Staff Shortages

Let me present you, dear reader, with a hypothetical. You date in your teens and twenties — like most of us — and your first long-term relationship ends in a brutal rejection or betrayal — not unlike most of us. After a few months of eating naught but Snickers and Bacardi, you move on to bad poetry and Morrissey — you work through the stages of relationship grief, and you get on with your life. After a few years of focusing on your career, you get back into the wasteland of dating. And, a little later on; you meet The One. Or close enough, anyway. You get married. After a few years of connubial bliss; your first great love calls you back to say they recently got divorced and are back on the market.

A fair number of folx — probably far too many, if Aaron Sorkin is to be believed — would leave their spouse on this weird proposition. I think it’s safe to say that the initial response for most of us would be ask, “This is still the same person who stood me up on our anniversary? Who cheated on me a dozen times? Who borrowed a ton of money and never paid it back? Who took advantage of my naivete?” And then we’d likely hang up and smile at our family.

I’m bringing this up because we are now collectively exiting quarantine and getting back to the “new normal,” and a lot of the food industry is short-handed. The phrase “new normal” is actually common on Planet Cancer, and let me tell you a horrible reality only the most unkillable of us know: there’s a certain finality and irreversible aspect to the term. If anyone could go back to the “old” normal, we’d all do it. You think I wouldn’t leap at the chance to repeat my 20’s without severe brain damage? Do you think anyone wants to know how chemical castration works? Do you think anyone wants to be triggered by a physician asking us how we’re doing, today? No one wants that; we’re stuck with it, and time travel is not an option. Life distorts, warps, bends, and sometimes breaks. In all of these cases, that’s done in response to some sort of trauma, but here’s the unspoken truth of trauma survival: merely surviving it requires such enormous changes and sacrifices that the experience will permanently change you.

The last year counts as a truly horrifying collective trauma, and it’s permanently changed us. As other writers have noted, the folks who traditionally worked as bartenders and waitresses (and, as someone who’s worked on rungs even lower than that, a good rule of thumb for any industry is, for every one worker you can see, there are at least two or three others working in less-glamorous but more-important positions) have been forced to find work elsewhere. Or have been forced to do unpaid labor in some capacity to support ourselves or our families. And, guess what? Those changes have become either permanent, or we’ve learned we like them more.

One major change is this: the political lifespan of every Millennial has been defined by rugged individualism, lack of government oversight, corruption, and a deep-seated mistrust of government. These are all carefully cultivated political positions initiated by the Nixon Administration, and kicked into overdrive by subsequent Republican administrations. Then COVID happened, and billionaires fled to their private islands, hospitals and health systems collapsed, and state governments turned into side shows. Even a Republican president was forced to rely on the power of a centralized government. He badly bungled it, because that’s what happens when you have someone in the Oval Office that the CIA considers to be a security risk. Then, we got to see how an efficient, centralized government can solve problems that are far too big for an individual effort. This is kind of an earth-shattering revelation after Reagan destroyed union bargaining power, and it completely refutes the GOP’s central promise that government can never, ever help you — governments and politicians can absolutely (and must) help us, but only if we make their livelihoods dependent upon that.

The second revelation is this: your employers do not pay you for your labor or the products you make. They pay you for your very mortality. An hour of minimum wage pay does not even begin to stack up to taking your kids and the dog to the park; and you only get one childhood per child.

And, as someone who has held a ton of truly crappy jobs; if you have a job where there’s a layer of management or two between you and the person who owns the business, you are living with a boot on your throat. The second that pressure is removed — even if you’re in a worse economic situation — you don’t want it back.

The last few revelations are this: we can absolutely vote against our interests, and usually, our interests run counter to our employers. And we’ve learned what every chronic disease survivor knows: you can make all the right decisions, work hard, and tragedy will still, somehow, find you. The American Dream does not stop the Laws of Entropy. And, if we can be fooled to work against ourselves, and that collective lie does not protect us from tragedy, why would anyone return to that harmful lie? We’ve also been warned, for decades, that every “unskilled” job will be replaced by a robot. Where are the robots, now?

We’re seeing a ton of advertisements about how no one wants to work, or how we’re no longer ambitious. That’s just those unnecessary layers of middle management screaming that there’s suddenly no longer a layer of “expendable laborers” between them and the bottom of society. A brewery a few miles from my home got the funds to reopen and advertised a full-time job with benefits, a few weeks’ vacation, and a living wage. There were hundreds of applications. The issue is not that Americans don’t want to work; the issue is that Americans don’t want to put in 20 hours a week of unpaid overtime. We don’t want to lose more money working a job than we gain (this is the actual Walmart model — they pay such low wages that all employees are eligible for Medicaid benefits). We don’t want to return to a fundamentally undemocratic labor hierarchy in which an unnecessary MBA can hector us about “process” or “quality.”

We’ve survived a year of hell; we’re not going to return to it just because Wall Street thinks it’s fine to sacrifice our health and mortality for short-term profits. And, I would imagine, unions and labor power will return to society as a way to level the playing field. Of course, that could be my cancer survivor optimism at play, which I will gladly eat the minute all of these “Hiring! Free meal with each application” (there’s a dystopian sentiment) signs come down, and all these entitled managers either shut up and start flipping burgers or make competitive salary offers (pro-tip to every Harvard Business School graduate: you absolutely can not refuse to do the exact same job your employees do; that just drives home the point that you’re more-concerned with the appearance of your social/professional standing than our well-being). I realize this is hardly novel sentiment, which should really signal the death-knell of free-for-all, unregulated capitalism: if I’m parroting what’s going on at Twitter, do your really think it’s going to take long before people start forming large groups of voting or bargaining blocs — guilds, if you will — to force your hand at this? And, if it takes some larger, outside authority to step in and improve your labor relations, will anyone want to work for you when that basic requirement to behave decently is removed?

So, yeah, Sean Hannity is absolutely correct when he says that no one wants to work. He’s telling a lie by omission, however, because the grander truth is; no one wants to work for cruel, lazy managers at a shit job that doesn’t put a roof over our heads or clothes on our back. We don’t want to work to barely avoid a death that can be prevented simply by guaranteeing the citizens of America the exact same guarantees that almost every industrialized nation makes its citizens; access to healthcare, housing, and not dying in the street. And, if all it takes to topple Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos is a general strike, then they need to look at this as a ransom situation: healthcare, affordable housing, and decent wages, like they have in France or Canada (those shithole countries from which we never get immigrants), or we refuse to work. Sorry about the break-up, no hard feelings, but we’re over you.