Yellowstone Journal, no. 8 June 15-17, 2001 Last Tuesday night it began to snow, and by late Wednesday morning it had snowed more than a foot. The entire park was closed,; no one could leave and no one could get in. At the time the hotel was completely booked, all 300 or so rooms. I began work at 6:30 that morning, and I worked nonstop til about 12:30 that afternoon. The place was bedlam, with guests crowding around the front desk wanting to know what they should do. Would they be able to get out; would they be able to catch planes; could they stay another night; was the snow going to continue and, if so, for how long; what was the temperature; how much snow had fallen; were activities cancelled; and on and on and on. As we tried to deal with all of this, the power went out a few times and the phone rang off the hook. Had I found someone's cell phone? Why didn't our tub drain? Why hadn't I made a wake up call exactly when the guest had requested? In the midst of all of this, I took a phone call from a man who was calling from England. Had a fax come through for a guest, the caller's father? We then proceeded to have a protracted conversation about this fax, which he said was urgent. It turned out that he had sent it to the wrong fax number. I gave him the correct number, and he said he would call me back later to be sure we had received it. I then got back to the nightmare at the front desk. About 30 minutes later, the phone rang and a fellow clerk said that there was a long distance call for me. I thought immediately that something was wrong with one of our children, and I picked up the phone fearfully. But it was just Mr. Young asking about the fax. Yes, I said, the fax had come through and I would notify his father, who had not yet checked in, that it was here. Well, he said, could I look at the fax. I got the fax, amidst all of the noise and confusion, went back to the phone, and spoke with Mr. Young (picture a small space with five or six clerks rushing around, very loud noise which made it hard to hear, me with a phone on my right shoulder and a pen in my left hand taking notes). He insisted that I verify that five pages had come and that they were all legible. Then he asked me to look at a particular paragraph. Did I have a highlighter? Would I highlight the sentence beginning with the word "Hereinafter" and ending with the word "yellow." I did as instructed. He said, "you've been soupah (super), Michael." Then back to the chaos and confusion. Later that evening, after the parents of Mr. Young had checked in, my wife received a long distance call at the restaurant from Mr. Young the younger. Were his parents at dinner? How would she know? He had to get in touch with them. Could they be paged? No. Well she would have to get in touch with them whatever it took. He was rude with her, no doubt because she was a woman. Finally, she said that she would go table to table to find them. She went to each table (remember that this restaurant seats over 300 people and is about as long as a football field) and said, "Are you the Youngs?" Finally, an English couple said that they were. As soon as they learned that their son was calling, they became hysterical. They went to the phone, and, after some business discussion (about a ship), the father told his son not to call him again, because he was on holiday. He ended by saying that he could not take this anymore. Then the mother got on the phone and in a loud and emotional voice told her son to please not call again, because "daddy is going to have a nervous breakdown." "Please, please, don't call again, daddy can't take anymore." All the while the many guests at the host stand must have wondered what in the hell was going on. And never a word of thanks to anyone for relaying the message to them nor an apology for such a bizarre conversation. Yesterday (June 15) we drove through a part of the park we had not previously seen. Besides the remarkable scenery (you could actually see the bowl created by the original volcanic action that created much of the park as well as an incredible gorge through which flows the Yellowstone river), we say five black bears and four golden eagles. One of the black bears first climbed part way up a tree and then after climbing down, stood and scratched his back against the tree. It looked for all the world like the bear was dancing. (Maybe this was a sign that the bears on Wall Street are dancing again and that stock prices will continue to fall!!) Two of the golden eagles flew right overhead. They looked as if they came straight off an Indian totem pole, good evidence that the Indians understood the power and beauty of these great birds. Through our binoculars we could see the underside of the eagles' wings. They were a beautiful yellow color. If you used your imagination a bit, they looked just like gigantic butterflies soaring through the sky. After seeing the eagles, we drove again to Bozeman, Montana so that I could watch the basketball game between the L.A. Lakers and the Philadelphia 76ers. The snow storm had wreaked havoc on the town's many trees, good business for the tree trimmers but a shame for the town. This time we noticed that to the west of the town huge suburban developments are springing up. It is the same old story. The farmers who used to own the land outside of the town were faced with the supply of their products growing faster than the demand for them, driving down prices and squeezing profits, since the farmers' costs were determined by large corporations who have greater control over their own prices. So they began to sell the land to "developers" who sell property to those with money to buy it, often people from areas in California and other such places where land prices are much higher. The results can be seen almost anywhere in the country: horrible suburban sprawl, cookie cutter houses, endless malls, and growing inequality and tension between town and suburb. I have been thinking about my job here. Here is what I have come up with so far. First, I have long believed that skilled jobs are few and far between and that it is a natural tendency for employers to eliminate skill whenever possible (by dividing up the labor into unskilled parts and by using machinery) because it is cheaper to rely on unskilled than on skilled labor. However, management scholars and even some progressives have argued that in the "new" workplace, new skills are needed, so that even if we no longer have, say, skilled machinists, millwrights, carpenters, etc. in our workplaces, we must still have people with skills. For example, they say that in the new workplace, people with good interpersonal skills are needed as well as people willing to work in teams. So an ability to work with others and to communicate effectively are the new skills. Or, in the computer-driven workplace, people must have computer skills. All of this is pure hokum. In my job as a