The Disposable Workforce
July 23rd 2007 06:38
"See I'm a dreamer, man, and when I was a cook I'd always work with people who weren't dreamers. Like, I was cooking at this restaurant and I put a hot dog on the grill and my kitchen manager came over, and he said, "Mitch, put the hot dog up here, in the right hand corner of the grill, so in case you get a whole bunch of orders at once you have all this space available." See, that's how I knew he wasn't a dreamer, 'cause the day I give up my dreams is the day I have strategic grill locations. A dreamer has a philosophy: the entire grill is hot." - Mitch Hedberg
The 20 tubs of multicoloured ice-cream arrayed in front of me are unlabeled. My supervisor tells me, “Okay. You have 10 minutes to learn all the flavours by heart.”
I want to say, or what?
I have trouble remembering things I do care about. I don't even like ice cream. But in the next 10 minutes, I need to memorise 20 obscure ice-cream flavours, including “Green Tea” and “Muramitsu”. I can't even differentiate between the 3 chocolate flavours, the 4 berry flavours, or the 2 nut flavours. My brain just glazes over as I read the names off the customer chart, which will be invisible to me when I'm behind the counter. But I have no choice. I'm part of the disposable workforce.
It's my first night working at a cafe/ice-cream bar. I've been issued with an ill-fitting polo shirt and a tax file number declaration form, and I'm trying not to look at the hot pink leather that adorns the interior. A popular radio station plays tinnily over invisible speakers hidden among the mass of white tiles. There are three other employees on besides me. One is my supervisor, whose name I can't tell you, because her accent is so thick that I don't understand her when she introduces herself. One is a girl about my age who seems vaguely bewildered all the time. And the other is a commerce student with neatly combed red hair, who has a handshake like an osteoporosis patient.
I lost my last job under circumstances too baffling and esoteric to begin to explain, but suffice to say, one day I was working over 40 hours a week, the next, I was unemployed. Thus began my journey of trawling the city on the cheap circuit of unskilled part-time employees. A world of fast food restaurants, seedy pubs, bustling cafes, overdressed wankers in trendy clothing stores; of pretending to know more than you do about uninteresting things, of anal-retentive balding middle managers, of don't-call-us-we'll-call-you' s. Of people with high horses and low ambitions.
The economy being what it is, I only spent a couple weeks out of work. My standards are not high. Two or three weeks of internet cafes, printing resumes at 10c a sheet, walking the business districts of local suburbs, wearing out my good shoes. For better or worse I wound up in the ice-cream bar.
When it comes to scooping the ice-cream into the cone, every seasoned employee has their own elaborate method. Scoop angle, scoop speed, scoop penetration depth. Every one of them is full of helpful advice, all too eager to share the most esoteric detail of their own expertise. The wildcard – hang onto your hats - is that each flavour has its own texture and consistency, meaning that a skilled scooper will use some kind of primitive physics to devise an adaptable scooping formula whereby their technique can be applied in slightly different ways in scooping the various flavours in order to produce an acceptable lump of ice cream in a plastic cup.
The McDonald's franchise was an innovator in almost every aspect of food service – no doubt this is the reason it was such a phenomenal success. As it evolved from a small hamburger grill restaurant in California to the multinational corporate Goliath we know today, its attitude toward its employees evolved (or devolved) as dramatically as the food. It is arguable that McDonald's invented fast food as we know it. It is inarguable that they invented the disposable workforce. They were the first major business to discover the benefits of treating your store as an assembly line.
Once, a man in an apron would take your order on a pad, put your money in the register, cook and prepare every part of your meal, then bring it to you on a plate. Over time, it became obvious that they could pay employees less if the employees knew less. Now a succession of different people take your money, grill your patty, fry your chips, build your burger, and carry out your food. Every employee is drilled in one insignificant job so simple and mind-numbing that they can literally learn it in an hour. If they quit or get fired, any pleb with an IQ over 10 can be trained to do the same thing in another hour, and will not expect to be paid above the rock-bottom minimum wage. They know that there are a million people on the street who could learn to pull that lever, push that button. They are inessential. They are cogs in a machine. They certainly are not inclined to unionize.
Ask your grandparents if many 14-year-olds had jobs in the service industry working for major business chains, back in their youth.
The beauty of a machine is that if a component stops working, you replace it and business continues as usual.
When my parents were young, a butcher was a broad job description. They would kill the animal, clean it, carve the sections of meat off, display and sell them. They knew how to recognise a good cut of meat from bad. They knew almost as much about animal physiology as a modern veterinarian, and could tell you what sort of quality you would get from an animal's meat depending on its diet and lifestyle. It was a trade knowledge expanded upon throughout a man's entire life.
A modern butcher's apprentice need not even work for a butcher as such. It is just as likely that he will be employed by the butcher's department of a supermarket. Carcasses are delivered stripped, skinned, gutted and cleaned; the apprentice need only cut the meat off the bones and put it on a machine that weighs and wraps it before it goes on the refrigerator shelf. The skills the apprentice learns are a slightly more complex version of the skills you exercise when you cut the fat off your steak with a knife before you eat it.
