September 1, 2011

I WORK at a grocery store. Recently, a customer comes up to me and asks where some Bob Evans frozen item is. I tell him it's over in the meat department. He asks if we have a very specific type of it. I tell him, again, it's not my department, so I'm not sure, but I'd be happy to walk him over to where it is, and help him find it.

He said that wouldn't be necessary and then decided to impart a bit of "wisdom" to me. He said something like: "If you just do what you're being paid to do, then you're never going to go anywhere, and you'll stay where you are. But if you do more than what you're paid to do, then they'll keep you around and start paying you for that stuff, too."

As he was walking away, he said he hoped that I could become the president of the company some day. I just had to smile and say "Have a nice day!" Here's what I would have liked to say:

LISTEN HERE, you condescending shit. First off, if I end up being the owner of the company, please kill me.

You think that because someone is working at a grocery store, they don't have any higher aspirations or talents? That everyone who works a job like that is a high school dropout with nothing better to offer the workforce?

I work with people who are going to school for Forensic Anthropology, who have business degrees and English degrees, people who have owned businesses and people who have programming skills that blow my mind. We don't need your advice on how to live our lives or do our jobs.

Many of the smartest people I know can't find jobs in their field. I know people with PhDs who work at Wal-Mart and people with multiple graduate degrees who drive busses. When I applied for a $10-an-hour, part-time, entry-level position at a programming company, there were people with PhDs applying for the position. Don't think for a second that this is all that I or any of these other people are capable of.

It's the politicians and their fucking capitalist profit-driven economic policies that are putting us where we are--not a lack of motivation, work ethic or intelligence.

Also, you don't know my life or my situation...or my job for that matter. I work my ass off every day because I need the hours and need to impress upon my bosses that they need to keep me around so that I can pay my rent. I don't do the bare minimum.

But they aren't going to recognize me for my hard work and reward me because of it. Why should they? That doesn't give them more profits. Just like last winter, when they unrolled their new "program" to draw in more customers. They make us work harder and faster for the exact same pay that we had before because that increases their profits. And they can do it, too, because we're non-union.

I get snubbed for opportunities for promotion and having regular hours because I had the nerve to speak up during the "mandatory labor-relations meeting" (read as: anti-union propaganda meeting) and call out the lies that were being fed to us--because I'd rather fight for the rights and well-being of all my coworkers rather than only caring about my self-preservation. I see it as just being another battlefront of the international working-class struggle. And for that altruism, I get punished.

Think that you can work your way up the ladder in this economy? This isn't the '50s, '60s or '70s--when generations grew up and could actually make a living at a grocery job with a strong work ethic. The American Dream is DEAD. The days of working hard to get ahead are OVER.

Economic disparity and lack of opportunity is ravaging my generation while our future Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are being taken away in order to pay for the economic crisis that YOUR generation caused! If you need any more proof of that, just take a look at Wisconsin, London, Greece or the Arab Spring revolutions and realize that they are all fighting the same thing.

So take your out-of-touch, trickle-down-economics, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps b.s. and go find someone else to preach to. I don't want to hear it.

Steven Wyatt, from the Internet