`People don’t know what to make of you.”
Last year a well meaning friend made this confession about the blue-collar union job I’d taken at a neighborhood grocery store. Of course she didn’t know what to make of me; I’d given up a job in the public relations department of the opera and before that I’d turned my back on a children’s museum I’d enthusiastically started when its success burned me out. Now I was selling bread. She didn’t intend to be snobbish or critical, yet I felt a sting in her well-meant remark.
Last year USA Today reported that 42 percent of American workers felt “used up” by the end of the day. I was one of them.
I’d drag home, obsessing about responsibility, too tired to cook, too frazzled to listen to my husband or help my daughter with homework. My family depends on my income but this time, before looking for work, I thought about what I wanted, not what I was qualified for. What I wanted was a pleasant office, minimal responsibilities, no commute and no dressing for success. A job that paid enough to cover our health insurance. A no-brainer.
The bakery fit the bill. I walk to work, wear a uniform and our health-care benefits are the best we’ve had in 22 years of married life, including the 14 years my husband worked as an executive for a state health association.
Customers talk easily. What they want to know is what bread goes with which pasta? Which bread has the best crust? Texture is the thing with bread as novelist Henry Miller pointed out, but it’s not what we’re supposed to seek or appreciate in work. Yet the texture of my job makes other jobs taste like Wonderbread: characterless, bland, boring.
In many ways, the grocery hardly holds a candle to the large state college I attended, but in its ethnic and economic mix it’s a dead ringer. Grocery workers are artists by day who shelve Spam at night. They’ve taught school, walked dogs, several are musicians and one was a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas.
Checkers attend high school, university, community college. Some are high school dropouts. The wine guy is Japanese as is the fellow in fish. My boss is Hispanic. Two retired men are courtesy clerks. Old and young, black and white, single moms, newlyweds and workers like me. I didn’t take the job because it was a melting pot, but that’s one reason I like it.
I’ve known some of my customers ever since our kids went to pre-school. Others I know from volunteer activities. Strangers are usually friendly though they can be rude and demanding; too preoccupied for “please” and “thank you.” But it’s my friends who can make me uncomfortable. And that discomfort boils down to the low regard we northwesterners have of blue-collar work.
Former President Jimmy Carter can build houses for the poor. Saints can labor a lifetime in obscurity. But middle-class folks with college educations are expected to perform to their potential. To modify Browning, the reach should exceed the grasp or what’s an education for.
There’s work we’re trained for, work we’re educated for, work, one might almost say, we’re born to. But blue-collar work is work anyone might do and do well. Who in his or her right mind would choose to consort with blue-collar riffraff? That’s the unspoken question and the answer far too often is, “Not me and not my kids.”
Carl Sandberg, Mark Twain and Maya Angelou worked a variety of menial jobs, but whether they knew it at the time they were climbing the ladder of success. Their progress was vertical; while the image that best fits my work history is the pogo stick. For better or worse, I’ve never lived to work.
“I’d love to have your job,” sighed a bank manager. I’ve heard the same refrain from doctors, lawyers and the upwardly mobile. They have come to know, even if they can’t admit it, that professional work takes its toll. The meetings, the politics, the meetings, the anxiety, the meetings, the posturing, the meetings, the meetings, the meetings!
The deadening routine of it. The emphasis on the superficial: how you look, who you know, how you come across. The long hours. The thankless, not to mention uncompensated, drudgery. And for what? Two weeks in Hawaii? A new car? A VCR? A compact disc player?
I’m on my feet for hours yet compared with managing an organization, fund-raising or photocopying press releases, my job’s a piece of cake.
If you want a good job and want to be productive, education may be the best bet, but it’s still a gamble. It doesn’t guarantee success any more than a white collar. Nor does menial work make you an ax murderer. I know people young and old who will not apply for work at fast-food operations.
College grads who choose to bide their time until as they put it, “a position in my field opens.” Parents resigned-in some cases happy-to support adult children rather than telling them to get a job, any job. Would-be workers who’d rather collect unemployment than dig a ditch. The work is mindless they whine. It’s beneath them reads the subtext.
Is my job meaningful? Important? Am I using my education? Doing what I was trained for? Have I achieved the American dream? On the face of it, no. But I’m not so sure those are the important questions. Once upon a time the American dream meant making money, seizing opportunity, bettering oneself. Yet in October 1988, Harper’s magazine declared that money has nothing to do with the dream: Only 5 percent of those earning less than $15,000 and 6 percent of those earning more than $50,000 claimed to have achieved it.
We’re not use to seeing educated friends replace ambitious jobs with low paying, menial ones, but it’s an alternative that many are now considering and choosing. Education and work may intertwine, but not always. To be idle through choice or circumstance, to be unable or unwilling to work reduces one to a marginal participant in life.
Unemployment keeps one sidelined. It may be an old-fashioned notion, but I believe the heavy hand of idleness grinds one down, oppresses, reduces. For many it’s torture. Those who work have nothing to be ashamed of. Whatever the job.
As for those who don’t know what to make of me now that I’ve sunk to working in a grocery store, I say “Blessed are those who run around in circles, for they shall be known as the big wheels.” I’ve been there, done that. I’m a little cog who has become aware of the fact that high-powered corporate life ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, it’s a darn sight less.
