I like to watch “Meet the Press” on Sunday mornings. I don’t know why. I guess after reading all the most recent bad news in the Sunday paper and looking at the ads for things I can no longer afford to buy, and downing half a pot or so of caffeine, watching a bunch of talking heads spout total nonsense with a straight face provides a certain comic relief.

Sometimes important stuff happens on “Meet the Press,” like the morning Colin Powell, a Republican, endorsed Barack Obama and Tom Brokaw let him. That was cool.

But this past Sunday it was Democratic Senator John Kerry and Republican Representative Kay Bailey Hutchison taking turns at soundbyte punditry on the BailOut Bill. Hint: He was for it, she was not.

Afterward, the usual assortment of talking heads batted around the dead mouse of corporate accountability and CEO pay in the aftermath of the announcement that Wall Street paid out $18 billion in bonuses last year after receiving TARP money. That’s right–they lost so much money that the entire banking system is now on the verge of collapse, and they paid themselves $18 BILLION in bonuses for doing that.

The talking heads were unrepentant, declaring the “populist tone” that has “crept into the rhetoric of late” showed a woeful lack of appreciation for their special skills, especially since everyone knows that “government is no good at running banks.”

Right. Like they are good at running banks?

Hello? Earth to Wall Street?

When are these guys going to stop blowin smoke up my ass? Honestly, I was waiting for Marie Antoinette to come out with a suggestion that perhaps the peasantry could eat cake if bread is not available.

These guys just don’t get it, and not only that, they think we don’t get it either. But I think most people do get it. Most ordinary working people saw this mess coming years ago. Now it’s here, and the people living in the financial stratosphere, the ones who delivered this flaming pile of financial dog poo to the front steps of the White House, are sniffing that President Obama talked mean to them.

And then gave them a bunch more money.

It’s lonely at the top.

I have this idea: If there ever is a cap placed on CEO pay (ha, ha, but you never know…) and they can’t find good people to work those jobs because of that cap, I’ll be glad to accept any of those jobs for just one billion. That’s all I want. A single billion. I used to want a million, but that was so 2007.

I’ll be waiting by the phone.

Then I began to notice that millions of Americans are losing their jobs right now. Americans have been losing jobs for the past year at the rate of about half a million per month.  All economic indicators suggest that in 2009 this trend will strengthen, as business after business goes belly up or lays off huge segments of their workforce.

2009 is going to be painful. There’s just no warm fuzzy way to say it.

Lately, as the reality of my own personal situation has begun to sink in, I’ve been asking myself some less practical and more philosophical questions. What is ‘work’ anyway? Is money the best way to draw a line between what constitutes work and what constitutes recreation? Shouldn’t work have some intrinsic value?

I spent 7 years in call centers, and I can tell you for sure that call center work has no intrinsic value. We were not there to provide ‘customer service’, we were there to shield the corporate overlords from the consequences of their greedy, exploitive decisions, tell lies, and make people go away. We provided the illusion of customer service. If we could get more money out of our callers in the process, all the better. No one likes customer service jobs or customer service workers. Everyone knows ‘customer service’ is a misnomer, especially customers.

‘Customer abuse’ might be more apt.

So many jobs are like this now though–devoid of purpose or respect. They serve no respectable purpose at all. The only reason we call them ‘work’ is because they require effort and are rewarded with pay, but beyond that, there is no good reason why anyone should be doing them. If you do these jobs well, you feel bad about yourself because you’ve helped  greedy management types to harm to ordinary people who don’t deserve it. If you do these jobs poorly, you feel bad about yourself because your performance sucks and the greedy management types are all over your ass about it. You can’t win. You’re miserable if you succeed and miserable if you fail.

When the world of work comes to this point of complete absurdity, maybe its time for it to be flushed.

I look around and see lots of other work that badly needs to be done, work that might not even be profitable but definitely is necessary. Local food banks are crying for help. Vacant lots that right now are filled with litter and indigent wanderers are crying out to be planted with vegetables and flowers. The few residents who remain in these blighted neighborhoods could use the work, the companionship, and the food. How much more useful is that kind of ‘work’ than the paid kind that enriches CEOs who are already richer than any human being needs to be?

