For his exposé working the jobs that most Americans won’t do, Working in the Shadows, Gabriel Thompson spent a year picking lettuce, processing poultry, and working in the back kitchens of New York City restaurants. During his immersion, Thompson, who is a journalist and former SEIU researcher, operated by the dictum, “no matter how unpleasant, I would stay with each job for two months”.
Like Nickel and Dimed or A Year of Living Biblically, Thompson's approach is the sincere adoption of prevailing practices taken to their logical conclusions, for the benefit of a larger literary public. Reading Working in the Shadows, the reader's is a task of empathy and endurance, and we trudge through the author's daily pains, which he himself must ease with steady regimen of pain killers. Fine in and of themselves, his tasks repeated ad infinitum deform his hands and give him sore limbs for weeks. In Yuma Arizona, stooping thousands of times a day as a lechugero (lettuce picker for Dole) leaves large welts on his thighs from his metal holster, and charley-horse spasms in his back.
In recent years, books like Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman and Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft have explored the sometimes liberating ontology of manual labor. To make peace with the brutality of his labor,Thompson finds grace in the acquired skill and tacit knowledge of his Mexican co-workers who swoop gracefully to cut heads of lettuce, and palm them gently before twisting them into plastic bags. In moments of sun-stroked delusion, Thompson himself imagines he is training to be a master of "lettuce martial arts."
But aside from rare instances, the work Thompson does as a laborer offers few opportunities for the satisfaction of a job well done. What emerges instead is a classical case of alienation and estrangement. He describes his time on the graveyard shift at a poultry processing plant: "The graveyard shift at the chicken plant is full of zombies. By two in the morning, nearly everyone on [the] line looks half-dead, with eyelids drooping and faces devoid of expression." Though Thompson jokes that the painful physicality of his job distracts him from his more existential concerns doing jobs where results are measured by absolutist standards, (eg; 3,000 lettuce heads cut a day, 4,200 chicken breasts in one shift) poetic descriptions serve only to masquerade literally deadening work. For example, everyone at the plant he works with looks 10 years older than they are, and life expectancy of the average farm worker is only 49.
Many of Thompson's colleagues are abused in his presence, and are paid less than minimum wage (this, even after landmark settlements). But not all of Thompson's colleagues are undocumented workers. Many in Arizona are guest workers with flimsy H2-A visas who commute from Mexico, or legal immigrants with work visas, like the Venezuelans he meets in Alabama. Nevertheless, the conditions Thompson describes provide evidence that legal and illegal immigrants' resistance to unionization efforts are ultimately detrimental to the rights of all workers. Suprisingly, however, Thompson discloses that many 'underground' jobs are often well-compensated (relative to the average US hourly wage of $22.46,) precisely because the work is so ignoble and the work is simply hard. The book will serve as a testimony refuting the claims that immigrants 'steal' blue-collar jobs, since in reality, blue-collar workers would never want these jobs. In 2006, John McCain offered, in mock-seriousness, to pay a group of union workers $50 an hour picking lettuce in Yuma: "You can't do it, my friends". Thompson could but he asked one of his Mexican colleagues why most Americans wouldn't. The honest answer: “ The very simple reason that everyone knows, is that Americans have become lazy”.
What does it say about the state of the American work-force today if the work we rely on cannot be done by Americans themselves? Meanwhile, in a cruel irony, the jobs that Americans are willing to do, that is, service jobs, cannot support the people that work them, though their compensation should technically put them "above the poverty line." In her book of case-studies, The Moral Underground, activist and Boston College professor Lisa Dodson compiles eight years of interviews with those on the fault lines of an " economy that impoverishes so many people, even as they do the jobs of the nation." Though Dodson initially set out to detail individual struggles of so-called 'wage-poor' workers, many middle class managers whom she spoke with revealed that they would often engage in remarkable acts of civil disobedience to help their employees get by. She speaks with supervisors, managers, day care workers, and grade-school teachers. Doctors give medicine "samples" to the whole family, food factory workers invite employees' children to eat in the evenings, store managers pad pay-checks and "borrow" prom-dresses, and interns at a Wisconsin highschool babysit a students' siblings to allow the student to participate in the school play. The eponymous "Moral Underground" she writes, is a nebulous indeterminate grouping of upper and middle-class managers who constantly grant their employees clemency.
The "Robin-Hood" style acts she hears described over and over again violate labor, FDA, caregiving, and supervisatory rules, and yet Dodson keeps the personal and technical details vague, so that she doesn't 'out' them. A central tenet of her book is that the very conditions endured reverse our conceptions of right and wrong, and that unsustainable working conditions warrant minor and occasional lawlessness. Her book, which is more suited to policy-makers and social workers than the general public, points to the adverse effects that instability and poverty have on the child's school performance, and prescribes work reforms not merely as cushy band aids for worker morale, but as crucial to closing the 'achievement gap' in American schools.
Though both Dodson and Thompson reveal what is ostensibly 'hidden' from middle class Americans, what they describe is in fact representative of a large portion of the American work effort. Immigrants, legal or illegal, are more likely than not to have a hand in processing the food we consume, and it is estimated that the informal sector contributes to 10% of our GNP. In terms of legal jobs, since 1979, hourly earnings for 80% of American workers (private sector, non supervisory jobs) have risen by just 1% after inflation, while worker productivity has climbed 60%. 39% of the nation's children live in low-income households and one in four US-workers earns less than $9 an hour. Though a new poverty threshold, set to be implemented for the fall 2010 census report will adjust "poverty" based on the cost of living in a given geography and extend more aid to families that need it, both of these books make clear that the way we pay the workers who bring us the food on our table and who will care for us in our old age, is unsustainable.
The publishing of both these books comes at a good time, adding to the discourse at a moment when we are reexamining both the Fordist workshop and American work-places stuck in an archaic (1950s) employment model of promotions in return for company loyalty. The regimen of cubicle-culture has become a punch-line in popular culture, its absurdities a ready-made situational comedy. Recent suggestions, from the hokey to the more serious, laud telecommuting, flexible hours, and the most dramatic of all, the "Results-Only Workplace". Of course, some of these solutions, which fit tech-workers and other knowledge-industry workers, may not make sense for service employees and other manual laborers whose physical presence is required. Nevertheless, anecdotal books like these will help as policy-makers and academics move forward with more prescriptive measures.
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