Tag Archives: labor

Lost Wages, Struwwelpeter for Adults

In a Different Desert at 65

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Now into being retired for several months, I did a few things instinctively experts suggest. First among them, I didn’t splurge.

Free of punching any timeclock, I didn’t travel. As much as I wanted to beat as many July and August weekends of Mojave Desert summer heat and hit the Coast – particularly Hermosa Beach and Oceanside – I deferred. Prudence demanded I first evaluate my new financial circumstances.

If I got deeper in the hole at this stage of life, escaping would be difficult without regular income through regular hours. I have no urge to return to the daily grind.

Although I pull part-time hours, those three midweek workdays keep me off the couch, my face away from the television. Oh, yeah, the job also provides a couple extra dollars.

During my 11 years in Las Vegas, I’ve observed retirees. Retirement was the impetus behind my relocating in the Big Mayberry. Once Medicare kicked in, oh, fit me for a white hat, white belt, and white shoes!

Had I my druthers, had my idiot former employers not driven their easy money enterprise off a cliff, this site’s dispatches would’ve emanated from Metropolitan New York. I would’ve reached 65 with a bigger bag o’cash. That would’ve allowed me wider range in determining my future residence. And before derailment, my next place this August should’ve been Tucson, Arizona. Yes, the Sonora Desert Margaritaville.

“Eating salty peanuts and drinking beer and kicking back so hard I land on my stomach.” Heard that on a Tucson radio commercial in the late 1970s. It became my life’s aspiration.

Okay. An aspiration for later life. Like now.

But my idiot former employers chose pyrite over gold. Therefore, real life turned out not to be a sure thing. Hence, I needed to make some adult choices.

Yes, I could’ve moved to Tucson in August 2013. That would’ve satisfied me emotionally. Unlike Las Vegas, I have history and connections in the Old Pueblo. Attended and graduated the finest public university west of the Pecos there. Have close friends from that time there today. I suspected correctly some others would be migrating back into the Sonora once they also bade farewell to work.

But being happy and immersed in one’s cohort does not make for financial security. Having written that then having read what I wrote, father would’ve approved of my forced decisions. Mother, on the other hand, would’ve found one or two lacking.

Tell the truth, there were a couple of choices I would’ve preferred never to have made. Yet life removed them from my hands.

In 2013, or as many now see it, ancient history, Tucson had recovered from the Great Recession. Real estate prices reflected this. Las Vegas, though? No shortage in the Big Mayberry of swimming pools brimming with green water or abandoned houses in which chronic homeless squatted.

Moreover, and more importantly, this city availed with employment opportunities. Doesn’t matter how bad the local economy is advertised, Las Vegas will always need bodies to fill openings. Sure. Likely the pay will suck. The position won’t be prestigious. Immaterial. This is the sort of place where once you have a job, finding, landing something better is possible while the bullshit one sustains you.

At least if you know how to keep your mouth shut, eyes and ears open. That, and are possessed with some kind of drive.

I’ve noticed Northeastern and Industrial Midwestern transplants vault ahead here. The BARs (born and raised), the long-time migrants from elsewhere – primarily from California – they are or they have become docile, poky, and timid.

They exhibit more gratitude than gumption. Few hustle and scuff. If they see opportunity, too few recognize the opening. Whereas if you’re from back East, you see it, you snatch it! And if someone has already grabbed it, you try wresting it from him or her.

Countless Nevadans wouldn’t grasp the preceding.

Higher Arizona property prices did not deter me from Tucson. Imposition of state taxes and state levies on capital gains did not deter me from Tucson. Finding a readily available job drove me to Las Vegas. Then 54, I would need a job that would sustain me until 65. Apply as I did to sundry Arizona employers, none either showed interest or expressed any immediate interest in hiring me.

Same hindrance I faced in the Northeast. The company I’d worked for filled a lot of niches. It was well regarded throughout the industry. Until the very last few years, word of mouth served as our sterling calling card. Until the last year or two, it never needed to advertise. That was unnecessary. Satisfied clients are the finest advertising there is. They talk.

But when the floor collapsed, all fell. Even though I occupied an entirely different area in the operation, and well aware of this, prospective employers still asked whether I had anything to do with the firm’s implosion.

Innocent of any crime, I was nonetheless found guilty. That made future prospects of continuance in the East plain.

But Nevada. The Silver State was never my desire. That said, Nevada has floated me financially. Bought a place in Las Vegas as easily and as quickly as could be. As Realtors say, “The seller was highly motivated.” No. I didn’t ask why. Just asked for the keys so I could hurry up and change the locks.

That first year here I stumbled through several short-term jobs. None really satisfied me. One was interesting though. A marketing firm whose offices overlooked the Strip.

