A few years ago, I moved to Connecticut and began looking for a job. I thought that I would be fairly successful at this; although my work record has some holes, it's not all that bad, and anyway, I'm a college grad and I interview well and I'm a good, hard worker.
It took me 9 months to successfully find work, and only part-time at that. In the intervening period I ended up blowing through most of my savings to survive, to pay back various people and companies for the goods I had stolen from them, and to help out others who were in even more dire straits than I was.
It wasn't that I hadn't spent those nine months furiously searching for employment; on the contrary, I spent those months repeatedly applying to every job that I could find, only I kept being turned down. I was even turned down for a position as a cashier at a local health-foods grocery store.
I'm not sure if I was turned down because of the gaps in my employment history; I can only really guess as to the reasons why I was never hired. If so, I've discovered a little injustice there, namely, that if you don't work for a period of time because of health reasons - which is what led to those employment history gaps - then our society makes it that much harder for you to find gainful employment again. One is being, as it were, shunted off to the margins.
Alternatively, in some cases, it could have been my physical handicap. I might have been able to find physical labor, at the very least, if I weren't physically disabled. Or, I might have been better able to find work if I weren't a student, and thus needed blocks of time free in order to be able to attend class at a minimum.
Regardless, eventually I was able to find part-time employment at the very least; however, shortly thereafter the health insurance I received through school lapsed as I became a part-time student rather than a full-time student. Suddenly I could no longer visit the doctor without paying exorbitant amounts of money, and my medications - one of which is still on-patent - cost $350 a month, a significant portion of my paycheck.
I've taken on other part-time work, since. I have a per diem job which gives me the chance to work now and then, and I have another 'job' which adds minor income to the pot whenever I'm able to get that work. But the search for a full-time job, one with health insurance benefits, goes on.
On the advice of a friend, I applied to a position as a bank teller in a local bank. Part of the application process included a test designed, apparently, to determine one's customer service skills. Having worked in customer service, with some skill, in my previous jobs, I felt that I should know the answers to the questions fairly easily. One question, however, concerned bothering a customer via telephone in order to sell a product: telemarketing. I, like most people, have a visceral reaction to someone bothering me in my home in order to sell me something; it is uncouth, a horrible practice, which has little to do with satisfying the customer than with hoisting petard products upon them. I chose, in the multiple choice options, to make excuses and hang up.
Wrong answer. My application was instantly denied. Not even an interview.
A few days later, swallowing my pride and my honesty, I decided to retake the test and give them the answer that they wanted. Glory of glories, application accepted. Interview scheduled. Yearly check-ups, here I come.
This morning I put on the monkey-suit and headed downtown to the HR department for this bank, in a foul mood. I had, and have, no interest in 'selling products', be they financial service ones or not. I think that viewing business in such a manner dehumanizes the very real practice of providing goods and services to meet peoples needs, rather than generating wants to sell goods and services made in excess: I'm more of a capitalist (in the Adam Smith mold) than a neoliberal consumerist. Supply is meant to follow demand, not the opposite.
Never mind the monkey-suit. I've never been a fan, ever since having to put on tight, uncomfortable, unflattering shirts with iron-starched collars, necktie nooses, tapered-leg pantaloons that only highlight my chicken legs... let me wear something comfortable, something more me instead, for the love of God. Dress casual I can do, and even wear a tie now and then if I feel like it, but don't force me to wear something I despise.
Of course, I try to justify this with the old Quaker testimony of simplicity and plainness, but that's just show. Really, I'm big kid who doesn't want to wear grown-up clothes.
So anyway, I get down to the office, and am told that I should not have come down; in fact, they cannot interview me because I am not allowed to retake their customer-service quiz less than 6 months after I failed it the first time. Thank you very much; you can have your parking ticket validated on the way out.
In some ways - many ways, actually - I'm glad. Me being me, I despised the thought of having to do the sort of work I would have to do in banking, what with numbers and selling things people didn't want and dressing in monkey-suits and similar. A part of me, the part of me that I really like and try to nourish, jumped for joy at not having had to 'sell-out' to the Man. Integrity: saved.
But then: I am still without health insurance, and still quite poor. With several large and major life changes approaching - moving to Hartford, getting married next year, insh'Allah - I rather need steady full-time work. And this job is only meant to be interim work, something to tide me over until I can take on full-time work as a substance-abuse counselor, the real sort of job I've always wanted to do.
Stepping back further, though, getting out of my own shoes for a second, I have to wonder how people in my situation deal with just this sort of thing. I'm spared a great deal of the degradation because I have a car, rich parents who help me out, and I know there are many, many people like me who do not have such safety nets.
I think about what happens to them, and I realize: of course. They are all those people who look so incredibly miserable at their jobs. They're telemarketers, DMV bureaucrats, bank tellers, supermarket clerks... people who work to survive and for little other reason. They're barely able to make ends meet, surviving just above the poverty-line, ineligible for a lot of the programs which are meant to service people in need but unable to purchase or otherwise receive the same benefits those programs are meant to cover for those without them.
It makes you wonder how many are out there, working multiple part-time jobs with all sorts of variable hours during the day which prevents them from seeing their kids, making appointments with doctors or banks (or to find another, better-paying or more full-time job) or other professionals who have the benefit of definite and clear working hours. People without health insurance, frozen in fear of getting sick at all because of the enormous expenses. And because every penny must be saved in order to make various ends meet, they have no room for 'luxury' items, and so probably find credit cards alluring, with their promise of deferred payment, in spite of 25% or more interest rates.
Of course we're a debtor nation.
I suppose none of this seems terribly 'spiritual', and so does not seem as if it belongs in such a blog as this one, but... these are the injustices and inequities I see in our society. Sure, we have a class of terribly poor, but I think much worse is the class of indentured citizens we have created here, able to survive but little else, without any friends or compassion.
There is something rotten to the core about the American Dream.
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