. The rest of the night I sat in an armchair and gazed into the crackling fire. I laughed no more in triumph when thus alone. The little taste of victory did not satisfy a hunger in my heart. In my mind I saw my mother far away on the Western plains, and she was holding a charge against me.Chapter Two of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “The Banking Concept of Education”By Paolo FreireA careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration -- contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. "Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem." The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of "capital" in the affirmation "the capital of Para is Belem," that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil.Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated account. Worse yet, it turns them into "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teachers. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teachers she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher’s existence -- but unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.The raison d'etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:the teacher teaches and the students are taught;the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;the teacher talks and the students listen -- meekly;the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the student's creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their "humanitarianism" to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in "changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them," (1) for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this the oppressors use the banking concept of education in conjunction with a paternalistic social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of "welfare recipients." They are treated as individual cases, as marginal persons who deviate from the general configuration of a "good, organized and just" society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society which must therefore adjust these "incompetent and lazy" folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be "integrated," "incorporated" into the healthy society that they have "forsaken."The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not "marginals," are not living "outside" society. They have always been "inside" the structure which made them "beings for others." The solution is not to 'integrate" them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become "beings for themselves." Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors' purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientizacao.The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never propose to students that they critically consider reality. It will deal instead with such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat, and insist upon the importance of learning that, on the contrary, Roger gave green grass to the rabbit. The "humanism" of the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons -- the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human.Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly (for there are innumerable well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are serving only to dehumanize), fail to perceive that the deposits themselves contain contradictions about reality. But sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to domesticate reality. They may discover through existential experience that their present way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human. They may perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation. If men and women are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation.But the humanist revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibility to materialize. From the outset, her efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in people and their creative power. To achieve this, they must be partners of the students in their relations with them.The banking concept does not admit to such partnership -- and necessarily so. To resolve the teacher-student contradiction, to exchange the role of depositor, prescriber, domesticator, for the role of student among students would be to undermine the power of oppression and serve the cause of liberation.Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator. In this view, the person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty "mind" passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside. For example, my desk, my books, my coffee cup, all the objects before me, -- as bits of the world which surround me -- would be "inside" me, exactly as I am inside my study right now. This view makes no distinction between being accessible to consciousness and entering consciousness. The distinction, however, is essential: the objects which surround me are simply accessible to my consciousness, not located within it. I am aware of them, but they are not inside me.It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educator's role is to regulate the way the world "enters into" the students. The teacher's task is to organize a process which already occurs spontaneously, to "fill" the students by making deposits of information which he of she considers to constitute true knowledge. (2) And since people "receive" the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still, and adapt them to the world. The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better 'fit" for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited for the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created and how little they question it.The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant majority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to their own purposes), the more easily the minority can continue to prescribe. The theory and practice of banking education serve this end quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading requirements, (3) the methods for evaluating "knowledge," the distance between the teacher and the taught, the criteria for promotion: everything in this ready-to-wear approach serves to obviate thinking.The bank-clerk educator does not realize that there is no true security in his hypertrophied role, that one must seek to live with others in solidarity. One cannot impose oneself, nor even merely co-exist with one's students. Solidarity requires true communication, and the concept by which such an educator is guided fears and proscribes communication.Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher's thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students' thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.Because banking education begins with a false understanding of men and women as objects, it cannot promote the development of what Fromm calls "biophily," but instead produces its opposite: "necrophily."While life is characterized by growth in a structured functional manner, the necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things. . . . Memory, rather than experience; having, rather than being, is what counts' The necrophilous person can relate to an object -- a flower or a person -- only if he possesses it; hence a threat to his possession is a threat to himself, if he loses possession he loses contact with the world. . . . He loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life. (4)Oppression --overwhelming control -- is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women and men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power.When their efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they find themselves unable to use their faculties, people suffer. "This suffering due to impotence is rooted in the very fact that the human has been disturbed." (5) But the inability to act which people's anguish also causes them to reject their impotence, by attempting “. . . .to restore [their] capacity to act. But can [they], and how? One way is to submit to and identify with a person or group having power. By this symbolic participation in another person's life, (men have] the illusion of acting, when in reality [they] only submit to and become a part of those who act.” (6)Populist manifestations perhaps best exemplify this type of behavior by the oppressed, who, by identifying with charismatic leaders, come to feel that they themselves are active and effective. The rebellion they express as they emerge in the historical process is motivated by that desire to act effectively. The dominant elites consider the remedy to be more domination and repression, carried out in the name of freedom, order, and social peace (that is, the peace of the elites). Thus they can condemn -- logically, from their point of view -- "the violence of a strike by workers and [can] call upon the state in the same breath to use violence in putting down the strike." (7)Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression. This accusation is not made in the naive hope that the dominant elites will thereby simply abandon the practice. Its objective is to call the attention of true humanists to the fact that they cannot use banking educational methods in the pursuit of liberation, for they would only negate that very pursuit. Nor may a revolutionary society inherit these methods from an oppressor society. The revolutionary society which practices banking education is either misguided or mistrusting of people. In either event, it is threatened by the specter of reaction.Unfortunately, those who espouse the cause of liberation are themselves surrounded and influenced by the climate which generates the banking concept, and often do not perceive its true significance or its dehumanizing power. Paradoxically, then, they utilize this same instrument of alienation in what they consider an effort to liberate. Indeed, some "revolutionaries" brand as "innocents," "dreamers," or even "reactionaries" those who would challenge this educational practice. But one does not liberate people by alienating them. Authentic liberation-the process of humanization-is not another deposit to be made in men. Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings in their relations with the world. "Problem-posing" education, responding to the essence of consciousness --intentionality -- rejects communiques and embodies communication. It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian split" --consciousness as consciousness of consciousness.Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information. It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far from being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actors -- teacher on the one hand and students on the other. Accordingly, the practice of problem-posing education entails at the outset that the teacher-student contradiction to be resolved. Dialogical relations -- indispensable to the capacity of cognitive actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object --are otherwise impossible.Indeed problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction. Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process, arguments based on "authority" are no longer valid; in order to function authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are "owned" by the teacher.The banking concept (with its tendency to dichotomize everything) distinguishes two stages in the action of the educator. During the first he cognizes a cognizable object while he prepares his lessons in his study or his laboratory; during the second, he expounds to his students about that object. The students are not called upon to know, but to memorize the contents narrated by the teacher. Nor do the students practice any act of cognition, since the object towards which that act should be directed is the property of the teacher rather than a medium evoking the critical reflection of both teacher and students. Hence in the name of the "preservation of and knowledge" we have a system which achieves neither true knowledge nor true culture.The problem-posing method does not dichotomize the activity of teacher-student: she is not "cognitive" at one point and "narrative" at another. She is always "cognitive," whether preparing a project or engaging in dialogue with the students. He does not regard objects as his private property, but as the object of reflection by himself and his students. In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students -- no longer docile listeners -- are now--critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own. The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge at the level of the logos. Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated. Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed.Education as the practice of freedom -- as opposed to education as the practice of domination -- denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it.La conscience et le monde sont dormes dun meme coup: exterieur par essence a la conscience, le monde est, par essence relatif a elle. (8)In one of our culture circles in Chile, the group was discussing (based on a codification) the anthropological concept of culture. In the midst of the discussion, a peasant who by banking standards was completely ignorant said: "Now I see that without man there is no world." When the educator responded: "Let's say, for the sake of argument, that all the men on earth were to die, but that the earth remained, together with trees, birds, animals, rivers, seas, the stars. . . wouldn't all this be a world?" "Oh no," the peasant replied . "There would be no one to say: 'This is a world'."The peasant wished to express the idea that there would be lacking the consciousness of the world which necessarily implies the world of consciousness. I cannot exist without a non-I. In turn, the not-I depends on that existence. The world which brings consciousness into existence becomes the world of that consciousness. Hence, the previously cited affirmation of Sartre: "La conscience et le monde sont dormes d'un meme coup."As women and men, simultaneously reflecting on themselves and world, increase the scope of their perception, they begin to direct their observations towards previously inconspicuous phenomena:In perception properly so-called, as an explicit awareness [Gewahren], I am turned towards the object, to the paper, for instance. I apprehend it as being this here and now. The apprehension is a singling out, every object having a background in experience. Around and about the paper lie books, pencils, inkwell and so forth, and these in a certain sense are also "perceived," perceptually there, in the "field of intuition"; but whilst I was turned towards the paper there was no turning in their direction, nor any apprehending of them, not even in a secondary sense. They appeared and yet were not singled out, were posited on their own account. Every perception of a thing has such a zone of background intuitions or background awareness, if "intuiting" already includes the state of being turned towards, and this also is a "conscious experience", or more briefly a "consciousness of" all indeed that in point of fact lies in the co-perceived objective background. (10)That which had existed objectively but had not been perceived in its deeper implications (if indeed it was perceived at all) begins to "stand out," assuming the character of a problem and therefore of challenge. Thus, men and women begin to single out elements from their "background awareness" and to reflect upon them. These elements are now objects of their consideration, and, as such, objects of their action and cognition.In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation. Although the dialectical relations of women and men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action.Once again, the two educational concepts and practices under analysis come into conflict. Banking education (for obvious reasons) attempts, by mythicizing reality, to conceal certain facts which explain the way human beings exist in the world; problem-posing education sets itself the task of demythologizing. Banking education resists dialogue; problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality. Banking education treats students as objects of assistance; problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers. Banking education inhibits creativity and domesticates (although it cannot completely destroy) the intentionality of consciousness by isolating consciousness from the world, thereby denying people their ontological and historical vocation of becoming more fully human. Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of persons as beings only when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation. In sum: banking theory and practice, as immobilizing and fixating forces, fail to acknowledge men and women as historical beings; problem-posing theory and practice take the people's historicity as their starting point.Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings the process of becoming -- as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality. Indeed, in contrast to other animals who are unfinished, but not historical, people know themselves to be unfinished; they are aware of their incompletion. In this incompletion and this awareness lie the very roots of education as an human manifestation. The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity.Education is thus constantly remade in the praxis. In order to be, it must become. Its "duration" (in the Bergsonian meaning of the word) is found in the interplay of the opposites permanence and change. The banking method emphasizes permanence and becomes problem-posing education -- which accepts neither a "well-behaved" present nor a predetermined future -- roots itself in the dynamic present and becomes revolutionary.Problem-posing education is revolutionary futurity. Hence it is prophetic (and as such, hopeful). Hence, it corresponds to the historical nature of humankind. Hence, it affirms women and men as who transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead, for whom immobility represents a fatal threat for whom looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future. Hence, it identifies with the movement which engages people as beings aware of their incompletion -- an historical movement which has its point of departure, its Subjects and its objective.The point of departure of the movement lies in the people themselves. But since people do not exist apart from the world, apart from reality, the movement must begin with the human-world relationship. Accordingly, the point of departure must always be with men and women in the "here and now," which constitutes the situation within which they are submerged, from which they emerge, and in which they intervene. Only by starting from this situation -- which determines their perception of it -- can they begin to move. To do this authentically they must perceive their state not as fated and unalterable, but merely as limiting - and therefore challenging.Whereas the banking method directly or indirectly reinforces men's fatalistic perception of their situation, the problem-posing method presents this very situation to them as a problem. As the situation becomes the object of their cognition, the naive or magical perception which produced their fatalism gives way to perception which is able to perceive itself even as it perceives reality, and can thus be critically objective about that reality.A deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation. Resignation gives way to the drive for transformation and inquiry, over which men feel themselves to be in control. If people, as historical beings necessarily engaged with other people in a movement of inquiry, did not control that movement, it would be (and is) a violation of their humanity. Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.This movement of inquiry must be directed towards humanization -- the people's historical vocation. The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity; therefore it cannot unfold in the antagonistic relations between oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so. Attempting to be more human, individualistically, leads to having more, egotistically, a form of dehumanization. Not that it is not fundamental to have in order to be human. Precisely because it is necessary, some men's having must not be allowed to constitute an obstacle to others' having, must not consolidate the power of the former to crush the latter.Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as fundamental that the people subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation. To that end, it enables teachers and students to become Subjects of the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism and an alienating intellectualism; it also enables people to overcome their false perception of reality. The world -- no longer something to be described with deceptive words -- becomes the object of that transforming action by men and women which results in their humanization.Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the oppressor. No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why? While only a revolutionary society can carry out this education in systematic terms, the revolutionary leaders need not take full power before they can employ the method. In the revolutionary process, the leaders cannot utilize the banking method as an interim measure, justified on grounds of expediency, with intention of later behaving in a genuinely revolutionary fashion. They must be revolutionary -- that is to say, dialogical -- from the outset.The New American Slavery: Invited to the U.S., Foreign Workers Find A Nightmare Ken Bensinger, Jessica Garrison, and Ben King / BuzzFeed News Jul. 24, 2015The H-2 visa program invites foreign workers to do some of the most menial labor in America. Then it leaves them at the mercy of their employers. Thousands of these workers have been abused — deprived of their fair pay, imprisoned, starved, beaten, raped, and threatened with deportation if they dare complain. And the government says it can do little to help. A BuzzFeed News investigation.MAMOU, Louisiana — Travis Manuel and his twin brother, Trey, were shopping at Walmart near this rural town when they met two Mexican women who struck them as sweet. Using a few words of Spanish he had picked up from his Navy days, Travis asked the two women out on a double date.Around midnight the following Saturday, when they finished their shift at a seafood processing plant, Marisela Valdez and Isy Gonzalez waited for their dates at the remote compound where they lived and worked.As soon as they got in the Manuel brothers’ car, the women began saying something about “patrón angry,” Travis recalled. While he was trying to puzzle out what they meant, his brother, who was driving, interrupted: “Dude,” Trey said. “There’s someone following us.”Trey began to take sudden turns on the country roads threading through the rice paddies that dot the area, trying to lose the pickup truck behind them. Finally, they saw a police car.“I said, we’re gonna flag down this cop” for help, Travis recalled. “But the cop pulled us over, lights on, and told us not to get out of the vehicle,” Trey added, noting that the pickup pulled up and the driver began conferring with the police.An officer asked Trey and his brother for ID. From the backseat, their dates began to cry.Travis tried to reassure them. They weren’t doing anything wrong, he said, and they were in the United States. “I was like, ‘There’s no way they are going to take you away.’”He was wrong.The man in the truck was the women’s boss, Craig West, a prominent farmer in the heart of Cajun country. As Sgt. Robert McGee later wrote in a police report, West said that Valdez and Gonzalez were “two of his girls,” and he asked the cops to haul the women in and “scare the girls.”The police brought the women, who were both in their twenties, to the station house. McGee told them they couldn’t leave West’s farm without permission, warning that they could wind up dead. To drive home the point, an officer later testified, McGee stood over Valdez and Gonzalez and pantomimed cutting his throat. He also brandished a Taser at them and said they could be deported if they ever left West’s property without his permission.A little after 2 in the morning, they released the women to West for the 15-minute drive through the steamy night to his compound — a place where, the women and the Mexican government say, workers were stripped of their passports and assigned to sleep in a filthy, foul-smelling trailer infested with insects and mice. Valdez and Gonzalez also claimed that they and other women were imprisoned, forced to work for little pay, and frequently harassed by West, who demanded to see their breasts and insisted that having sex with him was their only way out of poverty.These women were not undocumented immigrants working off the books. They were in the United States legally, as part of a government program that allows employers to import foreign labor for jobs they say Americans won’t take — but that also allows those companies to control almost every aspect of their employees’ lives.Each year, more than 100,000 people from countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, the Philippines, and South Africa come to America on what is known as an H-2 visa to perform all kinds of menial labor across a wide spectrum of industries: cleaning rooms at luxury resorts and national parks, picking fruit, cutting lawns and manicuring golf courses, setting up carnival rides, trimming and planting trees, herding sheep, or, in the case of Valdez, Gonzalez, and about 20 other Mexican women in 2011, peeling crawfish at L.T. West Inc.A BuzzFeed News investigation — based on government databases and investigative files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of court documents, as well as more than 80 interviews with workers and employers — shows that the program condemns thousands of employees each year to exploitation and mistreatment, often in plain view of government officials charged with protecting them. All across America, H-2 guest workers complain that they have been cheated out of their wages, threatened with guns, beaten, raped, starved, and imprisoned. Some have even died on the job. Yet employers rarely face any significant consequences.Many of those employers have since been approved to bring in more guest workers. Some have even been rewarded with lucrative government contracts. Almost none have ever been charged with a crime.In interview after interview, current and former guest workers — often on the verge of tears — used the same word to describe their experiences: slavery.“We live where we work, and we can’t leave,” said Olivia Guzman Garfias, who has been coming to Louisiana as a guest worker from her small town in Mexico since 1997. “We are tied to the company. Our visas are in the company’s name. If the pay and working conditions aren’t as we wish, who can we complain to? We are like modern-day slaves.”In a statement, the Department of Labor, which is charged with protecting workers and vetting employers seeking visas, said that the H-2 programs “are part of a wider immigration system that is widely acknowledged to be broken, contributing to an uneven playing field where employers who exploit vulnerable workers undermine those who do the right thing.”The number of H-2 visas issued has grown by more than 50% over the past five years. Unlike the better-known H-1B visa program, which brings skilled workers such as computer programmers into America’s high-tech industries, the H-2 program is for the economy’s bottom rung, designed to make it easier for employers to fill temporary, unskilled positions. Proponents argue that it gives foreigners a chance to work here legally, send home much-needed dollars, and return to their families when the job is over.In March, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce defended the guest worker program before a Senate committee, noting that such “temporary workers are needed in lesser-skilled occupations that are both seasonal and year round,” and that aspects of the program are “critical” to “American workers, the local community, and companies that provide goods and services to these seasonal businesses.”Tens of thousands of companies, ranging from family businesses to huge corporations, have participated in the program since it took its modern form in 1986. Employers pledge to pay their workers a set rate, which can range from the federal minimum wage to a higher “prevailing wage” that varies from state to state and job to job. As for the employees, they can only work for the company that sponsored their visa. They are legally barred from seeking other employment and must leave the country when the job ends.For some people, such as the hundreds of soccer coaches who youth sports camps bring in every year from the United Kingdom and elsewhere, an H-2 visa offers an opportunity to make some money while spending time in another country. Many companies treat their H- 2 employees well, and many guest workers interviewed for this article said they are grateful for the program.But public records and interviews reveal how easy it is for companies that sponsor H-2 visas to abuse their employees.Many companies pay their guest workers less than the law mandates. Others pay them for fewer hours than they actually work, or force them to work extremely long hours without overtime. Some, on the other hand, offer them far less work than promised, at times leaving workers without enough money to buy food. Employers also whittle away at wages by imposing an array of prohibited fees — starting with bribes to get the jobs in the first place, which can leave workers so deep in debt that they are effectively indentured servants.Guest workers often toil in conditions that are unsafe, inhumane, or simply exhausting, wielding dangerous machinery beneath a scorching sun or standing for hours on end in sweltering factories. And at the end of their shift, many workers retire to grim, squalid quarters that might be little more than a grimy mattress on the floor of a crowded, vermin- infested trailer. For such housing, some employers charge workers extortionate rent.Though it is against the law, employers often exert additional control over guest workers by confiscating their passports, without which many foreign workers, fearful of being deported, feel unsafe leaving the worksite. Some employers extend their influence over workers to extremes, screening their mail, preventing them from receiving visitors, banning radios and newspapers, or even coercing them to attend religious services they don’t believe in. Some foremen sexually harass female workers, who live in constant fear of losing their jobs and being deported.The world has become accustomed in recent years to hearing of guest worker abuse in countries such as Qatar or Thailand. But this is happening in the United States. And the problem is not just a few unscrupulous employers. The very structure of the visa program enables widespread abuse and exploitation.The way H-2 visas shackle workers to a single employer leaves them almost no leverage to demand better treatment. The rules also make it easy to banish a worker to her home country at the boss’s whim. And guest workers tend to be so poor — and, often, so indebted from the recruitment fees they paid to get the job in the first place — that they feel they have no choice but to endure even the worst abuses.Court documents and interviews revealed numerous cases where workers who tried to speak out said they received threats to their lives. Many others claimed they were blacklisted by employers, losing the opportunity to get jobs that, however miserable, give them more money than they could earn in their own countries.The government has been warned repeatedly over almost two decades that the guest worker program is deeply troubled, with more than a dozen official reports excoriating it for everything from widespread visa fraud to rampant worker abuse, and even calling for its elimination. Since 2005, Labor Department investigation records show, at least 800 employers have subjected more than 23,000 H-2 guest workers to violations of the federal laws designed to protect them from exploitation, including more than 16,000 instances of H-2 workers being paid less than the promised wage.Those numbers almost certainly understate the problem, as the federal government doesn’t check up on the vast majority of companies that bring guest workers into this country. The Labor Department noted in its statement that it has limited resources, with only about 1,000 investigators to enforce protections for all 135 million workers in the U.S. Still, it said, it recovered more than $2.6 million in back wages owed to roughly 4,500 H-2 workers in the 2014 fiscal year. In that year, the agency said, it found violations in 82% of the H-2 visa cases it investigated.Kalen Fraser, a former investigator for the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division who specialized in H-2 visa cases, said that while some companies stumble over complex rules, a substantial portion “maliciously” violate worker protection laws. “There’s a big power imbalance there, and the worst guys get away with everything.”Route 95 between Chataignier and Mamou, Louisiana, winds through endless acres of rice paddies that teem with crawfish after the grain is reaped. The country is dead flat, and stretching to the horizon there’s little but lush fields of green, dotted with glassy brown pools beneath a heavy sky. Near a bend in the two-lane highway sits the L.T. West crawfish plant.It was there that Valdez, Gonzalez, and the other women, tired and stiff from a crowded, 1,500-mile ride up from Mexico, stepped out into the dark, wet heat on the night of April 9, 2011.Valdez said it was need that had brought her there — need and principle. “I wanted to work and make money and do it in a legal way,” she said in a recent interview, “so I didn’t have to cross the border illegally or undocumented.”She had left behind her 5-year-old son and her 8-year-old daughter, along with her mother, who was taking care of the children, and her dream — at least for a time — of finishing her college degree. She was 26. It was her first time away from home.She landed in one of America’s most distinctive and insular regions. Acadiana stretches from the bayous near the Gulf of Mexico up through Lafayette and into the Cajun Prairie north of Interstate 10. It is a place where Spanish moss drips so thick off trees they can hardly be discerned, French is still many people’s first language, zydeco music blares from the radio, and social life for generations has centered around great feasts of boiled crab, shrimp, and crawfish.Valdez and Gonzalez claim they were assigned, along with three other of the youngest women, to an isolated trailer that lacked safe drinking water. Valdez was terrified — of the dark, of the sounds of animals in the brush, of snakes. The women talked that first night about their goals and what their families would do with the money they earned.