https://foundsf.org/api.php?days=30&limit=50&action=feedrecentchanges&feedformat=atomFoundSF - Recent changes [en]2024-03-29T00:34:17ZTrack the most recent changes to the wiki in this feed.MediaWiki 1.39.1https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Talks:_2024_Videos&diff=36573&oldid=36572Talks: 2024 Videos2024-03-28T20:08:25Z<p></p>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>'''Shaping San Francisco hosts Public Talks on a variety of topics on Wednesday nights, about 18 times a year. Our topic themes vary, but we've grouped them over time into these categories: Art & Politics, Ecology, Historical Perspectives, Literary, and Social Movements.''' </div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>'''Shaping San Francisco hosts Public Talks on a variety of topics<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">, usually </ins>on Wednesday nights, about 18 times a year. Our topic themes vary, but we've grouped them over time into these categories: Art & Politics, Ecology, Historical Perspectives, Literary, and Social Movements.''' </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Since Covid-19 disrupted our use of the 518 Valencia Street gallery for our Public Talks after March 2020, we <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">have </del>started hosting outdoor "Urban Forum: Walk and Talks" which turned out to be as or more popular than our original Public Talks series.. This page <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">has the </del>Walk & Talks from <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">2023 and if we get to hold some </del>indoor Talks <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">later this year, we'll add them here too</del>.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Since Covid-19 disrupted our use of the 518 Valencia Street gallery for our Public Talks after March 2020, we started hosting outdoor "Urban Forum: Walk and Talks" which turned out to be as or more popular than our original Public Talks series.<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">.. Many of them were recorded on video which you can see on the video pages covering 2020-2023</ins>. This page <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">may include some </ins>Walk & Talks from <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">2024 but will be primarily </ins>indoor Talks <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">hosted at 518 Valencia</ins>.</div></td></tr>
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</table>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Talks:_2024_Videos&diff=36572&oldid=0Talks: 2024 Videos2024-03-28T20:05:49Z<p>Created page with "'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Primary Source</font></font> </font>''' '''Shaping San Francisco hosts Public Talks on a variety of topics on Wednesday nights, about 18 times a year. Our topic themes vary, but we've grouped them over time into these categories: Art & Politics, Ecology, Historical Perspectives, Literary, and Social Movements.''' Since Covid-19 disrupted our use of the 518 Valencia Street gallery for our Public Talks after..."</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Primary Source</font></font> </font>'''<br />
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'''Shaping San Francisco hosts Public Talks on a variety of topics on Wednesday nights, about 18 times a year. Our topic themes vary, but we've grouped them over time into these categories: Art & Politics, Ecology, Historical Perspectives, Literary, and Social Movements.''' <br />
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Since Covid-19 disrupted our use of the 518 Valencia Street gallery for our Public Talks after March 2020, we have started hosting outdoor "Urban Forum: Walk and Talks" which turned out to be as or more popular than our original Public Talks series.. This page has the Walk & Talks from 2023 and if we get to hold some indoor Talks later this year, we'll add them here too.<br />
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<span id="v_mar26-24"><font size=4>March 26, 2024 </font size></span><br />
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<font size=4>Cultivating Food Resilience and Combating Global Challenges</font size><br />
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The French Punk Gardener Eric Lenoir presents a discussion on territorial food resilience, combating biodiversity collapse, and addressing global warming effects. <br />
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<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/eric-lenoir-punk-gardener-march-26-2024" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
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[[category:2020s]] [[category:Ecology]] [[category:Talks]] [[category:gardens]] [[category:Habitat]] [[category:Food]]</div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Category:Talks&diff=36571&oldid=36209Category:Talks2024-03-28T20:01:02Z<p></p>
