City Hall Diary
Labor Day is a time that many of us celebrate with BBQs and rest. It’s a day to acknowledge the work of everyone in our society. However, many people work on Labor Day, including but not limited to 9-1-1 dispatchers, grocery store clerks, nurses, and sewage treatment plant workers, etc.
This is also a day that I think of the show “Dirty Jobs” on the Discovery channel. The host, Mike Rowe, travels around the USA doing the most hardcore gross work. He could be shoveling pig manure in one segment, running around in liquid compost at a turkey farm or the back of a “roadkill” recovery truck the next minute. The jobs he profiles will make you grimace.
However, we don’t have to go that far in this area to see jobs that are less desirable. You make choices in your employment options as much as you are able, while others have fewer choices based on their skill set or physical capabilities.
So as you enjoy your BBQ and libation today on Labor Day, can you think of jobs in San Jose that you simply would not do, or jobs you did when you were younger that were not fun?
For example, when I was 15 years old, I worked at Burger King (don’t tell Councilmember Campos) and worked the fryer station. There is nothing like being a teenager who is already prone to acne being exposed to all that greasy air. The job was hot and tedious and I made $3.35 an hour before getting promoted to “Whopper Board” making $3.65.
I am not in a rush anytime soon to work at Burger King again. It was fun to race against my colleagues, Tung and Ajmir, who could make burgers faster, which was a big deal then. However, cleaning out the fryers, broilers and dumpsters was less prestigious.
Do you have similar work experiences that you would like to tell us about?
I worked at the Roost at SJSU. It was a fried chicken joint.
Don’t tell anyone who ate there; but we used to play floor hockey with the frozen chicken. And save it for rude people. basically, two trays were good clean chicken, the one on the end was for people who were rude or made fun of us.
Rumor has it, the rude person’s batch tasted good. Alot of poeple were rude to us at times!
I’m glad I finished my degree and got a good paying career. To this day, I go out of my way to be friendly to restaurant help! I suggest the same to anyone else out there!
While in college in the 70’s I worked one summer at a factory that sub-manufactured auto parts. We had a big contract to produce parts for the jacks of Ford Pintos.
I was assigned to work on a metal press. You would place a metal part into a mold, push two pedals, one with each hand, and WHAM the press would come down with several tons of force.
The problem was, you had to meet production quotas so you got into a rhythm: new part in, push pedals, remove part, etc. I quickly learned that if you went too fast your hand could be in the mold when the press came down. I had several close calls.
One day I was moved to another part of the factory. A woman took over on the metal press. Within a half hour she was in the back of an ambulance with a severely mangled hand which she later lost. It was horrible.
The next day the foreman tried to put me back on the metal press. There had been no safety inspections. accident investigation or down-time for the press. Instead the foreman was worried about falling behind. I refused and was fired.
The machinery could have been designed to be safer, the quotas could have been lower and there could have been better safety precautions. But the profit motive seemed to trump worker safety. It was cheaper to pay for a mangled hand and a new minimum wage worker than to redesign the factory. It was also more expedient to fire an employee who raised safety questions.
To this day I am glad we have OHSA and other regulatory bodies that protect workers. I wish they had more authority and more inspectors. While businesses tend to complain about safety regulations I have seen what can happen when the standards become too lax.
When I was 16 I worked as a cashier at my Uncle/Cousin’s Mexican restaurant in Tucson. It was a family owned establishment—the owner was my Dad’s cousin. We called him our “Tio” because he was the same age as our Dad and they were like brothers and basically, anyone older than 20 who was in any way related to Mom or Dad was automatically a Tio or Tia—when you’re a little kid it’s way easier than remembering everyone’s name in a very large family.
In that job I had to learn how to count change really fast because the restaurant would always get jammed at lunch and dinner and you had to get folks checked out quickly or suffer the consequences of your customers waiting in long lines.