What about the many kinds of work that shares individual talents and abilities? Artists, poets, musicians, craftsmen, writers–these people make life more beautiful and more meaningful, but rarely turn much of a profit. Are they therefore not ‘working’. Are they somehow less valuable to society than people who annoy others for a living but have 401ks and health care policies?

As the American economy circles the drain, we might want to ask ourselves some hard philosophical questions about what kind of society we really want, and what kind of work we want to do within it. Then, having thought those big thoughts, we might want to get out there and get busy.

There’s plenty of work. We’re just a little short on money.

Maybe if we get busy with what’s real, the money will follow.

Although lately the nation’s attention has been on the stimulus package being discussed in Congress and on Barack Obama’s upcoming Inauguration, for about three months now major retail and manufacturing companies and corporations have been quietly not paying their bills. That single fact threatens to kick off the next financial crisis in the United States (as if we need another one), and has the potential to sink so many small banks and local credit unions that we could easily end up with just three retail banking institutions–Bank of America, MBNA, and Citi.

And Citi is not looking so good either.

Here is what is happening:

Most large businesses float short term loans in order to stay operational when cash flow is weak. They do this on a regular basis. It’s part of normal daily functioning. When these businesses can’t get the short-term loans (which is what the credit crunch is all about–businesses not being able to get these short term loans) then they can’t make payroll, can’t pay normal monthly expenses and so forth.

In addition to all that, many businesses are badly over-leveraged. ‘Over-leveraged’ is just another word for having too much debt. When you buy on credit because you assume that down the road your investments will pay off big when your investment appreciates in value, you are over-leveraged. During the boom times lots of businesses borrowed beyond their capacity to repay and banks let them do it, because everyone thought economic expansion would continue and in the end everyone would make money.

So for months now, these loans (which are often for business expansion in commercial property and/or equipment) have been in default for many businesses. They just can’t make the payments, and what’s worse, the property/equipement they bought with money they didn’t have is now depreciating in value–so many of the loans are already “upsidedown,” made for more than the property is now worth.

What this means is that we are about to see a huge wave of commercial property foreclosures and equipment repossessions, followed by another wave of corporate bankruptcies. Some analysts believe we will start to see these foreclosures and bankruptcies as early as mid-February.

Not to throw cold water on your Inaugural party plans.

By all means, celebrate. But make sure you’ve stocked up on rice, beans, and noodles for the rest of 2009.

I’ve had three jobs over the past eight years: the first for a major multinational insurance company in the corporate call center (five years), the second for a major midwestern retail bank in their corporate call center (two years), and the most recent for a national retail distribution firm as a route service merchandising rep. All were paid hourly at about the same rate ($10-$15/hr), and all but one had an explicit policy that banned employees from performing work when not clocked in (the last job had no such stated policy).

Yet every one of these jobs required work that could not be completed while clocked in.

Why, you might ask, would a corporation have an explicit policy against working off the clock but then turn around and coerce employees into doing just that?

One good reason is that forcing employees to work without compensation at an hourly wage job is against the law in the U.S.

WalMart recently lost a big class action suit brought by employees who were required to do inventory and clean up work for the store before and after clocking in for actual pay. In other words, the employees were required to donate a portion of their time for no pay whatsoever in order to keep the paid portion of their jobs.

Corporate-think being what it is, most companies dealt with this set-back by simply issuing a formal “No Work Off the Clock” statement to all hourly employees and including that statement of policy in an employee manual, all the while arranging the job so that almost all employees are forced to complete some of the work off the clock in order not to get fired.

At the bank, we were required to review our individual sales and then submit a review report to our supervisor “inbetween calls” on a weekly and monthly basis. Typically there was no time inbetween calls, zero, nada, none. The calls came back to back with no option for stopping or delaying them, and there was no part of the work day allotted for work other than answering calls. If the reports were not submitted it reflected negatively on performance statistics which reduced the likelihood of a raise and could even result in termination of the employee if the stats fell below a certain level. So people did the reports before work or on their breaks in order to keep their jobs.

