Dangers in the Workplace
A Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse, which will open soon, received about 3,000 applications for 160 positions in a city of 20,000. The store will employ 160 workers during the peak seasons of spring and summer and 120 during off-peak seasons. About three-quarters of those positions will be full time.
This news made me want to mail a personal thank you note to the current compassionate conservatives in Washington. That’s 2,840 people who won’t have to worry about tax refunds in the near future, since there won’t be any income to tax in the first place. The 160 are the lucky ones, but I wonder how many of the applicants really wanted to work as retail sales clerks or cashiers, even for an employer like Lowe’s whose non-discrimination policy includes sexual orientation.
How many of us are working for enlightened employers and doing a job we like? In this economy, I would guess, not many. Not even my job, which involves a lot of fascinating labor market research, would be my first choice. I’d rather be writing stories.
And I have learned, in my frequent exposure to the labor market, that I’m not alone in this yearning to do something besides what brings home the bacon. I’ve also learned that I’m darned lucky to do the work I do.
All work is stressful. Mine, for example, requires that I cold call employers and ask questions about the jobs that they offer. They are not exactly sitting around waiting for my calls and can be everything from friendly and cooperative to curt or nasty. I suspect it’s, though not potentially fatal, kind of like working as a tree faller—that giant fir can come down where it’s supposed to, or might just snap back and kill the faller. Or like farming, where you can be riding along whistling while you work one minute and upside down under your flipped-over tractor the next.
I’ve never met anyone who characterizes her job as easy. Look at the attorney who bills hundreds of hours and gets stiffed by the client after giving her all to judge and jury. Look at the pink collar worker whose boss leaves things to the last minute, then pushes her to make up the time with impossible deadlines—or the fisherperson out on a boat in a high, rough sea. These are all jobs I’m glad I don’t have to do.
Then there are the glamour jobs like editing newspapers—the raging letters to the editor alone would scare me away. Or the disc jockey who has to keep up a cheerful patter on days when she has wicked menstrual cramps. Some athletes and rock singers may get rich, but I wouldn’t like their traveling schedules one bit.
I remember being amazed at the horrendously tough work a utility lineman described to me—as if the climbing were not enough, he had to wrestle with huge coils of cable, dig ditches and work in blazing hot sunlight or blizzard conditions. Another guy had a job treating telephone poles—he manually rolled the poles into place, then applied insecticides and other chemicals. A house painter I once worked with was a walking warning about the dangers he’d faced, having lost both arms after falling into electrical wires.
Maybe stocking at Lowe’s isn’t such a bad deal, compared to these jobs. Of course, I wouldn’t want to be the screener who had to wade through 3,000 applications—I hope she gets overtime pay. But then, I wouldn’t want to be a Republican either, at least one who pushes policies that create these kinds of conditions. How can they live with themselves? The only industries I’ve run across that are thriving are those which are war-related. A couple of weeks ago I spoke with the human resources rep for a company that makes metal tools. She said the company would have laid off hundreds more workers if it weren’t for military contracts. Is that what the government wants—a blood-based boom?
Another industry that’s thriving must be the repo business. Now, that’s a difficult, dangerous job and I don’t imagine many people make it number one on their lists of what they want to be when they grow up, yet it provides employment for thousands of Americans who will be visiting the jobless. These Recovery Specialists must be in great demand to pick up after the devastation wrought by eight years of Bush and his greedy gang.
Today, I can only be grateful that I have a job despite my government. Like it or not, I’ll be spending my days calling strangers and asking questions until I retire. Do I want to keep doing a job that requires serious multi-tasking when I don’t even particularly want to uni-task any more? And about that dream of retirement—now that neither Medicare nor Social Security are sacred, should I plan on keeping this job until I keel over?
When I made calls in the manufacturing field this week, a number of receptionists and human resource departments reported that their production jobs had all been sent overseas. Nothing was left but sales and distribution. The displaced workers were all hoping Lowe’s, repo work, something, anything would come through for them.