At the ice-creamery, I was instructed to clean the glass pane in the front of the display freezer. I was told where to find a spray-bottle of glass cleaning fluid and a roll of paper towel. The commerce student with the limp handshake mentored me. “Spray sort of evenly along the glass,” he said. “I usually do eight sprays, two rows of four.” I complied without question, kowtowing to expertise, and began rubbing the glass with two sheets of paper towel. “You can use more than that,” he said with a rakish devil-may-care hand gesture. “The paper towel's cheap. You can use as much as you want.” My mind spun with the decadent possibilities – endless rolls of paper towel, to be bunched up in unnecessary thickness and wiped over the glass panels at my very whim.
Later he showed me where to put the garbage when I carried it out at the end of the night. He engaged me in some more conversation. “At the end of the night, you have to do all the cleaning,” he said. “I used to like cleaning, because it's easy, you know? You don't have to think about it. You just learn how to do it, then you can do it automatically without having to think about it. But now I don't like it anymore. It gets really boring, just doing the same thing over and over.” I nodded dumbly. I wasn't sure how to reply to this lengthy missive imparting why cleaning is boring. What would you say to a man on the street who turned and told you that the sky was blue?
The modern junior workforce is undertrained and underpaid to the greatest extent an employer can get away with. They don't know how to deal with customers outside of an extremely narrow range of basic interactions. Now, instead of initiative, we have Junior Managers to answer any questions and make any decisions. The employee at the bottom of the food chain is taught to ignore every other aspect of the business that does not directly concern him. Instead, he specialises in inanity, and becomes a useless expert in the most esoteric elements of his job.
This approach breeds stupidity and laziness, but the employee is not concerned that he is not learning anything of value. He is uninterested in taking on responsibility and becoming involved with the more vital workings of the business. When he moves onto the next dead-end job, he brings all the skill and initiative of a medicated chimpanzee to his new employer.
I've sometimes been moved to feel bitter that what I'm doing is so unimportant that it amounts to nothing more than some distant rich man buying an hour of my life for less than fifteen dollars. I think my feelings on the subject are an isolated phenomenon.
Most of us, the disposable workforce, we don't really care. We're thinking about the end of our shift, homework, our Playstations, social events. We have acne and braces and bad posture. Our bosses don't know our names. Work is not fulfilling or stimulating in even the basest way for our generation – it's a mind-numbing succession of button-pushes and lever pulls. We have to reduce ourselves to cogs in a machine to make a living, and that mindset is one that tends be hard to shake.
The 20 tubs of multicoloured ice-cream arrayed in front of me are unlabeled. My supervisor tells me, “Okay. You have 10 minutes to learn all the flavours by heart.”
I have trouble remembering things I do care about. I don't even like ice cream. But in the next 10 minutes, I need to memorise 20 obscure ice-cream flavours, including “Green Tea” and “Muramitsu”. I can't even differentiate between the 3 chocolate flavours, the 4 berry flavours, or the 2 nut flavours. My brain just glazes over as I read the names off the customer chart, which will be invisible to me when I'm behind the counter. But I have no choice. I'm part of the disposable workforce.
It's my first night working at a cafe/ice-cream bar. I've been issued with an ill-fitting polo shirt and a tax file number declaration form, and I'm trying not to look at the hot pink leather that adorns the interior. A popular radio station plays tinnily over invisible speakers hidden among the mass of white tiles. There are three other employees on besides me. One is my supervisor, whose name I can't tell you, because her accent is so thick that I don't understand her when she introduces herself. One is a girl about my age who seems vaguely bewildered all the time. And the other is a commerce student with neatly combed red hair, who has a handshake like an osteoporosis patient.
I lost my last job under circumstances too baffling and esoteric to begin to explain, but suffice to say, one day I was working over 40 hours a week, the next, I was unemployed. Thus began my journey of trawling the city on the cheap circuit of unskilled part-time employees. A world of fast food restaurants, seedy pubs, bustling cafes, overdressed wankers in trendy clothing stores; of pretending to know more than you do about uninteresting things, of anal-retentive balding middle managers, of don't-call-us-we'll-call-you' s. Of people with high horses and low ambitions.
The economy being what it is, I only spent a couple weeks out of work. My standards are not high. Two or three weeks of internet cafes, printing resumes at 10c a sheet, walking the business districts of local suburbs, wearing out my good shoes. For better or worse I wound up in the ice-cream bar.
When it comes to scooping the ice-cream into the cone, every seasoned employee has their own elaborate method. Scoop angle, scoop speed, scoop penetration depth. Every one of them is full of helpful advice, all too eager to share the most esoteric detail of their own expertise. The wildcard – hang onto your hats - is that each flavour has its own texture and consistency, meaning that a skilled scooper will use some kind of primitive physics to devise an adaptable scooping formula whereby their technique can be applied in slightly different ways in scooping the various flavours in order to produce an acceptable lump of ice cream in a plastic cup.
