Day 324/365 – Jack of Many Trades

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Day 324/365 – Jack of Many Trades


Image by Kevin H.
A complaint from JW on her Twitter feed about grocery baggers last week gave me the idea of doing a shot that would provide me with an excuse to ramble on about all the jobs I’ve ever held in my life. And so here it is…

1. Grocery bagger at Safeway – My first job ever and I hated it. Does anyone enjoy their first job? They called us "courtesy clerks" and in addition to bagging groceries, we had to wrangle grocery carts, run price checks, and redeem aluminum cans brought in by recyclers. I worked there for about six months and then quit.

2. Game attendant at an amusement park – This job was fairly cool. When you weren’t working you got free admission to the park. It was a seasonal, summertime job and I worked there four years, partly during high school and partly during undergrad. The first year I worked a section of skill games that involved things like shooting baskets or throwing softballs at milkbottles to try and win prizes. The next three years I worked a remote control boat stand. That was great. I worked on my own without much in the way of supervision and I mostly just made change for people. When things were slow I would just turn one of the machines on and drive a boat around the little lagoon.

3. Busboy at a semi-fancy restaurant – Well, fancy for suburban Missouri anyhow. Hated this job too. I had it one winter in high school in between gigs at the amusement park. Cleaning up after people at a restaurant sucks. Even worse was having to occasionally act as ‘muffin boy’ and walk through the dining rooms with a muffin pan asking diners "would you care for a muffin?" Man I hated that part. On the plus side, I learned how to walk on a slippery/greasy restaurant kitchen floor, a skill that has proven useful on icy winter days.

4. Temp worker for an employment agency – I did this for a few months after graduating college before my Navy enlistment kicked in. I worked in an ice plant, an archery company, and a plastics factory. My mom was actually temping at the plastics factory at the same time, but we worked different shifts.

5. Operations Specialist, U.S. Navy – Had this hitch for four years. I operated radar, communications, and data network equipment, did some navigation, and spent a whole lot of time cleaning and painting (which is why I now refuse to help friends paint when they move to a new place. I’ll help with anything but that.). Being in the Navy was okay. I mostly enjoyed it the first three years, but by the fourth year I was more than ready to go. On the plus side, I got to go through the Panama Canal, cross the equator, and make more than a few trips to the Caribbean.

6. Receiving clerk at a Dollar Store – I did this for about nine months after I got out of the Navy while I was building up my Virginia residency so I could get in-state tuition for law school. I unloaded trucks, tracked shipments, and stocked shelves. It wasn’t a bad gig. My bosses were pretty cool. They even taught me how to rebuild the alternator on my Jeep during lunch one day.

7. Temp worker for an employment agency, part deux – The summer before entering law school I quit the Dollar Store and headed home to spend some time with my family after not seeing them much the previous few years. This time I just helped set up a Harry and David store at an outlet mall and then stayed on for a bit as a stock boy.

8. Research assistant for a law school professor – Did this the summer of my 1L year. It wasn’t a bad gig. Mostly I just did a lot of cite-checking and footnoting for an article a friend of the professor’s wrote on ceasefire agreements. Spent a ton of time in the library, but I got to set my own hours.

9. Judicial clerk for a state circuit court judge – During my second and third years at law school, I clerked part-time for a local judge. He was a great guy and I learned a lot. One of the opinions I drafted for him wound up being the single-most read state court opinion that year, so that was pretty exciting (it was about whether an accident report prepared after a hand dryer fell off the wall in a Ponderosa bathroom and landed on a woman’s foot could be withheld under the work product privilege. Or was it a paper towel dispenser? I can’t remember.).

10. Summer associate at Alcoa – I worked for Alcoa’s Office of General Counsel in Pittsburgh during my 2L summer. One time I got to fly to upstate NY and back on the corporate jet to go to a meeting about a deal to sell excess electricity generated by an aluminum factory power plant. The fridge on the plane was stocked with beer and I had one on the flight back. It was an all right job, even though the bastards didn’t offer me a permanent gig after graduation. That’s why I now take especial delight whenever I hear some bad news about Alcoa earnings and why I was thrilled that former Alcoa CEO Paul O’Neil crashed and burned as Treasury Secretary. Not that I hold grudges or anything.

11. Attorney for a government agency – My current gig. It’s not bad. Mostly I practice grants law, but I also do a bit of work with government contracting programs, personal and real property, and employee travel. I also did appropriations law for a few years but thankfully I don’t do that anymore. Having to answer the same question about whether federal funds can be used to buy food over and over and over again gets really old. (And no, 99 times out of a 100 they can’t, in case you were curious. But that doesn’t stop people from trying to scam a free meal.)

So there you have my list of employment, some more gainful than others. Hmm, I didn’t realize I’ve only held eleven jobs in my life. I also babysat a couple of my cousins one year when I was in high school, but that doesn’t really count.

(August 28, 2009)

YOUR BAILOUT MONEY AT WORK…….. (chrysler corp. union employees, drinking and smokin’ a little weed at lunch time)………HELPS TO BUILD THOSE FINE AUTOMOBILE THINGYS DON’TCHA KNOW


Image by SS&SS
February 21, 2011
Why I Changed My Mind About Unions
By Michael Filozof
The organized tactics of intimidation by the public employee unions in Wisconsin last week came as no surprise to me. I’m from New York, one of the most union-friendly states in the country, and I’ve seen the negative effects of unions my entire life.