Let me say this, before Strip establishments used Covid as cover to transform Las Vegas from a value destination into a price points maw, working on the Boulevard was fun. Now, people working inside those hotel casinos and supporting enterprises probably can’t wait to bolt home at quitting time. Then, it was nothing to actually linger after work, meet associates, have several cocktails, bullshit, check out and attempt to make conventioneers or tourists.

Finally, I landed a gig that paid decently, offered bennies through a union. Nirvana? No. What I needed? Yes.

I am fortunate to have worked in Las Vegas before retiring here. While working, I couldn’t help but notice the difference in retirees who’d earned here and those who’d migrated from elsewhere after retiring.

I was lucky to have met some of the last spear carriers, the housekeepers, bar staff, maintenance guys, people who got to watch the Rat Pack and following eras’ big-name entertainers perform from the floor or wings.
Yes. They all knew mob guys. The boys were quite ubiquitous during those times.

Like many performers appearing before bright lights, the guys in the shadows tipped generously. Moreover, many of them had had parents and relatives who’d made livings doing tasks regarded as menial. Such put food on tables, kept roofs over heads, and provided other life essentials. None of the heavies was going to look down on anyone who kindly reminded them of figures in their pasts. People who worked hard for relatively little, were discreet and circumspect.

One can only imagine the amounts of “whatever” those service staffers saw or heard and afterwards quickly forgot.

Pensioned off, the former personnel inside long demolished palaces were – I hate using this word – spry. Grateful, too. Pleasant. Happy. Far more so than others who’d toiled in Las Vegas at avocations away from the neon and casino floors.

Warehousemen. Mechanics. Salesclerks. Assemblers in light industry. Repairmen. While they knew what post-work Las Vegas offered, their enjoyments of it seemed less extensive. Probably somewhat resentful of what had been missed and what would never be availed.

All the categories above and others lacked the fist of collective bargaining. Nevada is a “right to work” state.

When I inform visiting current union or retired union members, they react as if gas had been loudly passed.

“Right to work,” like every human resources department, only benefits bosses, never any employee.

For Las Vegas retirees who’d toiled in an enterprise outside a casino, particularly a Strip one, every day on the clock must’ve been like mincing through a minefield. Between boss and employee, the former had the upper hand. Always. Dislike that? Okay. Get out!

Mentioned something earlier in this piece or elsewhere altogether about Nevadans being timid, poky, and slow. Losing one’s job on a whim and being without representation is enough to ingrain prudence, if not outright obsequiousness.

Nonetheless, lower on the rung as they were, former blue- or pink-collar Las Vegas workers know this dry turf. Post-career pleasures here are still to be mined for them. They know which side is up.

Yet then as now, it’s better to draw wages from a casino than anywhere else in Southern Nevada. In the old days, between union representation and no-necks’ occasional favors, a good many casino workers’ lives turned out rewarding. They were able to enter the middle class. The fat happy part. It provided them houses. Cars. Other “nice things.”

Their jobs enabled parents to send children off to earn higher educations. Through those degrees, that generation would find careers less strenuous than changing sheets, cleaning bathrooms, working in kitchens, slinging drinks, mopping or vacuuming floors as had their parents. At retirement, though, the long hours of decades ago did provide countless mothers and fathers present-day monetary tufts.

I’m one of the few Northeasterners who’s retired to Las Vegas. Californians predominate but a good number of former residents from the Industrial Midwest have settled here as well.

Once, I would’ve thought those Midwesterners might’ve migrated into Southern Nevada because of old mob ties. During its heyday, when Las Vegas thrived under mob rule, the Central States Pension Fund, a one-time front for the Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Kansas City outfits, had heavily invested union retirement funds in the Boulevard’s glittering establishments. In fact, through their unions a lot of rank-and-file members were encouraged to visit and spend in Las Vegas. Not for the obvious reasons. But to see their money working for them as well as enjoy life away from Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and Kansas.

No, if you lived in the Northeast, South Florida, Miami mainly, was your escape valve. That still holds true despite Florida sinking.

Pensioners who relocate here without having worked in Las Vegas are somewhat easy to recognize. After the initial excitement of living in Sin City vanishes, they look adrift. They come here either knowing no one or have tenuous, at best, connections. The lack of social contacts shrivels them. No close circle around as well susceptibility to ailments peculiar to the Mojave’s environment lets many take succor in routines that eases them into becoming pill-poppin’ day drunks.

It’s either that or surrender to despondency.

Countless days, okay, days after days, are spent in casinos seated at machines, mesmerized by them. Steady streams of cocktails and butt-lit cigarettes eliminate time and awareness. Such sedentariness takes its toll as well. It’s seen in the sallow sagging faces, dull eyes, body carriages that merciless gravity invariably collapses into barrel-like physiques whose legs increasingly become frail.