The McDonald's franchise was an innovator in almost every aspect of food service – no doubt this is the reason it was such a phenomenal success. As it evolved from a small hamburger grill restaurant in California to the multinational corporate Goliath we know today, its attitude toward its employees evolved (or devolved) as dramatically as the food. It is arguable that McDonald's invented fast food as we know it. It is inarguable that they invented the disposable workforce. They were the first major business to discover the benefits of treating your store as an assembly line.
Once, a man in an apron would take your order on a pad, put your money in the register, cook and prepare every part of your meal, then bring it to you on a plate. Over time, it became obvious that they could pay employees less if the employees knew less. Now a succession of different people take your money, grill your patty, fry your chips, build your burger, and carry out your food. Every employee is drilled in one insignificant job so simple and mind-numbing that they can literally learn it in an hour. If they quit or get fired, any pleb with an IQ over 10 can be trained to do the same thing in another hour, and will not expect to be paid above the rock-bottom minimum wage. They know that there are a million people on the street who could learn to pull that lever, push that button. They are inessential. They are cogs in a machine. They certainly are not inclined to unionize.
Ask your grandparents if many 14-year-olds had jobs in the service industry working for major business chains, back in their youth.
The beauty of a machine is that if a component stops working, you replace it and business continues as usual.
When my parents were young, a butcher was a broad job description. They would kill the animal, clean it, carve the sections of meat off, display and sell them. They knew how to recognise a good cut of meat from bad. They knew almost as much about animal physiology as a modern veterinarian, and could tell you what sort of quality you would get from an animal's meat depending on its diet and lifestyle. It was a trade knowledge expanded upon throughout a man's entire life.
A modern butcher's apprentice need not even work for a butcher as such. It is just as likely that he will be employed by the butcher's department of a supermarket. Carcasses are delivered stripped, skinned, gutted and cleaned; the apprentice need only cut the meat off the bones and put it on a machine that weighs and wraps it before it goes on the refrigerator shelf. The skills the apprentice learns are a slightly more complex version of the skills you exercise when you cut the fat off your steak with a knife before you eat it.
At the ice-creamery, I was instructed to clean the glass pane in the front of the display freezer. I was told where to find a spray-bottle of glass cleaning fluid and a roll of paper towel. The commerce student with the limp handshake mentored me. “Spray sort of evenly along the glass,” he said. “I usually do eight sprays, two rows of four.” I complied without question, kowtowing to expertise, and began rubbing the glass with two sheets of paper towel. “You can use more than that,” he said with a rakish devil-may-care hand gesture. “The paper towel's cheap. You can use as much as you want.” My mind spun with the decadent possibilities – endless rolls of paper towel, to be bunched up in unnecessary thickness and wiped over the glass panels at my very whim.
Later he showed me where to put the garbage when I carried it out at the end of the night. He engaged me in some more conversation. “At the end of the night, you have to do all the cleaning,” he said. “I used to like cleaning, because it's easy, you know? You don't have to think about it. You just learn how to do it, then you can do it automatically without having to think about it. But now I don't like it anymore. It gets really boring, just doing the same thing over and over.” I nodded dumbly. I wasn't sure how to reply to this lengthy missive imparting why cleaning is boring. What would you say to a man on the street who turned and told you that the sky was blue?
The modern junior workforce is undertrained and underpaid to the greatest extent an employer can get away with. They don't know how to deal with customers outside of an extremely narrow range of basic interactions. Now, instead of initiative, we have Junior Managers to answer any questions and make any decisions. The employee at the bottom of the food chain is taught to ignore every other aspect of the business that does not directly concern him. Instead, he specialises in inanity, and becomes a useless expert in the most esoteric elements of his job.
This approach breeds stupidity and laziness, but the employee is not concerned that he is not learning anything of value. He is uninterested in taking on responsibility and becoming involved with the more vital workings of the business. When he moves onto the next dead-end job, he brings all the skill and initiative of a medicated chimpanzee to his new employer.
I've sometimes been moved to feel bitter that what I'm doing is so unimportant that it amounts to nothing more than some distant rich man buying an hour of my life for less than fifteen dollars. I think my feelings on the subject are an isolated phenomenon.
Most of us, the disposable workforce, we don't really care. We're thinking about the end of our shift, homework, our Playstations, social events. We have acne and braces and bad posture. Our bosses don't know our names. Work is not fulfilling or stimulating in even the basest way for our generation – it's a mind-numbing succession of button-pushes and lever pulls. We have to reduce ourselves to cogs in a machine to make a living, and that mindset is one that tends be hard to shake.
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Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Connor
Middle Class Guilt
Post Script: I quit the job after 1 shift. I took the supervisor aside, whatever her name was, and said, "I'm sorry, I don't think this is going to work out." Four hours in a lurid pink hell was four hours too much for me.
Comment by Eamon
Anyway, hope all is well, good to see you're still writing, I haven't been here in a while but I'm glad I checked it out.
Comment by Elise
Comment by Anonymous
who else do you make fun of besides people with accents and those who suffer from arthritis? do you really think thats funny? i have a sense of humor but it doesnt involve making fun of foreigners and the physically disabled. your humor is for those seeking immediate gratification who dont think.