I dislike unions. But I didn’t always feel that way. My first job as a 16-year old grocery store shelf-stocker was a union job. I grew up in a union household; my father was an employee of one of the Big Three automakers. Although he wasn’t active in union politics, he worked in a "union shop" and was required to be a member. He always credited the union for the standard of living and benefits he enjoyed. When I was in grade school, the social studies curriculum taught the evils of management and the glory of organized labor, with morality tales like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911. Management had locked the doors to prevent non-unionized employees from leaving; when the place caught fire, workers were forced to jump to their deaths or be burned alive. Who could argue against the progress unions had made in safety and wages? In our blue-collar universe, there was one simple explanation for everything: management bad, unions good.

The industrial economy of Western New York imploded in the 1980s with the closing of the Bethlehem Steel plant in Lackawanna, which had once employed over 20,000 people. I’d heard stories about union people who worked in the steel mill or the auto plants who would punch the clock and than find a place to sleep all day, or would get drunk at lunchtime and return to work and still not get fired — but those stories never really registered with me when I was a student. No one ever blamed overpriced union labor for forcing the big industrial employers out of the region; it was always foreign competition or management greed or rich fat-cats. It didn’t matter to me; I was going to college, anyway.

I’d never heard word of criticism about unions in my life until I was in college and worked summers for a small, independent contractor with only two full-time employees. Those guys were courteous, professional, diligent craftsmen who worked very, very hard — and they hated unions. Before long I’d discover why.

Right around the time I graduated, it happened that my Dad needed a ride from work. I went to pick him up. I was wearing a shirt and tie that day, and when I went in to get him he gave me a tour of the place. I’d never actually seen heavy industry in action, and it’s very difficult to visualize without seeing it firsthand. I looked around, fascinated, while he leaned toward me, shouting explanations over the din of the machinery and pointing has he talked.

Then, some longhaired, leather-jacketed maggot with a scruffy goatee drove past on a forklift. Neither one of us knew him, but seeing an older man explaining things to a young kid in a tie, he must’ve thought I was a new hire, and shouted out "This f___ing job suuuucks!" as he drove past. He couldn’t get fired for that, thanks to the union. And I am certain that he was making more money back then than I’ve ever made in my life, and I have three college degrees.

A few years later, studying for my Master’s degree, I lived in a low-rent apartment. A tenant in one of the other units was a union roofer. From November to April, he’d get 0 a week in unemployment. It seems that in our state union employees didn’t have to look for non-union work. If the union didn’t call, the unemployment check was a certainty. But the phone stayed off the hook all winter to make sure the union couldn’t call anyway. He wasn’t idle, though; he worked "under the table" all winter doing side jobs tax-free while collecting unemployment. In the summer when he did union work he’d tell stories about the roofers getting drunk and stoned at lunchtime and making an hour.

That really frosted me. Why in hell was I bothering to get a postgraduate degree while a semiliterate guy who barely made it through high school got 0 a week for not working half the year? The scales fell from my eyes. Management wasn’t the root of all evil. Union workers were just as lazy, greedy, and corrupt. I now saw the union as a grand rip-off. The union working man wasn’t some noble, virtuous saint, fighting the good fight against the Robber Barons, as I’d always been taught. He was a drunken, stoned, uneducated, vulgar slob, ripping off a piece of the action for himself. And in my state he had the full force of the law and the state government behind him. So private sector employers fled.

The unions have chased the private sector out of the Great Lakes "Rust Belt." But the government can’t go out of business, and the unions here have a stranglehold on the government. If you want to make money in New York State, don’t be a fool and go to college. Get a government union job instead.

Last year, a Buffalo city cop retired with a pension of 5,000 per year after making 9,000 in his final year on the job. If he lives another 20 years he’ll cost the taxpayers .1 million for not working. The union contract allowed employees with the most seniority to get first dibs on overtime; it also allowed them to calculate their pensions on the overtime-inflated salaries. Also last year the New York Post reported that some unionized janitors in New York City public schools earned over 0,000, including one who made 1,000. Public sector union contracts here allow union stewards to be paid their full salary while they do union business full-time — thus, they are paid by the taxpayers to lobby against the taxpayers for more taxpayer money. It’s insane.

Buffalo is a place where actual union thuggery, violence and vandalism still exists in the 21st century. In 2010, members of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 17, an AFL-CIO affiliate, pleaded guilty to Federal racketeering charges. According to The Buffalo News, the union members were charged with "death threats and stabbings," "throwing scalding coffee at non-union workers," "telling a construction company official they were going to his home to sexually assault his wife," and "pouring sand into the engines of 18 pieces of [nonunion] construction equipment, causing 0,000 damage." What employer in his right mind would want to do business here?

I don’t deny that some unions have made contributions to worker safety and quality of life. But it’s simply not true that management is always bad and unions are always good.

As Sen. Barry Goldwater observed in Conscience of a Conservative, the First Amendment guarantees freedom of association for union members. But "[e]mployers are forbidden to act collusively for sound reasons. The same reasons [should] apply to unions…Let us henceforth make war on all monopolies — whether corporate or union. The enemy of freedom is unrestrained power" — whether it be unrestrained management power or unrestrained union power.