At the insurance company we had a variety of forms, paperwork, and follow-ups we also had to complete “inbetween calls” and the same total lack of time between calls to complete these tasks. The third job, the merchandising position, didn’t even attempt to conceal the “at your own expense, on your own time” requirement. We had to print off copious materials at home without reimbursement for time or paper or ink, and check and read up to a dozen lengthy email messages four times a day for no compensation.

How do employees feel about this practice?

They hate it. At every one of these jobs the biggest complaint among new and veteran employees was the off-the-clock work requirement–followed closely by what employees perceived to be unreasonable and unrelenting job-related stress. The two were clearly related, with stress levels leading to rapid turnover within the organizations.

You may think off-the-clock work at an hourly job is no big deal and that it’s just part of the privilege of being hired, a responsibility that any good employee would be glad to take on. However, if you multiply this practice by the millions of employees forced to comply with it, it comes to a LOT of money.

That’s money that stays in the corporation’s pocket and never makes it to yours or mine.

For instance, at the insurance company, I spent about 20 minutes a day working for free so I wouldn’t lose my job, about the same amount of time at the bank, and sometimes as much as an hour a day for the merchandising job. At $15 an hour that comes to $1300 a year that was not included in my paycheck. That particular insurance company employed over 30,000 people worldwide. Assuming all their hourly employees made $15 an hour (and most made more), that’s $390 MILLION dollars a year that stayed with the corporation instead of going to the workers who performed the tasks.

Why do corporations risk legal action by continuing this chintzy practice?

Because they can. It’s profitable, it’s possible, and class action suits take years and years to bring to court.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect to be paid for the work we do. But it looks like, without intervention in the form of litigation or intervention by organized labor movements, the practice is not likely to stop any time soon.

So much of the work we do is tied to money.

The questions we ask ourselves first usually have to do with dollars. How much will the job pay? What is the hourly rate? What are the benefits? Is health care included? What is the co-pay? What is the maximum pay out? When can I expect a raise? What are the prospects for advancement? What are my expenses?

These are not bad questions, but they all take as a baseline the issue of how much money can be made and how to get it as fast as possible. What if instead we asked questions that were more personal and more directed toward the nature of the work itself and our role in performing it?

Here are a few of the kinds of questions I’ve been considering lately in my own work:

What is the purpose of this work? Can I do the work well and does the work have value if done well? Who benefits if I do this work? Is anyone harmed by the work? Does the work make use of my skills, knowledge, and personal experience, or is all that irrelevant to the work? Am I valued by my employer? Do I respect my employer? Do we share common goals and ideals? Do I respect and like my co-workers and the other people I come in contact with day to day? Is there something I’d rather be doing than this? If so, how badly would I rather be doing this other thing? On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being totally dissatisfied and frustrated, am I closer to 2 or 9?

Most of us ask the first set of questions and, if we are honest, are mildly disappointed or else satisfied only moderately. That is because money is not real. Money is symbolic, representing and reflecting the stored economic value of a given culture. So if you love to shelve books and talk to people about them but your culture doesn’t much value that, your money questions will leave you frustrated but your work might make you pretty happy. If you hate selling securities but are good at it and are doing it at the height of an investment bubble, your first set of questions will yield positive answers and yet you will feel pretty miserable.

I’ve personally been on both sides of that (though not in those specific jobs), and I can vouch for the fact that happy and poor is way better than affluent and miserable.  Happy and affluent must be really great, and, at least in theory, I think it is totally possible, if not easy.

Imagine if everyone made their work decisions using the second set of questions as a guide and pretty much ignored the first? You might think that everyone would then make so little money that we’d have mass starvation on our hands, but another, more positive outcome is that, over time, society’s values would change. 

If ever there was a time in history when we needed to see society’s values change, this is it!

When we ask ourselves how we can be of use, we almost always end up contributing the things we are uniquely good at, and or the things that are most needed. By contrast, so many of the jobs created today by the corporate world fail the second test completely. Many of the worst paying jobs (for instance in call centers and in sales) are also the most prevalent, and many of these jobs not only don’t add value to society, they actually do quantifiable harm to others, their only ‘redeeming’ quality being that when done well, they enrich the stockholders in the corporation and the CEOs who run the corporation. But the rest of us? Not so much.
As we watch our economy melt down I think we are at a place where we have a unique opportunity to each ask ourselves the second set of questions as vigorously as possible and, finding the answers, start from a new set of values entirely. Just because there are few good paying jobs doesn’t mean there isn’t lots of work to be done.

