hiking (for a nominal advance on wages already earned...)

So I ended up finally getting an email out to my boss at the hiking store.  I tried to delicately explain my stance and why I should be paid.  His response was, frankly, appalling and literally sent me calling the national lawyers guild.  He didn't seem to see anything wrong with not paying me.  He had told me that I couldn't count on this job to be my main source of income, thus felt like he was covered and fine in not paying me on time.  He also questioned how he could possible pay me ahead of people that had been with him longer, and been waiting to get paid longer.  Yes, fair enough... they deserve to be paid as well!!  But what arrangement you've made with your other employees is between you and them and none of my business!  If you want to come ask me if I will do the same, fine, lets have that conversation.  The fact is though, that when you said that work would be sporadic at the store and I shouldn't count on it as my main source of income, you said I wouldn't be getting steady HOURS!!  You didn't say that when I did get hours I wouldn't be getting paid for them!  I mean, the audacity to even think, nevermind assume, that your workers would just be fine with working and not getting paid.

I waited till the next day to address it in person.  It was a struggle right from when I walked in the door though.  I saw my other coworker and the boss together.  The cold shoulder was evident from both of them.  The kind of fake smile and handshake where you are really thinking under your breath: "I hate you, you dirty bastard".  It seemed to me that my boss had obviously spoken to my colleague, sullying my name there for simply demanding to be paid for time I'd worked.  I can only picture how that story went: "tim is demanding to be paid before you!" "You've been here a year!" "The audacity!"

This is the way ownership gets us.  A political game that turns us against each other.  We are not supposed to talk about things like this, salaries, conditions, etc.  You know how this works.  We're NEVER supposed to ask other people what they make.  But why not?  Because we might all realize we are getting treated very differently?  Screwed even?  This is the heart of the idea behind collective bargaining and unionizing.  It is not so we can get extra days off a year and retire at 40.  It is so that there is communication amongst workers.  So that we will know if we are all being treated fairly.  As individuals we can be hired, fired, and taken advantage of, but as a collective group we can ask to actually get our pay, we can ask for humane working conditions, for dignity and respect in our daily tasks, and maybe even  a wage we can live on.

Yeah, frankly I don't trust this guy anymore.  I mean, I like him personally I guess.  But it is what we do that defines us, our actions, words, and how we treat people.  When I spoke to him, it was just as if he was trying to find a way to keep me on for the least outlay, with the least amount of integrity.  He agreed entirely to what I was saying bout it all, probably thinking: "yes! he's not actually going to ask for his full salary!"  I mean, he basically negotiated me out of demanding full pay for work done.  In this whole process he gets to pay me late.  Yet somehow I've accepted this.  Implicitly or not, I have agreed to getting shafted.  He also slipped in there at one point that this week he'd be paying February's wages.  This is of course what he said to me about last week as well.  But it still hasn't gone out.  But the worst thing about it all is that he doesn't realize that this is what he teaches us to say to customers about out of stock supplies and bills.  Like we don't recognize ourselves in these narratives.  Then, after all this, he then has the audacity to send an email out about a mandatory training a couple Monday's from now (yeah it'll be "paid").  Sorry bro, I'm nannying that day.  Working somewhere where I will get paid.  Your store is now at the bottom of the totem pole.  I will work for you when I can.      

There is one other thing that I want to bring up regarding this, which is pure speculation and may be completely colored by a singular and horrible experience in my past.  I mentioned that not getting paid like this happened to me once before.  That incidence was much worse.  The company owed my $29,000 in back pay, was stalling my work visa for that country, and was giving me just enough cash keep above water, but not enough to leave the country.  I was trapped and in a situation that was malicious in so many ways.  I was promised bonuses and a percentage to offset the situation, yet nothing was materializing while the owner lived it up, stealing money from the company.  I eventually got my pay back, but that's a looong story for a book!  No matter though, here I am again, with this hiking company getting screwed.

There is one thing that the two men that owned these outfits had in common: they were both long term military men (one British, one America).  The way they spoke, the calculations they seemed to take, the rationale they ultimately used, it was all so incredibly similar.  It's as if loyalty is a one way street that goes straight down the chain of command.  General to private, owner to worker.  As if hierarchy knows no bounds; resting upon its highest of peeks maintaining no moral ground from which to look down upon us from.  Neither of them seemed to stop paying their rents, their salaries, and their bills. 