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<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">:<font size=3>[[Talks: 2024 Videos#v_mar26-24|March 26, 2024: Cultivating Food Resilience and Combating Global Challenges]]</ins></div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><font size=4>Public Talks: Ecology / 2020-2023</font size></div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><font size=4>Public Talks: Ecology / 2020-2023</font size></div></td></tr>
</table>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:Shelley-Sella-and-Julie-Litwin.jpgFile:Shelley-Sella-and-Julie-Litwin.jpg2024-03-22T01:29:24Z<p><a href="/index.php?title=User:Ccarlsson" class="mw-userlink" title="User:Ccarlsson"><bdi>Ccarlsson</bdi></a> deleted page <a href="/index.php?title=File:Shelley-Sella-and-Julie-Litwin.jpg&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="File:Shelley-Sella-and-Julie-Litwin.jpg (page does not exist)">File:Shelley-Sella-and-Julie-Litwin.jpg</a> photographer's request</p>
Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Jews_Occupy_Oakland_Federal_Building_for_Gaza&diff=36570&oldid=36266Jews Occupy Oakland Federal Building for Gaza2024-03-21T23:57:15Z<p>removed photo at photographer's request</p>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Then I added, “Shutting down an ammunition plant would feel more satisfying; it’s true.”</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Then I added, “Shutting down an ammunition plant would feel more satisfying; it’s true.”</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"></del></div></td><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-added"></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"></del></div></td><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-added"></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">'''Shelley Sella (left) and Julie Litwin (right) at the Ceasefire rally at the Oakland Federal Building on November 13.'''</del></div></td><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-added"></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">''Photo courtesy of Julie Litwin''</del></div></td><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-added"></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>While the threat of riled-up police was ever present, our plan of entering the rotunda while singing fervently (but sweetly) was intended to communicate to law enforcement that we were not going to be violent, even if we were rushing through an open door to take over the space. Luckily, the police did not harm us. Some people were ready to risk arrest while others were not sure, and the action’s leaders did their best to accommodate these different needs. As the atrocities in Gaza continue, activists are rethinking the levels of risk that they are willing to take to face down war crimes.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>While the threat of riled-up police was ever present, our plan of entering the rotunda while singing fervently (but sweetly) was intended to communicate to law enforcement that we were not going to be violent, even if we were rushing through an open door to take over the space. Luckily, the police did not harm us. Some people were ready to risk arrest while others were not sure, and the action’s leaders did their best to accommodate these different needs. As the atrocities in Gaza continue, activists are rethinking the levels of risk that they are willing to take to face down war crimes.</div></td></tr>
</table>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Esprit_de_Corpse&diff=36569&oldid=36568Esprit de Corpse2024-03-17T05:40:05Z<p></p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 22:40, 16 March 2024</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The substance of fashion is in its perception. The designer sees the design refracted through the consumers' eyes. The world of fashion is also one of contradictions and illusion. Ordinary people doing ordinary things become extraordinary; advertisement and ideology become blurred. Dreams and dollars collide and scatter new fashions and forms in their wake.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The substance of fashion is in its perception. The designer sees the design refracted through the consumers' eyes. The world of fashion is also one of contradictions and illusion. Ordinary people doing ordinary things become extraordinary; advertisement and ideology become blurred. Dreams and dollars collide and scatter new fashions and forms in their wake.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>A case in point is Esprit de Corp. It is a dream: of its owners—or perhaps the label "parents" better describes Doug and Susie Tompkins—its consumers and the fashion oracles. It practices what it preaches and it never never tells the truth.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>A case in point is <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">[[ESPRIT: Sweatshops Behind the Labels|</ins>Esprit de Corp<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">]]</ins>. It is a dream: of its owners—or perhaps the label "parents" better describes Doug and Susie Tompkins—its consumers and the fashion oracles. It practices what it preaches and it never never tells the truth.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Which came first: The current marital problems of the Esprit owners or the divergent views of the company's product? This is perhaps a conundrum on the order of the egg and the chicken, for the polarity of their relation has to all accounts been part and parcel of both success and failure.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Which came first: The current marital problems of the Esprit owners or the divergent views of the company's product? This is perhaps a conundrum on the order of the egg and the chicken, for the polarity of their relation has to all accounts been part and parcel of both success and failure.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-lineno" id="mw-diff-left-l55">Line 55:</td>