Worse yet, casinos have so tightened the payouts the machines may as well whistle.

Healthwise, if one’s a retiree who never worked in Las Vegas before cashing in, a circle of friends and nearby family may prove better than doctors’ appointments.

The last two observations above are not meant facetiously. High numbers of Las Vegas area medical personnel practice on a contractual basis. They’re not here for the long run. Once terms of service end, a heavy percentage of them skedaddle to perceived greener pastures elsewhere. So, again let that word “connections” enter into play.

I’ve met transplanted retired Californians so dissatisfied with regional medical care, they, Angelenos mostly, go through the time and expense of flying back to the Coast for consultations with their “former” doctors.
Not exactly a seal of approval, that.

Las Vegas doctors aren’t negligent. But face it, their levels of concern for local clientele don’t rise to the same heights as MDs seeking to establish long-term practices through building solid consultations. It’s easy to suspect such light links also increases willingness to prescribe and perhaps overprescribe prescriptions. Some for physical pain. Others for the pain of loneliness.

It’s nothing to hear of pill smorgasbords Las Vegas seniors are prescribed. All those remedies and palliatives, some must be working at cross purposes inside the patients. But who’s to know? Who’s to care?

Agitprop/Propaganda, Baboon America

America May End Here

Project 2025 is a plan that intends degrading Americans’ lives. Project 2025 is a horrible phantasmagoria. It has been concocted by the Heritage Foundation, an organization dead-set on turning back the clock to a time when it was believed the United States was solely a white man’s land.

Don’t doubt this screed also didn’t benefit from malignant contributions from every selfish, intolerant, greedy, twisted clergy, conservative group in our nation.

The contents of the fetid stew concocted by the Heritage Foundation that is Project 2025 are contrary to America. Therefore, the substandard among us will adore it. Continue reading America May End Here →

Lost Wages

Water Finds Its Own Level

Only in America is free time frowned upon. No matter how deserved. Anytime I read or hear about a cubicle slave or some other automaton bound to his/her job by invisible chains, I say, “Poor sap.”

Where else but America do workers “brag” about their unused vacation days? Of course, where else but here do employers also grudge awarding those days which have been earned?

Deferring purchases is often wise. Deferring vacation days robs our humanity. Continue reading Water Finds Its Own Level →

Quarropas

Long. Languid. Like August.

August is the reason the French refer to September as “reentry.”

Like some Old World countries, the Belle Republique takes a month off after the bombast and celebrations of July. Americans should do that here in the New World but wouldn’t this just be the thing to interrupt our motorcycle rallies and guns shows? Besides, we must grudge the notion of vacation. Isn’t it a national trait? Instead of seeing time off as deserved, ah, earned, business and our hamsters on wheels go-getting natures insist we disdain time away from the millstone.

That’s just wrong. Continue reading Long. Languid. Like August. →

Agitprop/Propaganda, Baboon America

Our Times

Saw a job listing on a professional networking site that intrigued. Thirty/35 years ago, I would’ve been all over it. Most astonishing thing about the job description? A former high school classmate generated this possibility.

Recalling him, he never struck as being particularly dynamic. He filled backgrounds in many scenes.

Yet two reasons have throttled any enthusiasm towards pursuing his offer. One, I’m 63 and along the glidepath into retirement. Two, I’d bring experience to the job. Continue reading Our Times →

Observed

Speed Kills … As It Should

In July, barreled down into Northwestern Arizona from Las Vegas. Dropped some coin in barren White Hills playing lottery that’ll help fund the Grand Canyon State’s educational system. Such donations would’ve been better spent here in Nevada. But thanks to the Nevada gaming industry’s dumb insistence lotto dollars will deduct from the Silver State’s games of chance and sports books, Nevadans do not benefit from such participations. Continue reading Speed Kills … As It Should →

Baboon America

Elsewhere May Day Is Labor Day

This Covid period among our older populace proves that after a time minds become less pliant. In them views narrow then solidify.

When I hear people, say, at least 14 years my senior, opine, they often remind me of an Allen Ginsberg quote. The poet said: “Our heads are round so thought can change direction.”

Life has squared their noggins.

There must come a period in life when our ability to juggle contrary positions against – or even adapt to – what our minds hold as irrevocable erodes. At one point each of us must’ve been mentally nimble. But as many of us age, our ability to modify or rearrange perception and understanding loses fluidity.

It’s not that those hewing tenaciously to fixed positions are simply stubborn. More like their mental processes have congealed. They just can’t budge.

No need to provoke such people. They’ll erupt without cause. The mantra they spew? “Nobody wants to work anymore.”