But anyway, who knows if that is the case here.  All I know is that I don't have enough cash to pay a bill that's due this week and be able to eat over the next two weeks.  Yeah, I'll get some cash, but I won't get what I'm supposed to, thus my budgeting matters not.  But, I've learned something.  I've learned not to trust ownership (again) and I've learned to be wary of military ownership, especially those falling on hard times.  It also should go without saying that I've also gotten my daily fix of reiteration that our system is fundamentally flawed.  But let's just keep moving forward with that one.  One step... 

Occupying

So I feel like it is time for this blog to actually get used again.  But the Africa stuff has been going so slowly that I think it is time to just jump in and do some writing about life, its peculiarities, and revolution.  During the last five months I have been Occupying.  Frankly, this post is not where I really want to get into the whole of the last five months.  Rather I'm thinking I'll pick up as life is today, and fill in the holes as it all goes.

I'll pick up where I sit right now.  I am in Brooklyn, Bedford-Stuyvesant.  I just had an incredibly interesting evening chatting with a slightly staggered African American gentleman I met at the liquor store.  He was talking to the shop keeper about love, how it existed and why he had it for all people.  This is of course a conversation I had no trouble running headlong into!!  Got my cheap bottle of rum and took the conversation outside - stop and frisk, race relations, whatever.  I love the neighborhood.  I'm not really living there per say.  My girlfriend does.  I'm still wholly about occupation it seems, and I occupy three different places at any given day of the week.  Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, Glenwood Queens, or the West Village in Manhattan.  The park is gone, no more sleeping there for me.  Now its about surviving in whatever way we can on our own.

I've just started a job.  This is where I've decided I really needed to start writing here again.  I am working for a relatively obscure political party that focuses on progressive issues and campaigns topush legislation through on these issues (raising the minimum wage, campaign finance reform, over turning corporate personhood, anti-fracking, etc).  The shock and awe of life back in the "real world" has been amazing.  But not how you'd think it would be.  One of the beauties of Occupy has been its horizontal structure.  Everyone has an equal voice.  Conversation is dignified and egalitarian (for the most part).  People wait their turn, use non verbal communication to engage in the conversation while still not being intrusive.  On the whole, everyone is equal.

Now though, I work in the "real world", where corporate structures and hierarchical forms of doing things reign.  It is truly eye opening.  To think that this was the way that things seemed normal to me 6 months ago.   To have a boss, a chain of command, a pecking order, egos fixated on seniority, and a staff of "arms lengths" type.  I feel like I'm in a reverse culture shock like when I came back to the US for the first time after living in Prague for two years.  It's like everything that seemed so innately normal has suddenly been flipped upside down.  That world seems so ridiculous now.  To think that we have these structures in society that completely and purposely segregate us.  Completely make some voices so much more important than others.  We sit there and act as if this is about merit, about hard work; but there are so many factors - history, education, socio-economics, etc - that dictate these relationships in a way that occupy has completely flipped on its head.  I mean, why is it that everyone does not have an equal voice in a corporate structure?  Why is it that I - even as a white male - feel even more emboldened to speak i this setting?  I don't so much at Occupy, where I feel less emboldened to speak as I try to "step back" at times, in an effort for every gender, ethnicity, race, creed, socio-economic and education level to have more of a voice.  In the context of this conversation though, and having more voices involved and heard, I feel like more people should be speaking, more voices heard.   

At Occupy, everyone in theory (and even in attempt I feel), is on the same footing: the millionaire and the homeless, the black and the white, the male and the female, the employer and the employee.  Now granted, it does not always work smoothly.  People still feel innately ostracized at times, but at least at Occupy it is more about history and the effects of growing up in our current society, rather than the current day's fixed institutionalized structures and social patterns that reinforce those same old power dynamics so daily.

This is the work world we live in, fully hierarchical, wholly marginalizing, completely disheartening.  I miss Occupy already.  Not that I am gone, but at even the first taste of that "real world", I am still yearning for that other life.  A new occupation.  What an amazing culture shock.  I wish everyone could feel the empowerment of actually having a voice, only to have it suppressed again.