<td colspan="2" class="diff-lineno">Line 55:</td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Yet Esprit is far more than bold architecture—it is a sort of corporate utopia. It boasts its own gourmet cafe, a greenhouse, a small park, even a lawn tennis court (the only one in Northern California). On its walls hangs perhaps the world's foremost collection of Amish quilts, as well as exhibits of photos from exotic lands. To keep all this impeccable and orderly, Esprit hires full-time landscapers, carpenters, even an architect or two. And moving gracefully through this stylish complex like bright colored tropical fish are the Esprit executives themselves: predominantly healthy lithe, nubile, young women, attired in bold, modern styles and chic Italian shoes (to keep them healthy, lithe and nubile Esprit employs a full-time fitness director).</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Yet Esprit is far more than bold architecture—it is a sort of corporate utopia. It boasts its own gourmet cafe, a greenhouse, a small park, even a lawn tennis court (the only one in Northern California). On its walls hangs perhaps the world's foremost collection of Amish quilts, as well as exhibits of photos from exotic lands. To keep all this impeccable and orderly, Esprit hires full-time landscapers, carpenters, even an architect or two. And moving gracefully through this stylish complex like bright colored tropical fish are the Esprit executives themselves: predominantly healthy lithe, nubile, young women, attired in bold, modern styles and chic Italian shoes (to keep them healthy, lithe and nubile Esprit employs a full-time fitness director).</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>As if to cement my first impressions, my smiling Esprit coworkers happily informed me that all the rave media reviews (Newsweek , Us Magazine, and so forth) of Esprit are true. I was told that Esprit is a progressive company that cares about its workers; that it hires diverse, "international" people; that it believes in health and youthful vigor; and that it is a darn fun place to work where employees dress and act just as they wish (so long as they're stylish). And what's more 'exciting' —Esprit is on the verge of becoming a fashion empire like Levi-Strauss. In addition to some 2,000 San Francisco employees, Esprit has set up shop in over twenty foreign countries.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>As if to cement my first impressions, my smiling Esprit coworkers happily informed me that all the rave media reviews (<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">''</ins>Newsweek, Us Magazine<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">''</ins>, and so forth) of Esprit are true. I was told that Esprit is a progressive company that cares about its workers; that it hires diverse, "international" people; that it believes in health and youthful vigor; and that it is a darn fun place to work where employees dress and act just as they wish (so long as they're stylish). And what's more 'exciting' —Esprit is on the verge of becoming a fashion empire like <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">[[LEVI's, Too?!?|</ins>Levi-Strauss<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">]]</ins>. In addition to some 2,000 San Francisco employees, Esprit has set up shop in over twenty foreign countries.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>But the more I saw, the more doubtful I became. Whisk aside the saccharine Esprit public relations and you find something quite unglamorous: an old fashioned, anti-union, anti-worker company run by a man who discriminates against the old and unattractive, who has no qualms about doing business in South Africa and Chile, and whose success is based on paying slave wages to foreign textile workers.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>But the more I saw, the more doubtful I became. Whisk aside the saccharine Esprit public relations and you find something quite unglamorous: an old fashioned, anti-union, anti-worker company run by a man who discriminates against the old and unattractive, who has no qualms about doing business in South Africa and Chile, and whose success is based on paying slave wages to foreign textile workers.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-lineno" id="mw-diff-left-l81">Line 81:</td>