The real question is, how can each of us be of use?

As the U.S. economy continues to explore new lows, the cable news networks are now trotting out lame employment experts to advise laid-off workers to get nursing degrees, start their own businesses, or learn to build oil rigs. These geniuses don’t to mention the fact that nursing schools have 20 applicants every available opening, or the fact that major hospitals across the U.S are facing imminent bankruptcy, or the fact that not every factory worker has the brains or the personality to be around sick people for a living, or the fact that we can’t ALL work in the field of health care or reinvent ourselves as the next Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.

Some people are always going to need a J-O-B, and the fact is, there aren’t very many of those any more.

Even before the current financial meltdown hit, full-time jobs were disappearing faster than polar bears in Wasilla, and the full-time jobs that remained available were mostly in call centers or temporary agencies. Call centers are notorious for intentionally turning over employees in a year or two (to keep wages low and avoid paying out benefits), and besides, who want to work in a call center any longer than that anyway?

Most call center employees want to quit after the first day.

Retail and office work has been trending toward low-pay and part-time for a very long time now. Many professional jobs have actually moved to sub-contracting freelancers as independent agents to avoid having to deal with withholding or unemployment benefits (or any other kinds of benefits). Living in Michigan, I personally know a number of women who work three or more part-time sub-contracted little retail jobs to grub together enough money to almost equal the grocery bill, but they are all still watching the horizon for signs of a full-time job.

I’m beginning to think we might as well hope to come across a breeding pair of Dodo birds or passenger pigeons.

It’s easy to become alarmed and negative about all this, but in fact it hasn’t been that long ago that not everyone had or wanted a J-O-B. Many people worked for themselves or lived on the land in rural areas. Big corporations did not exist so we had a need for craftspersons, and skilled trades men and women who were more than able to earn enough money to support themselves and a family without a payroll department.

We may be returning to those days, or something like them. I don’t imagine the transition will be smooth or painless, but I think it may be necessary.

Be honest: Will you miss call centers? Big box stores? Cell phone companies?

Me neither.

I got a part-time merchandising job back in October of 2008 and I like it. I spend between 15 and 20 hours a week merchandising DVDs, CDs, and magazines in a big box store for a major distribution firm. They sent me a free movie for Christmas and my boss is nice (I rarely see him) and the schedule is flexible. So that’s all cool.

Two if us merchandise the store, and we are supposed to work as a team, but my partner seems to be always seething with resentments about this, that, and the other thing. She doesn’t want to do this because it’s too upsetting, or that because it’s too stressful, or the other thing because she shouldn’t have to and it isn’t fair. We put things on shelves. I mean, that is the job–putting stuff on shelves and going home! No stress, no worries, no need for drama, and yet every day is a new drama with this woman in the center of it.

It’s making me nuts.

I got to thinking how many people live their whole lives this way–Constantly keeping a scorecard and storing up resentments about things that aren’t even really happening at all–It’s sad. Even so, I’m now to the point where I’m just not going to be able to tolerate anymore drama over petty crap that isn’t even happening.

Right now I’ve taken on all the aspects of the job this person finds distasteful except one, and I put my foot down finally and said, “Look, I’m not doing that just because you feel like you don’t want to. Take it up with our boss and tell him you won’t do it.” When I got home, I talked with him and he said I did the right thing, but I still feel upset about it.

Up until now I’ve been trying to make my merchandising partner comfortable and be supportive and all that, but today I realized something has snapped in me. From now on, I’m going to be as unpleasant as possible and see if I can’t encourage her to go away. If a person takes a job, then that person should expect to have to do the job. Especially when it’s a 15-20 hour a week job that any monkey could do and still have time to type Shakespeare in the afternoons!

I know this is a very personal post, and I know I haven’t been here posting for awhile, but I’ve been busy dealing with an insane person for $10 an hour.  Now that the holidays are ending, maybe it will tone down on its own.

Thanks for listening.