“I felt very strange,” she said. “Being with all these people I didn’t know, having to leave behind my life, my family, my things, in a country I had never been in before. I felt very sad. I felt sad, but the truth is the need we had at that moment was so great that we had to do it, we had to be there.”Valdez lay awake, she said, “thinking about where I was, how did I get there, why I was in this position.” A few hours later, the women were rousted and sent to peel crawfish.After hatching and maturing in the shallow ponds that spool over the landscape, the crustaceans — rusty brown and squirming — are plucked from baited traps. The “mudbugs” are stuffed in mesh sacks, heaved into the back of pickup trucks, then cooked in steel baths until they are bright red.Then the women go to work. Still steaming, the crawfish are dumped by the basketful onto long metal tables. The workers crowd in, standing shoulder to shoulder or perching on stools. Hour after hour, they pull the heads off and extract the tail meat.The hot crawfish “would hurt your fingers,” Valdez said. But the worst thing was the smell. “It stung your nostrils,” she said. “The smell stuck to everything. We carried it home with us.”In its application for H-2 visas, filed in November 2010, L.T. West committed to pay the workers $9.10 an hour, plus overtime. The company also promised the Labor Department it would issue detailed pay statements.The women soon learned, however, that they would sometimes be paid for each pound of crawfish tails they peeled. Federal law allows guest workers to be paid a piece rate, but only if the employer makes up any difference between that and the promised hourly wage.L.T. West did not backfill their wages, according to the women’s complaint. Some weeks, they said, their piece-rate wages amounted to the equivalent of less than $4 an hour. Sometimes they were given only about 15 hours of work per week.Craig West denies that he shorted the women. But notes from a Labor Department investigation show that he did not keep proper pay records, making it impossible to verify that assertion.The women also said West forbade them from leaving his plant and ordered one of his employees to confiscate their passports and visas — their only proof, in a region that takes border enforcement seriously, that they were in the U.S. legally. On numerous occasions, they said, West threatened to call police or immigration authorities.A few days after the disastrous double date, two of the women claimed, West pointed a gun at Valdez, the red beam of his laser scope directly on her face, and told her never to leave the work camp.West, a solidly built man with a honey drawl, vehemently denied that he mistreated his workers, taking particular umbrage at the allegation involving the gun. He is a hunting instructor and runs the church skeet shoot, he said in an interview outside his home in June, and would never recklessly point a weapon at anyone.The real story, West said, is that Valdez, Gonzalez, and some of the other women in their trailer were “wild,” partying and arranging to have cases of beer dropped off at his property. In a sworn deposition, one L.T. West employee said the women went out often and sometimes came back after “having been drinking.” Another said that West did not get angry if they went out without his permission.West also denied trying to use the Mamou police to intimidate the women. He called them, he said, because some of the workers had expressed fears that a rapist would sneak onto the property.Police officers, however, tell a different story. Two testified that when West arrived at the station that night, he was in a state of fury. In a sworn deposition in 2012, Mamou Police Sgt. Lucas Lavergne described West’s behavior this way: “He said — like looking toward the girls, he said, ‘Mucho fuck you. Mucho kill you.’”What happened that night, Travis said, was “nuts” and “wrong.” Reflecting on West’s and the police’s attitude toward the women, he said, “It seemed like we had messed with his property, like we had stolen a horse or did damage to his property.”His brother Trey added, “Shortest date ever.”By scouring legal and administrative documents, BuzzFeed News identified more than 800 workers over the last 10 years who complained to authorities that they had their passports confiscated, were held against their will, were physically attacked, or were threatened with harm for trying to leave their housing or job sites. The number who experienced these abuses but did not speak out may be much higher.In January 2013, a group of Mexican forestry workers said that they had been held at gunpoint in the mountains north of Sacramento and forced to work 13 hours a day and handle chemicals that made them vomit and peeled their skin, according to a search warrant affidavit filed in federal court last year by a Department of Homeland Security investigator.Their employer, a small forestry contractor out of Idaho called Pure Forest, had also illegally charged the workers about $2,000 apiece for their visas, paid for out of deductions from their paychecks, the workers said. After additional fees were levied for food, they said, they were sometimes left with less than $100 for two weeks of grueling work. In one case, a worker said he was charged $100 for a pair of used shoes held together with nails.“Two of Pure Forest’s foremen ... reportedly carried firearms and threatened to shoot workers in the head and leave them in the woods if they did not work harder,” the DHS special agent, Eugene Kizenko, wrote. He added that “multiple workers heard these threats.”Five workers who escaped sued Pure Forest in federal court last year. They filed the suit, which is ongoing, using pseudonyms; the complaint states that the workers fear “retaliation due to threats of bodily injury or death made by defendants.”Pure Forest denied the allegations in court papers and in an interview. “Completely false,” Owen Wadsworth said by phone. His father, Jeff, owns the company, and Owen was also named in the workers’ suit. “We’ve had nothing but good working relationships with all our employees,” he said. The H-2 program “seems more set up to put the company, the owner or the employer, in a bad situation,” he added, “and whatever allegations or negative that come up, it’s treated almost like it’s true, and they’ll assume that you’re the bad guy.”A particularly effective force to keep workers in line is debt.Interviews and court records reviewed by BuzzFeed News turned up hundreds of workers who claimed they were forced to pay for their visas. That’s illegal; companies are responsible for making sure their labor brokers don’t charge bribes. But diplomats from the U.S. and Mexico say such bribes are rampant. In cables released by WikiLeaks, U.S. consular officials in Mexico, Jamaica, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic describe reports of recruiters demanding fees for visas and also committing fraud in order to get visas approved.Jacob Joseph Kadakkarappally was eager to come from India to the U.S. to work as a welder at the Pascagoula, Mississippi, shipyard of Signal International in late 2006. But he didn’t have the approximately $14,500 recruiters demanded for the visa and other fees, so first he pawned the gold bangles his wife wore every day on her wrist. Then he hocked a gold chain that, he later testified, “is considered to be holy, a symbol of wedding.”Other Signal workers from India, who had been misled into thinking they would get green cards, went deeply into debt or sold property to pay fees. Once the workers arrived in the U.S., Signal housed them in a labor camp, up to 24 men to a trailer, for which Signal charged them each $1,050 a month. After Kadakkarappally and others began asking for better working and housing conditions, security guards raided his trailer early one morning and managers told him he was fired.“I almost lost my breath,” Kadakkarappally testified. He pleaded with managers, he said, recounting his huge debts and telling them “that I would not be able to support my family.” A fellow worker slit his wrist in a failed suicide attempt.Kadakkarappally and four other welders eventually sued Signal, and in February a federal jury in New Orleans awarded them $14 million. This month, the Southern Poverty Law Center announced that Signal had agreed to a $20 million settlement that resolves those claims and those of 200 additional Indian welders in 11 related lawsuits. Signal, which filed for bankruptcy to carry out the settlement, also agreed to apologize to its guest workers. Signal did not respond to requests for comment.Such a victory is extremely rare. Very few H-2 workers have the resources or support to file a lawsuit. Many workers become prisoners of their debt. The best way to pay it off is with a job in the U.S. — and the only job H-2 workers can legally get is the one with the company that sponsors their visas.“In so many cases, these workers end up being abused,” said Jennifer Gordon, a law professor at Fordham University and a former MacArthur Fellow who has conducted research into the discrimination against and mistreatment of immigrant workers. “In routine ways, all the time, the workers pay fees, they are threatened, their families are threatened. And the employer knows that if you get workers through that program, they’re not going to complain.”That stark power imbalance can be downright dangerous, contributing to on-the-job injuries and even deaths.Leonardo Espinabarro Telles entered the country on an H-2 visa in April 2011, to work for Crystal Rock Amusements as it moved from Pennsylvania to Vermont and back, staging that most American of pastimes: county fairs. The Mexico native had been on the job about three months, living in a crowded converted horse trailer without a working bathroom, when the crew of 17 guest workers arrived in northern Vermont for the Lamoille County Field Days.A little before 3 in the afternoon on Tuesday, July 19, Espinabarro went to retrieve electrical connectors from a trailer housing the hulking Caterpillar generator that powered the carnival rides.Inside, two feet separated the trailer wall from the generator’s massive spinning fan blades. The protective guard over the blades had either broken or been removed. At ankle level, pulleys and fan belts were also exposed.Espinabarro was alone, so no one witnessed what happened, but co-workers heard cries for help. One man rushed to the trailer to see Espinabarro standing upright, then watched him collapse and fall out of the trailer. His clothing had gotten tangled in the machinery, and the fan blades had ripped through his body. From neck to waist, his back was carved open, his organs spilling out. He was dead by the time he reached the hospital.Inspectors from the Vermont Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that Crystal Rock management knew the fan blades were unguarded at the time of the accident but had not told the workers. No one had posted proper warning signs. Nor had they delivered safety training in any language.Vermont OSHA levied $114,550 in fines. The case is still open, because Crystal Rock has not paid.Asked whether he had ever trained his guest workers how to be safe around heavy equipment, Crystal Rock’s owner, Arthur Gillette, told an inspector: “How can you train these guys?” adding, “Do you train someone to eat a hot dog?”Gillette, whose company has been certified for at least 358 visas since 2002, added that Mexican workers were “mechanically inclined and would figure things out” and that if the investigator had ever been to the country she would understand that. He explained: “The streets of Mexico, cars were stolen and disassembled with just the frames left on the street.”The Labor Department conducted its own investigation following the accident, finding that Gillette routinely underpaid workers and owed more than $60,000 in back wages. This month, the Maine state fire marshal criminally charged Gillette with falsifying physical evidence after an accident on a roller coaster injured three children at a carnival in Waterville in June.Gillette, reached by phone, said the criminal charges in Maine were “unjust” and denied tampering with evidence.He said both the Labor Department and Vermont OSHA investigations of Crystal Rock, which is now out of business, were unfair. “I’ve worked dozens of carnivals and dealt with hundreds of foreign employees,” he added. “The vast majority of the guys that worked for me said I am more than fair. That I owe them nothing. That we are square.”Guest workers in other industries have died after being run over in grisly accidents, or collapsing for unknown reasons. They’ve had limbs amputated and suffered other catastrophic injuries.On-the-job injuries happen to all kinds of employees, of course, but employers’ virtually unchecked sway over H-2 workers — as well as some employers’ attitudes about foreigners — can foster a cavalier attitude toward workplace dangers. It can also keep workers from pointing out safety violations or even reporting injuries.In a 2012 report from the Labor Occupational Health Program at the University of California, Berkeley, researchers surveyed 150 forestry workers in Oregon, about a third of them on H-2 visas, and found that more than 40% had been injured on the job in the previous 12 months. Fifteen of the workers had suffered broken bones, and another 18 had dislocated one or more bones. And yet workers kept quiet about many of their injuries — including more than a quarter of the broken bones and nearly half of the dislocated ones.The report concluded: “They were afraid they would be fired, and they were afraid of otherwise getting in trouble.”Topolobampo occupies a peninsula at the mouth of a bay off the Sea of Cortez in violence-ravaged Sinaloa, the home state of the infamous drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. The sparkling sea along the malecón belies a deep listlessness, more stifling than the tropical heat, that has settled over the town. The seafood plant along the waterfront closed down years ago. Mangy dogs range along barely maintained streets, while a few tiny restaurants with cement floors have almost nothing on the menu. Decent jobs — outside of the drug trade — are hard to find.As much as a third of the population of 6,500 travels to the swamps and prairies of Louisiana every year to catch and process seafood, according to local recruiters. Those who make the trek are colloquially known as “Louisianeros.” The rewards of their work are easy to see: solidly built houses, clean tile floors, modern appliances, and framed degrees from private schools. Less visible are the costs: children who grow up in someone else’s family, because their own parents are working “on the other side.”Fernanda Padilla was just 3 when her mother, Guadalupe, started coming to Louisiana for 10 months a year to process shellfish. “I couldn’t understand,” said Padilla. “I used to tell her, ‘I don’t care. I’ll eat rice and beans every day, but be here with me.’”But at 17, Padilla dropped out of school and decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps to make money. She secured an H-2 visa and arrived at her new job at Bayou Shrimp in April 2009. She was pregnant, but her pay stubs show she worked more than 60 hours some weeks. Forty days after her daughter was born, Padilla was back at work at the plant, leaving her baby with a friend.Padilla, who has since had a second child, worked in the Louisiana shrimp industry for five seasons before losing her job last year. She said she used to worry that, like her own mother, she was abandoning her children in order to provide for them.“Five years working there seemed like no time had passed at all, and my daughter had already grown up and I didn’t even realize it,” Padilla said, adding that she is now cobbling together a living with odd jobs.North of the border, H-2 visas are also important to the economy.Louisiana is the nation’s second-largest seafood-producing state, and its crawfish industry used to rely on local labor. But competition from cheap Asian imports, along with the demand by huge retailers such as Wal-Mart for ever lower prices, have squeezed profit margins and put downward pressure on wages — below the point, producers say, where people in America will take the jobs on a seasonal basis. In the 1990s, processors including Craig West hoped that machines could be built to take over the repetitive task of extracting the tail meat from the crustaceans. But eventually crawfish farmers discovered that the best and cheapest option is a Mexican on an H-2 visa.The visa comes in two types: H-2A for agricultural workers and H-2B for nonagricultural unskilled workers, with varying rules and provisions. While many workers say that regulators don’t do enough to protect them, their employers generally have the opposite complaint. They say they are burdened by endless bureaucratic hurdles and inspectors who ding them for tiny infractions of incomprehensible rules.Ben LeGrange, the general manager of Atchafalaya Crawfish Processing, in Henderson, Louisiana, said most crawfish processors treat their workers well, and “isolated incidents” shouldn’t taint the whole industry. He said he tries to treat guest workers “as an extension of someone in my family” and that without them the whole company, which also employs six American workers, would be in jeopardy.Standing on his expansive lawn beside a riding mower, West, who co-owns the crawfish producer L.T. West with his brother, said he treats his workers well. “My wife got holy water for them,” he said, adding that when they were not working he and his wife, Cathy, drove workers to Walmart or church, and sometimes invited them to relax in the shade of a tree that protects his house from the sun.But seven of his workers, including Valdez and Gonzalez, claim West took a different kind of interest in some of them.Some of their allegations include that he took to bursting into their trailer unexpectedly, even when they were dressing, and called them his “property” and his “Mexican ladies,” according to their complaint. Some of the women recall him saying things such as “mucho booby” and “mexicanas mucho booby,” gesturing for them to lift up their shirts. He instructed one of his other workers to tell the women in Spanish that the only way they could get out of poverty was to accept his propositions, which included requests that they come to his house when his wife was away. In the suit, the women did not allege he actually had sex with them.West, with his wife looking on, flatly denied the allegations, saying the women had made them up.Cut off from their families, often unable to speak English, and beholden to their employers, women with H-2 visas are among the most vulnerable workers in America. Advocates and law enforcement officials say they have logged numerous reports of guest workers being coerced into having sex with their employers or being sexually harassed. Over and over, that abuse involves the threat of deportation — and the loss of desperately needed income.Under such threats, workers describe attempts to control deeply private aspects of their lives, even their religious identity. When they worked at Harvest Time Seafood in Abbeville, Louisiana, Manuela Ruiz and her sister Yadira said workers were compelled to attend an evangelical church with their boss, Kevin Dartez, and his wife. Those who didn’t — even those who said they were Roman Catholic — were threatened with fewer hours, the sisters claimed in interviews. Employees were also ordered to keep their heads down while working, they said, and were forbidden to make eye contact with anyone of the opposite gender.“We couldn’t talk to any men because we were told it’s disrespectful to their religion,” said Manuela, who worked at Harvest Time from 2007 to 2009 and is now back home in Sinaloa, Mexico. “A lot of workers got baptized in their church to ensure they got a visa for the following year,” she added. “It’s ugly to work like that.”They said they never complained to outside authorities about being coerced to change their faith, or about their bosses confiscating their passports, or even about the seeping lesions that formed on their arms and legs that they attributed to chemicals in the crab bath. What finally convinced the sisters to seek outside help was Harvest Time cutting back on the one thing that made the pain and humiliation bearable: their wages. Dartez instructed his foremen to squeeze crabmeat after it had been pulled from shells, Ruiz said, making the juice run out and the meat weigh less. For workers paid by the pound, this meant less money. Particularly galling, she said, was that when the crab was canned, the juice was poured back in.A Labor Department investigation opened in 2011 found that Harvest Time owed workers more than $52,000 in back wages for 167 violations of worker protection laws.Dartez said he invited workers to his church but didn’t coerce them to follow his religious practice. “We weren’t choosing family or church or nothing,” he said in an interview. He did not confiscate passports, he said, though “the problem with giving them their passports, they can skip out anytime they want.”As for crab squeezing, he said it was the only way to stop his workers from adding water to bloat their pay: “They didn’t tell you that they patted their hand in the water bowl and dropped the water on the meat, did they?”In an attempt to help workers who fall victim to abuses, U.S. consular officials hand out pamphlets to guest workers following their visa interviews. Among other information, that literature includes toll-free phone numbers they can call for help.Belinda Flores Shinshillas, an employee of the Mexican Consulate in New Orleans whose job was to protect Mexicans in the U.S., was on duty when a distress call came in from a worker at L.T. West.Flores and a colleague made the four-hour drive to the compound that very day. Recalling her first glimpse of the trailer where Valdez, Gonzalez, and other women stayed, she shook her head. “They didn’t have means to buy food. They didn’t have water to drink,” she said. “Based on the standards of today, those girls were slaves.”The women, Flores recalled, began to sob. “They didn’t believe someone was there to help them,” she said.The Mexican government called a team of lawyers from Chicago, who came to Mamou and met with the women, taking statements and gathering evidence late at night to avoid detection. About a week later, the Mexican consul removed four women from L.T. West, including Valdez and Gonzalez, in another late-night operation. (Gonzalez couldn’t be reached for comment.) Others escaped separately and called a human trafficking hotline. The women together filed suit against L.T. West and the Mamou Police Department in federal district court in Lafayette.Mexico has repeatedly appealed to the U.S. to do more to protect guest workers.In 2003, 2005, and again in 2011, advocates petitioned the Mexican government to intervene on workers’ behalf under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico’s Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare forwarded the complaints to the U.S. Department of Labor but received little or no response. Mexico resubmitted the complaints in 2012, making clear that it considers mistreatment of H-2 workers to be a grave human rights abuse. “The 13th Amendment of the Constitution prohibits all forms of slavery or involuntary servitude, regardless of nationality, and therefore it protects H-2A and H-2B workers,” the Mexican government wrote.It is the job of the U.S. government, the report continued, “to make sure workers are not intimidated, threatened or held against their will.”In response, the Labor Department said, it has taken steps to educate employers of their responsibilities and workers of their rights. Late in 2014 and early this year, it held a series of outreach events for guest workers in 15 states. At some of those events, a spokeswoman said, officials learned of 16 cases that may merit further investigation.If a United States citizen were threatened on the job by a supervisor holding a gun or cornered by her boss while she was getting dressed, she might well go to the police. But H-2 visa holders rarely choose that option.“These are people that work 10 to 14 hours a day,” said Doug Molloy, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Florida who now works as a criminal defense attorney in Fort Myers, Florida. “People that wouldn’t know how to even call the police for help.”But another factor may also be at work: the close relationship that their employers have with local authorities.Even before Star One Staffing, a Miami labor staffing company, brought Filipino workers to the U.S. to clean hotel rooms, its owners informed those workers that the company had tight connections with politicians and police.The company squeezed numerous unpermitted fees from its workers, at times reducing their net pay to less than $1 per hour, employees alleged. They also feared being deported, especially because the company was connected to “powerful people” such as Florida criminal judge Andrew Hague, who is married to the company’s president and who met the workers in the Philippines. In addition, workers said a police officer frequently visited the house where they slept, and they were brought to meet to a staffer for a U.S. congressman. Reached by phone, Judge Hague said he could not comment on the matter, and his wife, Mary Jane Hague, did not respond to requests seeking comment.If workers ever tried to complain or leave, Star One managers “would have our visas revoked or deport us and we could never work in the U.S. again,” Robert Bautista, who shared a house with 40 other workers, said in a sworn declaration. “They were very powerful people and we all knew this.”In Mamou, West told his workers he was friends with local police and made a point of inviting an officer into the trailer where they lived, according to the lawsuit.When the Manuel brothers picked up Valdez and Gonzalez for their date, West called 911. “I asked [Sgt. McGee] why he brought the girls” to the station, Officer Brent Zackery said in a sworn deposition, “and he told me that Mr. West wanted him to scare them because they shouldn’t go out late like they did.”It worked, especially when, Zackery testified, Sgt. McGee threatened that they could be deported and pulled out the Taser. “That really scared the mess out of them,” Zackery said.Zackery also testified that, after the women filed their lawsuit, some of the officers conspired to cover up the Taser incident: If discharge tests were ever administered, they agreed that they would swap out McGee’s Taser with another one. Then they all went to Hooters for lunch. McGee is now Mamou’s police chief. He did not return calls seeking comment.Ten months after the women were detained, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division opened an investigation of L.T. West.The probe, begun in March 2012, was supposed to audit the treatment and pay of H-2 employees at the plant dating back almost two years. Although case files show the department was aware of the women’s lawsuit, the investigator waited until June to visit the plant — by which time crawfish season had ended, and almost all the workers had returned home. The inspector did not visit any worker housing at the crawfish plant.As for Craig West, he told the investigator that he had not kept complete payroll records — not even a daily log of hours worked — and didn’t have home addresses for his employees.In the end, the Department of Labor fined L.T. West $7,200 — not for underpaying or abusing its employees, but for keeping poor records.BuzzFeed News reviewed more than three dozen investigations by the Department of Labor, the arm of the government that is supposed to ensure employers treat guest workers in accordance with the law. In most cases, inspectors interviewed few if any workers, showed up at workplaces only with advance warning, and accepted at face value the employer’s version of events.The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division investigated the Arkansas-based Superior Forestry — the largest forestry contractor in the country, according to the department — at least 15 times between 2000 and 2014. Few of those probes involved any worker interviews, records show. In one case, the inspector had not even been fully trained in applicable H-2 law.In a 2011 probe, investigators did interview workers, but only after setting up a formal visit far in advance with a third-party labor broker that handles Superior’s visa applications. The labor broker arranged for the interview to be conducted at a nearby motel rather than the job site, which inspectors did not visit. Still, they concluded that everything was in order, adding that the labor broker “makes sure all applicable laws are ‘followed to a T.’”None of the investigation reports mentioned that Superior had been sued in 2006 in Tennessee federal court by 2,200 H-2 workers who alleged the company did not pay them the promised wage or overtime; or that those workers were subsequently threatened by Superior agents who said they would report the workers to immigration if they didn’t drop the lawsuit; or that even after the court issued a protective order, a Superior recruiter spooked workers back home in Oaxaca, Mexico, by attending a meeting where legal information was being shared.“I can’t honestly say we do everything right all the time, but we try to,” said John Foley, an operations manager at the company, which has 25 full-time employees but brings in as many as 450 H-2 workers every year. “The laws are very confusing,” he added in a phone interview. “It’s telling that we have a full-time attorney.”The guest workers eventually won a $2.75 million settlement to resolve claims that they’d had millions in back wages stolen over a period of six years. But over the course of the Labor Department’s 15 investigations, the agency pinned only minor violations on the company, ordering Superior to repay its workers a total of just $12,652 in back wages over a dozen years.For many companies, the financial incentive to underpay guest workers far outweighs the risk of getting caught, said Jacob Horwitz, an organizer for the National Guestworker Alliance in New Orleans. Stealing wages “is standard business practice,” he said.The Labor Department, in its statement, noted it has “finite resources” and “must be strategic” in how it deploys them for enforcement. It has sought greater powers to raise wages, prevent unlawful fees and retaliation against workers who speak out, and punish companies that break the law. However, it said, “these efforts have met with legal challenges and Congressional opposition.”In the case of the most egregious violations, the Department of Labor has the option of debarring a company — banning it for up to three years from bringing in guest workers.The department maintains a public list of companies under such censure; the current list has 76 names on it. Employers that do work for the federal government can also be debarred from future contracts.That’s how it works in theory. This March, however, the Government Accountability Office found that the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division failed to conclude more than half its investigations of H-2 employers within the two-year statute of limitations. And many companies that were repeatedly found to abuse workers were nevertheless granted more H-2 visas, lucrative federal contracts, and farm subsidies.Over the previous five years, government investigations found at least 12 firms underpaid H-2 workers by more than $100,000. Yet only one of them was debarred. Five — including an onion producer that had more than 1,400 violations and owed its Mexican workers $2.3 million in back wages — have been certified for more than 2,000 additional visas this year alone. In short, even though the U.S. government determined that these companies stiffed guest workers on a grand scale, it granted them the right to bring in more.Some companies the Labor Department moves to debar nonetheless continue to receive government contracts.Garcia Forest Service was caught multiple times stealing thousands of dollars in wages from guest workers, misleading investigators, and doctoring time sheets to cover it up. “Some of these violations were innocent mistakes,” Garcia’s attorney, Ray Perez, said in an interview. “A lot of the times the investigators have it in their mind that they’re going to nitpick you and get you.”The Labor Department didn’t see it that way and debarred the company from receiving federal contracts for three years starting in March of last year. But so far, the ban has had little if any effect. The Rockingham, North Carolina, company appealed, and while awaiting a final ruling it has been awarded $715,082 in contracts from the U.S. Forest Service, including a $72,147 award early this month to spray herbicide on 529 acres of the Apalachicola National Forest in Florida.During her four years auditing companies with H-2 visas, said Kalen Fraser, the former Wage and Hour Division investigator, she saw terrible abuses. She recalled the agricultural guest workers in western Colorado who slept four to a room in a filthy old roadside motel, cooking on hot plates on the floor and unable to drink the tap water because the plumbing was defective and actually issued electric shocks. “That was really an instance of you feeling horrible because people are just living in really bad conditions,” said Fraser, who now helps employers comply with labor laws.She fined their employer, but did not escalate the case or refer it to law enforcement. Indeed, Fraser said, despite seeing hundreds of serious violations, she never recommended a single case to the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or her own inspector general, all of which can bring criminal actions. “We didn’t do any criminal stuff,” she said. “If you see a problem, you don’t stomp out and say something.” Instead, she said, she and other Labor Department inspectors would ask companies “to agree not to hold people’s passports, not to deduct wages, etc. And hopefully they agree to that.”In January 2013, Valdez, Gonzalez, and the other women reached a final settlement in their lawsuit with L.T. West and the city of Mamou. The city paid Valdez and Gonzalez $20,000 each. L.T. West settled with all seven plaintiffs, but the amount is confidential.Today, Valdez doesn’t want to say where she is living. She declined to discuss the allegations in the lawsuit, or the settlement. She signed a confidentiality agreement. But looking back, she said that a big part of being a guest worker is feeling “vulnerable” and “like we’re not worth anything.”“We make lots of plans; we think this is the thing that is going to change our lives for the better. We have so many illusions about what it’s going to be like,” she said. And then when it’s not, “you get desperate. You feel like there won’t be any more opportunities. You so badly want to go home but not like this, not like a failure. It’s not just your dreams and your illusions. It’s your mom and dad, your kids: ‘Oh my mom is going to bring me this thing,’” but then “having to come back with empty hands.”She continued: “People have asked me whether they should go to the U.S.” on an H-2 visa. “They say they want to go and ask if I can help. But, honestly,” she said, “I just tell them I don’t know anyone who can help.”Growth in the ‘Gig Economy’ Fuels Work Force AnxietiesBy Noam Scheiber, , JULY 12, 2015, When the California Labor Commissioner’s Office ruled last month that an Uber driver was an employee deserving of a variety of workplace protections — and was not, as the company maintained, an independent contractor — it highlighted the divided feelings many Americans have about what is increasingly being called the “gig economy.”On one hand, start-ups like Uber, which is appealing the decision, and Lyft make it possible to conjure up rides on a smartphone in a few seconds’ time.On the other, Uber — which directly employs fewer than 4,000 of the more than 160,000 people in the United States who depend on it for at least part of their livelihood — and similar companies pose a challenge to longstanding notions of what it means to hold a job.As it happens, though, Uber is not so much a labor-market innovation as the culmination of a generation-long trend. Even before the founding of the company in 2009, the United States economy was rapidly becoming an Uber economy writ large, with tens of millions of Americans involved in some form of freelancing, contracting, temping or outsourcing. The decades-long shift to these more flexible workplace arrangements, the venture capitalist Nick Hanauer and the labor leader David Rolf argue in the latest issue of Democracy Journal, is a “transformation that promises new efficiencies and greater flexibility for ‘employers’ and ‘employees’ alike, but which threatens to undermine the very foundation upon which middle-class America was built.”Along with other changes, like declining unionization and advancing globalization, the increasingly arm’s-length nature of employment helps explain why incomes have stagnated and why most Americans remain deeply anxious about their economic prospects six years after the Great Recession ended.Last year, 23 percent of Americans told Gallup they worried that their working hours would be cut back, up from percentages in the low to midteens in the years leading up to the recession. Twenty-four percent said they worried that their wages would be reduced, up from the mid- to high teens before the recession.Even if the economy continues to improve, the lingering malaise will almost certainly be the central issue in next year’s presidential election.On Monday, Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to give a speech outlining her vision for improving the economic fortunes of the middle class. Leading Republicans, like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, have framed their policy ideas as an attempt to solve economic insecurity and the erosion of middle-class incomes.But the tidal wave sweeping through the American economy has already reshaped the political landscape — from the rise of an anti-Wall Street movement on the left to the Tea Party on the right — and is sowing frustration among a large mass of voters.