Those were the days before computerized anything—no computer cash box, no computerized credit card machine—everyone paid in cash. I had to manually input the amount of the dinner check, the sales tax, then the total. Then I had to calculate the customer’s change in my head, take it out of the cash box, count it again in front of the customer and then go on to the next customer.
At the end of the night I had to count the receipts with my Uncle. Any descrepencies between the night’s receipts and the beginning cash balance in the cash box would be taken out of my salary.
I was a nervous wreck in the beginning but by the end of a couple of weeks I got the hang of it. The bonus was free food, made by my relatives who were in the kitchen making home made dishes the old fashioned way—nothing was microwaved—the kitchen opened at 5am and everything was prepapred to order.
Here’s a tip (pun intended) on how to count change—if the customer pays cash—always place the funds in front of you and the customer so you can both see it and count the change backwards—e.g., if the bill is $7.60—count from $7.60 to $8.00 then from $8.00 to $10.00 and so on.
Or you can look at the change amount on your brand new computerized cash box.
Call me old fashioned—but I think there is something valuable in having to mentally calculate simple math transactions in your daily life—keeps you on your toes.
Thanks to all the blue collar grunts who do the back breaking work. Thanks to the police officers and firemen who keep us safe 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and whom we as a society expect to lay down their own life to protect the rest of us if necessary. Thanks to our nurses and doctors. Although harder and harder to do try and buy American goods to keep our jobs in the United States. To our corporate and political leaders, please stop shipping our jobs to China, Vietnam, Mexico, India etc where children are still used for virtual slave labor and adults work for pennies a day.
The day after I turned 16, I started working in the finishing room of a furniture manufacturer. It was a summer job I held for a couple of summers, and during Christmas breaks from high school and college.
My mother was what they then called a “Gal Friday” at the company, which means she did absolutely everything in the office. That’s how I got the job. I could not start until I was 16, since laws at the time precluded anyone younger from working in maufacturing.
Every man (yup,no women) who worked in the assembly part of the plant had lost parts of one or more fingers on the job. That’s why my Mom didn’t want me working in that part of the plant. In the finishing room, we sprayed a sealer coat, then sanded it; then a stain coat, and wiped off the excess; then the final coat. No masks, no protection for skin but your shirt, a simple exhaust fan in the spray booths. At the end of each shift we cleaned the sealer and stain, and lacquer from our hands and arms with benzine, now a known carcinogen. It cleaned off the various liquids left on your skin by removing a layer of skin. There was nothing to clean our lungs.
My hard work there spurred me to go to college rather than spend my life at such a task. I take my hat off to the people who I worked with at the time, and am glad that worker protections have been implemented since. We all need to respect honest labor.
Galt 6,
Workers from other coutries fight to get into the united states because even the lowest wages here beat their own country, plus they get de facto free health insurance here. These people dont need to be “shipped” here by anyone, they find their own way to get here. Why dont you spend some time helping them form a union to prevent their vicimization as you care so much about.
Steve,
You might also want to ask our corporate and political leaders to please stop shipping workers FROM China, Vietnam, Mexico, India, etc. to compete against YOUR FELLOW COUNTRYMEN, causing them to have to work for slave wages right here in the United States.
Steve 7,
There IS a union that is already in place that would protect the wages and working conditions of all Americans if our political leaders had any respect for it’s “bylaws”.
It’s called The United States of America.
Consider.
What is it that affords a worker the benefits of a union? Answer: Membership.
Being a citizen of the United States is like being a union member. If only citizens were allowed to hold employment in this country we would find that employers would be forced to pay more to anybody that was willing to work. Encouraging illegal immigration is equivalent to urging scabs to cross a picket line. For some reason many Americans who think that crossing a picket line, which doesn’t break any law, is a despicable act of betrayal, have no problem with foreign nationals crossing our border, our “national picket line”, and taking jobs at low wages, undermining the earning power of our own lowest paid workers.
Working to help people in need around the world is indeed admirable, but I think we need to consider the health of our own society first.
By the way, sorry for the stupid, self-indugent criticism of my earlier post.