Four days ago, the employees of Republic Windows & Doors on Chicago’s North side were given three days notice that the factory (where some of them had worked for over 10 years) would be closing its doors because sales were down due to the severe recession and access to credit to tide the plant over had completely dried up. This meant no more jobs for the employees and oh, yes, no severance pay or owed vacation time would be paid out either, due to lack of access to funds.

The employees decided to stay at work until the company paid out what it owed them.

They are still there.

Yesterday, Jesse Jackson showed up with food for the workers. Congressional Representatives Jan Shakowsky and Luis V. Gutierrez showed up to encourage and meet with them. Even President-Elect Barack Obama came down on the side of the workers, making a public statement that the company should pay the dismissed workers what it owes them.

Company representatives argue that they cannot get the money because Bank of America, a recent recipient of $25 billion in TARP funds, has decided they are a poor credit risk due to recently reduced sales.  Bank of America says that the company’s employee problems are not their affair. And yet, Bank of America received taxpayer money to insure it would not withhold credit it precisely this sort of situation.

Support is growing for the workers, who are quickly becoming emblematic of the plight of Americans all over the country who are being let go without warning as major banks continue to hold onto federal funds (provided by us, the workers and taxpayers) instead of using those funds to thaw the credit freeze and keep businesses afloat.

A federal law requires 60 days notice of a plant closing or lay-off, but the three days notice the employees at Republic Windows & Doors received are three more days than many workers get.

I admit I cheered when I heard of the plant takeover. My partner Bill was given a one week notice of the shutdown of his plant last month–after working there for 20 years. He had a little less than a single week to decide whether to take a buy-out based on seniority and be unemployed, or get in line for a job at a location with the same company–at a different city or a different state.

Because he is 5 years away from his earliest possible retirement date, he chose to commute 60 miles to a city north of us to continue working. Twenty other employees there did not have enough seniority to be given that choice. After twenty years of work, he now is by no means assured of retiring from this company, which may or may not survive the current economic downturn.

What really stands out for me in all of this is that a fairly vicious double standard is being maintained when it comes to workers and upper level management. You may or may not remember Richard Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers who, the week his bank folded, was earning approximately $17,000 an hour. Fuld appeared before Congress to defend his right to this salary, even though under his leadership Lehman tanked and took the U.S down with it.

Other corporate CEOs have been granted huge ‘golden parachutes’ upon leaving companies they ran right into the ground, while the workers, who worked every bit as hard (harder actually, given productivity statistics) under bad management as they did under good,  are given short notice or no notice.

The last two corporations I worked for closed departments with no notice, zero. The employees went home thinking they had jobs, and when they showed up the next day the doors were closed. Some had the option of accepting lower paid positions in the corporate call centers of these corporations, most were just let go without warning. The CEO of the bank I left in October retired last November with a $120 million golden parachute.

That very same month the bank’s stock plummeted 80%.

In mid-November of this year (two weeks after I left) the U.S. Treasury denied the bank’s request for TARP funds and used the funds instead to sell the bank to a bigger bank–which didn’t want to buy our bank but had to in order to get the TARP money for itself. So now all those jobs are history, not just mine, and our own tax dollars helped to eliminate them.

We are coming off an era of heady laissez-faire, idealistic capitalism that embraced the insane idea that they system always self-regulates, that greed is good, that human beings at the bottom are dispensable and are responsible for their own situation anyway. The people at the top hold self-justifying positions within their organizations. Because they are at the top, they argue that proves they deserve to be, no matter what their actual performance is. Meanwhile, workers at the bottom are held accountable for corporate policies they had no hand in creating.

What surprises me is not that the employees at Republic Windows & Doors are occupying their plant and demanding pay they were promised. What surprises me is that it took this long to happen somewhere in America. I hope this trend continues, and grows, and spreads.

The obscenely rich have had their day. Let’s not go too quietly into that good night.

Cause it ain’t gonna be that good. Or that quiet.

I do still have a job (for now) as a retail merchandiser, and I don’t hate it. I also write web copy and blogs for about four hours a day, and I get paid for that too. I earn advertising revenue on my blogs, which isn’t much, but it gets to be more each day. Before I set up my current work life though, I worked in national call centers for seven years–first for a multi-national insurance company as an agent, and next for a major regional bank as a CSR.