<td colspan="2" class="diff-lineno">Line 81:</td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The best way to describe the brave new world at Esprit is, in fact, 'see no evil, hear no evil.' Whatever its shortcomings, Esprit continues to be inundated with resumes from credulous young grads who are attracted to the company's image. Esprit is even now planning to build a "campus-like Esprit City" for its deserving executives. And Esprit continues to present itself as a populist organization by using 'real people' in its ads (which greatly cuts down on modeling costs).</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The best way to describe the brave new world at Esprit is, in fact, 'see no evil, hear no evil.' Whatever its shortcomings, Esprit continues to be inundated with resumes from credulous young grads who are attracted to the company's image. Esprit is even now planning to build a "campus-like Esprit City" for its deserving executives. And Esprit continues to present itself as a populist organization by using 'real people' in its ads (which greatly cuts down on modeling costs).</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Such a real person is Ariel O'Donnell, a San Francisco waitress who had the good fortune of serving Doug and Susie one evening. Over the next several days she was ushered into the Esprit head quarters for a photography session and an interview. Her face appeared in Esprit ads in Mademoiselle, Glamour. Vanity Fair, Elle and Metropolitan Home. The caption in the ads reads: Ariel O'Donnell, San Francisco, California. Age 21. Waitress/Bartender. Non professional AIDS Educator. Cyclist. Art Restoration Student. Anglophile. Neo-Feminist. Clearly a model citizen of the Esprit utopia.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Such a real person is Ariel O'Donnell, a San Francisco waitress who had the good fortune of serving Doug and Susie one evening. Over the next several days she was ushered into the Esprit head quarters for a photography session and an interview. Her face appeared in Esprit ads in <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">''</ins>Mademoiselle, Glamour. Vanity Fair, Elle<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">'' </ins>and <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">''</ins>Metropolitan Home<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">''</ins>. The caption in the ads reads: Ariel O'Donnell, San Francisco, California. Age 21. Waitress/Bartender. Non professional AIDS Educator. Cyclist. Art Restoration Student. Anglophile. Neo-Feminist. Clearly a model citizen of the Esprit utopia.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>In fact, however, a 1987 issue of Image magazine reported O'Donnell's true biography like this: "Waitress, bartender and cyclist are factual descriptions. Non-professional AIDS educator and neo-feminist, O'Donnell assumes, were extrapolations from her interview remark. 'No longer can we be sexually free. We have to be safe. So if I were sleeping with someone new, I'd insist he use a condom.' An interest in art restoration became ·an art restoration student.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>In fact, however, a 1987 issue of Image magazine reported O'Donnell's true biography like this: "Waitress, bartender and cyclist are factual descriptions. Non-professional AIDS educator and neo-feminist, O'Donnell assumes, were extrapolations from her interview remark. 'No longer can we be sexually free. We have to be safe. So if I were sleeping with someone new, I'd insist he use a condom.' An interest in art restoration became ·an art restoration student.</div></td></tr>
</table>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Esprit_de_Corpse&diff=36568&oldid=0Esprit de Corpse2024-03-17T05:34:03Z<p>Created page with "'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>''' :''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in <a href="/index.php?title=Processed_World:_A_Political_History" title="Processed World: A Political History">''Processed World magazine''</a> between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.'' ''—from Pro..."</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
:''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in [[Processed World: A Political History|''Processed World magazine'']] between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.''<br />
<br />
''—from Processed World #23, published in Winter, 1988.''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Esprit-title-processedworld23.jpg]]<br />
<br />
''Introduction by Primitivo Morales''<br />
<br />
::"It's like if I see a fat, ugly girl walking down the street in an Esprit sweatshirt. I don't want that kind of advertising."<br />
:::—Doug Tompkins, co-owner of Esprit<br />
<br />
::"These are not clothes for people who sit behind desks every day and hate their jobs."<br />
:::—Tom Direnzo, Esprit outlet manager<br />
<br />
The substance of fashion is in its perception. The designer sees the design refracted through the consumers' eyes. The world of fashion is also one of contradictions and illusion. Ordinary people doing ordinary things become extraordinary; advertisement and ideology become blurred. Dreams and dollars collide and scatter new fashions and forms in their wake.<br />
<br />