“Whether America will be America or not hinges on whether we have a downward spiral around wages,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, a think tank closely aligned with Mrs. Clinton. “People know things are changing. They don’t feel like anyone has a handle on it. There’s a yearning for a political vision that addresses that.”In retrospect, the Uberization of the economy began innocently enough back in the late 1970s.David Weil, who runs the Wage and Hour Division of the United States Labor Department, describes in his recent book, “The Fissured Workplace,” how investors and management gurus began insisting that companies pare down and focus on what came to be known as their “core competencies,” like developing new goods and services and marketing them.Far-flung business units were sold off. Many other activities — beginning with human resources and then spreading to customer service and information technology — could be outsourced. The corporate headquarters would coordinate among the outsourced workers and monitor their performance.Cost was unquestionably an advantage of the new approach: Workers were typically cheaper when off the corporate payroll than on it, and the arrangement allowed a company to staff up as needed rather than employ a full complement of workers at all times.But simply cutting costs wasn’t the primary motivation. The real advantage was to enable the organization to focus on what it did best rather than distract itself with tasks for which it had little expertise and which were not especially profitable.Since the early 1990s, as technology has made it far easier for companies to outsource work, that trend has evolved beyond what anyone imagined: Companies began to see themselves as thin, Uber-like slivers standing between customers on one side and their work forces on the other.“In the past, firms overstaffed and offered workers stable hours,” said Susan N. Houseman, a labor economist at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “All of these new staffing models mean shifting risk onto workers, making work less secure.”The hospitality industry has led the transformation. In the 1960s, according to data cited by Dr. Weil, only a small fraction of United States motels were franchised, meaning they weren’t owned and typically weren’t managed by the chains that branded and marketed them. As of 1986, the franchised figure was 68 percent worldwide for the top hotel chains, like Hilton and Marriott. By 2006, it was 78 percent.The hotels are frequently owned by outside investors and run by separate management companies, which, in turn, contract out a variety of other functions, like housekeeping, maintenance and janitorial services. Industrywide, wages have fallen since 2000, and labor law violations are rampant.Though the broader phenomenon of shifting work to nonemployees is difficult to quantify, data on contingent workers suggests rapid growth in the last decade.The number for the category of jobs mostly performed by part-time freelancers or part-time independent contractors, according to Economic Modeling Specialists Intl., a labor market analytics firm, grew to 32 million from just over 20 million between 2001 and 2014, rising to almost 18 percent of all jobs. Surveys, including one by the advisory firm Staffing Industry Analysts of nearly 200 large companies, point to similar changes.Apple is a vivid example of the trend toward relying on outsiders, directly employing fewer than 10 percent of the more than one million workers around the world who are involved in designing, making and selling all those iMacs and iPhones. The leaner, more flexible workplace is unquestionably a boon to many workers. A company called HourlyNerd, based in Boston, connects alumni of top business schools and other specialized programs to companies with projects in need of completing, like market analysis or examinations of pricing strategy. The most sought-after experts enjoy a steady stream of work, earn well into six figures and can winter in Buenos Aires if they choose.“I had an offer from another consulting firm, but I wanted more flexibility with my life,” said Carlos Castelán, who started taking on HourlyNerd projects while still at Harvard Business School and now plans to build his career around the platform. “I can work from home, have more control of my schedule.”It is not just people with advanced degrees who can benefit. Corey Becker spent a few years working as an independent contractor for a company called Cascom, which in turn contracted with Time Warner Cable to install cable, Internet and phone service. Mr. Becker was paid by the task, not by the hour.He was hard-working and efficient, and had no family obligations. He recalled that he made $1,000 to $1,500 in a typical 60-hour week, before taxes and expenses on tools, gas and vehicle upkeep, which he shouldered himself.“I thought it was a great deal,” Mr. Becker said.But many of his colleagues did not fare so well. “Some of the techs were slow, not as good at it,” he said. “Or the home was a mess and you had to fix it— you’re working longer for the same result, same payout.”Mr. Becker estimated that in some cases, these technicians’ hourly pay would fall below minimum wage. In 2009, the Labor Department sued Cascom for misclassifying workers as independent contractors; a judge ruled against the company in 2011 and later awarded some 250 installers nearly $1.5 million in back wages and damages.Such arrangements can send even highly skilled workers into a precarious state. Unlike many of their colleagues in the fast-growing legal outsourcing and temping market, lawyers who work for Axiom, one of the industry’s leading players, receive health insurance, paid time off, 401(k)’s and money comparable to what they would make at a traditional firm or corporation. Yet many live with the uncertainty of not knowing how long they will go between assignments, during which time they earn no income from the company.“When I’m done with this job, it could be a month, two months” before another one, said a lawyer who worked for Axiom until 2013 and requested anonymity to avoid drawing attention to her current employer. “It was a stress point for me. My family depends on me.” (An Axiom official said the company worked hard to minimize unwanted downtime, which he said had fallen significantly in the last few years.)Contingent workers still represent a limited corner of the nation’s approximately $17.5 trillion economy. But even many full-time employees share an underlying anxiety that is a result, according to the sociologist Arne L. Kalleberg, author of “Good Jobs, Bad Jobs,” of the severing of the “psychological contract between employers and employees in which stability and security were exchanged for loyalty and hard work.”All of which helps explain a discouraging trend in incomes. According to a study by the economists Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney, most men were earning substantially less in 2009 than men of similar ages and education did in 1969, adjusted for inflation.Sara Horowitz, founder and executive director of the Freelancers Union, an advocacy organization, puts the scale of the dislocation on a par with that caused by the spread of railroads before and after the Civil War and the boom in the mass production of goods during the early 20th century.“The economic argument is that those who have power in the labor market do better, and traditionally it’s been higher-skilled workers,” Ms. Horowitz said. “Today, it’s unclear who has the skills necessary to remain relevant amid all the disruptions.”NEW ECONOMY, NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT: A PLAN FOR A SAFETY NET IN A MULTIEMPLOYER WORLDSTEVEN HILL, AUGUST 2015ABOUT NEW AMERICANew America is dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the Digital Age. We carry out our mission as a nonprofit civic enterprise: an intellectual venture capital fund, think tank, technology laboratory, public forum, and media platform. Our hallmarks are big ideas, impartial analysis, pragmatic policy solutions, technological innovation, next generation politics, and creative engagement with broad audiences.NEW ECONOMY, NEW SOCIAL CONTRACTEXECUTIVE SUMMARYThe US workforce, which has been one of the most productive and wealthiest in the world, is undergoing an alarming transformation. Increasing numbers of workers find themselves on shaky ground, turned into freelancers, temps and contractors. Even many full-time and professional jobs are experiencing this precarious shift. Within a decade, nearly half of the 145 million employed Americans are expected to be impacted. Driving this disturbing trend are U.S. businesses, led by those in the so-called “sharing economy,” which increasingly rely on an “independent contractor loophole” that allows an employer to lower labor costs dramatically. By hiring independent contractors instead of regular W-2 employees, a business can evade contributing to a worker’s health benefits, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, injured workers compensation, lunch breaks, paid sick days and vacation leave, lowering costs by 30 percent or more. New app- and Web-based technologies are making it easier than ever to hire such “1099 workers,” which in turn threatens to eviscerate the national safety net.This paper outlines a fair, sensible and affordable way to create a new safety net for this new economy. Drawing upon what is already working in the U.S., this proposal would allow workers with multiple employers to benefit from a fully portable safety net based on Individual Security Accounts and a greater degree of legal parity between the many different classifications of U.S. workers.THE INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR LOOPHOLEThe ride-sharing company Uber, besides being a rapidly growing global phenomenon, has also become a poster child for the “independent contractor loophole.” In a few short years, the company claims that it has spread to some 300 cities and58 countries, striking fear into the hearts of taxi companies everywhere. It has been assessed a jaw-dropping market valuation of $41 billion (soon to be $50 billion)—to put that in perspective, that’s higher than Facebook’s valuation at a similar point in its growth, and is fast approaching the king itself, General Motors, the largest U.S. automaker ($52.6 billion value). Not bad for a company that doesn’t actually make anything or own any cars, or directly employ any drivers -- since the drivers are all treated as independent contractors.The employment status of its drivers has become one of the many controversies dogging Uber. CEO Travis Kalanick insists that his company is merely a technology platform facilitating rides between passengers and drivers, not an employer of drivers. “Are we American Airlines or Expedia?” asked Kalanick, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.1 He maintains they are more like Expedia, merely a go-between connecting buyers and sellers, in this case of a transit plicating matters, the legal standard for what makes an individual an employee rather than a contractor is vague, having to do with how much the worker is actually “independent,” and how much she or he is dictated to by the employer. The lack of clarity and resolution has led to complex situations, some of them tragic. When an Uber driver hit and killed six year old Sofia Liu, and badly injured her mother and brother as they were traversing a crosswalk on New Year’s Eve in San Francisco in 2013, Uber washed its hands of any responsibility. Why? Because the driver was an independent contractor, not an employee, according to Uber (never mind that the driver had a reckless driving record in Florida, including being arrested for driving 100 mph into oncoming traffic while trying to pass another car––something Uber’s faulty method used for background checks failed to uncover).2But Goliath may have met his David in June 2015. That’s when the California Labor Commissioner’s Office ruled that an Uber driver should be classified as a direct employee, instead of a contractor. In response to a claim filed by driver Barbara Berwick, the commissioner decided that because “Uber is involved in every aspect of the operation,” Berwick should be classified as an employee and is owed $4,000 in employee expenses. The ruling only applies to this single driver, and is limited in its scope (and Uber is appealing the decision). But it’s not the only case. In Florida, the Department of Economic Opportunity also ruled that Uber driver Darrin McGillis was an employee of the company. And two groups of Uber and Lyft drivers have brought class- action lawsuits against the ride-sharing companies, claiming they are treated more like employees, not as independent contractors free to perform their services as they see fit. These cases might eventually amount to sizable chinks in the Uber armor, but so far have been little more than minor speed bumps on the road to Uber’s multi-multi-billion dollar IPO. The controversy over Uber drivers’ job classification is not likely to be settled any time soon.THE 1099 ECONOMYYet Uber’s labor battle is just the tip of a looming iceberg that the US economy is drifting toward. The ride-sharing company is not the only employer looking to benefit from the independent contractor loophole. Businesses, whether identified with the so- called “sharing economy” or not, are increasingly relying on “non-regular” employees -- a vast and growing army of freelancers, contractors, temp workers and part-timers that are assuming leading roles in this burgeoning “freelance society.” This practice has given rise to the term “1099 economy,” since these workers don’t file W-2 income tax forms like any regular, permanent employee, instead they file the 1099-MISC form for the IRS classification for “independent contractor” (‘MISC’ is short for Miscellaneous Income).The advantage for a business such as Uber of using 1099 wage-earners over W-2 workers is obvious: an employer usually can lower its labor costs dramatically -- usually by 30 percent or more -- since it is no longer responsible for a 1099 worker’s health benefits, Social Security, unemployment or injured workers compensation, lunch or rest breaks, overtime, disability, paid sick, holiday or vacation leave and more. Outsourcing to this growing multitude of 1099 workers has become the preferred method for America’s business leaders to cut costs and maximize profits. Corporate America, once the anchor of the “good jobs” economy that came out of the New Deal era, is increasingly relying on these non-regular type workers as a core part of its new business model.Consequently, many workers today are no longer employed for very long by a single employer. More and more people have multiple employers, and the work day is being segmented and reduced into shorter and shorter “micro-gigs.” Indeed, in the gigs of the sharing economy, working for companies like TaskRabbit, Elance-Upwork, Postmates, Homejoy and others, some contractors, rabbits, taskers, day laborers and freelancers have multiple employers in a single day. One new economy booster clarified employers’ new strategy: “Companies today want a workforce they can switch on and off as needed”3—like one can turn off a faucet or a radio.How widespread are these labor force trends? A 2014 study commissioned by the Freelancers Union found that more than one in three workers—53 million Americans—are now freelancing. “Freelancing is the new normal,” says Sara Horowitz, executive director of the Freelancers Union.4 Other estimates predict that within 10 years nearly half of the 145 million employed Americans—65–70 million workers—will find themselves on similar grounds, turned into so-called “independent workers.”5 Sharing economy companies like Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit allegedly are "liberating workers" to become "independent" and "their own CEOs" --in reality, workers are being forced to take ever-smaller jobs (“micro- gigs”) and wages while the companies profit handsomely. Even many full-time, professional jobs and occupations are experiencing this precarious shift.The accelerated use by employers of the 1099/independent contractor loophole has in turn begun causing a rapid erosion of the safety net for workers and families – indeed of the New Deal social contract that was forged across many decades. The working conditions are dramatically shifting, and more and more American workers are no longer covered by the laws and regulations of that social contract. Under the current system, employers actually have an incentive to fire their entire workforce if they can get away with it, and go 100 percent with 1099 workers, or as high a percentage of them as possible. A business owner would be foolish not to, watching as your competitors go this route and dramatically slash their labor costs by 30 percent or more.Sounds extreme? The large pharmaceutical company Merck sold its factory in Philadelphia and the new owner fired all 400 Merck employees and rehired them as independent contractors—Merck then contracted with the company to continue making the same antibiotics for them.6 These strategies are what I call the “performance steroids” of the new economy—once enough businesses engage in that kind of practice it unleashes a race to the bottom, putting pressure on all businesses to adopt that strategy to compete. These perverse incentives are threatening to destroy the U.S. labor force and turn tens of millions of workers into little more than bracero day laborers. The sharing economy’s app- and web- based technologies have made it so much easier to hire and fire 1099 workers, and we are only at the initial stages of their impacts and how it will affect the labor force over the next several decades. Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel has rightly observed that “any tech reporter who spends their time covering the sharing economy is now, essentially, a labor reporter.”That in turn will be greatly destabilizing to the broader macroeconomy. For at the end of the day, if not enough people have enough income in their pockets and bank accounts to buy up all the products and services that U.S. companies produce, the economy could reach a dangerous tipping point. We could well face the prospect of an “economic singularity” in which there will be too few viable consumers with enough purchasing power to continue driving economic growth in our mass-market economy.So a lot is at stake in the resolution of these labor market tensions. The problem created by the new digital economy is not merely one of inequality, which is typically thought of as income inequality. The challenge really needs to be reimagined as one over how to stabilize the economy and re-establish economic security for the broad swath of American workers. One important way would be to figure out how to provide the support structures that workers and families need in order to prosper and feel a measure of protection and reassurance, regardless of their employment situation or their job classification. In other words, we have to figure out how to preserve some of the New Deal social contract and safety net for workers of all stripes.THE PORTABILITY OF THE SAFETY NETFormer Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, as well as many others, have proposed the idea of the “portability” of the safety net. The United States, says Summers in a Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, which he co-chaired, is “unique in providing significant aspects of basic economic security through the employment contract.” As a result, “as corporations have shed employees through devices such as subcontracting or hiring independent contractors, they have also shed traditional responsibilities as employers, leaving families to face risks on their own. The unraveling of the traditional employer-employee relationship has made it more difficult to provide basic economic security.”7The New Deal system was constructed around the notion that most of the supports for workers and families accrued to an individual based on her or his employment in a specific workplace, and often with a single employer for a considerable length of time. Employers acted as mini-agents of the New Deal social contract for their own employees. But the working conditions on which that social contract was based have shifted dramatically, and more and more American workers are no longer covered by the laws and regulations of that social contract.In Summers’ report for the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, he cites the example of health care insurance to illustrate his point. One of the major selling points for passing the Affordable Care Act was that it would liberate workers to move more easily from job to job. No longer are their employment prospects hurt by “job lock,” in which they do not dare leave a job for fear of losing their affordable health care. That change alone gives slightly more bargaining power to workers with their employers.But as the Summers report goes on to say, “other elements—including pensions, workers’ compensation, and unemployment compensation—are all still tied to employment.” And that increasingly has become a major problem as more Americans become “independent” workers, unmoored from any particular job or company. They are losing their access to core components of the safety net, not only health care and Social Security but also unemployment and injured workers compensation, paid sick days, holidays, vacations and more. This should be properly thought of as the “personal infrastructure” for individuals and families, and it is corroding – just as we understand the importance of maintaining a rusty bridge, or investing in physical infrastructure like roads, ports and airports, or in energy efficiency, we have to invest in the support structures that maintain individuals and families, and by extension entire communities.So the challenge has become: How do we replace any single employer or business as the central point of delivery for the New Deal benefits basket, and spread the load and risk to multiple employers? How do we allow the increasingly sizable labor force of millions of Americans who are becoming 1099 workers, with multiple employers and “independent” of any single workplace, to retain access to this safety net? Every generation has a stake in figuring this out.This paper outlines a way for the United States to evolve our system to retain the best parts of the safety net while s till fostering a vigorous entrepreneurial climate. It will outline a foundation for a new social contract that can provide a degree of security for workers and families who are trying to make it in the new economy. As Larry Summers and others have said, the key word is “portability”: we have to make the personal support infrastructure for workers and families more portable, so that the safety net follows the worker from job to gig and employer to employer. The net needs to protect the worker, regardless of her or his employment situation. Here’s an example that points the way for how we can do that.A SAFETY NET FOR A MULTIEMPLOYER WORLDFortunately, we already have a working model that can be adapted. It’s called a “multiemployer plan,” which is an employee benefit plan to which more than one employer contributes. Multiemployer plans operate like an insurance plan; they provide benefits for participants through pooling of risk and economies of scale for the employees covered by the plan. Crucially, multiemployer plans allow mobile workers to earn and retain their benefits even as they transfer from employer to employer or job to job, a portability which helps to avoid interruptions in coverage.8Such multiemployer plans are often found in industries like construction and mining, and increasingly among some Silicon Valley companies. Most construction workers, for example, are independent contractors and temp workers. They contract with an employer to do a specific job, and once that job is finished, their relationship with that employer ends. Then the construction worker has to look for a new job with a new employer. In any given year, that worker may end up working for numerous employers at various jobs and projects. These are the types of conditions that more and more U.S. workers in many different occupations and industries are being subjected to.Despite the fact that these construction workers are hired on a contingency basis, the types of benefits offered by a multiemployer plan are often fairly comprehensive and substantial. The benefits are on a par with those provided by large corporations and other companies to their regular employees, including:? Health care benefits? Pension benefits? Unemployment benefits? Occupational illness/injury benefits? Vacation, holiday and severance benefits? Disability/sickness insurance? Training and education (including apprenticeships and educational scholarships)? Financial assistance for housing? Child care centers? Life insurance? Accident insurance? Legal services9So how are such plans funded? That is a key question, since someone has to pay for all the different pools of social insurance established to support each worker and her or his family. Typically the employer pays a set amount per each worker, pro-rated according to the number of hours the employee works for that employer (often called an “hour bank” system). Those payroll deductions are set aside in a fund. The specific amount paid by the employer is written into an agreement (typically $3 to $4 per each hour worked by each employee), and it pays for each worker’s own safety net, i.e. “personal infrastructure.” The fund is governed by a board of trustees, with equal number of employer and employee representatives appointed as trustees. The trust agreement defines the benefit rules, with the board of trustees given the authority to determine the plan design and level of benefits.It all sounds perfect for part-time and freelance/temp/independent workers in the new economy, like just what the doctor has ordered, but there is a catch: in most cases, these multiemployer plans are the products of one or more collective bargaining agreements that typically involve one or more labor unions. The unions often are guild unions, that is, unions that are representing a particular craft or occupation that have enough collective muscle to persuade multiple employers to sign on the dotted line. For example, the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) is a 100-year-old union with a membership of 400,000 nationwide. Operating engineers operate, maintain, and repair heavy construction equipment to build the nation’s highways, power plants, dams and buildings.10 Through a multiemployer plan for its members, the IUOE has been able to attain and maintain a middle class level of benefits, wages, conditions and even training and apprenticeships for its members.The multiemployer plan administered by IUOE Local 9 in Colorado has an hour bank system, in which hours worked by an employee for a contributing employer are accumulated in much the same way that funds accumulate in a savings account, or in one’s own personal Social Security accounts. A participant can accumulate four months (500 hours) of unemployment coverage for when the member is having difficulty finding the next job, a constant worry in the construction and trades industry. Local 9 also has maintained a training facility southeast of Denver with a mechanic/welder training shop and over 30 training pieces of heavy equipment, so that employers can be assured of a pool of skilled workers. IUOE also maintains a defined-benefit pension fund with $8 billion in assets, the fifth largest labor-management pension plan in the United States, with no unfunded liabilities and benefits guaranteed by the U.S. Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation.11Another labor union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, maintains the largest multiemployer defined-benefit pension plan in the US, the Western Conference of Teamsters Pension Trust. The WCTPT has 583,000 participants, and it is a $35 billion fund that receives “personal infrastructure” contributions from more than 1400 employers, ranging from small companies with fewer than 50 employees to major corporations like Coca-Cola, Safeway supermarkets and United Parcel Service. It was founded in 1955 and designed to allow union workers – truck drivers, vegetable packers, floor sweepers, construction workers – to benefit from the security of a pension safety net despite frequent job changes.12These multiemployer vehicles have been operating semi-quietly, beneath the radar, despite the fact that they are in widespread use, providing personal infrastructure for millions of Americans. Some of the plans provide only pensions; others provide other components of the safety net, such as health care, unemployment benefits and such, and are called “welfare plans.” As of 2012, there were 2,740 multiemployer pension plans in existence with $624 billion in assets and over 15 million workers participating. And there were approximately 1800 multiemployer welfare plans, providing health care and other kinds of personal infrastructure, with nearly 6 million workers participating.13 So these are not obscure, never- been-tried vehicles. These are duly constructed legal entities, overseen by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), which permits employers to contribute money into a joint trust on behalf of a specific individual employee, pro-rated to the number of hours the employee works for each employer.But what if an individual is not a member of a union, and as an independent contractor or freelancer has no hope of joining a union anytime soon? For those workers, there is another model, a variation on a multiemployer plan, known as a multiple employer welfare arrangement (MEWA). Primarily used for health care, a MEWA is an arrangement to provide medical benefits to employees of two or more employers, even if there is no collective bargaining agreement with those employers. Typically, a MEWA will involve employers who are members of a professional, trade or business association that offers medical coverage to association members.14In Silicon Valley, where a constant churn of thousands of contractors, temps and freelancers are hired and let go every week, a similar model is emerging. Agencies like MBO Partners act as the “employer of record” for contingent tech workers, providing a bridge between contracted employees and their multiple employers. The services of MBO Partners and similar agencies include providing a “centralized benefit administration” for the worker’s access to safety net provisions such as health benefits, injured workers compensation, disability, 401(k), as well as payroll administration, tax deductions, overtime and more.All of these different types of multiemployer plans show potential for creating an effective safety net for freelancers, indie contractors, temps, part-timers and other types of 1099 workers. It’s all a matter of whether the laws and regulations have been structured in the right way. In drafting a better model, it makes sense to build upon what is already working successfully.INDIVIDUAL SECURITY ACCOUNTSHere’s how we can adapt these multiemployer safety net models for the current challenges presented by the new economy. When Uber, TaskRabbit, Elance-Upwork, Manpower, Merck or any other business is hiring their contractors and freelancers, in addition to the wages that they pay they should also pay a few dollars per hour that is invested in an “Individual Security Account” for each worker’s safety net. The amount any business pays into the ISA would be pro-rated according to the number of hours the worker is employed by that business. These accounts would be structured to pay, via payroll deductions, into existing state and federal safety net programs -- Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance and injured workers’ compensation -- as well for other safety net components, such as health care and paid sick days, vacation and holidays (the worker also would have some wages deducted, much like regularly-employed W-2 workers do now for Social Security, Medicare, etc.). Each worker’s ISA, and the funds in it, would be tracked with a personal ID number (such as a Social Security number).If an employer already provides health insurance for its regular employees, that would continue. But for non-regular 1099 workers and part-timers, employers would pay into each worker’s Individual Security Account a pro-rated amount based on the number of hours worked, and the funds would go toward the worker’s purchasing of health insurance through one of the Obamacare exchanges or co-ops. For workers with multiple employers, that worker would earn a contribution from each employer, pro-rated to the number of hours worked, which would accumulate in the ISA and would be used to purchase health insurance.What about paid sick days, vacations and holidays? Currently in most states there are no existing, legally-mandated programs for those. Where they exist, it is usually the result of a contractual agreement between a single employer and its (usually unionized) employees. But what if a worker has multiple employers? That makes it more challenging to figure out which employer is responsible for providing paid sick days, vacations and holidays. The multiemployer model for construction workers, in which the joint labor-management trust becomes the repository for any funds paid by the employer for these purposes, provides a template for this situation. However in this proposal the Individual Security Account would assume the trust’s role for the individual worker. So each employer would deposit funds into the worker's ISA, pro-rated to the number of hours worked, needed for providing paid sick, vacation and holiday leave. In short, the Individual Security Account would assume the joint labor-management trust’s role for the individual worker, and form the foundation for this multiemployer safety net.This is an elegant way to address this, because then it’s not necessary to argue over whether the worker is actually an employee of that company or an independent contractor. That point becomes largely irrelevant (in terms of the safety n et, though not for other issues such as job security). Either way, the employer allocates the necessary financial resources that are then set aside for each employee’s safety net, pro-rated according to the number of hours the employee works for that employer.So for example, suppose Donna is employed 20 hours a week by a hairdresser and 10 hours a week driving for Uber. She would earn half of the benefits provided by a full-time 40-hour-a-week job from the hairdresser, and a quarter of her benefits from Uber. That would amount to earning three-fourths of her full benefits. Or suppose George contracts for 14 hours a week with TaskRabbit, 10 hours driving for Lyft, eight hours making deliveries for Postmates and eight hours cleaning houses for Homejoy. He would earn 35% of his benefits from TaskRabbit, 25% from Lyft and 20% each from Postmates and Homejoy, for full 100% benefits for a 40 hour week.The Individual Security Accounts could be overseen by the government (much as it does for an individual’s Social Security account today, tracked with a personalized number) or private entities (regulated by the government), much as insurance companies or agencies like MBO Partners do today for health care and other safety net features, or labor unions like IUOE, Teamsters, SEIU and others currently do. These Individual Security Accounts would be collected into a larger insurance pool and professionally managed. This would form the basis for a safety net that the worker would draw upon as needed, just as any regular, W-2 employee would.So that means when an individual worker loses her or his job (which happens many times a year for these types of 1099 workers), she/he would have some unemployment compensation to fall back on; the same if she/he was injured on the job, or became too disabled to work, or suddenly fell ill and could not work a shift. It also could be structured to provide some paid vacation days per year, just as regular employees have. In many ways, this would work in a similar fashion to the way Social Security and Obamacare work now, in which a retirement account or a health care account is established for individuals who work for multiple employers. But with the Individual Security Account, each employer who hires that worker would pay a pro- rated amount into the ISA and existing safety net programs to cover the various components of that worker’s safety net.What it comes down to is this: there’s absolutely no reason why, just because a business decides to outsource a job to a temp worker, freelancer, independent contractor or a franchise, instead of hiring regular, W-2 employees who are covered by standard labor laws and contracts, that the employer should be able to evade paying a few dollars more per hour for each worker to provide a safety net. Similarly, regardless of how many employers a person works for, a worker should not be denied the civilized and modern-day necessity of having access to a support system she needs for herself and her family. The principle of this system is simple: the employer contributes (as does the employee), no matter what the employee’s classification as a worker. The 1099/independent contractor loophole would be closed.HOW MUCH WILL IT COST? AFFORDABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATIONSurprisingly, implementing such a multiemployer safety net based on Individual Security Accounts would not be that expensive. In some circumstances, less than two dollars per hour per employee. We can make pretty decent estimates as to what the costs would be, and the amount of employers’ contributions for each independent worker, by looking at how much employers pay now for their regular employees. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is an arm of the US Department of Labor, calculates such things on a regular basis.Using data from September 2014, we can see that the wages and salaries for all workers in the United States averaged $22.13 per hour. Besides paying their employees that hourly income, employers also paid a certain amount toward a basket of worker supports with a number of safety net components. In the following example, I include these features: Social Security, Medicare, federal and state unemployment insurance, and state injured workers compensation (all legally required for regularly-employed, W-2 workers); health insurance and long and short-term disability insurance; and paid sick days, vacation and holidays.In addition to paying all their workers an average of $22.13 per hour, US employers also paid an additional $7.44 per hour – about a third more – to make sure all of those workers had access to a safety net (with the components described above). If we focus just on service sector workers and sales and office workers – which are the vast majority of 1099 and part-time workers – it’s even less expensive. Sales and office employees earned an average of $16.83 per hour per hour, and employers paid an extra $5.67 per hour (33%) to provide that safety net. For service workers, who made an average of $11.97 per hour, employers paid an extra $3.76 per hour (31%) to provide that safety net.But if we leave out government-employed workers and focus even more narrowly on private sector employees, which is where most 1099 workers are employed today, it gets even less expensive.For sales and office employees, they earned $16.74 per hour and their employers kicked in another $5.37 per hour – less than a third more than their base pay. For service sector workers, they made $10.81 per hour on average and employers spent another $2.91 per hour – less than 27%– to give them the security of a comprehensive safety net. That’s a small amount of money to provide for every worker, regardless of her or his employment status, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, injured workers compensation, disability, paid sick leave, holidays and vacation.15But those numbers based on BLS tables are likely the upper limit of what this will cost. By carefully designing the safety net, we could make this even less expensive.For example, the scenario above assumes about two weeks/10 paid vacation days (since that's what the BLS figures are based on), which could be scaled back initially to four or five days (and would still provide far more than the zero vacation days currently received by tens of millions of working Americans). The same with paid holidays, which could be scaled back, or even not included initially. The number of sick leave days could be limited initially to cut that cost. Scaling back the safety net basket in various ways would reduce the overall cost, so that employers would pay only an extra $2.27 per hour for private sector workers in the services industries, and $4.19 per hour for private sector sales and office workers.16 That’s a small amount of money to provide for millions of workers their health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, injured workers compensation, disability, paid sick leave and vacations (but no paid holidays, in this example) —regardless of their employment situation.And it likely would cost even less to employers. Low income wage-earners are eligible for Obamacare subsidies for health care, reducing that cost even more for the employer. Health care is by far the greatest expense of this proposed safety net basket, consuming 34% of the overall basket. The breakdown of the other costs are: Social Security (21%), vacations (16%), holidays (9%), injured workers compensation (6%), Medicare (5%), sick leave (4%), unemployment (4%), long and short- term disability (1%). With these numbers as our guide, we could propose different mixes to make it even more affordable, phasing in certain benefits over time to get a program like this up and running, and then build on it over the years (that model reflects the history of Social Security, which initially in the 1930s had modest benefits. But over the years, as it proved itself to be economically useful, as well as popular, it was expanded).For example, simply providing a minimum basket composed of worker supports that already are legally required for regular W- 2 employees (in other words, Social Security, Medicare, federal and state unemployment insurance, and injured workers compensation) would cost a mere $1.50 per hour for service workers and $1.87 per hour for sales and office workers in the private sector. That’s less than two bucks per hour to provide a basic safety net to millions of workers who currently have nothing. The world’s lone remaining superpower cannot afford that?Also, once the vast insurance pools of previously uncovered workers are formed, with billions of dollars in play, and insurance companies bid to supply these parts of the safety basket, the impact of “economies of scale” are likely to reduce costs even further. Indeed, one can envision a whole new business springing up of "central administrator companies” that do nothing but administer safety net plans for 1099 workers, offering in a competitive market a package deal of benefits that is purchased by individual workers, with each employer of that worker kicking in a certain pro-rated amount into the worker’s Individual Security Account to help pay for it. A minimum level of coverage would be mandated by law, with more expensive plans providing more benefits/coverage also being available, i.e. Gold, Silver and Bronze Plans, much like the Affordable Care Act’s setup for health care. Each worker would shop for the safety net package she/he can afford. Of course, the rules, products and services would have to be regulated and closely monitored by the government, to ensure quality, fairness, cost effectiveness and no fraud. But economies of scale resulting from a competitive market of insurance - type companies offering more than health or life insurance, and acting as central administrators offering an entire package of safety net features, would further reduce costs.And of course, if the US could ever reduce the terribly expensive price we pay for health care (especially when compared to other developed nations, which deliver far better health care metrics to a greater proportion of their populations for half the cost), that also would be a great help in bringing down the expense of this safety net basket. Politicians and experts from both the right and the left all agree that long-term health care costs are threatening to bankrupt the nation.So Travis Kalanick (Uber), Leah Busque (Task Rabbit), Stephane Kasriel (Elance-Upwork) and all the other CEOs of companies involved in the hiring of armies of 1099 workers and part-timers would be legally required to bank the allotted amount of money per worker into each worker’s Individual Security Account, pro-rated according to the number of hours each worker was on the job for their company. The excuse that these workers are independent contractors or freelancers who are not actually employed by them would be moot -- if you contract with these workers, the employer pays. Over time, employers even might want to attract more high-quality workers by sweetening the pot a bit, paying into each worker’s ISA enough for a few more vacation or sick days, or a small amount towards ongoing training and education, or paid parental leave (after the birth of a child, or due to sickness in the family), housing assistance, and other possibilities.EXTENDING LEGAL PARITY TO ALL WORKERSIn short, what we are talking about is extending legal parity to 1099 workers and part-timers so that they are on the same safety net footing as regular and full-time workers. That’s a better, pro-active strategy than mounting lawsuits over misclassification of workers, which is the current method used for redress. The goal of such litigation is to win a court ruling that says the workers have been misclassified as contractors instead of W-2 employees. These are tough lawsuits to win, and also hugely expensive, time consuming, a drain on resources and ultimately a forum in which there are few winners. It creates a hodgepodge legal landscape in which no one is quite sure of the rules. “Worker misclassification is going to become weaker and weaker” as more workers migrate from regular jobs into the 1099 category, says Denise Cheng, a researcher at MIT and expert on the sharing economy. “It doesn’t make sense to hinge everything on that. What we should think through is, ‘What should the protections be for an independent contractor?’”17That’s exactly what this proposal does. And fortunately, it turns out this is not exactly rocket science, as it is already being done elsewhere. The European Union, for example, has passed legislation that makes it illegal to treat part-time or temporary employees differently than regular, full time employees.18 The EU guarantees that those working through temporary employment agencies receive equal pay and conditions as regular employees in the same business that do the same work, starting on Day 1. The principle of equal treatment applies not only to pay but also to the basic working and employment conditions, including the duration of working time, overtime, breaks, rest periods, night work, vacations and holidays.19 Other nations such as Japan, Korea, Israel and Brazil also provide greater levels of legal parity between different classifications of workers.20But this proposal would do even more than create legal parity – it also would create universality. Even during the height of the New Deal era, a certain number of workers were always left out of the safety net support system. Farm workers, for example, were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act (though California years later included its ag workers via state law). The American labor force has always had “insiders” and “outsiders,” so this structure of universal Individual Security Accounts would bring everyone into the fold to a much greater degree than they are now.An important consequence of this proposal is that, by putting nearly all employees on a similar footing, we would greatly reduce the incentives for employers to resort to 1099 employees as a way of avoiding paying for benefits and worker supports. Employers would still have the freedom to use a temp, freelancer, part-timer or individual contractor, and might have good reason to do so because that would still allow the flexibility to ramp up their workforce, depending on customer demand. Flexibility is a recognized good in the labor market, to some extent, and this proposal would not prevent that. But by enacting laws and regulations that extend the concept of multiemployer plans and legal parity between different categories of workers, we will go a long way towards removing the corrosive antagonism and perverse incentives created by these vastly unequal categories of workers. We would shut down the 1099/independent contractor loophole.It also liberates workers to seek their own creative space in the labor market, driven by their passions and individual genius instead of being in job-lock at a particular company because it happens to be one of the remaining few that provide a level of worker support that they and their families need. Liberating employees like this would unleash the innate genius and talent of the American work force. This would be the basis for a “truly sharing” economy worth sharing.REFORM OPPORTUNITIES AT LOCAL, STATE AND FEDERAL LEVELSSocial Security, which is one of the most popular government programs ever enacted—even a majority of Republicans say they don’t want to see benefits cut—already is structured like a limited Individual Security Account, in which the employer and worker both pay into the worker’s personal account. Ideally the upgrades and modernizations proposed in this paper would be implemented at the national/federal level, so that all businesses and employers are subjected to the same rules. But it’s not essential. These changes can be implemented at the local and state level as well.Four states (California, Connecticut, Oregon and Massachusetts) and 18 cities (including Washington, D.C., New York City, Philadelphia and Seattle) have passed paid sick leave policies.21 San Francisco has a paid sick leave policy as well as a requirement that city contractors must provide to their covered employees twelve paid days off per year.22 Also in San Francisco the city government passed a law for universal health care coverage before Obamacare was passed, which created health care accounts for uncovered workers employed by certain types of businesses which were notorious for not providing health care (especially restaurants and other service-sector jobs). The employers either had to provide insurance or pay into each worker’s health care account a certain amount of money, which could be used by the worker to purchase health insurance. The businesses were allowed to pass that cost on to their customers (San Francisco restaurants patrons saw a new charge on their bill of 4 percent, dedicated to providing health care for these workers).A similar strategy could be used by cities and states to establish Individual Security Accounts for each 1099 or part-time worker, and require that employers pay into the ISAs, pro-rated according to the number of hours worked. Those funds then would be directed into existing safety-net systems (Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, injured worker compensation) and used to purchase other safety net components (health care, paid leave, etc.) by each 1099 or part-time worker. It’s not necessary to wait for the politicians in Washington to get their act together (which could be a very long wait indeed). Passing the right laws and regulations at the local and state levels could start the transition toward the right kind of new economy.In some cases, “angel employers” could implement these policies within their own companies, and push for it within their industries. In March 2015, Microsoft announced that it would require many of its 2,000 contractors and vendors to provide their employees who perform work for Microsoft with 15 paid days off (to be used for sick days and/or vacation time). Microsoft’s Bradford Smith explained the company’s rationale, saying “The research shows that employees who do get these kinds of benefits are far likelier to be happier, have higher morale and are far more likely to be productive.”23So there are multiple opportunities in cities and states across the nation, where reform efforts could gain traction and begin converting the U.S. safety net into one that can work in the multiemployer world of the new economy.CRITICISMS OF THE PLANMany business leaders and lobbyists like the Chamber of Commerce of course will complain that such a requirement will be a “job killer,” that it will be expensive and hurt businesses and put them at a competitive disadvantage. But especially if the policies become national and universal, like Social Security is, then all employers are affected equally and no one is impacted more than another. For many service sector businesses their competition usually is local, so especially within a certain industry (like restaurants, for example) or occupation (like plumbers or janitors), all local employers will be affected equally by the passage of a local law. And most of the costs can be passed on to the consumer, but since the millions of workers benefitting are themselves consumers, it will create a virtuous circle in which a rising tide will lift all boats.Other businesses will complain that it will hurt them against their international competitors. But most U.S. businesses compete only domestically, in the huge internal market. For those competing internationally, they can rest easy knowing that most of their international competitors are from nations that already have such policies in place, and have had them for years. Are American businesses somehow less vital and competent than those in Europe, Japan, Korea and elsewhere?Or look at it this way: sure, an employer might say that this will be expensive to take on. But policymakers need to recognize that it’s going to be increasingly expensive for society not to do it. For example, because Walmart pays so poorly and provides such a sparse safety net for its employees, the rest of society—read, taxpayers—have to foot the bill for things like food stamps, Medicaid, subsidized housing and expensive hospital emergency room visits (instead of doctor’s office visits) for those employees. Forbes reports that Walmart costs U.S. taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion annually in public assistance for its workers. (McDonald’s employees reportedly cost taxpayers $1.2 billion per year).24Either way, we pay.So increasingly the numbers are on the side of modernizing the social contract in this way. Rebecca Smith, deputy director for the National Employment Law Project, asks “Why shouldn't Uber, Lyft, and their kin be required, just like other labor brokers are...to pay the payroll taxes that ensure workers have access to basic benefits like workers' compensation when they are injured and Social Security when they retire? Given the kind of huge revenue being generated in some of these companies, it's not a lot to ask.”25In the past, business hostility and deep-pocketed donor influence over politicians have prevented much headway in enacting worker supports for 1099 workers. The last time a bill to offer some benefits for private sector temp workers got even so much as a committee hearing in Congress was in 1971.26 A federal bill to give all employees seven days of paid sick leave a year has been introduced into the U.S. Senate every session since 2004, but has never made it to the Senate floor27 (the U.S. is still one of only a handful of nations that has no national law guaranteeing paid sick leave. Current policy leaves 43 million workers—38 percent of the private labor force—without a single paid sick day, with women and low income workers particularly vulnerable).28“There’s a very strong strain of economic thought in the United States that one of the reasons why we are as productive and successful economically as we are is that there’s so much flexibility in the labor markets,” says Seth Harris, former deputy labor secretary. Sure, economies suffer when companies can’t get rid of employees who aren’t productive, he says, but they also suffer when employers don’t invest in training or pay living wages.“There’s a need to find a balance,” says Harris. One of the tragedies of the temp workers’ situation is that it treats “workers as disposable inputs rather than valuable assets for their companies.”29That’s the attitude on the part of so many U.S. businesses that needs to change – workers must be valued again, and a sense of shared partnership has to be rediscovered. Sixty years ago, most CEOs assumed some level of responsibility for all their stakeholders, including their employees. “The job of management,” proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman in 1951 of Standard Oil of New Jersey, which was one of the largest oil producers in the world (and eventually became Exxon), “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups ... stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.”30 Abrams’ predecessor, Walter Teagle, initiated worker representation at Standard Oil of New Jersey in 1918, which was emulated by Germany after World War II when they designed their system of economic democracy within corporations, known as codetermination.31So American business leaders – including highly successful ones – used to think differently about these matters. Current attitudes among this group have only resulted in unleashing a race to the bottom for all. Increasingly these postures are not only damaging to workers and families but to the very fabric of American society. The major point here, which is a philosophical one about the type of society we want to live in, bears repeating: just because a business decides to outsource a job to a temp worker, freelancer, independent contractor or a franchise, instead of directly hiring a regular employee; or just because a person works for multiple employers, that’s not a good reason, economic or otherwise, that those employers should be able to wiggle out of paying a couple more dollars per hour so that each of their workers can know the civilized security of a basket of supports for herself and her family.Businesses today are using all sorts of loopholes and tricks – hiring third-party operations like temp agencies, private contractor businesses and franchises – to turn their employees into freelancers, temps, perma-temps, rabbits, gig- preneurs, micro entrepreneurs, nano-taskers, indie contractors, contingent laborers and part-timers. It’s practically a new taxonomy for a workforce that has become segmented into a dizzying assortment of labor categories. It’s all part of a strategy by parent companies to evade responsibility for providing a decent, middle-class wage and safety net for their employees. If they have their way, apparently every worker will be turned into a 1099 employee with minimal personal infrastructure supports, just because it’s cheaper for their bottom line. But is that really what’s best for the nation?CONCLUSIONWith legal parity between different categories of workers, combined with the proposed multiemployer Individual Security Account as the basis for a new type of safety net and social contract, every worker would have access to the following: health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, injured workers compensation, disability, and a few days of paid sick days and vacations. Basing a new social contract for the new economy on such a system holds great potential. Besides benefiting individuals, this “new kind of deal” would act as an automatic stabilizer and ongoing stimulus for the broader macroeconomy, helping to maintain the consumer spending that drives the economy and creates jobs. It would form the basis for keeping the U.S. economy plowing forward into the 21st century, enriched by technology and innovation instead of being impoverished and bedeviled by it. That would amount to a giant step in the right direction.In this insecure age, with the threat of ongoing job loss and debility hanging like a sword over the heads of American workers, a personal safety net based on Individual Security Accounts, as well as extending greater legal parity between1099 workers, part-timers and regular full-time workers will be increasingly necessary. It will help ensure productive and satisfied workers, healthy families, vibrant communities, prosperous businesses and a more stable macroeconomy. With this proposal as a foundation, the US economy would be placed on a more steady and secure footing for the 21st century.(This paper is excerpted from the author’s book, Raw Deal: How the "Uber Economy" and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers () published by St. Martin’s Press in October 2015)NOTES1. Andy Kessler, “Travis Kalanick: The Transportation Trustbuster,” Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2013, (accessed March 28, 2015).2. The FBI says Uber’s method, called a “name-based criminal background check,” has a 43 percent error rate. Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, “Leaving Room for Error,” San Francisco Examiner, May 29, 2015, ride-hail-apps- study-says/Content?oid=2931669 (accessed June 2, 2015). Also see Carolyn Said, “Uber to Vet Drivers More Thoroughly,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 12, 2014, (accessed March 23, 2015); Olivia Nuzzi, “The Ten Worst Uber Horror Stories,” Daily Beast, November 19, 2014, (accessed March 23, 2015).3. Mike Berg, Invisible to Remarkable: In Today’s Job Market, You Need to Sell Yourself as “Talent,” Not Just Someone Looking for Work (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2012), 13.4. Sara Horowitz and Fabio Rosati, “53 Million Americans Are Freelancing, New Survey Finds,” Freelancers Union, September 4, 2014, (accessed March 29, 2015).5. MBO Partners, “2014 State of Independence in America Report,” MBO_Partners_State_of_Independence_Report.pdf (accessed March 20, 2015); see also Susan Adams, “More Than a Third of U.S. Workers Are Freelancers Now, but Is That Good for Them?” Forbes, September 5, 2014, third-of-u-s-workers-are-freelancers- now-but-is-that-good-for-them/ (accessed March 20, 2015).6. Claire Gordon, “How Employers Can Legally Strip Your Job of Benefits,” AOL Jobs, April 27, 2012, employers-can-legally-strip-your-job-of-benefits (accessed March 30, 2015).7. Lawrence H. Summers and Ed Balls, “Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity,” Appendix 1, US Policy Response, page 107, PDF-U.S.appendix.pdf.8. "What is a Multiemployer Plan?," International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, 2015, (accessed April 2, 2015).9. What is a Multiemployer Plan?," International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, 2015, (accessed April 2, 2015).10. “The IUOE,” International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE), June 7, 2012, . “Welcome to our website,” International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE), September 27, 2010, . Frances Denmark, "Can the Teamsters Save Union Pensions?" Institutional Investor, May 20, 2014, save-union-pensions.html13. "What is a Multiemployer Plan?," International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, 2015, (accessed April 2, 2015).14. "What is a Multiemployer Plan?," International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, 2015, (accessed April 2, 2015).15. “Employer Costs for Employee Compensation – September 2014,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, USDL-14-2208, December 10, 2014, Tables 1 and 5, pages 5, 10, . According to the tables, the percent being paid out by employers for each safety net component is the following: health care 12%, Social Security 6.2%, Medicare 1.45%, federal and state unemployment insurance 1%, injured workers compensation 2%, long and short-term disability 0.5%, paid leave 9.6% (paid vacation 5%, paid holidays 3%, paid sick days 1.5%).16. That amount works out to about 21 to 25% extra above the worker’s base hourly wage.17. Ellen Huet, “What Happens To Uber Drivers And Other Sharing Economy Workers Injured On The Job?” Forbes, January 6, 2015, drivers-sharing-economy/ (accessed April 2, 2015).18. “Equal treatment for all agency workers,” European Commission, news release October 22, 2008, (accessed April 2, 2015); “Working Conditions-Part-Time Work,” European Commission, (accessed April 2, 2015); “Part- time working,” Europa, July 4, 2006, rganisation/c10416_en.htm (accessed April 2, 2015).19. “Agency workers,” Citizens Information, January 9, 2013, (accessed April 2, 2015).20. For a nice summary of the laws and regulations regarding temp workers in nations all over the world, see Michael Grabell and Lena Groeger, “Temp Worker Regulations Around the World,” ProPublica, February 24, 2014, (accessed April 2, 2015). The US has some of the least temp-friendly or supportive laws in the world.21. “Overview of Paid Sick Time Laws in the United States,” A Better Balance, March 10, 2015, (accessed April 2, 2015).22. “San Francisco Labor Laws—City Contractors,” City and County of San Francisco, Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, August 13, 2014, (accessed April 2, 2015).23. Claire Cain Miller, “From Microsoft, a Novel Way to Mandate Sick Leave,” New York Times, March 26, 2015, (accessed April 2, 2015).24. Clare O’Connor, “Report: Walmart Workers Cost Taxpayers $6.2 Billion In Public Assistance,” Forbes, April 15, 2014, 2-billion-in-public-assistance/.25. Rebecca Smith, “Will Uber and Lyft make your job obsolete?,” CNN, February 10, 2015, economy-uber-lyft (accessed April 5, 2015).26. Michael Grabell, “U.S. Lags Behind World in Temp Worker Protections,” Pro Publica, February 24, 2014, lags-behind-world-in-temp-worker-protections, (accessed March 21, 2015).27. Claire Cain Miller, “From Microsoft, a Novel Way to Mandate Sick Leave,” New York Times, March 26, 2015, , (accessed April 2, 2015).28. Brigid Schulte, “Voters Want Paid Leave, Paid Sick Days, Poll Shows. Obama, Too. Will Congress Oblige?” Washington Post, paid-sick-days-poll-shows-obama-too-will-congress-oblige (accessed March 27, 2015); and Jane Farrell and Joanna Venator, “Paid Sick Days” (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2012), 2, available at content/uploads/issues/2012/08/pdf/paidsickdays_factsheet.pdf (accessed May 10,2015).29. Michael Grabell, “U.S. Lags Behind World in Temp Worker Protections,” Pro Publica, February 24, 2014, lags-behind-world-in-temp-worker-protections, (accessed March 21, 2015).30. Robert Reich, “The Rebirth of Stakeholder Capitalism?” Robert Reich blog, August 9, 2014, (accessed April 5, 2015).31. On Standard Oil’s worker representation, see “Every Employee Is A Partner,” Petroleum Age, Volume 5, Number 4, April 1918, gle%20%20worker%20representation&p g=PA142#v=onepage&q=Walter%20Teagle%20%20worker%20representation&f=false (accessed April 6, 2015), page 142; and Robert Zieger, “The Wage-Earner and the New Economic System, 1919-1929” in Herbert Hoover As Secretary of Commerce: Studies in New Era Thought and Practice, editor Ellis Wayne Hawley (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1981), il%22%20and%20%22worker%20represe ntation%22&pg=PA99#v=onepage&q=%22standard%20oil%22&f=false (accessed April 6, 2015), page 9@ProgramTwitter | @NewAmerica | I Was a Warehouse Wage SlaveBy Mac McClelland, Mother Jones, April 2012"Don't take anything that happens to you there personally," the woman at the local chamber of commerce says when I tell her that tomorrow I start working at Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc. She winks at me. I stare at her for a second."What?" I ask. "Why, is somebody going to be mean to me or something?"She smiles. "Oh, yeah." This town somewhere west of the Mississippi is not big; everyone knows someone or is someone who's worked for Amalgamated. "But look at it from their perspective. They need you to work as fast as possible to push out as much as they can as fast as they can. So they're gonna give you goals, and then you know what? If you make those goals, they're gonna increase the goals. But they'll be yelling at you all the time. It's like the military. They have to break you down so they can turn you into what they want you to be. So they're going to tell you, 'You're not good enough, you're not good enough, you're not good enough,' to make you work harder. Don't say, 'This is the best I can do.' Say, 'I'll try,' even if you know you can't do it. Because if you say, 'This is the best I can do,' they'll let you go. They hire and fire constantly, every day. You'll see people dropping all around you. But don't take it personally and break down or start crying when they yell at you."Several months prior, I'd reported on an Ohio warehouse where workers shipped products for online retailers under conditions that were surprisingly demoralizing and dehumanizing, even to someone who's spent a lot of time working in warehouses, which I have. And then my editors sat me down. "We want you to go work for Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc.," they said. I'd have to give my real name and job history when I applied, and I couldn't lie if asked for any specifics. (I wasn't.) But I'd smudge identifying details of people and the company itself. Anyway, to do otherwise might give people the impression that these conditions apply only to one warehouse or one company. Which they don't. So I fretted about whether I'd have to abort the application process, like if someone asked me why I wanted the job. But no one did. And though I was kind of excited to trot out my warehouse experience, mainly all I needed to get hired was to confirm 20 or 30 times that I had not been to prison.The application process took place at a staffing office in a run-down city, the kind where there are boarded-up businesses and broken windows downtown and billboards advertising things like "Foreclosure Fridays!" at a local law firm. Six or seven other people apply for jobs along with me. We answer questions at computers grouped in several stations. Have I ever been to prison? the system asks. No? Well, but have I ever been to prison for assault? Burglary? A felony? A misdemeanor? Raping someone? Murdering anybody? Am I sure? There's no point in lying, the computer warns me, because criminal-background checks are run on employees. Additionally, I have to confirm at the next computer station that I can read, by taking a multiple-choice test in which I'm given pictures of several album covers, including Michael Jackson's Thriller, and asked what the name of the Michael Jackson album is. At yet another set of computers I'm asked about my work history and character. How do I feel about dangerous activities? Would I say I'm not really into them? Or really into them?In the center of the room, a video plays loudly and continuously on a big screen. Even more than you are hurting the company, a voice-over intones as animated people do things like accidentally oversleep, you are hurting yourself when you are late because you will be penalized on a point system, and when you get too many points, you're fired—unless you're late at any point during your first week, in which case you are instantly fired. Also because when you're late or sick you miss the opportunity to maximize your overtime pay. And working more than eight hours is mandatory. Stretching is also mandatory, since you will either be standing still at a conveyor line for most of your minimum 10-hour shift or walking on concrete or metal stairs. And be careful, because you could seriously hurt yourself. And watch out, because some of your coworkers will be the kind of monsters who will file false workers' comp claims. If you know of someone doing this and you tell on him and he gets convicted, you will be rewarded with $500.The computers screening us for suitability to pack boxes or paste labels belong to a temporary-staffing agency. The stuff we order from big online retailers lives in large warehouses, owned and operated either by the retailers themselves or by third-party logistics contractors, a.k.a. 3PLs. These companies often fulfill orders for more than one retailer out of a single warehouse. America's largest 3PL, Exel, has 86 million square feet of warehouse in North America; it's a subsidiary of Deutsche Post DHL, which is cute because Deutsche Post is the German post office, which was privatized in the 1990s and bought DHL in 2002, becoming one of the world's biggest corporate employers. The $31 billion "value-added warehousing and distribution" sector of 3PLs is just a fraction of what large 3PLs' parent companies pull in. UPS's logistics division, for example, pulls in more than a half a billion, but it feeds billions of dollars of business to UPS Inc."Leave your pride and your personal life at the door," the lady at the chamber of commerce says, if I want to last as an online warehouse worker.Anyhow, regardless of whether the retailer itself or a 3PL contractor houses and processes the stuff you buy, the actual stuff is often handled by people working for yet another company—a temporary-staffing agency. The agency to which I apply is hiring 4,000 drones for this single Amalgamated warehouse between October and December. Four thousand. Before leaving the staffing office, I'm one of them.I'm assigned a schedule of Sunday through Thursday, 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. When additional overtime is necessary, which it will be soon (Christmas!), I should expect to leave at 7 or 7:30 p.m. instead. Eight days after applying, i.e., after my drug test has cleared, I walk through a small, desolate town nearly an hour outside the city where I was hired. This is where the warehouse is, way out here, a long commute for many of my coworkers. I wander off the main road and into the chamber of commerce to kill some afternoon time—though not too much since my first day starts at 5 a.m.