Popularly known as “the Silent Generation,” they huddle wedged between former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” and “Baby Boomers.” Arriving just before the Depression then shoved onto the periphery of American memory with the first birth of 1946, too few members of this cohort left an impression on our national scene. Also, the calamities that occurred between the years 1929-1945 made prospective parents wary about bringing or being able to afford having children. Their aggregate was lower than the two generations sandwiching them.

Though the Depression and World War II were nowhere near as formative to them as it was upon the participants and combatants, both events nevertheless left imprints. Here in the economically poleaxed America of the1930s and wartime’s Fortress of Democracy, daily life must’ve been maintained at some levels of precariousness.

Each era embedded its own worries upon the still forming.

Unless one’s background affluent during the Depression, want was a constant threat. A job which sustained home and hearth week after week was no certainty. And unlike today, the safety net, if one existed, consisted of savings, family, and perhaps friends. Compared to now, government programs that helped citizens tide over rough patches were meager as well as sparse.

Doubtlessly parents one pay envelope away from being up against it discussed finances in the most sotto tones. Nonetheless careful as they must have been, that sort of constant stress must’ve also reached then affected young minds.

And while the war that broke out among the Europeans in September 1939 was a topic that could be bandied at intellectual remove, Pearl Harbor two years later became a realer than real matter of survival. The Depression’s threat of possible imminent destitution might be diverted through a head down, no boat rocking posture coupled with an “it could be worse” attitude which made them grateful to possess what they had.

The December 7th, 1941, attack became a life and death matter.

Two oceans aside, wolves threatened Americans’ doors. The vast watery expanses which had kept America remote from most global conflicts were by 1941 capable of being crossed by all sorts of weapons. What had been viewed while watching movie theaters’ newsreels – cities obliterated from the air, columns of grim jackbooted troops intent on carnage – now offered foretastes of what America might’ve shared with Europe or Asia.

Easy to imagine that after Pearl Harbor no American regarded fates similar to Rotterdam or Shanghai visiting these shores as “improbable.” At least initially, conversation based on war topics were undoubtedly debated between disbelief and hysteria.

Although dementia and death have substantially reduced those then present as WWII adults, that there was possibly an undercurrent of defeatism during the global conflict’s first disastrous months is difficult to deny. It’s just the sort of thing children can absorb though can’t properly articulate sufficiently in order to have parents explain. Or dispel.

Maybe it becomes a thing that weighs adolescents who enter their teens before becoming adults; that inexplicable thing they unconsciously drag with them through life.

A benefit from Covid is it’s loosened the shackles of American workers. That’s given them leverage against bosses. Terrific!

On one hand, the worker shortage, created from retirements, deaths, and searches for better, stems directly from the disease.

The first a realization by long-time employees they’d gotten to points of simply living to work rather than working to live. Why drop dead at one’s place of employment or linger a few post-retirement years in pain and regret? If the necessary years had accrued – even if the total short – why not abandon that toil and enjoy what remained of life while it still possible?

The second, a factor way too few Americans grasp or want to, is a good number of working people succumbed to Covid. To them, their families, friends, it wasn’t a hoax. Covid wasn’t just jumped-up flu.

Despite the best efforts of right-wing barking heads and jackleg screamers to slander every patient overwhelming ICUs and hospital staffs, sufferers filling wards and providing care in them weren’t crisis actors. For awhile rumors circulated that at my own job Covid claimed one co-worker a week. Of course confidentiality rules and HR doing its utmost to protect the company blunted ascertaining whether this fact or not.

Third, the first two Covid conditions created mobility. Countless current workers are exploiting this last opening. A circumstance anyone constitutionally timid finds adverse.

A worker shortage meant dead-end, low-wage positions, and peonage treatment could be dumped for perhaps more satisfying, higher paying labor where supervisors aware the worm has turned keep their tyrant conduct in check.

That’s what “the Silent Generation” means when it erroneously states “Nobody wants to work anymore.” They’re angered that it appears nobody wants to work as they once did.

Fearful of losing jobs they were grateful to have even if it meant being humiliated throughout a career. For far too many laboring Americans that was the take-it-or-leave-it pact until Covid.

Current attitudes spreading regarding how one’s daily bread is earned reflects badly on “the Silent Generation.” They put up with shit because in return for a comfortable living standard made possible through a decent salary, benefits, and pensions, the boss could release his inner Attila the Hun on them at will. Rotten management will never hide its contempt for the cogs. Before Covid, underlings could be replaced as easily as getting a fresh tissue after soiling the previous sheet.

Then, even getting raises could’ve grown into ordeals. Despite workplace performances justifying the bump how often had the process transformed productive employees into nearly on their knees supplicants?

We may suppose “the Silent Generation” invented some nobility about enduring these trials. We may also suppose them seeing a new generation come along and blithely chucking the old nature for new measures somehow tarnishes whatever glory had shined jobs offering two-weeks-a year vacation.