A case in point is Esprit de Corp. It is a dream: of its owners—or perhaps the label "parents" better describes Doug and Susie Tompkins—its consumers and the fashion oracles. It practices what it preaches and it never never tells the truth.<br />
<br />
Which came first: The current marital problems of the Esprit owners or the divergent views of the company's product? This is perhaps a conundrum on the order of the egg and the chicken, for the polarity of their relation has to all accounts been part and parcel of both success and failure.<br />
<br />
The company is virulently anti-union, a feeling dating back to the Tompkins' creation of the Great Chinese American Sewing Co. in San Francisco. Following an ILGWU attempt at organizing, the Tompkins fired a worker who signed a union card, and then closed the plant entirely. The union won a lawsuit (after 10 years) and collected $1.25 million in back wages. Since then, Esprit has relocated its production to offshore trade zones. Apparently the workers who actually produce the clothes are excluded from the mandate of former Senior Vice President Thomas Moncho: "It's a sin here not to develop your potential."<br />
<br />
Esprit retail clerks must look elsewhere for development subsidies: the hourly wage (in 1987) at the SF store (gross sales of $20 million) is a munificent $5.00-down from $5.50! The salesworkers are sold discounted shirts but are required to wear black slacks and dark socks and shoes.<br />
<br />
The designers of image, however, fared better—the corporate headquarters boasts many amenities, as well as subsidized vacations and the use of company facilities. Perhaps the method to this discrimination is found in the effort to shape The Image, which 1s everything in this business.<br />
<br />
The image began to tarnish in late 1986, as problems emerged. Said one observer, "Suddenly Esprit ran into this incredible wall of consumer resistance." Although sales remained flat, profits fell by 80%. The expansion into retail stores foundered; overseas sales were doing well (in places like Chile) but remitted insufficient funds to the home office. There have been wholesale replacements of personnel at senior levels, the introduction of executives from other fashion companies, and a new sales force. With the prospect of reduced profits, the company showed its professional staff the same courtesies it had previously bestowed only on garment workers—a 30% layoff, wages and bonus reductions, warehouse closings, and extensive "perk" rollbacks. Employees now buy their own coffee and pay for personal phone calls. The days are gone when a manager, considered to be "negative and burnt out," would be sent on a European trip in the hope that she would conclude that she no longer belonged at Esprit.<br />
<br />
According to Susie, "Doug has always known we'd get through... he doesn't ever think things will get out of his control."<br />
<br />
And control is indeed a central concept here. Says Patagonia owner Yvon Chouinard, one of Mr. Tompkins' closest friends, "Doug is not an Evel Knievel type. Before he jumps, he knows he can do it." Behind the "carefree" and "breezy" look of the fashion, behind the amicable surroundings and benevolent attentions is an overpowering need for domination and an almost obsessive attention to detail.<br />
<br />
He once told his workers, “If ask you what books you’ve read to stimulate your brains, what adventures you’ve had… what love affair was fulfilling… like good coaches, we want answers and actions.” Of his alleged “septigon” of sexual relationships among Esprit employees, according to author Leonard Koren, “He believes that if you want to harness [sic] the entire employee, you have to engage the entire being.” Could it be the emperor of old fashioned harassment and self-indulgence dressed up in new age clothes?<br />
<br />
Management style differs as much as Image management, with Ms. Tompkins favoring a more “career” look, maturing the line with the customer. Says she, “I’m the product person and that’s what I fight for.” She professes to have outgrown the leisure lifestyle, and she is deeply concerned with AIDS and the homeless (wouldn’t it be “nice” if her concern extended to Esprit’s far-flung employees?).<br />
<br />
Mr. Tompkins continues to look to youth as the icon of fashion and sex. He prefers the vision of Esprit’s photographer Olivero Toscani, saying “This company will never have a career orientation. Will I listen to Toscani before I listen to Susie? You bet. He’s the image maker and she isn’t.”<br />
<br />
Said Corrado Federico, chief operating officer of Esprit’s flagging fortunes, “You an have all the image and panache in the world, but without substance forget it.” Substance, in the world of fashion?<br />
<br />
Come with us now into the twilight between image and reality.<br />
<br />
<hr><br />
<br />
[[Image:Desprit processedworld23.jpg]]<br />
<br />
''By Dan Herman''<br />
<br />
The chic tanned receptionist took in my surplus pea coat and weathered boots with disdainful curiosity, wondering what might possess this rustic intruder to pose as a new employee of Esprit De Corp., San Francisco's homegrown fashion capital. Indeed I felt none too sure myself. My career plans hardly included typing business letters for the trendsetter of flashy fashions for the 1980's. But as I explained to the young woman, I was a mere transient in the church of trendiness having been taken aboard as a temporary word processor.<br />