—but I end up getting useful job advice."Well, what if I do start crying?" I ask the woman who warns me to keep it together no matter how awfully I'm treated. "Are they really going to fire me for that?""Yes," she says. "There's 16 other people who want your job. Why would they keep a person who gets emotional, especially in this economy?"Still, she advises, regardless of how much they push me, don't work so hard that I injure myself. I'm young. I have a long life ahead of me. It's not worth it to do permanent physical damage, she says, which, considering that I got hired at elevensomething dollars an hour, is a bit of an understatement.As the sun gets lower in the curt November sky, I thank the woman for her help. When I start toward the door, she repeats her "No. 1 rule of survival" one more time."Leave your pride and your personal life at the door." If there's any way I'm going to last, she says, tomorrow I have to start pretending like I don't have either.Though it's inconvenient for most employees, the rural location of the Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc. warehouse isn't an accident. The town is bisected by a primary interstate, close to a busy airport, serviced by several major highways. There's a lot of rail out here. The town became a station stop on the way to more important places a hundred years ago, and it now feeds part of the massive transit networks used to get consumers anywhere goods from everywhere. Every now and then, a long line of railcars rolls past my hotel and gives my room a good shake. I don't ever get a good look at them, because it's dark outside when I go to work, and dark again when I get back.We are surrounded by signs that state our productivity goals. Other signs proclaim that a good customer experience, to which our goal-meeting is essential, is the key to growth, and growth is the key to lower prices, which leads to a better customer experience. There is no room for inefficiencies.Inside Amalgamated, an employee's first day is training day. Though we're not paid to be here until 6, we have been informed that we need to arrive at 5. If we don't show up in time to stand around while they sort out who we are and where they've put our ID badges, we could miss the beginning of training, which would mean termination. "I was up half the night because I was so afraid I was going to be late," a woman in her 60s tells me. I was, too. A minute's tardiness after the first week earns us 0.5 penalty points, an hour's tardiness is worth 1 point, and an absence 1.5; 6 is the number that equals "release." But during the first week even a minute's tardiness gets us fired. When we get lined up so we can be counted a third or fourth time, the woman conducting the roll call recognizes the last name of a young trainee. "Does your dad work here? Or uncle?" she asks. "Grandpa," he says, as another supervisor snaps at the same time, sounding not mean but very stressed out, "We gotta get goin' here."The culture is intense, an Amalgamated higher-up acknowledges at the beginning of our training. He's speaking to us from a video, one of several videos—about company policies, sexual harassment, etc.—that we watch while we try to keep our eyes open. We don't want to be so intense, the higher-up says. But our customers demand it. We are surrounded by signs that state our productivity goals. Other signs proclaim that a good customer experience, to which our goal-meeting is essential, is the key to growth, and growth is the key to lower prices, which leads to a better customer experience. There is no room for inefficiencies. The gal conducting our training reminds us again that we cannot miss any days our first week. There are NO exceptions to this policy. She says to take Brian, for example, who's here with us in training today. Brian already went through this training, but then during his first week his lady had a baby, so he missed a day and he had to be fired. Having to start the application process over could cost a brand-new dad like Brian a couple of weeks' worth of work and pay. Okay? Everybody turn around and look at Brian. Welcome back, Brian. Don't end up like Brian.Soon, we move on to practical training. Like all workplaces with automated and heavy machinery, this one contains plenty of ways to get hurt, and they are enumerated. There are transition points in the warehouse floor where the footing is uneven, and people trip and sprain ankles. Give forklifts that are raised up several stories to access products a wide berth: "If a pallet falls on you, you won't be working with us anymore." Watch your fingers around the conveyor belts that run waist-high throughout the entire facility. People lose fingers. Or parts of fingers. And about once a year, they tell us, someone in an Amalgamated warehouse gets caught by the hair, and when a conveyor belt catches you by the hair, it doesn't just take your hair with it. It rips out a piece of scalp as well.If the primary message of one-half of our practical training is Be Careful, the takeaway of the other half is Move As Fast As Humanly Possible. Or superhumanly possible. I have been hired as a picker, which means my job is to find, scan, place in a plastic tote, and send away via conveyor whatever item within the multiple stories of this several-hundred-thousand-square-foot warehouse my scanner tells me to. We are broken into groups and taught how to read the scanner to find the object among some practice shelves. Then we immediately move on to practicing doing it faster, racing each other to fill the orders our scanners dictate, then racing each other to put all the items back."Hurry up," a trainer encourages me when he sees me pulling ahead of the others, "and you can put the other items back!" I roll my eyes that my reward for doing a good job is that I get to do more work, but he's got my number: I am exactly the kind of freak this sort of motivation appeals to. I win, and set myself on my prize of the bonus errand.That afternoon, we are turned loose in the warehouse, scanners in hand. And that's when I realize that for whatever relative youth and regular exercise and overachievement complexes I have brought to this job, I will never be able to keep up with the goals I've been given.The place is immense. Cold, cavernous. Silent, despite thousands of people quietly doing their picking, or standing along the conveyors quietly packing or box-taping, nothing noisy but the occasional whir of a passing forklift. My scanner tells me in what exact section—there are nine merchandise sections, so sprawling that there's a map attached to my ID badge—of vast shelving systems the item I'm supposed to find resides. It also tells me how many seconds it thinks I should take to get there. Dallas sector, section yellow, row H34, bin 22, level D: wearable blanket. Battery-operated flour sifter. Twenty seconds. I count how many steps it takes me to speed-walk to my destination: 20. At 5-foot-9, I've got a decently long stride, and I only cover the 20 steps and locate the exact shelving unit in the allotted time if I don't hesitate for one second or get lost or take a drink of water before heading in the right direction as fast as I can walk or even occasionally jog. Olive-oil mister. Male libido enhancement pills. Rifle strap. Who the fuck buys their paper towels off the internet? Fairy calendar. Neoprene lunch bag. Often as not, I miss my time 60?US?Online RetailersAmazonStaplesAppleDellOffice DepotWalmartSearsLiberty Media Corp. (QVC)Office MaxCDW Corp.Best BuyNeweggNetflixSony USAW.W. GraingerCostcoMacy'sVictoria Secret and Bath & Body WorksHP Home & Home Office StoreJ.C. PenneyL.L. BeanTargetSystemaxGapWilliams-Amway GlobalToys R UsAvonKohl'Redcats USANordstromSymantecVistaprintPC ConnectionSaksNeiman MarcusCabela'sBarnes & NobleBlockbusterHome DepotMusician's Friend1-800-PeapodUrban OutfittersGilt GroupeJ. Crew GroupCSN StoresPC MallFoot LockerScholasticCrate and BarrelAbercrombie & FitchAmerican Eagle OutfittersFollett Higher Education groupUS Auto Parts NetworkBlue NileSource: Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide Plenty of things can hurt my goals. The programs for our scanners are designed with the assumption that we disposable employees don't know what we're doing. Find a Rob Zombie Voodoo Doll in the blue section of the Rockies sector in the third bin of the A-level in row Z42, my scanner tells me. But if I punch into my scanner that it's not there, I have to prove it by scanning every single other item in the bin, though I swear on my life there's no Rob Zombie Voodoo Doll in this pile of 30 individually wrapped and bar-coded batteries that take me quite a while to beep one by one. It could be five minutes before I can move on to, and make it to, and find, my next item. That lapse is supposed to be mere seconds.This week, we newbies need to make 75 percent of our total picking-volume targets. If we don't, we get "counseled." If the people in here who've been around longer than a few weeks don't make their 100 percent, they get counseled. Why aren't you making your targets? the supervisors will ask. You really need to make your targets.More than 15 percent of pickers, packers, movers, and unloaders are temps. They make $3 less an hour on average than permanent workers. And they can be "temporary" for years.From the temp agency, Amalgamated has ordered the exact number of humans it should take to fill this week's orders if we work at top capacity. Lots of retailers use temporary help in peak season, and online ones are no exception. But lots of warehousing and distribution centers like this also use temps year-round. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that more than 15 percent of pickers, packers, movers, and unloaders are temps. They make $3 less an hour on average than permanent workers. And they can be "temporary" for years. There are so many temps in this warehouse that the staffing agency has its own office here. Industry consultants describe the temp-staffing business as "very, very busy." "On fire." Maximizing profits means making sure no employee has a slow day, means having only as many employees as are necessary to get the job done, the number of which can be determined and ordered from a huge pool of on-demand labor literally by the day. Often, temp workers have to call in before shifts to see if they'll get work. Sometimes, they're paid piece rate according to the number of units they fill or unload or move. Always, they can be let go in an instant, and replaced just as quickly.Everyone in here is hustling. At the announcement to take one of our two 15-minute breaks, we hustle even harder. We pickers close out the totes we're currently filling and send them away on the conveyor belt, then make our way as fast as we can with the rest of the masses across the long haul of concrete between wherever we are and the break room, but not before passing through metal detectors, for which there is a line—we're required to be screened on our way out, though not on our way in; apparently the concern is that we're sneaking Xbox 360s up under our shirts, not bringing in weapons. If we don't set off the metal detector and have to be taken aside and searched, we can run into the break room and try to find a seat among the rows and rows and long-ass rows of tables. We lose more time if we want to pee—and I do want to pee, and when amid the panic about the time constraints it occurs to me that I don't have my period I toss a fist victoriously into the air—between the actual peeing and the waiting in line to pee in the nearest one of the two bathrooms, which has eight stalls in the ladies' and I'm not sure how many in the men's and serves thousands of people a day. Once I pare this process down as much as possible, by stringing a necktie through my belt loops because I can't find a metal-less replacement for my belt at the local Walmart—and if my underwear or butt-crack slips out, I've been warned, I can get penalized—and by leaving my car keys in the break room after a manager helps me find an admittedly "still risky" hiding place for them because we have no lockers and "things get stolen out of here all the time," I get myself up to seven minutes' worth of break time to inhale as many high-fat and -protein snacks as I can. People who work at Amalgamated are always working this fast. Right now, because it's almost Black Friday, there are just more of us doing it.Then as quickly as we've come, we all run back. At the end of the 15 minutes, we're supposed to be back at whichever far-flung corner of the warehouse we came from, scanners in hand, working. We run to grab the wheeled carts we put the totes on. We run past each other and if we do say something, we say it as we keep moving. "How's the job market?" a supervisor says, laughing, as several of us newbies run by. "Just kidding!" Ha ha! "I know why you guys are here. That's why I'm here, too!" At another near collision between employees, one wants to know how complaining about not being able to get time off went and the other spits that he was told he was lucky to have a job. This is no way to have a conversation, but at least conversations are not forbidden, as they were in the Ohio warehouse I reported on—where I saw a guy get fired for talking, specifically for asking another employee, "Where are you from?" So I'm allowed the extravagance of smiling at a guy who is always so unhappy and saying, "How's it goin'?" And he can respond, "Terrible," as I'm running to the big industrial cage-lift that takes our carts up to the second or third floors, which involves walking under a big metal bar gating the front of it, and which I should really take my time around. Within the last month, three different people have needed stitches in the head after being clocked by these big metal bars, so it's dangerous. Especially the lift in the Dallas sector, whose bar has been installed wrong, so it is extra prone to falling, they tell us. Be careful. Seriously, though. We really need to meet our goals here.It's a welcome distraction from the pain to imagine all these sex toys being taken out from under a tree and unwrapped. Merry Christmas. I got you this giant black cock you wanted.Amalgamated has estimated that we pickers speed-walk an average of 12 miles a day on cold concrete, and the twinge in my legs blurs into the heavy soreness in my feet that complements the pinch in my hips when I crouch to the floor—the pickers' shelving runs from the floor to seven feet high or so—to retrieve an iPad protective case. iPad anti-glare protector. iPad one-hand grip-holder device. Thing that looks like a landline phone handset that plugs into your iPad so you can pretend that rather than talking via iPad you are talking on a phone. And dildos. Really, a staggering number of dildos. At breaks, some of my coworkers complain that they have to handle so many dildos. But it's one of the few joys of my day. I've started cringing every time my scanner shows a code that means the item I need to pick is on the ground, which, in the course of a 10.5-hour shift—much less the mandatory 12-hour shifts everyone is slated to start working next week—is literally hundreds of times a day. "How has OSHA signed off on this?" I've taken to muttering to myself. "Has OSHA signed off on this?" ("The thing about ergonomics," OSHA says when I call them later to ask, "is that OSHA doesn't have a standard. Best practices. But no laws.") So it's a welcome distraction, really, to imagine all these sex toys being taken out from under a tree and unwrapped. Merry Christmas. I got you this giant black cock you wanted.At lunch, the most common question, aside from "Which offensive dick-shaped product did you handle the most of today?" is "Why are you here?" like in prison. A guy in his mid-20s says he's from Chicago, came to this state for a full-time job in the city an hour away from here because "Chicago's going down." His other job doesn't pay especially well, so he's here—pulling 10.5-hour shifts and commuting two hours a day—anytime he's not there. One guy says he's a writer; he applies for grants in his time off from the warehouse. A middle-aged lady near me used to be a bookkeeper. She's a peak-season hire, worked here last year during Christmas, too. "What do you do the rest of the year?" I ask. "Collect unemployment!" she says, and laughs the sad laugh you laugh when you're saying something really unfunny. All around us in the break room, mothers frantically call home. "Hi, baby!" you can hear them say; coos to children echo around the walls the moment lunch begins. It's brave of these women to keep their phones in the break room, where theft is so high—they can't keep them in their cars if they want to use them during the day, because we aren't supposed to leave the premises without permission, and they can't take them onto the warehouse floor, because "nothing but the clothes on your backs" is allowed on the warehouse floor (anything on your person that Amalgamated sells can be confiscated—"And what does Amalgamated sell?" they asked us in training. "Everything!"). I suppose that if I were responsible for a child, I would have no choice but to risk leaving my phone in here, too. But the mothers make it quick. "How are you doing?" "Is everything okay?" "Did you eat something?" "I love you!" and then they're off the phone and eating as fast as the rest of us. Lunch is 29 minutes and 59 seconds—we've been reminded of this: "Lunch is not 30 minutes and 1 second"—that's a penalty-point-earning offense—and that includes the time to get through the metal detectors and use the disgustingly overcrowded bathroom—the suggestion board hosts several pleas that someone do something about that smell—and time to stand in line to clock out and back in. So we chew quickly, and are often still chewing as we run back to our stations.The days blend into each other. But it's near the end of my third day that I get written up. I sent two of some product down the conveyor line when my scanner was only asking for one; the product was boxed in twos, so I should've opened the box and separated them, but I didn't notice because I was in a hurry. With an hour left in the day, I've already picked 800 items. Despite moving fast enough to get sloppy, my scanner tells me that means I'm fulfilling only 52 percent of my goal. A supervisor who is a genuinely nice person comes by with a clipboard listing my numbers. Like the rest of the supervisors, she tries to create a friendly work environment and doesn't want to enforce the policies that make this job so unpleasant. But her hands are tied. She needs this job, too, so she has no choice but to tell me something I have never been told in 19 years of school or at any of some dozen workplaces. "You're doing really bad," she says.I'll admit that I did start crying a little. Not at work, thankfully, since that's evidently frowned upon, but later, when I explained to someone over Skype that it hurts, oh, how my body hurts after failing to make my goals despite speed-walking or flat-out jogging and pausing every 20 or 30 seconds to reach on my tiptoes or bend or drop to the floor for 10.5 hours, and isn't it awful that they fired Brian because he had a baby, and, in fact, when I was hired I signed off on something acknowledging that anyone who leaves without at least a week's notice—whether because they're a journalist who will just walk off or because they miss a day for having a baby and are terminated—has their hours paid out not at their hired rate but at the legal minimum. Which in this state, like in lots of states, is about $7 an hour. Thank God that I (unlike Brian, probably) didn't need to pay for opting into Amalgamated's "limited" health insurance program. Because in my 10.5-hour day I'll make about $60 after taxes."This is America?" my Skype pal asks, because often I'm abroad.With an hour left in the day, I've already picked 800 items. Despite moving fast enough to get sloppy, my scanner tells me that means I'm fulfilling only 52 percent of my goal.Indeed, and I'm working for a gigantic, immensely profitable company. Or for the staffing company that works for that company, anyway. Which is a nice arrangement, because temporary-staffing agencies keep the stink of unacceptable labor conditions off the companies whose names you know. When temps working at a Walmart warehouse sued for not getting paid for all their hours, and for then getting sent home without pay for complaining, Walmart—not technically their employer—wasn't named as a defendant. (Though Amazon has been named in a similar suit.) Temporary staffers aren't legally entitled to decent health care because they are just short-term "contractors" no matter how long they keep the same job. They aren't entitled to raises, either, and they don't get vacation and they'd have a hell of a time unionizing and they don't have the privilege of knowing if they'll have work on a particular day or for how long they'll have a job. And that is how you slash prices and deliver products superfast and offer free shipping and still post profits in the millions or billions."This really doesn't have to be this awful," I shake my head over Skype. But it is. And this job is just about the only game in town, like it is in lots of towns, and eventually will be in more towns, with US internet retail sales projected to grow 10 percent every year to $279 billion in 2015 and with Amazon, the largest of the online retailers, seeing revenues rise 30 to 40 percent year after year and already having 69 giant warehouses, 17 of which came online in 2011 alone. So butch up, Sally."You look way too happy," an Amalgamated supervisor says to me. He has appeared next to me as I work, and in the silence of the vast warehouse, his presence catches me by surprise. His comment, even more so."Really?" I ask.I don't really feel happy. By the fourth morning that I drag myself out of bed long before dawn, my self-pity has turned into actual concern. There's a screaming pain running across the back of my shoulders. "You need to take 800 milligrams of Advil a day," a woman in her late 50s or early 60s advised me when we all congregated in the break room before work. When I arrived, I stashed my lunch on a bottom ledge of the cheap metal shelving lining the break room walls, then hesitated before walking away. I cursed myself. I forgot something in the bag, but there was no way to get at it without crouching or bending over, and any extra times of doing that today were times I couldn't really afford. The unhappy-looking guy I always make a point of smiling at told me, as we were hustling to our stations, that this is actually the second time he's worked here: A few weeks back he missed some time for doctors' appointments when his arthritis flared up, and though he had notes for the absences, he was fired; he had to start the application process over again, which cost him an extra week and a half of work. "Zoom zoom! Pick it up! Pickers' pace, guys!" we were prodded this morning. Since we already felt like we were moving pretty fast, I'm quite dispirited, in fact."Really?" I ask."Well," the supervisor qualifies. "Just everybody else is usually really sad or mad by the time they've been working here this long."It's my 28th hour as an employee.I probably look happier than I should because I have the extreme luxury of not giving a shit about keeping this job. Nevertheless, I'm tearing around my assigned sector hard enough to keep myself consistently light-headed and a little out of breath. I'm working in books today. "Oh," I smiled to myself when I reached the paper-packed shelves. I love being around books.A hot spark shoots between my hand and the metal shelving, striking enough to make my body learn to fear it.Picking books for Amalgamated has a disadvantage over picking dildos or baby food or Barbies, however, in that the shelving numbers don't always line up. When my scanner tells me the book I need is on the lowest level in section 28 of a row, section 28 of the eye-level shelf of that row may or may not line up with section 28 of the lowest level. So when I spot eye-level section 28 and squat or kneel on the floor, the section 28 I'm looking for might be five feet to my right or left. Which means I have to stand up and crouch back down again to get there, greatly increasing the number of times I need to stand and crouch/kneel in a day. Or I can crawl. Usually, I crawl. A coworker is choosing the crouch/kneel option. "This gets so tiring after a while," he says when we pass each other. He's 20. It's 9:07 a.m.There are other disadvantages to working in books. In the summer, it's the heat. Lots of the volumes are stored on the second and third floors of this immense cement box; the job descriptions we had to sign off on acknowledged that temperatures can be as low as 60 and higher than 95 degrees, and higher floors tend to be hotter. "They had to get fans because in the summer people were dying in here," one of the supervisors tells us. The fans still blow now even though I'm wearing five shirts. "If you think it's cold in here," one of my coworkers told me when she saw me rubbing my arms for warmth one morning, "just hope we don't have a fire drill." They evacuated everyone for one recently, and lots of the fast-moving employees had stripped down to T-shirts. They stood outside, masses of them, shivering for an hour as snow fell on their bare arms.In the books sector, in the cold, in the winter dryness, made worse by the fans and all the paper, I jet across the floor in my rubber-soled Adidas, pant legs whooshing against each other, 30 seconds according to my scanner to take 35 steps to get to the right section and row and bin and level and reach for Diary of a Wimpy Kid and "FUCK!" A hot spark shoots between my hand and the metal shelving. It's not the light static-electric prick I would terrorize my sister with when we got bored in carpeted department stores, but a solid shock, striking enough to make my body learn to fear it. I start inadvertently hesitating every time I approach my target. One of my coworkers races up to a shelving unit and leans in with the top of his body first; his head touches the metal, and the shock knocks him back. "Be careful of your head," he says to me. In the first two hours of my day, I pick 300 items. The majority of them zap me painfully."Please tell me you have suggestions for dealing with the static electricity," I say to a person in charge when the morning break comes. This conversation is going to cost me a couple of my precious few minutes to eat/drink/pee, but I've started to get paranoid that maybe it's not good for my body to exchange an electric charge with metal several hundred times in one day."You'll feel carpal tunnel start to set in," one of the supervisors told me, "so you'll want to change hands.""Oh, are you workin' in books?""Yeah.""No. Sorry." She means this. I feel bad for the supervisors who are trying their damnedest to help us succeed and not be miserable. "They've done everything they can"—"they" are not aware, it would appear, that anti-static coating and matting exist—"to ground things up there but there's nothing you can do."I produce a deep frown. But even if she did have suggestions, I probably wouldn't have time to implement them. One suggestion for minimizing work-related pain and strain is to get a stepladder to retrieve any items on shelves above your head rather than getting up on your toes and overreaching. But grabbing one of the stepladders stashed few and far between among the rows of merchandise takes time. Another is to alternate the hand you use to hold and wield your cumbersome scanner. "You'll feel carpal tunnel start to set in," one of the supervisors told me, "so you'll want to change hands." But that, too, he admitted, costs time, since you have to hit the bar code at just the right angle for it to scan, and your dominant hand is way more likely to nail it the first time. Time is not a thing I have to spare. I'm still only at 57 percent of my goal. It's been 10 years since I was a mover and packer for a moving company, and only slightly less since I worked ridiculously long hours as a waitress and housecleaner. My back and knees were younger then, but I'm only 31 and feel pretty confident that if I were doing those jobs again I'd still wake up with soreness like a person who'd worked out too much, not the soreness of a person whose body was staging a revolt. I can break into goal-meeting suicide pace for short bouts, sure, but I can't keep it up for 10.5 hours."Do not say that," one of the workampers tells me at break. Workampers are people who drive RVs around the country, from temporary job to temporary job, docking in trailer camps. "We're retired but we can't…" another explains to me about himself and his wife, shrugging, "make it. And there's no jobs, so we go where the jobs are."Amalgamated advertises positions on websites workampers frequent. In this warehouse alone, there are hundreds of them."Never say that you can't do it," the first workamper emphasizes. "When they ask you why you aren't reaching your goals—""Say, 'It's because they're totally unreasonable'?" I suggest."These decisions are made at a business level and are based on cost," an industry analyst says. "I never, ever thought about what they're like and how they treat people. Fulfillment centers want to keep clients blissfully ignorant of their conditions.""Say you'll do better, even if you know you can't," she continues, ignoring me. "Say you'll try harder, even if the truth is that you're trying your absolute hardest right now, no matter how many times they tell you you're not doing good enough."There are people who make the goals. One of the trainers does. She works here all year, not just during Christmas. "I hated picking for the first month," she told me sympathetically the other day. "Then you just get used to it." She's one of many hardcore workers here, a labor pool studded with dedicated and solid employees. One of the permanent employees has tried to encourage me by explaining that he always makes his goals, and sometimes makes 120 percent of them. When I ask him if that isn't totally exhausting, he says, "Oh yeah. You're gonna be crying for your mommy when today's over." When I ask him if there's any sort of incentive for his overperformance, if he's rewarded in any way, he says occasionally Amalgamated enters him in drawings for company gift cards. For $15 or $20. He shrugs when he admits the size of the bonus. "These days you need it." Anyway, he says, he thinks it's important to have a good attitude and try to do a good job. Even some of the employees who are total failures are still trying really hard. "I heard you're doing good," one of the ladies in my training group says to me. Her eyebrows are heavy with stress. I am still hitting less than 60 percent of my target. Still, that's better than she's doing. "Congratulations," she says, and smiles sadly.We will be fired if we say we just can't or won't get better, the workamper tells me. But so long as I resign myself to hearing how inadequate I am on a regular basis, I can keep this job. "Do you think this job has to be this terrible?" I ask the workamper."Oh, no," she says, and makes a face at me like I've asked a stupid question, which I have. As if Amalgamated couldn't bear to lose a fraction of a percent of profits by employing a few more than the absolute minimum of bodies they have to, or by storing the merchandise at halfway ergonomic heights and angles. But that would cost space, and space costs money, and money is not a thing customers could possibly be expected to hand over for this service without huffily taking their business elsewhere. Charging for shipping does cause high abandonment rates of online orders, though it's not clear whether people wouldn't pay a few bucks for shipping, or a bit more for the products, if they were guaranteed that no low-income workers would be tortured or exploited in the handling of their purchases."The first step is awareness," an e-commerce specialist will tell me later. There have been trickles of information leaking out of the Internet Order Fulfillment Industrial Complex: an investigation by the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Morning Call in which Amazon workers complained of fainting in stifling heat, being disciplined for getting heat exhaustion, and otherwise being "treated like a piece of crap"; a workampers' blog picked up by Gizmodo; a Huffington Post exposé about the lasting physical damage and wild economic instability temporary warehouse staffers suffer. And workers have filed lawsuits against online retailers, their logistics companies, and their temp agencies over off-the-clock work and other compensation issues, as well as at least one that details working conditions that are all too similar. (That case has been dismissed but is on appeal.) Still, most people really don't know how most internet goods get to them. The e-commerce specialist didn't even know, and she was in charge of choosing the 3PL for her midsize online-retail company. "These decisions are made at a business level and are based on cost," she says. "I never, ever thought about what they're like and how they treat people. Fulfillment centers want to keep clients blissfully ignorant of their conditions." If you called major clothing retailers, she ventured, and asked them "what it was like at the warehouse that ships their sweaters, no one at company headquarters would have any fucking clue."Further, she said, now that I mentioned it, she has no idea how to go about getting any information on the conditions at the 3PL she herself hired. Nor how to find a responsible one. "A standard has to be created. Like fair trade or organic certification, where social good is built into the cost. There is a segment of the population"—like the consumers of her company's higher-end product, she felt—"that cares and will pay for it."There's no time off on Election Day. "What if I want to vote?" I ask a supervisor. "I think you should!" he says. "But if I leave I'll get fired," I say. To which he makes a sad face before saying, "Yeah."If they are aware how inhumane the reality is. But awareness has a long way to go, and logistics doesn't just mean online retail; food packagers and processors, medical suppliers, and factories use mega-3PLs as well. And a whole lot of other industries—hotels, call centers—take advantage of the price controls and plausible deniability that temporary staffing offers."Maybe awareness will lead to better working conditions," says Vinod Singhal, a professor of operations management at Georgia Tech. "But…" Given the state of the economy, he isn't optimistic.This is the kind of resignation many of my coworkers have been forced to accept. At the end of break, the workamper and I are starting to fast-walk back to our stations. A guy who's been listening to our conversation butts in. "They can take you for everything you've got," he says. "They know it's your last resort."At today's pickers' meeting, we are reminded that customers are waiting. We cannot move at a "comfortable pace," because if we are comfortable, we will never make our numbers, and customers are not willing to wait. And it's Christmastime. We got 2.7 million orders this week. People need—need—these items and they need them right now. So even if you've worked here long enough to be granted time off, you are not allowed to use it until the holidays are over. (And also forget about Election Day, which is today. "What if I want to vote?" I ask a supervisor. "I think you should!" he says. "But if I leave I'll get fired," I say. To which he makes a sad face before saying, "Yeah.") No time off includes those of you who are scheduled to work Thanksgiving. There are two Amalgamated-catered Thanksgiving dinners offered to employees next week, but you can only go to one of them. If you attend one, your employee badge will be branded with a nonremovable sticker so that you cannot also attempt to eat at the other. Anyway, good luck, everybody. Everybody back to work. Quickly!I feel genuinely sorry for any child who ever asks me for anything for Christmas, only to be informed that every time a "Place Order" button rings, a poor person takes four Advil and gets told they suck at their job.Speed-walking back to the electro-trauma of the books sector, I wince when I unintentionally imagine the types of Christmas lore that will prevail around my future household. I feel genuinely sorry for any child I might have who ever asks me for anything for Christmas, only to be informed that every time a "Place Order" button rings, a poor person takes four Advil and gets told they suck at their job.I suppose this is what they were talking about in the radio ad I heard on the way to work, the one that was paid for by a coalition of local businesses, gently begging citizens to buy from them instead of off the internet and warning about the importance of supporting local shops. But if my coworker Brian wants to feed his new baby any of these 24-packs of Plum Organics Apple & Carrot baby food I've been picking, he should probably buy them from Amazon, where they cost only $31.16. In my locally owned grocery store, that's $47.76 worth of sustenance. Even if he finds the time to get in the car to go buy it at a brick-and-mortar Target, where it'd be less convenient but cost about the same as on Amazon, that'd be before sales tax, which physical stores, unlike Amazon, are legally required to charge to help pay for the roads on which Brian's truck, and more to the point Amazon's trucks, drive.Back in books, I take a sharp shock to my right hand when I grab the book the scanner cramping my left hand demands me to and make some self-righteous promises to myself about continuing to buy food at my more-expensive grocery store, because I can. Because I'm not actually a person who makes $7.25 an hour, not anymore, not one of the 1 in 3 Americans who is now poor or "near poor." For the moment, I'm just playing one."Lucky girl," I whisper to myself at the tail of a deep breath, as soon as fresh winter air hits my lungs. It's only lunchtime, but I've breached the warehouse doors without permission. I've picked 500 items this morning, and don't want to get shocked anymore, or hear from the guy with the clipboard what a total disappointment I am. "Lucky girl, lucky girl, lucky girl," I repeat on my way to my car. I told the lady from my training group who's so stressed about her poor performance to tell our supervisor not to look for me—and she grabbed my arm as I turned to leave, looking even more worried than usual, asking if I was sure I knew what I was doing. I don't want our supervisor to waste any time; he's got goals to make, too. He won't miss me, and nobody else will, either. The temp agency is certainly as full of applicants as it was when I went to ask for a job."Just look around in here if you wanna see how bad it is out there," one of the associates at the temp office said to me, unprompted, when I got hired. It's the first time anyone has ever tried to comfort me because I got a job, because he knew, and everyone in this industry that's growing wildfire fast knows, and accepts, that its model by design is mean. He offered me the same kind of solidarity the workers inside the warehouse try to provide each other at every break: Why are you here? What happened that you have to let people treat you like this? "We're all in the same boat," he said, after shaking my hand to welcome me aboard. "It's a really big boat."This story ran in the March/April 2012 issue of Mother Jones, under the headline "Shelf Lives."Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace By Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, The New York Times, Aug. 15, 2015SEATTLE — On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working.They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs, one employee recalled. When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported. To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, “I’m Peculiar” — the company’s proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)Many of the newcomers filing in on Mondays may not be there in a few years. The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,” one former Amazon human resources director said. Some workers who suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other personal crises said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover.Even as the company tests delivery by drone and ways to restock toilet paper at the push of a bathroom button, it is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable. The company, founded and still run by Jeff Bezos, rejects many of the popular management bromides that other corporations at least pay lip service to and has instead designed what many workers call an intricate machine propelling them to achieve Mr. Bezos’ ever- expanding ambitions.“This is a company that strives to do really big, innovative, groundbreaking things, and those things aren’t easy,” said Susan Harker, Amazon’s top recruiter. “When you’re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work is really challenging. For some people it doesn’t work.”Bo Olson was one of them. He lasted less than two years in a book marketing role and said that his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”Thanks in part to its ability to extract the most from employees, Amazon is stronger than ever. Its swelling campus is transforming a swath of this city, a 10-million-square-foot bet that tens of thousands of new workers will be able to sell everything to everyone everywhere. Last month, it eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the country, with a market valuation of $250 billion, and Forbes deemed Mr. Bezos the fifth-wealthiest person on earth.Tens of millions of Americans know Amazon as customers, but life inside its corporate offices is largely a mystery. Secrecy is required; even low-level employees sign a lengthy confidentiality agreement. The company authorized only a handful of senior managers to talk to reporters for this article, declining requests for interviews with Mr. Bezos and his top leaders.However, more than 100 current and former Amazonians — members of the leadership team, human resources executives, marketers, retail specialists and engineers who worked on projects from the Kindle to grocery delivery to the recent mobile phone launch — described how they tried to reconcile the sometimes-punishing aspects of their workplace with what many called its thrilling power to create.In interviews, some said they thrived at Amazon precisely because it pushed them past what they thought were their limits. Many employees are motivated by “thinking big and knowing that we haven’t scratched the surface on what’s out there to invent,” said Elisabeth Rommel, a retail executive who was one of those permitted to speak.Others who cycled in and out of the company said that what they learned in their brief stints helped their careers take off. And more than a few who fled said they later realized they had become addicted to Amazon’s way of working.“A lot of people who work there feel this tension: It’s the greatest place I hate to work,” said John Rossman, a former executive there who published a book, “The Amazon Way.”Amazon may be singular but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims. It has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.“Organizations are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money, either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the executioner’s blade,” said Clay Parker Jones, a consultant who helps old-line businesses become more responsive to change.On a recent morning, as Amazon’s new hires waited to begin orientation, few of them seemed to appreciate the experiment in which they had enrolled. Only one, Keith Ketzle, a freckled Texan triathlete with an M.B.A., lit up with recognition, explaining how he left his old, lumbering company for a faster, grittier one.“Conflict brings about innovation,” he said.Jeff Bezos turned to data-driven management very early.He wanted his grandmother to stop smoking, he recalled in a 2010 graduation speech at Princeton. He didn’t beg or appeal to sentiment. He just did the math, calculating that every puff cost her a few minutes. “You’ve taken nine years off your life!” he told her. She burst into tears.He was 10 at the time. Decades later, he created a technological and retail giant by relying on some of the same impulses: eagerness to tell others how to behave; an instinct for bluntness bordering on confrontation; and an overarching confidence in the power of metrics, buoyed by his experience in the early 1990s at D. E. Shaw, a financial firm that overturned Wall Street convention by using algorithms to get the most out of every trade.According to early executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost from the moment he founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought sapped businesses over time — bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the company grew, he wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them proudly counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of businesses he wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared.The result was the leadership principles, the articles of faith that describe the way Amazonians should act. In contrast to companies where declarations about their philosophy amount to vague platitudes, Amazon has rules that are part of its daily language and rituals, used in hiring, cited at meetings and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime. Some Amazonians say they teach them to their children.The guidelines conjure an empire of elite workers (principle No. 5: “Hire and develop the best”) who hold one another to towering expectations and are liberated from the forces — red tape, office politics — that keep them from delivering their utmost. Employees are to exhibit “ownership” (No. 2), or mastery of every element of their businesses, and “dive deep,” (No. 12) or find the underlying ideas that can fix problems or identify new services before shoppers even ask for them.The workplace should be infused with transparency and precision about who is really achieving and who is not. Within Amazon, ideal employees are often described as “athletes” with endurance, speed (No. 8: “bias for action”), performance that can be measured and an ability to defy limits (No. 7: “think big”).“You can work long, hard or smart, but at you can’t choose two out of three,” Mr. Bezos wrote in his 1997 letter to shareholders, when the company sold only books, and which still serves as a manifesto. He added that when he interviewed potential hires, he warned them, “It’s not easy to work here.”Mr. Rossman, the former executive, said that Mr. Bezos was addressing a meeting in 2003 when he turned in the direction of Microsoft, across the water from Seattle, and said he didn’t want Amazon to become “a country club.” If Amazon becomes like Microsoft, “we would die,” Mr. Bezos added.While the Amazon campus appears similar to those of some tech giants — with its dog-friendly offices, work force that skews young and male, on-site farmers’ market and upbeat posters — the company is considered a place apart. Google and Facebook motivate employees with gyms, meals and benefits, like cash handouts for new parents, “designed to take care of the whole you,” as Google puts it.Amazon, though, offers no pretense that catering to employees is a priority. Compensation is considered competitive — successful midlevel managers can collect the equivalent of an extra salary from grants of a stock that has increased more than tenfold since 2008. But workers are expected to embrace “frugality” (No. 9), from the bare-bones desks to the cellphones and travel expenses that they often pay themselves. (No daily free food buffets or regular snack supplies, either.) The focus is on relentless striving to please customers, or “customer obsession” (No. 1), with words like “mission” used to describe lightning-quick delivery of Cocoa Krispies or selfie sticks.As the company has grown, Mr. Bezos has become more committed to his original ideas, viewing them in almost moral terms, those who have worked closely with him say. “My main job today: I work hard at helping to maintain the culture,” Mr. Bezos said last year at a conference run by Business Insider, a web publication in which he is an investor.Of all of his management notions, perhaps the most distinctive is his belief that harmony is often overvalued in the workplace — that it can stifle honest critique and encourage polite praise for flawed ideas. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to “disagree and commit” (No. 13) — to rip into colleagues’ ideas, with feedback that can be blunt to the point of painful, before lining up behind a decision.“We always want to arrive at the right answer,” said Tony Galbato, vice president for human resources, in an email statement. “It would certainly be much easier and socially cohesive to just compromise and not debate, but that may lead to the wrong decision.”At its best, some employees said, Amazon can feel like the Bezos vision come to life, a place willing to embrace risk and strengthen ideas by stress test. Employees often say their co-workers are the sharpest, most committed colleagues they have ever met, taking to heart instructions in the leadership principles like “never settle” and “no task is beneath them.” Even relatively junior employees can make major contributions. The new delivery-by-drone project announced in 2013, for example, was coinvented by a low-level engineer named Daniel Buchmueller.Last August, Stephenie Landry, an operations executive, joined in discussions about how to shorten delivery times and developed an idea for rushing goods to urban customers in an hour or less. One hundred eleven days later, she was in Brooklyn directing the start of the new service, Prime Now.“A customer was able to get an Elsa doll that they could not find in all of New York City, and they had it delivered to their house in 23 minutes,” said Ms. Landry, who was authorized by the company to speak, still sounding exhilarated months later about providing “Frozen” dolls in record time.That becomes possible, she and others said, when everyone follows the dictates of the leadership principles. “We’re trying to create those moments for customers where we’re solving a really practical need,” Ms. Landry said, “in this way that feels really futuristic and magical.”Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,” said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.In Amazon warehouses, employees are monitored by sophisticated electronic systems to ensure they are packing enough boxes every hour. (Amazon came under fire in 2011 when workers in an eastern Pennsylvania warehouse toiled in more than 100-degree heat with ambulances waiting outside, taking away laborers as they fell. After an investigation by the local newspaper, the company installed air-conditioning.)But in its offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do more and more. “The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff,” said Amy Michaels, a former Kindle marketer.The process begins when Amazon’s legions of recruiters identify thousands of job prospects each year, who face extra screening by “bar raisers,” star employees and part-time interviewers charged with ensuring that only the best are hired. As the newcomers acclimate, they often feel dazzled, flattered and intimidated by how much responsibility the company puts on their shoulders and how directly Amazon links their performance to the success of their assigned projects, whether selling wine or testing the delivery of packages straight to shoppers’ car trunks.Every aspect of the Amazon system amplifies the others to motivate and discipline the company’s marketers, engineers and finance specialists: the leadership principles; rigorous, continuing feedback on performance; and the competition among peers who fear missing a potential problem or improvement and race to answer an email before anyone else.Some veterans interviewed said they were protected from pressures by nurturing bosses or worked in relatively slow divisions. But many others said the culture stoked their willingness to erode work-life boundaries, castigate themselves for shortcomings (being “vocally self-critical” is included in the description of the leadership principles) and try to impress a company that can often feel like an insatiable taskmaster. Even many Amazonians who have worked on Wall Street and at start-ups say the workloads at the new South Lake Union campus can be extreme: marathon conference calls on Easter Sunday and Thanksgiving, criticism from bosses for spotty Internet access on vacation, and hours spent working at home most nights or weekends.“One time I didn’t sleep for four days straight,” said Dina Vaccari, who joined in 2008 to sell Amazon gift cards to other companies and once used her own money, without asking for approval, to pay a freelancer in India to enter data so she could get more done. “These businesses were my babies, and I did whatever I could to make them successful.”She and other workers had no shortage of career options but said they had internalized Amazon’s priorities. One ex-employee’s fiancé became so concerned about her nonstop working night after night that he would drive to the Amazon campus at 10 p.m. and dial her cellphone until she agreed to come home. When they took a vacation to Florida, she spent every day at Starbucks using the wireless connection to get work done.“That’s when the ulcer started,” she said. (Like several other former workers, the woman requested that her name not be used because her current company does business with Amazon. Some current employees were reluctant to be identified because they were barred from speaking with reporters.)To prod employees, Amazon has a powerful lever: more data than any retail operation in history. Its perpetual flow of real-time, ultradetailed metrics allows the company to measure nearly everything its customers do: what they put in their shopping carts, but do not buy; when readers reach the “abandon point” in a Kindle book; and what they will stream based on previous purchases. It can also tell when engineers are not building pages that load quickly enough, or when a vendor manager does not have enough gardening gloves in stock.“Data creates a lot of clarity around decision-making,” said Sean Boyle, who runs the finance division of Amazon Web Services and was permitted by the company to speak. “Data is incredibly liberating.”Amazon employees are held accountable for a staggering array of metrics, a process that unfolds in what can be anxiety-provoking sessions called business reviews, held weekly or monthly among various teams. A day or two before the meetings, employees receive printouts, sometimes up to 50 or 60 pages long, several workers said. At the reviews, employees are cold-called and pop-quizzed on any one of those thousands of numbers.Explanations like “we’re not totally sure” or “I’ll get back to you” are not acceptable, many employees said. Some managers sometimes dismissed such responses as “stupid” or told workers to “just stop it.” The toughest questions are often about getting to the bottom of “cold pricklies,” or email notifications that inform shoppers that their goods won’t arrive when promised — the opposite of the “warm fuzzy” sensation of consumer satisfaction.The sessions crowd out other work, many workers complain. But they also say that is part of the point: The meetings force them to absorb the metrics of their business, their minds swimming with details.“Once you know something isn’t as good as it could be, why wouldn’t you want to fix it?” said Julie Todaro, who led some of Amazon’s largest retail categories.Employees talk of feeling how their work is never done or good enough. One Amazon building complex is named Day 1, a reminder from Mr. Bezos that it is only the beginning of a new era of commerce, with much more to accomplish.In 2012, Chris Brucia, who was working on a new fashion sale site, received a punishing performance review from his boss, a half-hour lecture on every goal he had not fulfilled and every skill he had not yet mastered. Mr. Brucia silently absorbed the criticism, fearing he was about to be managed out, wondering how he would tell his wife.“Congratulations, you’re being promoted,” his boss finished, leaning in for a hug that Mr. Brucia said he was too shocked to return.Noelle Barnes, who worked in marketing for Amazon for nine years, repeated a saying around campus: “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”In 2013, Elizabeth Willet, a former Army captain who served in Iraq, joined Amazon to manage housewares vendors and was thrilled to find that a large company could feel so energetic and entrepreneurial. After she had a child, she arranged with her boss to be in the office from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day, pick up her baby and often return to her laptop later. Her boss assured her things were going well, but her colleagues, who did not see how early she arrived, sent him negative feedback accusing her of leaving too soon.“I can’t stand here and defend you if your peers are saying you’re not doing your work,” she says he told her. She left the company after a little more than a year.Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else.Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman, said the tool was just another way to provide feedback, like sending an email or walking into a manager’s office. Most comments, he said, are positive.However, many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue. In some cases, the criticism was copied directly into their performance reviews — a move that Amy Michaels, the former Kindle manager, said that colleagues called “the full paste.”Soon the tool, or something close, may be found in many more offices. Workday, a human resources software company, makes a similar product called Collaborative Anytime Feedback that promises to turn the annual performance review into a daily event. One of the early backers of Workday was Jeff Bezos, in one of his many investments. (He also owns The Washington Post.)The rivalries at Amazon extend beyond behind-the-back comments. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers challenge one another “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat.Resources are sometimes hoarded. That includes promising job candidates, who are especially precious at a company with a high number of open positions. To get new team members, one veteran said, sometimes “you drown someone in the deep end of the pool,” then take his or her subordinates. Ideas are critiqued so harshly in meetings at times that some workers fear speaking up.David Loftesness, a senior developer, said he admired the customer focus but could not tolerate the hostile language used in many meetings, a comment echoed by many others.For years, he and his team devoted themselves to improving the search capabilities of Amazon’s website — only to discover that Mr. Bezos had greenlighted a secret competing effort to build an alternate technology. “I’m not going to be the kind of person who can work in this environment,” he said he concluded. He went on to become a director of engineering at Twitter.Each year, the internal competition culminates at an extended semi-open tournament called an Organization Level Review, where managers debate subordinates’ rankings, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a matrix projected on the wall. In recent years, other large companies, including Microsoft, General Electric and Accenture Consulting, have dropped the practice — often called stack ranking, or “rank and yank” — in part because it can force managers to get rid of valuable talent just to meet quotas.The review meeting starts with a discussion of the lower-level employees, whose performance is debated in front of higher-level managers. As the hours pass, successive rounds of managers leave the room, knowing that those who remain will determine their fates.Preparing is like getting ready for a court case, many supervisors say: To avoid losing good members of their teams — which could spell doom — they must come armed with paper trails to defend the wrongfully accused and incriminate members of competing groups. Or they adopt a strategy of choosing sacrificial lambs to protect more essential players. “You learn how to diplomatically throw people under the bus,” said a marketer who spent six years in the retail division. “It’s a horrible feeling.”Mr. Galbato, the human resources executive, explained the company’s reasoning for the annual staff paring. “We hire a lot of great people,” he said in an email, “but we don’t always get it right.”Dick Finnegan, a consultant who advises companies on how to retain employees, warns of the costs of mandatory cuts. “If you can build an organization with zero deadwood, why wouldn’t you do it?” he asked. “But I don’t know how sustainable it is. You’d have to have a never-ending two-mile line around the block of very qualified people who want to work for you.”Many women at Amazon attribute its gender gap — unlike Facebook, Google or Walmart, it does not currently have a single woman on its top leadership team — to its competition-and-elimination system. Several former high-level female executives, and other women participating in a recent internal Amazon online discussion that was shared with The New York Times, said they believed that some of the leadership principles worked to their disadvantage. They said they could lose out in promotions because of intangible criteria like “earn trust” (principle No. 10) or the emphasis on disagreeing with colleagues. Being too forceful, they said, can be particularly hazardous for women in the workplace.Motherhood can also be a liability. Michelle Williamson, a 41-year-old parent of three who helped build Amazon’s restaurant supply business, said her boss, Shahrul Ladue, had told her that raising children would most likely prevent her from success at a higher level because of the long hours required. Mr. Ladue, who confirmed her account, said that Ms. Williamson had been directly competing with younger colleagues with fewer commitments, so he suggested she find a less demanding job at Amazon. (Both he and Ms. Williamson left the company.)He added that he usually worked 85 or more hours a week and rarely took a vacation.Molly Jay, an early member of the Kindle team, said she received high ratings for years. But when she began traveling to care for her father, who was suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and weekends, her status changed. She was blocked from transferring to a less pressure-filled job, she said, and her boss told her she was “a problem.” As her father was dying, she took unpaid leave to care for him and never returned to Amazon.“When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said.A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. “What kind of company do we want to be?” the executive recalled asking her bosses.The mother of the stillborn child soon left Amazon. “I had just experienced the most devastating event in my life,” the woman recalled via email, only to be told her performance would be monitored “to make sure my focus stayed on my job.”Mr. Berman, the spokesman, said such responses to employees’ crises were “not our policy or practice.” He added, “If we were to become aware of anything like that, we would take swift action to correct it.” Amazon also made Ms. Harker, the top recruiter, available to describe the leadership team’s strong support over the last two years as her husband battled a rare cancer. “It took my breath away,” she said.Several employment lawyers in the Seattle area said they got regular calls from Amazon workers complaining of unfair treatment, including those who said they had been pushed out for “not being sufficiently devoted to the company,” said Michael Subit. But that is not a basis for a suit by itself, he said. “Unfairness is not illegal,” echoed Sara Amies, another lawyer. Without clear evidence of discrimination, it is difficult to win a suit based on a negative evaluation, she said.For all of the employees who are edged out, many others flee, exhausted or unwilling to further endure the hardships for the cause of delivering swim goggles and rolls of Scotch tape to customers just a little quicker.Jason Merkoski, 42, an engineer, worked on the team developing the first Kindle e-reader and served as a technology evangelist for Amazon, traveling the world to learn how people used the technology so it could be improved. He left Amazon in 2010 and then returned briefly in 2014.“The sheer number of innovations means things go wrong, you need to rectify, and then explain, and heaven help if you got an email from Jeff,” he said. “It’s as if you’ve got the C.E.O. of the company in bed with you at 3 a.m. breathing down your neck.”Amazon retains new workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two years. Several fathers said they left or were considering quitting because of pressure from bosses or peers to spend less time with their families. (Many tech companies are racing to top one another’s family leave policies — Netflix just began offering up to a year of paid parental leave. Amazon, though, offers no paid paternity leave.)In interviews, 40-year-old men were convinced Amazon would replace them with 30-year-olds who could put in more hours, and 30-year-olds were sure that the company preferred to hire 20-somethings who would outwork them. After Max Shipley, a father of two young children, left this spring, he wondered if Amazon would “bring in college kids who have fewer commitments, who are single, who have more time to focus on work.” Mr. Shipley is 25.Amazon insists its reputation for high attrition is misleading. A 2013 survey by PayScale, a salary analysis firm, put the median employee tenure at one year, among the briefest in the Fortune 500. Amazon officials insisted tenure was low because hiring was so robust, adding that only 15 percent of employees had been at the company more than five years. Turnover is consistent with others in the technology industry, they said, but declined to disclose any data.Employees, human resources executives and recruiters describe a steady exodus. “The pattern of burn and churn at Amazon, resulting in a disproportionate number of candidates from Amazon showing at our doorstep, is clear and consistent,” Nimrod Hoofien, a director of engineering at Facebook and an Amazon veteran, said in a recent Facebook post.Those departures are not a failure of the system, many current and former employees say, but rather the logical conclusion: mass intake of new workers, who help the Amazon machine spin and then wear out, leaving the most committed Amazonians to survive.“Purposeful Darwinism,” Robin Andrulevich, a former top Amazon human resources executive who helped draft the Leadership Principles, posted in reply to Mr. Hoofien’s comment. “They never could have done what they’ve accomplished without that,” she said in an interview, referring to Amazon’s cycle of constantly hiring employees, driving them and cutting them.“Amazon is O.K. with moving through a lot of people to identify and retain superstars,” said Vijay Ravindran, who worked at the retailer for seven years, the last two as the manager overseeing the checkout technology. “They keep the stars by offering a combination of incredible opportunities and incredible compensation. It’s like panning for gold.”The employees who stream from the Amazon exits are highly desirable because of their work ethic, local recruiters say. In recent years, companies like Facebook and LinkedIn have opened large Seattle offices, and they benefit from the Amazon outflow.Recruiters, though, also say that other businesses are sometimes cautious about bringing in Amazon workers, because they have been trained to be so combative. The derisive local nickname for Amazon employees is “Amholes” — pugnacious and work-obsessed.Call them what you will, their ranks are rapidly increasing. Amazon is finishing a 37-floor office tower near its South Lake Union campus and building another tower next to it. It plans a third next to that and has space for two more high-rises. By the time the dust settles in three years, Amazon will have enough space for 50,000 employees or so, more than triple what it had as recently as 2013.Those new workers will strive to make Amazon the first trillion-dollar retailer, in the hope that just about everyone will be watching Amazon movies and playing Amazon games on Amazon tablets while they tell their Amazon Echo communications device that they need an Amazon-approved plumber and new lawn chairs, and throw in some Amazon potato chips as well.Maybe it will happen. Liz Pearce spent two years at Amazon, managing projects like its wedding registry. “The pressure to deliver far surpasses any other metric,” she said. “I would see people practically combust.”But just as Jeff Bezos was able to see the future of e-commerce before anyone else, she added, he was able to envision a new kind of workplace: fluid but tough, with employees staying only a short time and employers demanding the maximum.“Amazon is driven by data,” said Ms. Pearce, who now runs her own Seattle software company, which is well stocked with ex-Amazonians. “It will only change if the data says it must — when the entire way of hiring and working and firing stops making economic sense.”The retailer is already showing some strain from its rapid growth. Even for entry-level jobs, it is hiring on the East Coast, and many employees are required to hand over all their contacts to company recruiters at “LinkedIn” parties. In Seattle alone, more than 4,500 jobs are open, including one for an analyst specializing in “high-volume hiring.”Some companies, faced with such an overwhelming need for new bodies, might scale back their ambitions or soften their message.Not Amazon. In a recent recruiting video, one young woman warns: “You either fit here or you don’t. You love it or you don’t. There is no middle ground.”Why I Am Leaving Goldman SachsBy GREG SMITH, The New York Times, March 14, 2012Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it. To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for. It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief. But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied. I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work. When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival. Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave. How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence. What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym. Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all. It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact. It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen. When I was a first-year analyst I didn’t know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces. I was taught to be concerned with learning the ropes, finding out what a derivative was, understanding finance, getting to know our clients and what motivated them, learning how they defined success and what we could do to help them get there. My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore. I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its clients — for very much longer. Greg Smith is resigning today as a Goldman Sachs executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.On Goldman Executive Greg Smith’s Brave DepartureBy Matt Taibbi, , March 14, 2012Wall Street is buzzing this morning about a resignation – a historic one. Greg Smith, the executive director and head of Goldman Sachs’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East?and Africa, not only decided to quit Goldman, he decided to do it in the New York Times, eloquently deconstructing the firm’s moral slide in a lengthy op-ed piece.The essence of Smith’s piece is devastating. He points to one simple, specific problem in the company: the fact that Goldman routinely screws its own clients. Anyone familiar with the report prepared by Senator Carl Levin’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will recognize the jargon Smith points to in this line, in which he talks about what one has to do to become a leader in today’s Goldman:Execute on the firm’s "axes," which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit.We heard about "axes" before in the tales about loser mortgage-derivative products like Timberwolf – that Goldman gave incentives to executives to unload its most toxic crap on clients. It was one thing to read about it in a Senate report, but here we have it from one of the firm’s own directors. He goes further, talking about the ways in which Goldman executives derided their own clients as fools and dupes:It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as "muppets," sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on.The resignation will have an effect on Goldman’s business. The firm’s share price opened this morning at 124.52; it’s down to 120.72 as of this writing (it dropped two percent while I was writing this blog), and it will probably dive further. Why? Because you can stack all the exposés on Goldman you want by degenerates like me and the McClatchy group, and you can even have a Senate subcommittee call for your executives to be tried for perjury, but that doesn’t necessarily move the Street.But when one of the firm’s own partners is saying out loud that his company liked to "rip the eyeballs out" of "muppets" like you, then you start to wonder if maybe this firm is the best choice for managing your money. Hence we see headlines this morning like this item from : "Greg Smith Quits, Should Clients Fire Goldman Sachs?"This always had to be the endgame for reforming Wall Street. It was never going to happen by having the government sweep through and impose a wave of draconian new regulations, although a more vigorous enforcement of existing laws might have helped. Nor could the Occupy protests or even a monster wave of civil lawsuits hope to really change the screw-your-clients, screw-everybody, grab-what-you-can culture of the modern financial services industry.Real change was always going to have to come from within Wall Street itself, and the surest way for that to happen is for the managers of pension funds and union retirement funds and other institutional investors to see that the Goldmans of the world aren't just arrogant sleazebags, they’re also not terribly good at managing your money. As Smith writes:It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don't trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn't matter how smart you are… These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, "How much money did we make off the client" It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave.Banking, and finance, is a business that has to be first and foremost about trust. The reason you're paying your broker/money manager such exorbitant sums is because that’s the value of integrity and honesty: You're paying for the comfort of knowing he has your best interests at heart.But what we’ve found out in the last years is that these Too-Big-To-Fail megabanks like Goldman no longer see the margin in being truly trustworthy. The game now is about getting paid as much as possible and as quickly as possible, and if your client doesn’t like the way you managed his money, well, fuck him – let him try to find someone else on the market to deal him straight.These guys have lost the fear of going out of business, because they can’t go out of business. After all, our government won’t let them. Beyond the bailouts, they’re all subsisting daily on massive loads of free cash from the Fed. No one can touch them, and sadly, most of the biggest institutional clients see getting clipped for a few points by Goldman or Chase as the cost of doing business.The only way to break this cycle, since our government doesn't seem to want to end its habit of financially supporting fraud-committing, repeat-offending, client-fleecing banks, is for these big "muppet" clients to start taking their business elsewhere. Right now, many clients stay because they think that even if Goldman takes a bite out of them here and there, the bank still has the smartest guys in the room. But as Forbes writes this morning, this incident may turn Goldman into such a pariah that the best young bankers won't want to work there anymore:Until a wave of talented people leave Goldman and go work for some other bank, many clients will stick with Goldman and hope for the best. That's why the biggest threat to Goldman's survival is that Smith’s departure — and the reasons he publicized so nicely in his Times op-ed — leads to a wider talent exodus.Anyway, Smith's op-ed is a brave and thoughtful piece of writing:My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.There are a lot of people who just want to tear Wall Street down and start over again, but what Smith did in this piece was show that people like him can be part of the solution. What he did couldn’t have been easy – kudos to him, and let's hope the inevitable blowback sent his way won't be too roughOn the Phenomenon of Bullshit JobsBy David Graeber, Strike! Magazine, August 17th, 2013In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.I think this is actually a pretty accurate description of the moral dynamics of our own economy.Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: “who are you to say what jobs are really ‘necessary’? What’s necessary anyway? You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the ‘need’ for that?” (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value.I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless? Not long ago I got back in touch with a school friend who I hadn’t seen since I was 12. I was amazed to discover that in the interim, he had become first a poet, then the front man in an indie rock band. I’d heard some of his songs on the radio having no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He was obviously brilliant, innovative, and his work had unquestionably brightened and improved the lives of people all over the world. Yet, after a couple of unsuccessful albums, he’d lost his contract, and plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, “taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school.” Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.Serving in Florida, Excerpted from Nickel and DimedBarbara EhrenreichMostly out of laziness, I decide to start my low-wage life in the town nearest to where I actually live, Key West, Florida, which with a population of about 25,000 is elbowing its way up to the status of a genuine city. The downside of familiarity, I soon realize, is that it's not easy to go from being a consumer, thoughtlessly throwing money around in exchange for groceries and movies and gas, to being a worker in the very same place. I am terrified, especially at the beginning, of being recognized by some friendly business owner or erstwhile neighbor and having to stammer out some explanation of my project. Happily, though, my fears turn out to be entirely unwarranted: during a month of poverty and toil, no one recognizes my face or my name, which goes unnoticed and for the most part unuttered. In this parallel universe where my father never got out of the mines and I never got through college, I am "baby," "honey," "blondie," and, most commonly, "girl." My first task is to find a place to live. I figure that if I can earn $7 an hour-which, from the want ads, seems doable - I can afford to spend $500 on rent or maybe, with severe economies, $600 and still have $400 or $500 left over for food and gas. In the Key West area, this pretty much confines me to flophouses and trailer homes- like the one, a pleasing fifteen- minute drive from town, that has no air-conditioning, no screens, no fans, no television, and, by way of diversion, only the challenge of evading the landlord's Doberman pinscher. The big problem with this place, though, is the rent, which at $675 a month is well beyond my reach. All right, Key West is expensive. But so is New York City, or the Bay Area, or Jackson, Wyoming, or Telluride, or Boston, or any other place where tourists and the wealthy compete for living space with the people who clean their toilets and fry their hash browns. Still, it is a shock to realize that "trailer trash" has become, for me, a demographic category to aspire to. So I decide to make the common trade-off between affordability and convenience and go for a $500-a-month "efficiency" thirty miles up a two- lane highway from the employment opportunities of Key West, meaning forty-five minutes if there's no road construction and I don't get caught behind some sundazed Canadian tourists. I hate the drive, along a roadside studded with white crosses commemorating the more effective head-on collisions, but it's a sweet little place-a cabin, more or less, set in the swampy backyard of the converted mobile home where my landlord, an affable TV repairman, lives with his bartender girlfriend. Anthropologically speaking, the trailer park would be preferable, but here I have a gleaming white floor and a firm mattress, and the few resident bugs are easily vanquished. The next piece of business is to comb through the want ads and find a job. I rule out various occupations for one reason or another: hotel front-desk clerk, for example, which to my surprise is regarded as unskilled and pays only $6 or $7 an hour, gets eliminated because it involves standing in one spot for eight hours a day. Waitressing is also something I'd like to avoid, because I remember it leaving me bone-tired when I was eighteen, and I'm decades of varicosities and back pain beyond that now. Telemarketing, one of the first refuges of the suddenly indigent, can be dismissed on grounds of personality. This leaves certain supermarket jobs, such as deli clerk, or housekeeping in the hotels and guest houses, which pays about $7 and, I imagine, is not too different from what I've been doing part-time, in my own home, all my life. So I put on what I take to be a respectable- looking outfit of ironed Bermuda shorts and scooped-neck T-shirt and set out for a tour of the local hotels and supermarkets. Best Western, Econo Lodge, and Hojo's all let me fill out application forms, and these are, to my relief, mostly interested in whether I am a legal resident of the United States and have committed any felonies. My next stop is Winn-Dixie, the supermarket, which turns out to have a particularly onerous application process, featuring a twenty- minute "interview" by computer since, apparently, no human on the premises is deemed capable of representing the corporate point of view. I am conducted to a large room decorated with posters illustrating how to look "professional" (it helps to be white and, if female, permed) and warning of the slick promises that union organizers might try to tempt me with. The interview is multiple-choice: Do I have anything, such as child care problems, that might make it hard for me to get to work on time? Do I think safety on the job is the responsibility of management? Then, popping up cunningly out of the blue: How many dollars' worth of stolen goods have I purchased in the last year? Would I turn in a fellow employee if I caught him stealing? Finally, "Are you an honest person?" Apparently I ace the interview, because I am told that all I have to do is show up in some doctor's office tomorrow for a urine test. This seems to be a fairly general rule: if you want to stack Cheerios boxes or vacuum hotel rooms in chemically fascist America, you have to be willing to squat down and pee in front of a health worker (who has no doubt had to do the same thing herself.)1 The wages Winn-Dixie is offering-$6 and a couple of dimes to start with-are not enough, I decide, to compensate for this indignity. I lunch at Wendy's, where $4.99 gets you unlimited refills at the Mexican part of the Super-bar, a comforting surfeit of refried beans and cheese sauce. A teenage employee, seeing me studying the want ads, kindly offers me an application form, which I fill out, though here, too, the pay is just $6 and change an hour. Then it's off for a round of the locally owned inns and guest houses in Key West's Old Town, which is where all the serious sightseeing and guzzling goes on, a couple of miles removed from the functional end of the island, where the discount hotels make their homes. At The Palms, let's call it, a bouncy manager actually takes me around to see the rooms and meet the current housekeepers, who, I note with satisfaction, look pretty much like me-faded ex-hippie types in shorts with long hair pulled back in braids. Mostly, though, no one speaks to me or even looks at me except to proffer an application form. At my last stop, a palatial B & B, I wait twenty minutes to meet "Max," only to be told that there are no jobs now but there should be one soon, since "nobody lasts more than a couple weeks." Three days go by like this and, to my chagrin, no one from the approximately twenty places at which I've applied calls me for an interview. I had been vain enough to worry about coming across as too educated for the jobs I sought, but no one even seems interested in finding out how overqualified i am. Only later will I realize that the want ads are not a reliable measure of the actual jobs available at any particular time. They are, as I should have guessed from Max's comment, the employers' insurance policy against the relentless turnover of the low-wage workforce. Most of the big hotels run ads almost continually, if only to build a supply of applicants to replace the current workers as they drift away or are fired, so finding a job is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time and flexible enough to take whatever is being offered that day. This finally happens to me at one of the big discount chain hotels where I go, as usual, for housekeeping and am sent instead to try out as a waitress at the attached "family restaurant," a dismal spot looking out on a parking garage, which is featuring "Polish sausage and BBQ sauce" on this 95-degree day. Phillip, the dapper young West Indian who introduces himself as the manager, interviews me with about as much enthusiasm as if he were a clerk processing me for Medicare, the principal questions being what shifts I can work and when I can start. I mutter about being woefully out of practice as a waitress, but he's already on to the uniform: I'm to show up tomorrow wearing black slacks and black shoes; he'll provide the rust-colored polo shirt with "Hearthside," as we'll call the place, embroidered on it, though I might want to wear my own shirt to get to work, ha ha. At the word tomorrow, something between fear and indignation rises in my chest. I want to say, "Thank you for your time, sir, but this is just an experiment, you know, not my actual life." SO BEGINS MY CAREER AT THE HEARTHSIDE, WHERE FOR TWO WEEKS I work from 2:00 till 10:00 P.M. for $2.43 an hour plus tips. Employees are barred from using the front door, so I enter the first day through the kitchen, where a red-faced man with shoulder-length blond hair is throwing frozen steaks against the wall and yelling, "Fuck this shit!" "That's just Billy," explains Gail, the wiry middle-aged waitress who is assigned to train me. "He's on the rag again"-a condition occasioned, in this instance, by the fact that the cook on the morning shift had forgotten to thaw out the steaks. For the next eight hours, I run after the agile Gail, absorbing bits of instruction along with fragments of personal tragedy. All food must be trayed, and the reason she's so tired today is that she woke up in a cold sweat thinking of her boyfriend, who was killed a few months ago in a scuffle in an upstate prison. No refills on lemonade. And the reason he was in prison is that a few DUIs caught up with him, that's all, could have happened to anyone. Carry the creamers to the table in a "monkey bowl," never in your hand. And after he was gone she spent several months living in her truck, peeing in a plastic pee bottle and reading by candlelight at night, but you can't live in a truck in the summer, since you need to have the windows down, which means anything can get in, from mosquitoes on up. At least Gail puts to rest any fears I had of appearing overqualified. From the first day on, I find that of all the things that I have left behind, such as home and identity, what I miss the most is competence. Not that I have ever felt 100 percent competent in the writing business, where one day's success augurs nothing at all for the next. But in my writing life, I at least have some notion of procedure: do the research, make the outline, rough out a draft, etc. As a server, though, I am beset by requests as if by bees: more iced tea here, catsup over there, a to-go box for table 14, and where are the high chairs, anyway? Of the twenty-seven tables, up to six are usually mine at any time, though on slow afternoons or if Gail is off, I sometimes have the whole place to myself. There is the touch-screen computer-ordering system to master, which I suppose is meant to minimize server-cook contacts but in practice requires constant verbal fine-tuning: "That's gravy on the mashed, OK? None on the meatloaf," and so forth. Plus, something I had forgotten in the years since I was eighteen: about a third of a server's job is "side work" invisible to customers- sweeping, scrubbing, slicing, refilling, and restocking. If it isn't all done, every little bit of it, you're going to face the 6:00 P.M. dinner rush defenseless and probably go down in flames. I screw up dozens of times at the beginning, sustained in my shame entirely by Gail's support- "It's OK, baby, everyone does that sometime"-because, to my total surprise and despite the scientific detachment I am doing my best to maintain, I care. The whole thing would, be a lot easier if I could just skate through it like Lily Tomlin in one of her waitress skits, but I was raised by the absurd Booker T. Washingtonian precept that says: If you're going to do something, do it well. In fact, "well" isn't good enough by half. Do it better than anyone has ever done it before. Or so said my father, who must have known what he was talking about because he managed to pull himself, and us with him, up from the mile-deep copper mines of Butte to the leafy suburbs of the Northeast, ascending from boilermakers to martinis before booze beat out ambition. As in most endeavors I have encountered in my life, "doing it better than anyone" is not a reasonable goal. Still, when I wake up at 4 A.M. in my own cold sweat, I am not thinking about the writing deadlines I'm neglecting; I'm thinking of the table where I screwed up the order and one of the kids didn't get his kiddie meal until the rest of the family had moved on to their Key lime pies. That's the other powerful motivation-the customers, or "patients," as I can't help thinking of them on account of the mysterious vulnerability that seems to have left them temporarily unable to feed themselves. After a few days at Hearthside, I feel the service ethic kick in like a shot of oxytocin, the nurturance hormone. The plurality of my customers are hardworking locals-truck drivers, construction workers, even housekeepers from the attached hotel-and I want them to have the closest to a "fine dining" experience that the grubby circumstances will allow. No "you guys" for me; everyone over twelve is "sir" or "ma'am." I ply them with iced tea and coffee refills; I return, midmeal, to inquire how everything is; I doll up their salads with chopped raw mushrooms, summer squash slices, or whatever bits of produce I can find that have survived their sojourn in the cold storage room mold- free. There is Benny, for example, a short, tight- muscled sewer repairman who cannot even think of eating until he has absorbed a half hour of air-conditioning and ice water. We chat about hyperthermia and electrolytes until he is ready to order some finicky combination like soup of the day, garden salad, and a side of grits. There are the German tourists who are so touched by my pidgin "Wilkommen" and "Ist alles gut?" that they actually tip. (Europeans, no doubt spoiled by their trade union-ridden, high- wage welfare states, generally do not know that they are supposed to tip. Some restaurants, the Hearthside included, allow servers to "grat" their foreign customers, or add a tip to the bill. Since this amount is added before the customers have a chance to tip or not tip, the practice amounts to an automatic penalty for imperfect English.) There are the two dirt- smudged lesbians, just off from their shift, who are impressed enough by my suave handling of the fly in the pina colada that they take the time to praise me to Stu, the assistant manager. There's Sam, the kindly retired cop who has to plug up his tracheotomy hole with one finger in order to force the cigarette smoke into his lungs. Sometimes I play with the fantasy that I am a princess who, in penance for some tiny transgression, has undertaken to feed each of her subjects by hand. But the nonprincesses working with me are just as indulgent, even when this means flouting management rules- as to, for example, the number of croutons that can go on a salad (six). "Put on all you want," Gail whispers, "as long as Stu isn't looking." She dips into her own tip money to buy biscuits and gravy for an out-of-work mechanic who's used up all his money on dental surgery, inspiring me to pick up the tab for his pie and milk. Maybe the same high levels of agape can be found throughout the "hospitality industry." I remember the poster decorating one of the apartments I looked at, which said, "If you seek happiness for yourself you will never find it. Only when you seek happiness for others will it come to you," or words to that effect-an odd sentiment, it seemed to me at the time, to find in the dank one-room basement apartment of a bellhop at the Best Western. At Hearthside, we utilize whatever bits of autonomy we have to ply our customers with the illicit calories that signal our love. It is our job as servers to assemble the salads and desserts, pour the dressings, and squirt the whipped cream. We also control the number of butter pats our customers get and the amount of sour cream on their baked potatoes. So if you wonder why Americans are so obese, consider the fact that waitresses both express their humanity and earn their tips through the covert distribution of fats. Ten days into it, this is beginning to look like a livable lifestyle. I like Gail, who is "looking at fifty," agewise, but moves so fast she can alight in one place and then another without apparently being anywhere between. I clown around with Lionel, the teenage Haitian busboy, though we don't have much vocabulary in common, and loiter near the main sink to listen to the older Haitian dishwashers' musical Creole, which sounds, in their rich bass voices, like French on testosterone. I bond with Timmy, the fourteen-year- old white kid who buses at night, by telling him I don't like people putting their baby seats right on the tables: it makes the baby look too much like a side dish. He snickers delightedly and in return, on a slow night, starts telling me the plots of all the jaws movies (which are perennial favorites in the shark-ridden Keys): "She looks around, and the water-skier isn't there anymore, then SNAP! The whole boat goes . . ." I especially like Joan, the svelte fortyish hostess, who turns out to be a militant feminist, pulling me aside one day to explain that "men run everything - we don't have a chance unless we stick together." Accordingly, she backs me up when I get overpowered on the floor, and in return I give her a chunk of my tips or stand guard while she sneaks off for an unauthorized cigarette break. We all admire her for standing up to Billy and telling him, after some of his usual nastiness about the female server class, to "shut the fuck up." I even warm up to Billy when, on a slow night and to make up for a particularly unwarranted attack on my abilities, or so I imagine, he tells me about his glory days as a young man at "coronary school" in Brooklyn, where he dated a knockout Puerto Rican chick - or do you say "culinary"? I finish up every night at 10:00 or 10:30, depending on how much side work I've been able to get done during the shift, and cruise home to the tapes I snatched at random when I left my real home - Marianne Faithfull, Tracy Chapman, Enigma, King Sunny Adé, Violent Femmes - just drained enough for the music to set my cranium resonating, but hardly dead. Midnight snack is Wheat Thins and Monterey Jack, accompanied by cheap white wine on ice and whatever AMC has to offer. To bed by 1:30 or 2:00, up at 9:00 or 10:00, read for an hour while my uniform whirls around in the landlord's washing machine, and then it's another eight hours spent following Mao's central instruction, as laid out in the Little Red Book, which was: Serve the people. I COULD DRIFT ALONG LIKE THIS, IN SOME DREAMY PROLETARIAN idyll, except for two things. One is management. If I have kept this subject to the margins so far it is because I still flinch to think that I spent all those weeks under the surveillance of men (and later women) whose job it was to monitor my behavior for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse, or worse. Not that managers and especially "assistant managers" in low-wage settings like this are exactly the class enemy. Mostly, in the restaurant business, they are former cooks still capable of pinch-hitting in the kitchen, just as in hotels they are likely to be former clerks, and paid a salary of only about $400 a week. But everyone knows they have crossed over to the other side, which is, crudely put, corporate as opposed to human. Cooks want to prepare tasty meals, servers want to serve them graciously, but managers are there for only one reason-to make sure that money is made for some theoretical entity, the corporation, which exists far away in Chicago or New York, if a corporation can be said to have a physical existence at all. Reflecting on her career, Gail tells me ruefully that she swore, years ago, never to work for a corporation again. "They don't cut you no slack. You give and you give and they take." Managers can sit - for hours at a time if they want - but it's their job to see that no one else ever does, even when there's nothing to do, and this is why, for servers, slow times can be as exhausting as rushes. You start dragging out each little chore because if the manager on duty catches you in an idle moment he will give you something far nastier to do. So I wipe, I clean, I consolidate catsup bottles and recheck the cheesecake supply, even tour the tables to make sure the customer evaluation forms are all standing perkily in their places-wondering all the time how many calories I burn in these strictly theatrical exercises. In desperation, I even take the desserts out of their glass display case and freshen them up with whipped cream and bright new maraschino cherries; anything to look busy. When, on a particularly dead afternoon, Stu finds me glancing at a USA Today a customer has left behind, he assigns me to vacuum the entire floor with the broken vacuum cleaner, which has a handle only two feet long, and the only way to do that without incurring orthopedic damage is to proceed from spot to spot on your knees. On my first Friday at Hearthside there is a "mandatory meeting for all restaurant employees," which I attend, eager for insight into our overall marketing strategy and the niche (your basic Ohio cuisine with a tropical twist?) we aim to inhabit. But there is no "we" at this meeting. Phillip, our top manager except for an occasional "consultant" sent out by corporate headquarters, opens it with a sneer: "The break room - it's disgusting. Butts in the ashtrays, newspapers lying around crumbs." This windowless little room, which also houses the time clock for the entire hotel, is where we stash our bags and civilian clothes and take our half-hour meal breaks. But a break room is not a right, he tells us, it can be taken away. We should also know that the lockers in the break room and whatever is in them can be searched at any time. Then comes gossip; there has been gossip; gossip (which seems to mean employees talking among themselves) must stop. Off-duty employees are henceforth barred from eating at the restaurant, because "other servers gather around them and gossip." When Phillip has exhausted his agenda of rebukes, Joan complains about the condition of the ladies' room and I throw in my two bits about the vacuum cleaner. But I don't see any backup coming from my fellow servers, each of whom has slipped into her own personal funk; Gail, my role model, stares sorrowfully at a point six inches from her nose. The meeting ends when Andy, one of the cooks, gets up, muttering about breaking up his day off for this almighty bullshit. Just four days later we are suddenly summoned into the kitchen at 3:30 P.M., even though there are live tables on the floor. We all-about ten of us-stand around Phillip, who announces grimly that there has been a report of some "drug activity" on the night shift and that, as a result, we are now to be a "drug-free" workplace, meaning that all new hires will be tested and possibly also current employees on a random basis. I am glad that this part of the kitchen is so dark because I find myself blushing as hard as if I had been caught toking up in the ladies' room myself: I haven't been treated this way- lined up in the corridor, threatened with locker searches, peppered with carelessly aimed accusations-since at least junior high school. Back on the floor, Joan cracks, "Next they'll be telling us we can't have sex on the job." When I ask Stu what happened to inspire the crackdown, he just mutters about "management decisions" and takes the opportunity to upbraid Gail and me for being too generous with the rolls. From now on there's to be only one per customer and it goes out with the dinner, not with the salad. He's also been riding the cooks, prompting Andy to come out of the kitchen and observe - with the serenity of a man whose customary implement is a butcher knife - that "Stu has a death wish today." Later in the evening, the gossip crystallizes around the theory that Stu is himself the drug culprit, that he uses the restaurant phone to order up marijuana and sends one of the late servers out to fetch it for him. The server was caught and she may have ratted out Stu, at least enough to cast some suspicion on him, thus accounting for his pissy behavior. Who knows? Personally, I'm ready to believe anything bad about Stu, who serves no evident function and presumes too much on our common ethnicity, sidling up to me one night to engage in a little nativism directed at the Haitian immigrants: "I feel like I'm the foreigner here. They're taking over the country." Still later that evening, the drug in question escalates to crack. Lionel, the busboy, entertains us for the rest of the shift by standing just behind Stu's back and sucking deliriously on an imaginary joint or maybe a pipe. The other problem, in addition to the less-than-nurturing management style, is that this job shows no sign of being financially viable. You might imagine, from a comfortable distance, that people who live; year in and year out, on $6 to $10 an hour have discovered some survival stratagems unknown to the middle class. But no. It's not hard to get my coworkers talking about their living situations, because housing, in almost every case, is the principal source of disruption in their lives, the first thing they fill you in on when they arrive for their shifts. After a week, I have compiled the following survey: Gail is sharing a room in a well-known downtown flophouse for $250 a week. Her roommate, a male friend, has begun hitting on her, driving her nuts, but the rent would be impossible alone. Claude, the Haitian cook, is desperate to get out of the two room apartment he shares with his girlfriend and two other, unrelated people. As far as I can determine, the other Haitian men live in similarly crowded situations. Annette, a twenty- year-old server who is six months pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend, lives with her mother, a postal clerk. Marianne, who is a breakfast server, and her boyfriend are paying $170 a week for a one-person trailer. Billy, who at $10 an hour is the wealthiest of us, lives in the trailer he owns, paying only the $400-a- month lot fee. The other white cook, Andy, lives on his dry-docked boat, which, as far as I can tell from his loving descriptions, can't be more than twenty feet long. He offers to take me out on it once it's repaired, but the offer comes with inquiries as to my marital status, so I do not follow up on it. Tina, another server, and her husband are paying $60 a night for a room in the Days Inn. This is because they have no car and the Days Inn is in walking distance of the Hearthside. When Marianne is tossed out of her trailer for subletting (which is against trailer park rules), she leaves her boyfriend and moves in with Tina and her husband. Joan, who had fooled me with her numerous and tasteful outfits (hostesses wear their own clothes), lives in a van parked behind a shopping center at night and showers in Tina's motel room. The clothes are from thrift shops.It strikes me, in my middle-class solipsism, that there is gross improvidence in some of these arrangements. When Gail and I are wrapping silverware in napkins - the only task for which we are permitted to sit - she tells me she is thinking of escaping from her roommate by moving into the Days Inn herself. I am astounded: how she can even think of paying $40 to $60 a day? But if I was afraid of sounding like a social worker, I have come out just sounding like a fool. She squints at me in disbelief: "And where am I supposed to get a month's rent and a month's deposit for an apartment?" I'd been feeling pretty smug about my $500 efficiency, but of course it was made possible only by the $1,300 I had allotted myself for start- up costs when I began my low-wage life: $1,000 for the first month's rent and deposit, $100 for initial groceries and cash in my pocket, $200 stuffed away for emergencies. In poverty, as in certain propositions in physics, starting conditions are everything. There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs. If you can't put up the two months' rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can't save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store. If you have no money for health insurance - and the Hearthside's niggardly plan kicks in only after three months - you go without routine care or prescription drugs and end up paying the price. Gail, for example, was doing fine, healthwise anyway, until she ran out of money for estrogen pills. She is supposed to be on the company health plan by now, but they claim to have lost her application form and to be beginning the paperwork all over again. So she spends $9 a pop for pills to control the migraines she wouldn't have, she insists, if her estrogen supplements were covered. Similarly, Marianne's boyfriend lost his job as a roofer because he missed so much time after getting a cut on his foot for which he couldn't afford the prescribed antibiotic. My own situation, when I sit down to assess it after two weeks of work, would not be much better if this were my actual life. The seductive thing about waitressing is that you don't have to wait for payday to feel a few bills in your pocket, and my tips usually cover meals and gas, plus something left over to stuff into the kitchen drawer I use as a bank. But as the tourist business slows in the summer heat, I sometimes leave work with only $20 in tips (the gross is higher, but servers share about 15 percent of their tips with the busboys and bartenders). With