Breaking Up With Work Is Hard To Do
It’s funny how quitting a job can sometimes feel like breaking up with a girlfriend. Even if the break-up occurred for good reasons, it tears you up to hear what she’s been up to, and makes you wish, if only for a moment, that you were still there.
Sunday’s New York Times profiles the upcoming contract fight for the city’s hotel employees union, where I worked for three years before resigning last November 3rd. That fight was brewing for at least as long as I worked for the union, so I’ve had a front row seat to this drama.
The term “Me Too” still makes my heart sing. More than just a promise to keep the employees working, as the Times frames it, a “Me Too” is actually where the company signs the contract before it is even written. Whatever the other companies agree to, we do too. Please don’t strike us. It’s key. A general hotel strike does no real damage if it hurts all the industry’s competitors equally. But if the hold-outs are shuttered while their competitors who made peace with the union do boffo business, that’ll nudge the bosses to settle a lot sooner. Besides, no matter how impressive a $30 million war chest may be (and the membership referendum that voted by a nine to one margin to tax themselves ten dollars a week for two years is one of the most impressive, and unsung, victories for working people last year), it won’t last long with all 27,000 members out on picket lines.
Next year’s nine city hotel strike will likely be a historically epic battle between trade unions and the multinational corporations. My guess is that it will be the first real test of the Change to Win federation. This will be where talk is translated into action. It’s going to be a tough fight. I’m sorry that I won’t be a more active participant. But you can’t go home again. But I will be there on picket lines, if and when they materialize, and I will be exhorting you, dear readers, to do the same.
This seems as good a time as any to announce that I have finally accepted a permanent position with a union (well, as permanent as any job in the labor movement can be). I started this blarg when I was unemployed. I’m still figuring out how much I should talk about work. So, all I’ll say now is that I’m organizing, somewhere in the teacher’s union. Fight the good fight, comrades.
She Came From Wal-Mart
I finally got a pet. A cat. I found her lounging under a tree, at a “golden community” located behind the parking lot of the Wal-Mart at the Green Acres mall at Valley Stream. I was doing my usual union organizer thing, but stopped to pet this unusually sweet and friendly stray cat.
One of the residents, Pat Day, caught me petting her, and commenced a month-long lobbying effort to get me to adopt the cat. Lots of strays gather at the retirement community, since the residents are perfectly happy to feed and care for them. I’ve been thinking about adopting a pet for some time, so I was tempted by this cute little rusty-colored calico with an awful gravelly meow. But I was worried about my long hours at work, and how little I would be home for it, not to mention cat hair everywhere and cat claws scratching up all my furniture.
Well, Pat kept working on me, and when she called me to report on the kitty’s visit to animal control, which turned up the fact that the cat had been “altered” and declawed, I ran out of excuses. It’s a terrible thing to declaw a cat and then send it out to fend for itself in the suburban “wild.” Clearly, my home is better than that. Plus, my furniture would be safe!
After spending the first night crying and behaving badly, she seems quite content and at-home by now. She sleeps on my bed, and jumps up to meet my hand when petting her. She’s chasing her tail around the living room as I type this. I can’t imagine why anyone would abandon this sweet little cat.
I don’t feel inclined towards naming her. It’s kind of arrogant of us humans to name cats and expect them to respect our nomenclature. My brother has seized this opportunity to give the cat a new name everyday. So far, she has been General Whiskers, the Queen of Spain, Mork (not Mindy) and Sandy Duncan (that last one was mine; it felt right at 8 am). Why, you too can name her for a small donation.
Everyone You Know Someday Will Die
This is going to be unforgivably morbid.
A lawsuit has been filed against the Port Authority by the kin of those who died in the 1993 car bombing of the World Trade Center. Without comment on the lawsuit, which has serious merits, one motivation is dubious. According to the NY Times:
“Among survivors of the first attack, which left six people dead and more than 1,000 injured, there has long been a feeling of neglect, as if their suffering was not valued as highly as that of the people who endured the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001. There was no federally engineered compensation fund, no blue-ribbon panel to apportion blame.”
Well, geez, whose death is as valued as those who perished in the attack on New York four years ago? And what, exactly, is fair about valuing any random death over another? We have in the Gulf Coast devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina a clear example of our weird priorities. Only weeks later, as the death toll reaches 9/11-like proportions, is there anything approaching the outrage that was palpable in this country four years ago. Maybe it’s because we can’t bomb God and Nature in retaliation, or maybe it’s because we’re so numb to daily life that doesn’t directly affect us that we’re only moved by astronomical body counts.
I’m working again – organizing – and without giving too much away, I am brought in daily contact with senior citizens (shucks, I’ve probably given it away). I met a woman the other day who was all too eager to talk about her life’s tragedies with anyone who would listen, particularly any young man who reminded her of her own son, who died years ago at the age of 33. Apparently he got into an argument with a friend of his, which resulted in a karate chop to the neck and a death from internal bleeding a few days later. Totally random and tragic, but who’s left to mourn him except his elderly mom and maybe an old flame, if he’s lucky? The old woman still beamed with pride over her lost son. She talked about the flashy job in finance he had landed a year or two before he died. He worked for some firm on the hundred-and-somethingth floor of the World Trade Center. “He would have died anyway,” she said wistfully.
Of course he would have. Everyone you know someday will die. So why privilege certain deaths over others?
Why do the 9/11 widows get to veto any kind of cultural space downtown that acknowledges the USA’s imperialism? Why is Cindy Sheehan’s voice privileged over those of the moms whose kids didn’t die in Iraq, or over the kids themselves who have yet to be shipped there?
My younger brother was at the World Trade Center on that fateful day in 1993, part of a third grade field trip to the observation deck. And had that been an airplane bomb instead of a car bomb, then I would be devastated by the loss of my kid brother and probably still climbing on the soapbox afforded me. But my brother will still die one day (I promised this would be morbid, Brian), and if I’m still around to see it, I’ll still be devastated. So why the double standard over everyday tragedies?
“You just don’t fit in.”
Apparently, to soften the blow from being fired from her reality show, contestants on Martha Stewart’s new version of “The Apprentice” will be told, “You just don’t fit in.”
Ha! Where have I heard that one before?