<br />
Once admitted to the inner sanctum, I saw immediately that the creator of Esprit had no love of things convention al. Esprit is the mission control of haute couture: a cathedral-like assemblage of glass walls and redwood beams; every chair made of wicker and every desk made of oak; and resting appropriately atop each, state-of-the-art computers of all shapes and sizes.<br />
<br />
Yet Esprit is far more than bold architecture—it is a sort of corporate utopia. It boasts its own gourmet cafe, a greenhouse, a small park, even a lawn tennis court (the only one in Northern California). On its walls hangs perhaps the world's foremost collection of Amish quilts, as well as exhibits of photos from exotic lands. To keep all this impeccable and orderly, Esprit hires full-time landscapers, carpenters, even an architect or two. And moving gracefully through this stylish complex like bright colored tropical fish are the Esprit executives themselves: predominantly healthy lithe, nubile, young women, attired in bold, modern styles and chic Italian shoes (to keep them healthy, lithe and nubile Esprit employs a full-time fitness director).<br />
<br />
As if to cement my first impressions, my smiling Esprit coworkers happily informed me that all the rave media reviews (Newsweek , Us Magazine, and so forth) of Esprit are true. I was told that Esprit is a progressive company that cares about its workers; that it hires diverse, "international" people; that it believes in health and youthful vigor; and that it is a darn fun place to work where employees dress and act just as they wish (so long as they're stylish). And what's more 'exciting' —Esprit is on the verge of becoming a fashion empire like Levi-Strauss. In addition to some 2,000 San Francisco employees, Esprit has set up shop in over twenty foreign countries.<br />
<br />
But the more I saw, the more doubtful I became. Whisk aside the saccharine Esprit public relations and you find something quite unglamorous: an old fashioned, anti-union, anti-worker company run by a man who discriminates against the old and unattractive, who has no qualms about doing business in South Africa and Chile, and whose success is based on paying slave wages to foreign textile workers.<br />
<br />
The spiritual and financial force behind Esprit is Doug Tompkins, the 45-year old president and owner (along with wife Susie) of the company. Babyfaced, silver-haired, trim and tanned, he seems the distillation of the Esprit ideal: fun-loving, lighthearted, yet success-oriented. In keeping with Esprit's 'fitness' consciousness, he spends only about half the year on the job. The rest of the time he jaunts around the world to climb mountains, run rapids, and consort with other high-powered fashion industry types.<br />
<br />
Yct like most everything else at Esprit, the real Doug Tompkins sharply contrasts with the image of Doug Tompkins. Doug master-minded the image of the friendly, happy Espriter, yet he remains aloof and enigmatic to his workers. Most Espriters refer to him as "Doug," but few know him well enough to say hello. He occasionally dines with upper-echelon employees, but he scarcely notices the rank and file, and he smiles only in photographs. His employees reason that the pressures of the industry keep him preoccupied. In any event, most agree that his diffidence is surely not symptomatic of low self-esteem.<br />
<br />
Despite the fact that Doug spends little time at Esprit, he controls the cosmetic details of the premises with totalitarian fervor. Doug demands final approval of any new furnishings, lighting, even small accessories like typing stands.<br />
<br />
Another cosmetic detail to which Doug pays inordinate attention is hiring policy. “When I first arrived at Esprit, I asked a coworker why everyone looked under 21. She shrugged, assuring me that many were closer to 25 (she herself was 19). Almost without exception Esprit hires the bright, cheery-faced young people you might see in Club Med ads. It is easy to imagine that Esprit manufactures its cute employees in Hong Kong right alongside its cotton v-necks and acetate skirts. The assembly line does not, however, tend to produce many blacks, Hispanics or middle-aged employees.<br />
<br />
Whatever their age or race, the company treats all workers the same: like children. High-heeled shoes are banned (ostensibly they could damage the wooden floor); workers are forbidden to bring snacks or open beverages near the work area (special mugs with hinged lids are provided); workers may not wear clothing with flashy logos other than Esprit, etc. With all the rules, Esprit could easily be mistaken for a boarding school. On the wall in the cafe hangs a framed aphorism that sums up the atmosphere of the place; "Please pick up after yourself, your mother doesn't work here."<br />
<br />