desk clerk (or "guest service agent" as the company calls us, another trick to make us feel more important than we really are), I have to get along with people, mainly the guests. I have to know how to keep them from getting too angry, and it is useful to know how to make small talk with them. But if this is a skill, it is certainly one that the overwhelming majority of clerks can easily master if they choose to do so. Since I am older and know about a lot of things, I am a bit better at this than some of the clerks, but not much so and the difference does not matter at all in terms of the work getting done and the company making its profits. I also have to work in a "team," each shift of clerks constituting a team. The advantage of this to the employer is that we are more or less bound to help each other out. If someone gets stuck and I can help, it is a natural human tendency to do so, so I do it. The very nature of the way in which the work is structured compels us to cooperate to a certain extent or all hell breaks loose. But this is not a skill; we all do it more or less automatically. As a side note, each shift has a "team leader" (called a "senior clerk"), another worker who has extra duties and earns a slightly higher hourly wage. It has been interesting to watch these "seniors" (aged 19, 20 and 23) ally themselves with management, even to the point of ordering us around and criticizing us in public. Of course, the nature of their jobs forces them to solve problems for us, and, in this sense they are useful to us. But it is amazing to see how quickly people fit themselves into a chain of command without a second thought. Finally, I do have to know the commands on the computer necessary to do my job. And there are a lot of these and it took me awhile to learn all of them. But this is not skill, just memorization and repetition. Some of us are better than others, but again, if there is a problem someone will solve it pretty easily. Second, the way in which a modern workplace is structured often makes it difficult for workers not to give their time to the company and to work pretty intensely while on the job. For one thing, there is a strict work schedule, and you have to follow it or lose your job. In my old job as a teacher, this was only minimally the case. Here life revolves around the work schedule, and right from the start you have lost most of your freedom. Then, there is the timeclock; you have to use it to get paid. I had never punched a time clock in my life, and it has been quite a shock to have to do so, to be compelled to be on the job during certain times and no others. What an ingenious device, just like the factory whistle of old, but more sophisticated because more precise, and taken for granted by all but a very few of the workers. In my former job, time was mine to an extent so much greater than here as to seem absolutely remarkable to me now. Controlling the employees' time is the key to management's control of the workplace and must, therefore be the key to any attack by workers on this system. Here unions have failed miserably; instead of pushing insistently for shorter workdays and more worker control of time, they have ceded this control completely to the employer. Of course, once I have punched in, it is imperative that the employer see to it that I don't slack, that I work hard all day. Here the employer appears to have understood (or grasped it by trial and error) the Japanese notion of "kaizen" or constant speedup. This is achieved by never having enough clerks to complete our tasks soon enough to get some slack time and to constantly assign new duties on those rare occasions when customers aren't making demands upon us. So we are constantly "stressed" and thereby forced to work steadily throughout the day. Also, we don't want to let our fellow workers down, so we sometimes don't take our breaks or even our lunch or dinner, much less go to the bathroom. The other day, a young woman came to work with a hangover and began complaining immediately that she was tired. Then she took a break not one hour after she had started and right when lots of people were checking out. My immediate reaction was to think, what is this - she is shifting the work onto us. She knew she had to work, so why wasn't she prepared to do so. This is a more or less natural way to think, but it certainly plays right into the hands of the employer. Instead of us thinking about what is wrong with the whole job setup, we immediately think in terms of personal animosity toward the slacker. Another aspect of the job that makes it hard to take it easy is that we are working right out in the open. There is no place to hide. If we are idle it is immediately apparent. And you can't read or do anything interesting during slack times. About the only things you can do are take longer than normal breaks and meal periods, but then you let your team members down by making them do your work. It really is a no win situation. The only hope would by a union, but the nature of the workforce here makes this an impossible dream. People have told me that one good thing about a routine job is that once you are done, you don't have to think about it anymore. As a teacher, I thought about my job all the time; everything I read or talked about might be put to good advantage in the classroom, or in something I might write or give a talk about. I worked every day of the week most of the time. But in most respects this did not really seem like "work." I did it when I wanted to, and for the most part it was pleasurable to read, write, and prepare lectures. Here I do not have to prepare for the next day's work, but the day's work takes its toll on my "free" time. The work is tiring, since I am on my feet all day. So at the end of the day I am free, but often too tired to do anything. Two nights last week I fell asleep soon after opening a book (It was only 7:00 p.m.). The work is also very much routine for the most part. Sundays seem to be the worst days in terms of work intensity and customer complaints. On Sunday nights I get home (I measured our room the other day. It is about 10' by 10' with a tiny shower and toilet, smaller than a prison cell but not by much) and I cannot sleep, even after two beers. The computer keys I have had to punch all day keep going through my head in an endless loop, and conversations I have had with irate guests keep bothering me. My thoughts sometimes become violent as when I think I should have gone over the counter and smacked some particularly obnoxious customer. Monday morning arrives and I have to be at work at 7:00 a.m., and I never catch up on the sleep until about Wednesday evening. I am sure that a few years on this job would probably make me pretty stupid, unless I found some way to deal with its more awful aspects. Keep in touch. To be continued . . . Michael Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