If I never see the inside of another call center, ever, it will be fine with me.

Ugh.

Right now lots of people are losing their jobs, and while I don’t want to minimize how scary that is and how painful, I do want to point out that, if you hate your job anyway, you could see this time as an opportunity to figure out who you really are and what you want to accomplish with whatever time you have left on this planet. We tend not to think about life that way. We’re trained to be wage-earners: To find a company, pledge our time, and in turn get a measure of security and some health insurance and maybe a 401K. Then we settle into a kind of trance and wait for retirement.

That’s simplistic, I know. But it feels exactly that boring sometimes, and many of us harbor dreams and fantasies about our ‘real’ work that we save for retirement, or vacation, or our ’spare time’ (what’s that?!). Maybe, as the economy goes down the drain, we could resurrect those fantasies and hopes and dreams and ask ourselves if we couldn’t take at least a small step towards achieving at least one of them.

I mean hey, what else do we have to do? There certainly aren’t any jobs!

As I write this there is a new show on TV with a segment about a job fair that has received (so far) 400 resumes at a single employer booth. That employer has 8 positions open. Here in Michigan, I quit sending out resumes, especially when the employer requested them emailed to a specific address, when I realized the email boxes were already full by the time I sent the damn things out. They kept coming back to me undeliverable. So I quit sending them.

Now more than ever America’s future may well depend on each of our abilities to re-imagine work in our own private lives. Self-reliance, creativity, cutting back on nonessentials: All of this is, if we choose to think of it this way, an opportunity to reinvent our country and ourselves.

I don’t think it will be easy or quick. But I think it will be exciting and fascinating. Over the coming weeks I’ll try to write about some resources for both finding out what you are good at and figuring out how to make money at it.

Crisis/Opportunity.

They may or may not be two sides of the same coin.

But if they aren’t, then maybe we can invent some new coins.

This past Sunday Maureen Dowd ran a New York Times column about the current trend towards outsourcing newspaper reporting to India. Yes, you heard that right–As more and more newspapers are shifting to online versus paper print publication, some are also outsourcing their copy writing to India, where work can be done as cheaply as $1.50 per 1000 words. If you’ve ever bid on contract work on the job boards (Guru, Elance, Odesk, etc.) you already know that if someone cares about price only, that contract is most likely going to India, not to you.

In other news, a major book publisher recently announced a moratorium on acquiring book manuscripts: not just unsolicited manuscripts, but rather any new book manuscripts. For the next indefinite period of time, they will only print sure-fire bestsellers (how this will pan out its hard to say) and greatly reduce their number of publications. That just can’t be good news for writers. Not in any universe.

Is writing really dead in the water? Have we become a nation of video game players and movie goers, a people that only cares about the price of popcorn and gasoline and can’t read very well and doesn’t care? Is it true that no one reads anymore and the few who do only want to read John Grisham?

I think the times are a-changin’, but it might be a bit premature to declare literature a dead art. I write for Hub Pages a lot, and I can tell you a lively community of writers does is exist in this country–Good writers, writers who care about quality and will continue to write whether they are published or not, whether they get rich or not. This is the kind of atmosphere that creates writing that people actually want to read, and it’s an exciting development.

I think writing is going through a transformation right now. As print media become less saleable, the internet becomes the forum of choice, and in the age old tradition of the starving artist, we have our pockets of internet writers who are more than hacks, who have something to say, who understand grammar and style and mood and all that jazz, and who are not giving up. I have to believe that over time, reader will gravitate to those writers, the ones with ideas, and not to word producers who don’t know our culture, hired at pennies a page.

So if you’re a writer, and you just lost another job writing copy for a foot powder website to some stranger in Mumbai, don’t despair. Just keep writing. Take a foot powder break and write something you care about for a change. Reconnect to what made you want to write in the first place. You’ll feel better, and you might even gain a readership.

The fat lady isn’t planning to sing about writing anytime in this century or next. It’s just change, that’s all. And change is what you will make for quite awhile if you want to be writer.

Has it ever been otherwise?