wages included, this amounts to about the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. The sum in the drawer is piling up but at the present rate of accumulation will be more than $100 short of my rent when the end of the month comes around. Nor can I see any expenses to cut. True, I haven't gone the lentil stew route yet, but that's because I don't have a large cooking pot, potholders, or a ladle to stir with (which would cost a total of about $30 at Kmart, somewhat less at a thrift store), not to mention onions, carrots, and the indispensable bay leaf. I do make my lunch almost every day-usually some slow-burning, high-protein combo like frozen chicken patties with melted cheese on top and canned pinto beans on the side. Dinner is at the Hearthside, which offers its employees a choice of BIT, fish sandwich, or hamburger for only $2. The burger lasts longest, especially if it's heaped with gutpuckering jalapenos, but by midnight my stomach is growling again. So unless I want to start using my car as a residence, I have to find a second or an alternative job. I call all the hotels I'd filled out housekeeping applications at weeks ago- the Hyatt, Holiday Inn, Econo Lodge, HoJo's, Best Western, plus a half dozen locally run guest houses. Nothing. Then I start making the rounds again, wasting whole mornings waiting for some assistant manager to show up, even dipping into places so creepy that the front-desk clerk greets you from behind bulletproof glass and sells pints of liquor over the counter. But either someone has exposed my real- life housekeeping habits-which are, shall we say, mellow-or I am at the wrong end of some infallible ethnic equation: most, but by no means all, of the working housekeepers I see on my job searches are African Americans, Spanish-speaking, or refugees from the Central European post-Communist world, while servers are almost invariably white and monolingually English-speaking. When I finally get a positive response, I have been identified once again as server material. Jerry's-again, not the real name-which is part of a well-known national chain and physically attached here to another budget hotel, is ready to use me at once. The prospect is both exciting and terrifying because, with about the same number of tables and counter seats, Jerry's attracts three or four times the volume of customers as the gloomy old Hearthside. PICTURE A FAT PERSON'S HELL, AND I DON'T MEAN A PLACE WITH NO food. Instead there is everything you might eat if eating had no bodily consequences - the cheese fries, the chicken- fried steaks, the fudge- laden desserts - only here every bite must be paid for, one way or another, in human discomfort. The kitchen is a cavern, a stomach leading to the lower intestine that is the garbage and dishwashing area, from which issue bizarre smells combining the edible and the offal: creamy carrion, pizza barf, and that unique and enigmatic Jerry's scent, citrus fart. The floor is slick with spills, forcing us to walk through the kitchen with tiny steps, like Susan McDougal in leg irons. Sinks everywhere are clogged with scraps of lettuce, decomposing lemon wedges, water- logged toast crusts. Put your hand down on any counter and you risk being stuck to it by the film of ancient syrup spills, and this is unfortunate because hands are utensils here, used for scooping up lettuce onto the salad plates, lifting out pie slices, and even moving hash browns from one plate to another. The regulation poster in the single unisex rest room admonishes us to wash our hands thoroughly, and even offers instructions for doing so, but there is always some vital substance missing-soap, paper towels, toilet paper-and I never found all three at once. You learn to stuff your pockets with napkins before going in there, and too bad about the customers, who must eat, although they don't realize it, almost literally out of our hands. The break room summarizes the whole situation: there is none, because there are no breaks at Jerry's. For six to eight hours in a row, you never sit except to pee. Actually, there are three folding chairs at a table immediately adjacent to the bathroom, but hardly anyone ever sits in this, the very rectum of the gastroarchitectural system. Rather, the function of the peritoilet area is to house the ashtrays in which servers and dishwashers leave their cigarettes burning at all times, like votive candles, so they don't have to waste time lighting up again when they dash back here for a puff. Almost everyone smokes as if their pulmonary well-being depended on it-the multinational mélange of cooks; the dishwashers, who are all Czechs here; the servers, who are American natives-creating an atmosphere in which oxygen is only an occasional pollutant. My first morning at Jerry's, when the hypoglycemic shakes set in, I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don't understand how she can go so long without food. "Well, I don't understand how you can go so long without a cigarette," she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself. I don't know why the antismoking crusaders have never grasped the element of defiant self- nurturance that makes the habit so endearing to its victims-as if, in the American workplace, the only thing people have to call their own is the tumors they are nourishing and the spare moments they devote to feeding them. Now, the Industrial Revolution is not an easy transition, especially, in my experience, when you have to zip through it in just a couple of days. I have gone from craft work straight into the factory, from the air-conditioned morgue of the Hearthside directly into the flames. Customers arrive in human waves, sometimes disgorged fifty at a time from their tour buses, peckish and whiny. Instead of two "girls" on the floor at once, there can be as many as six of us running around in our brilliant pink-and-orange Hawaiian shirts. Conversations, either with customers or with fellow employees, seldom last more than twenty seconds at a time. On my first day, in fact, I am hurt by my sister servers' coldness. My mentor for the day is a supremely competent, emotionally uninflected twenty-three-year-old, and the others, who gossip a little among themselves about the real reason someone is out sick today and the size of the bail bond someone else has had to pay, ignore me completely. On my second day, I find out why. "Well, it's good to see you again," one of them says in greeting. "Hardly anyone comes back after the first day." I feel powerfully vindicated-a survivor-but it would take a long time, probably months, before I could hope to be accepted into this sorority. I start out with the beautiful, heroic idea of handling the two jobs at once, and for two days I almost do it: working the breakfast/lunch shift at Jerry's from 8:00 till 2:00, arriving at the Hearthside a few minutes late, at 2:10, and attempting to hold out until 10:00. In the few minutes I have between jobs, I pick up a spicy chicken sandwich at the Wendy's drive-through window, gobble it down in the car, and change from khaki slacks to black, from Hawaiian to rust-colored polo. There is a problem, though. When, during the 3:00-4:00 o'clock dead time, I finally sit down to wrap silver, my flesh seems to bond to the seat. I try to refuel with a purloined cup of clam chowder, as I've seen Gail and Joan do dozens of time, but Stu catches me and hisses "No eating!" although there's not a customer around to be offended by the sight of food making contact with a server's lips. So I tell Gail I'm going to quit, and she hugs me and says she might just follow me to Jerry's herself. But the chances of this are minuscule. She has left the flophouse and her annoying roommate and is back to living in her truck. But, guess what, she reports to me excitedly later that evening, Phillip has given her permission to park overnight in the hotel parking lot, as long as she keeps out of sight, and the parking lot should be totally safe since it's patrolled by a hotel security guard! With the Hearthside offering benefits like that, how could anyone think of leaving? This must be Phillip's theory, anyway. He accepts my resignation with a shrug, his main concern being that I return my two polo shirts and aprons. Gail would have triumphed at Jerry's, I'm sure, but for me it's a crash course in exhaustion management. Years ago, the kindly fry cook who trained me to waitress at a Los Angeles truck stop used to say: Never make an unnecessary trip; if you don't have to walk fast, walk slow; if you don't have to walk, stand. But at Jerry's the effort of distinguishing necessary from unnecessary and urgent from whenever would itself be too much of an energy drain. The only thing to do is to treat each shift as a one-time-only emergency: you've got fifty starving people out there, lying scattered on the battlefield, so get out there and feed them! Forget that you will have to do this again tomorrow, forget that you will have to be alert enough to dodge the drunks on the drive home tonight-just burn, burn, burn! Ideally, at some point you enter what servers call a "rhythm" and psychologists term a "flow state," where signals pass from the sense organs directly to the muscles, bypassing the cerebral cortex, and a Zen- like emptiness sets in. I'm on a 2:00- 10:00 P.M. shift now, and a male server from the morning shift tells me about the time he "pulled a triple"-three shifts in a row, all the way around the clock-and then got off and had a drink and met this girl, and maybe he shouldn't tell me this, but they had sex right then and there and it was like beautiful. But there's another capacity of the neuromuscular system, which is pain. I start tossing back drugstore-brand ibuprofens as if they were vitamin C, four before each shift, because an old mouse-related repetitive-stress injury in my upper back has come back to full-spasm strength, thanks to the tray carrying. In my ordinary life, this level of disability might justify a day of ice packs and stretching. Here I comfort myself with the Aleve commercial where the cute blue-collar guy asks: If you quit after working four hours, what would your boss say? And the not-so-cute blue-collar guy, who's lugging a metal beam on his back, answers: He'd fire me, that's what. But fortunately, the commercial tells us, we workers can exert the same kind of authority over our painkillers that our bosses exert over us. If Tylenol doesn't want to work for more than four hours, you just fire its Ass and switch to Aleve. True, I take occasional breaks from this life, going home now and then to catch up on e- mail and for conjugal visits (though I am careful to "pay" for everything I eat here, at $5 for a dinner, which I put in a jar), seeing The Truman Show with friends and letting them buy my ticket. And I still have those what-am-I-doing-here moments at work, when I get so homesick for the printed word that I obsessively reread the six-page menu. But as the days go by, my old life is beginning to look exceedingly strange. The e-mails and phone messages addressed to my former self come from a distant race of people with exotic concerns and far too much time on their hands. The neighborly market I used to cruise for produce now looks forbiddingly like a Manhattan yuppie emporium. And when I sit down one morning in my real home to pay bills from my past life, I am dazzled by the two- and three- figure sums owed to outfits like Club Body Tech and . Management at Jerry's is generally calmer and more "professional" than at the Hearthside, with two exceptions. One is Joy, a plump, blowsy woman in her early thirties who once kindly devoted several minutes of her time to instructing me in the correct one- handed method of tray carrying but whose moods change disconcertingly from shift to shift and even within one. The other is B.J., aka B.J. the Bitch, whose contribution is to stand by the kitchen counter and yell, "Nita, your order's up, move it!" or "Barbara, didn't you see you've got another table out there? Come on, girl!" Among other things, she is hated for having replaced the whipped cream squirt cans with big plastic whipped-cream- filled baggies that have to be squeezed with both hands-because, reportedly, she saw or thought she saw employees trying to inhale the propellant gas from the squirt cans, in the hope that it might be nitrous oxide. On my third night, she pulls me aside abruptly and brings her face so close that it looks like she's planning to butt me with her forehead. But instead of saying "You're fired," she says, "You're doing fine." The only trouble is I'm spending time chatting with customers: "That's how they're getting you. " Furthermore I am letting them "run me," which means harassment by sequential demands: you bring the catsup and they decide they want extra Thousand Island; you bring that and they announce they now need a side of fries, and so on into distraction. Finally she tells me not to take her wrong. She tries to say things in a nice way, but "you get into a mode, you know, because everything has to move so fast."I mumble thanks for the advice, feeling like I've just been stripped naked by the crazed enforcer of some ancient sumptuary law: No chatting for you, girl. No fancy service ethic allowed for the serfs. Chatting with customers is for the good looking young college- educated servers in the downtown carpaccio and ceviche joints, the kids who can make $70-$100 a night. What had I been thinking? My job is to move orders from tables to kitchen and then trays from kitchen to tables. Customers are in fact the major obstacle to the smooth transformation of information into food and food into money - they are, in short, the enemy. And the painful thing is that I'm beginning to see it this way myself. There are the traditional asshole types - frat boys who down multiple Buds and then make a fuss because the steaks are so emaciated and the fries so sparse-as well as the variously impaired-due to age, diabetes, or literacy issues-who require patient nutritional counseling. The worst, for some reason, are the Visible Christians - like the ten-person table, all jolly and sanctified after Sunday night service, who run me mercilessly and then leave me $1 on a $92 bill. Or the guy with the crucifixion T-shirt (SOMEONE TO LOOK UP TO) who complains that his baked potato is too hard and his iced tea too icy (I cheerfully fix both) and leaves no tip at all. As a general rule, people wearing crosses or WWJD? ("What Would Jesus Do?") buttons look at us disapprovingly no matter what we do, as if they were confusing waitressing with Mary Magdalene's original profession. I make friends, over time, with the other "girls" who work my shift: Nita, the tattooed twenty-something who taunts us by going around saying brightly, "Have we started making money yet?" Ellen, whose teenage son cooks on the graveyard shift and who once managed a restaurant in Massachusetts but won't try out for management here because she prefers being a "common worker" and not "ordering people around." Easygoing fiftyish Lucy, with the raucous laugh, who limps toward the end of the shift because of something that has gone wrong with her leg, the exact nature of which cannot be determined without health insurance. We talk about the usual girl things - men, children, and the sinister allure of Jerry's chocolate peanut-butter cream pie-though no one, I notice, ever brings up anything potentially expensive, like shopping or movies. As at the Hearthside, the only recreation ever referred to is partying, which requires little more than some beer, a joint, and a few close friends. Still, no one is homeless, or cops to it anyway, thanks usually to a working husband or boyfriend. All in all, we form a reliable mutual-support group: if one of us is feeling sick or overwhelmed, another one will "bev" a table or even carry trays for her. If one of us is off sneaking a cigarette or a pee, the others will do their best to conceal her absence from the enforcers of corporate rationality.But my saving human connection - my oxytocin receptor, as it were - is George, the nineteen- year-old Czech dishwasher who has been in this country exactly one week. We get talking when he asks me, tortuously, how much cigarettes cost at Jerry's. I do my best to explain that they cost over a dollar more here than at a regular store and suggest that he just take one from the half- filled packs that are always lying around on the break table. But that would be unthinkable. Except for the one tiny earring signaling his allegiance to some vaguely alternative point of view, George is a perfect straight arrow-crew-cut, hardworking, and hungry for eye contact. "Czech Republic," I ask, "or Slovakia?" and he seems delighted that I know the difference. "Vaclav Havel," I try, "Velvet Revolution, Frank Zappa?" "Yes, yes, 1989," he says, and I realize that for him this is already history. My project is to teach George English. "How are you today, George?" I say at the start of each shift. "I am good, and how are you today, Barbara?" I learn that he is not paid by Jerry's but by the "agent" who shipped him over-$5 an hour, with the agent getting the dollar or so difference between that and what Jerry's pays dishwashers. I learn also that he shares an apartment with a crowd of other Czech "dishers," as he calls them, and that he cannot sleep until one of them goes off for his shift, leaving a vacant bed. We are having one of our ESL sessions late one afternoon when B.J. catches us at it and orders "Joseph" to take up the rubber mats on the floor near the dishwashing sinks and mop underneath. "I thought your name was George," I say loud enough for B.J. to hear as she strides off back to the counter. Is she embarrassed? Maybe a little, because she greets me back at the counter with "George, Joseph - there are so many of them!" I say nothing, neither nodding nor smiling, and for this I am punished later, when I think I am ready to go and she announces that I need to roll fifty mo re sets of silverware, and isn't it time I mixed up a fresh four- gallon batch of blue-cheese dressing? May you grow old in this place, B.J., is the curse I beam out at her when I am finally permitted to leave. May the syrup spills glue your feet to the floor. I make the decision to move closer to Key West. First, because of the drive. Second and third, also because of the drive: gas is eating up $4-$5 a day, and although Jerry's is as high- volume as you can get, the tips average only 10 percent, and not just for a newbie like me. Between the base pay of $2.15 an hour and the obligation to share tips with the busboys and dishwashers, we're averaging only about $7.50 an hour. Then there is the $30 I had to spend on the regulation tan slacks worn by Jerry's servers-a setback it could take weeks to absorb. (I had combed the town's two downscale department stores hoping for something cheaper but decided in the end that these marked-down Dockers, originally $49, were more likely to survive a daily washing.) Of my fellow servers, everyone who lacks a working husband or boyfriend seems to have a second job: Nita does something at a computer eight hours a day; another welds. Without the forty-five- minute commute, I can picture myself working two jobs and still having the time to shower between them. So I take the $500 deposit I have coming from my landlord, the $400 I have earned toward the next month's rent, plus the $200 reserved for emergencies, and use the $1,100 to pay the rent and deposit on trailer number 46 in the Overseas Trailer Park, a mile from the cluster of budget hotels that constitute Key West's version of an industrial park. Number 46 is about eight feet in width and shaped like a barbell inside, with a narrow region-because of the sink and the stove-separating the bedroom from what might optimistically be called the "living" area, with its two-person table and half-sized couch. The bathroom is so small my knees rub against the shower stall when I sit on the toilet, and you can't just leap out of the bed, you have to climb down to the foot of it in order to find a patch of floor space to stand on. Outside, I am within a few yards of a liquor store, a bar that advertises "free beer tomorrow," a convenience store, and a Burger King-but no supermarket or, alas, Laundromat. By reputation, the Overseas Park is a nest of crime and crack, and I am hoping at least for some vibrant multicultural street life. But desolation rules night and day, except for a thin stream of pedestrians heading for their jobs at the Sheraton or the 7-Eleven. There are not exactly people here but what amounts to canned labor, being preserved between shifts from the heat. In line with my reduced living conditions, a new form of ugliness arises at Jerry's. First we are confronted- via an announcement on the computers through which we input orders-with the new rule that the hotel bar, the Driftwood, is henceforth off- limits to restaurant employees. The culprit, I learn through the grapevine, is the ultraefficient twenty-three-year-old who trained me-another trailer home dweller and a mother of three. Something had set her off one morning, so she slipped out for a nip and returned to the floor impaired. The restriction mostly hurts Ellen, whose habit it is to free her hair from its rubber band and drop by the Driftwood for a couple of Zins before heading home at the end of her shift, but all of us feel the chill. Then the next day, when I go for straws, I find the dry-storage room locked. It's never been locked before; we go in and out of it all day-for napkins, jelly containers, Styrofoam cups for takeout. Vic, the portly assistant manager who opens it for me, explains that he caught one of the dishwashers attempting to steal something and, unfortunately, the miscreant will be with us until a replacement can be found-hence the locked door. I neglect to ask what he had been trying to steal but Vic tells me who he is - the kid with the buzz cut and the earring, you know, he's back there right now. I wish I could say I rushed back and confronted George to get his side of the story. I wish I could say I stood up to Vic and insisted that George be given a translator and allowed to defend himself or announced that I'd find a lawyer who'd handle the case pro bono. At the very least I should have testified as to the kid's honesty. The mystery to me is that there's not much worth stealing in the dry-storage room, at least not in any fenceable quantity: "Is Gyorgi here, and am having 200- maybe 250-catsup packets. What do you say?" My guess is that he had taken- if he had taken anything at all-some Saltines or a can of cherry pie mix and that the motive for taking it was hunger. So why didn't I intervene? Certainly not because I was held back by the kind of moral paralysis that can mask as journalistic objectivity. On the contrary, something new- something loathsome and servile-had infected me, along with the kitchen odors that I could still sniff on my bra when I finally undressed at night. In real life I am moderately brave, but plenty of brave people shed their courage in POW camps, and maybe something similar goes on in the infinitely more congenial milieu of the low-wage American workplace. Maybe, in a month or two more at Jerry's, I might have regained my crusading spirit. Then again, in a month or two I might have turned into a different person altogether - say, the kind of person who would have turned George in. But this is not something I was slated to find out. When my month-long plunge into poverty was almost over, I finally landed my dream job housekeeping. I did this by walking into the personnel office of the only place I figured I might have some credibility, the hotel attached to Jerry's, and confiding urgently that I had to have a second job if I was to pay my rent and, no, it couldn't be front-desk clerk. "All right," the personnel lady fairly spits, "so it's housekeeping, " and marches me back to meet Millie, the housekeeping manager, a tiny, frenetic Hispanic woman who greets me as "babe" and hands me a pamphlet emphasizing the need for a positive attitude. The pay is $6.10 an hour and the hours are nine in the morning till "whenever," which I am hoping can be defined as a little before two. I don't have to ask about health insurance once I meet Carlotta, the middle-aged African American woman who will be training me. Carlie, as she tells me to call her, is missing all of her top front teeth. ON THAT FIRST DAY OF HOUSEKEEPING AND LAST DAY - ALTHOUGH I don't yet know it's the last - of my life as a low-wage worker in Key West, Carlie is in a foul mood. We have been given nineteen rooms to clean, most of them "checkouts," as opposed to "stay-offers," and requiring the whole enchilada of bed stripping, vacuuming, and bathroom scrubbing. When one of the rooms that had been listed as a stay-over turns out to be a checkout, she calls Millie to complain, but of course to no avail. "So make up the motherfucker," she orders me, and I do the beds while she sloshes around the bathroom. For four hours without a break I strip and remake beds, taking about four and a half minutes per queen-sized bed, which I could get down to three if there were any reason to. We try to avoid vacuuming by picking up the larger specks by hand, but often there is nothing to do but drag the monstrous vacuum cleaner-it weighs about thirty pounds-off our cart and try to wrestle it around the floor. Sometimes Carlie hands me the squirt bottle of "Bam" (an acronym for something that begins, ominously, with "butyric" - the rest of it has been worn off the label) and lets me do the bathrooms. No service ethic challenges me here to new heights of performance. I just concentrate on removing the pubic hairs from the bathtubs, or at least the dark ones that I can see. I had looked forward to the breaking-and-entering aspect of cleaning the stay-offers, the chance to examine the secret physical existence of strangers. But the contents of the rooms are always banal and surprisingly neat- zipped- up shaving kits, shoes lined up against the wall (there are no closets), flyers for snorkeling trips, maybe an empty wine bottle or two. It is the TV that keeps us going, from Jerry to Sally to Hawaii Five-0 and then on to the soaps. If there's something especially arresting, like "Won't Take No for an Answer" on Jerry, we sit down on the edge of a bed and giggle for a moment, as if this were a pajama party instead of a terminally dead-end job. The soaps are the best, and Carlie turns the volume up full blast so she won't miss anything from the bathroom or while the vacuum is on. In Room 503, Marcia confronts Jeff about Lauren. In 505, Lauren taunts poor cheated-on Marcia. In 511, Helen offers Amanda $10,000 to stop seeing Eric, prompting Carlie to emerge from the bathroom to study Amanda's troubled face. "You take it, girl," she advises. "I would for sure." The tourists' rooms that we clean and, beyond them, the far more expensively appointed interiors in the soaps begin after a while to merge. We have entered a better world-a world of comfort where every day is a day off, waiting to be filled with sexual intrigue. We are only gate-crashers in this fantasy, however, forced to pay for our presence with backaches and perpetual thirst. The mirrors, and there are far too many of them in hotel rooms, contain the kind of person you would normally find pushing a shopping cart down a city street - bedraggled, dressed in a damp hotel polo shirt two sizes too large, and with sweat dribbling down her chin like drool. I am enormously relieved when Carlie announces a half-hour meal break, but my appetite fades when I see that the bag of hot dog rolls she has been carrying around on our cart is not trash salvaged from a checkout but what she has brought for her lunch. Between the TV and the fact that I'm in no position, as a first dayer, to launch new topics of conversation, I don't learn much about Carlie except that she hurts, and in more than one way. She moves slowly about her work, muttering something about joint pain, and this is probably going to doom her, since the young immigrant housekeepers-Polish and Salvadoranlike to polish off their rooms by two in the afternoon, while she drags the work out till six. It doesn't make any sense to hurry, she observes, when you're being paid by the hour. Already, management has brought in a woman to do what sounds like time- motion studies and there's talk about switching to paying by the room. She broods, too, about all the little evidences of disrespect that come her way, and not only from management. "They don't care about us," she tells me of the hotel guests; in fact, the y don't notice us at all unless something gets stolen from a room- "then they're all over you." We're eating our lunch side by side in the break room when a white guy in a maintenance uniform walks by and Carlie calls out, "Hey you," in a friendly way, "what's your name?" "Peter Pan," he says, his back already to us. "That wasn't funny," Carlie says, turning to me. "That was no kind of answer. Why did he have to be funny like that?" I venture that he has an attitude, and she nods as if that were an acute diagnosis. "Yeah, he got a attitude all right." "Maybe he's a having a bad day," I elaborate, not because I feel any obligation to defend the white race but because her face is so twisted with hurt. When I request permission to leave at about 3:30, another housekeeper warns me that no one has so far succeeded in combining housekeeping with serving at Jerry's: "Some kid did it once for five days, and you're no kid." With that helpful information in mind, I rush back to number 46, down four Advils (the name brand this time), shower, stooping to fit into the stall, and attempt to compose myself for the oncoming shift. So much for what Marx termed the "reproduction of labor power," meaning the things a worker has to do just so she'll be ready to labor again. The only unforeseen obstacle to the smooth transition from job to job is that my tan Jerry's slacks, which had looked reasonably clean by 40-watt bulb last night when I hand washed my Hawaiian shirt, prove by daylight to be mottled with catsup and ranch-dressing stains. I spend most of my hour- long break between jobs attempting to remove the edible portions of the slacks with a sponge and then drying them over the hood of my car in the sun. suspect that Carlie, if she lasted, was still making the equivalent of $6 an hour or quite a bit less. I can do this two-job thing, is my theory, if I can drink enough caffeine and avoid getting distracted by George's ever more obvious suffering. The first few days after the alleged theft, he seemed not to understand the trouble he was in, and our chirpy little conversations had continued. But the last couple of shifts he's been listless and unshaven, and tonight he looks like the ghost we all know him to be, with dark half-moons hanging from his eyes. At one point, when I am briefly immobilized by the task of filling little paper cups with sour cream for baked potatoes, he comes over and looks as if he'd like to explore the limits of our shared vocabulary, but I am called to the floor for a table. I resolve to give him all my tips that night, and to hell with the experiment in low-wage money management. At eight, Ellen and I grab a snack together standing at the mephitic end of the kitchen counter, but I can only manage two or three mozzarella sticks, and lunch had been a mere handful of McNuggets. I am not tired at all, I assure myself, though it may be that there is simply no more "I" left to do the tiredness monitoring. What I would see if I were more alert to the situation is that the forces of destruction are already massing against me. There is only one cook on duty, a young man named Jesus ("Hay-Sue," that is), and he is new to the job. And there is Joy, who shows up to take over in the middle of the shift dressed in high heels and a long, clingy white dress and fuming as if she'd just been stood up in some cocktail bar. Then it comes, the perfect storm. Four of my tables fill up at once. Four tables is nothing for me now, but only so long as they are obligingly staggered. As I bev table 27, tables 25, 28, and 24 are watching enviously. As I bev 25, 24 glowers because their bevs haven't even been ordered. Twenty-eight is four yuppyish types, meaning everything on the side and agonizing instructions as to the chicken Caesars. Twenty- five is a middle-aged black couple who complain, with some justice, that the iced tea isn't fresh and the tabletop is sticky. But table 24 is the meteorological event of the century: ten British tourists who seem to have made the decision to absorb the American experience entirely by mouth. Here everyone has at least two drinks- iced tea and milk shake, Michelob and water (with lemon slice in the water, please)-and a huge, promiscuous orgy of breakfast specials, mozz sticks, chicken strips, quesadillas, burgers with cheese and without, sides of hash browns with cheddar, with onions, with gravy, seasoned fries, plain fries, banana splits. Poor Jesus! Poor me! Because when I arrive with their first tray of food - after three prior trips just to refill bevs - Princess Di refuses to eat her chicken strips with her pancake and sausage special since, as she now reveals, the strips were meant to be an appetizer. Maybe the others would have accepted their meals, but Di, who is deep into her third Michelob, insists that everything else go back while they work on their starters. Much of what happens next is lost in the fog of war. Jesus starts going under. The little printer in front of him is spewing out orders faster than he can rip them off, much less produce the meals. A menacing restlessness rises from the tables, all of which are full. Even the invincible Ellen is ashen from stress. I take table 24 their reheated main courses, which they immediately reject as either too cold or fossilized by the microwave. When I return to the kitchen with their trays (three trays in three trips) Joy confronts me with arms akimbo: "What is this?" She means the food-the plates of rejected pancakes, hash browns in assorted flavors, toasts, burgers, sausages, eggs. "Uh, scrambled with cheddar," I try, "and that's - " "No," she screams in my face, "is it a traditional, a super-scramble, an eye-opener?" I pretend to study my check for a clue, but entropy has been up to its tricks, not only on the plates but in my head, and I have to admit that the original order is beyond reconstruction. "You don't know an eye-opener from a traditional?" she demands in outrage. All I know, in fact, is that my legs have lost interest in the current venture and have announced their intention to fold. I am saved by a yuppie (mercifully not one of mine) who chooses this moment to charge into the kitchen to bellow that his food is twenty-five minutes late. Joy screams at him to get the hell out of her kitchen, please, and then turns on Jesus in a fury, hurling an empty tray across the room for emphasis. I leave. I don't walk out, I just leave. I don't finish my side work or pick up my credit card tips, if any, at the cash register or, of course, ask Joy's permission to go. And the surprising thing is that you can walk out without permission, that the door opens, that the thick tropical night air parts to let me pass, that my car is still parked where I left it. There is no vindication in this exit, no fuck-you surge of relief, just an overwhelming dank sense of failure pressing down on me and the entire parking lot. I had gone into this venture in the spirit of science, to test a mathematical proposition, but somewhere along the line, in the tunnel vision imposed by long shifts and relentless concentration, it became a test of myself, and clearly I have failed. Not only had I flamed out as a housekeeper/ server, I had forgotten to give George my tips, and, for reasons perhaps best known to hardworking, generous people like Gail and Ellen, this hurts. I don't cry, but I am in a position to realize, for the first time in many years, that the tear ducts-are still there and still capable of doing their job. WHEN I MOVED OUT OF THE TRAILER PARK, I GAVE THE KEY TO number 46 to Gail and arranged for my deposit to be transferred to her. She told me that Joan was still living in her van and that Stu had been fired from the Hearthside. According to the most up-to-date rumors, the drug he ordered from the restaurant was crack and he was caught dipping into the cash register to pay for it. I never found out what happened to George. ................
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