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Get to work at 8 or
9. Knock off around 5. Home again, 6-ish. Fifty weeks a year. For about 45
years.
Most are glad to have the work, but don t really choose it. They may dream,
they may study and even train for work they intensely want; but sooner or
later, for most, that doesn t pan out. Then they take what they can and make
do. Most have families to support, so they need their jobs more than their
jobs admit to needing them. They re employees. And, as employees, most have
no say whatsoever about much of anything on the job. The purpose or service,
the short and long-term goals of the company, are considered quite literally
none of their business - though these issues drastically influence every
aspect of their lives. No matter that they ve given years to the day-to-day
survival of the business; employees (even when they re called managers )
mostly take orders. Or else. It seems an odd way to structure a free society:
Most people have little or no authority over what they do five days a week
for 45 years. Doesn t sound much like life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. Sounds like a nation of drones.
It used to be that one s compensation for being an American drone was the
freedom to live in one s own house, in one s own quirky way, in a clean and
safe community in which your children had the chance to be happier, richer
drones than you. But working stiffs can t afford houses now, fewer
communities are clean, none are safe, and your kid s prospects are worse.
(This condition may be because for five days a week, for 45 years, you had no
say - while other people have been making decisions that haven t been good
for you.) I m not sure whose happiness we ve been pursuing lately, but one
thing is clear: It s not the happiness of those who ve done our society s
work.
On the other hand - or so they say - you re free, and if you don t like your
job you can pursue happiness by starting a business of your very own, by
becoming an independent entrepreneur. But you re only as independent as
your credit rating. And to compete in the business community, you ll find
yourself having to treat others - your employees - as much like slaves as you
can get away with. Pay them as little as they ll tolerate and give them no
say in anything, because that s what s most efficient and profitable. Money
is the absolute standard. Freedom, and the dignity and well-being of one s
fellow creatures, simply don t figure in the basic formula.
This may seem a fairly harsh way to state the rules America now lives by. But
if I sound radical, it s not from doing a lot of reading in some cozy
university, then dashing off to dispense opinion as a prima donna of the
alternative press. I learned about drones by droning. From ages 18 to 29
(minus a few distracted months at college when I was 24) I worked the sort of
jobs that I expected to have all my life: typesetter for two years, tape
transcriber for three, proofreader (a grossly incompetent one) for a few
weeks, messenger for a few months, and secretary (yes, secretary) for a year
and a half. Then I stopped working steadily and the jobs got funkier:
hospital orderly, vacuum-cleaner salesman, Jack-in-the-Box counter-person,
waiter, nail hammerer, cement mixer, toilet scrubber, driver.
It was during the years of office work that I caught on: I got two weeks
paid vacation per year. A year has 52 weeks. Even a comparatively unskilled,
uneducated worker like me, who couldn t (still can t) do fractions or long
division - even I had enough math to figure that two goes into 52
how
many times? Twenty-sic. Meaning it would take me 26 years on the job to
accumulate one year for myself. And I could only have that in 26 pieces, so
it wouldn t even feel like a year. In other words, no time was truly mine. My
boss merely allowed me an illusion of freedom, a little space in which to