In fact, your mother couldn't get a job here—she would be too old. But more to the point, your mother wouldn't want to work at Esprit for fear of breaking her neck. It is a good thing indeed that Esprit stresses youth and fitness, because Espriters must be agile and well-coordinated to avoid slipping down the narrow stairways of polished wood. Workers say that Doug refuses to mar their treacherous beauty with traction strips (just about everyone recalls falling down the stairs at least once).<br />
<br />
Likewise, Espriters must be quick-witted enough to dodge a glass partition now and then (Doug believes in the illusion of openness and communication among workers, and thus installed glass walls. The glass also offers the advantage of exhibiting Doug's stable of colorful employees—rather like a Macy's window display). Visitors at Esprit, conspicuous by their clumsiness, often see walls materialize within inches of their faces, which is usually too late.<br />
<br />
And if invisible walls and slippery stairs aren't enough to keep Espriters agile and alert, there are the wicker chairs, which sounds harmless enough until you have sat in one for a day. Only then do you realize that Espriters must have especially strong backs, since their chairs give no support whatsoever. Esprit once supplied workers with dull, old office chairs but Doug tossed them out in favor of the cute but rickety wicker. Workers sometimes complain of chronic backaches but are promptly reminded that at Esprit image is everything.<br />
<br />
Of course, if you think about it, image is not everything. It is mere illusion. Yet Doug Tompkins and Esprit have bravely ventured beyond the realm of image and into the realm of the callous. Back in 1974, a youthful Esprit celebrated its puberty by [[Jung Sai Garment Workers Strike 1974|locking out some 125 manual workers at the company-owned Great Chinese American Sewing Company in Chinatown]]. This magnanimous step was taken because the workers wanted to join a union. After a lengthy legal battle, the National Labor Relations Board awarded the workers $1.25 million in back wages. Tompkins, however, is not a man who likes being told how to run his business. Esprit moved its manufacturing overseas mostly to the Far East where workers know their place.<br />
<br />
Doing business in repressive nations has subsequently become something of a crusade for Tompkins. Not only does Esprit conduct a thriving business in South Africa and Chile, but Tompkins has also launched the "American Free Trade Council," an organization that lobbies for the lofty principle of, what else, free trade. Despite its noble ideals, Esprit refuses to comment on any of this. Either the company does not wish to brag of good works, or its spokesmen are fearful of the provision in the company manual threatening dismissal for any negative statements made to the press.<br />
<br />
The best way to describe the brave new world at Esprit is, in fact, 'see no evil, hear no evil.' Whatever its shortcomings, Esprit continues to be inundated with resumes from credulous young grads who are attracted to the company's image. Esprit is even now planning to build a "campus-like Esprit City" for its deserving executives. And Esprit continues to present itself as a populist organization by using 'real people' in its ads (which greatly cuts down on modeling costs).<br />
<br />
Such a real person is Ariel O'Donnell, a San Francisco waitress who had the good fortune of serving Doug and Susie one evening. Over the next several days she was ushered into the Esprit head quarters for a photography session and an interview. Her face appeared in Esprit ads in Mademoiselle, Glamour. Vanity Fair, Elle and Metropolitan Home. The caption in the ads reads: Ariel O'Donnell, San Francisco, California. Age 21. Waitress/Bartender. Non professional AIDS Educator. Cyclist. Art Restoration Student. Anglophile. Neo-Feminist. Clearly a model citizen of the Esprit utopia.<br />
<br />
In fact, however, a 1987 issue of Image magazine reported O'Donnell's true biography like this: "Waitress, bartender and cyclist are factual descriptions. Non-professional AIDS educator and neo-feminist, O'Donnell assumes, were extrapolations from her interview remark. 'No longer can we be sexually free. We have to be safe. So if I were sleeping with someone new, I'd insist he use a condom.' An interest in art restoration became ·an art restoration student.<br />
<br />
From the perspective of history, all of this blurring of reality doesn't really matter—utopias don't usually last long. But Esprit is somehow above history. With its existence based on a gaseous cloud of image, Esprit has proven as resilient as superstition itself. Perhaps it's time to call an exorcist.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[category:Labor]] [[category:Tales of Toil]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:Dogpatch]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:Chinatown]] [[category:Technology]]</div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:Desprit_processedworld23.jpg&diff=36567&oldid=0File:Desprit processedworld23.jpg2024-03-17T05:33:38Z<p><a href="/index.php?title=User:Ccarlsson" class="mw-userlink" title="User:Ccarlsson"><bdi>Ccarlsson</bdi></a> uploaded <a href="/index.php?title=File:Desprit_processedworld23.jpg" title="File:Desprit processedworld23.jpg">File:Desprit processedworld23.jpg</a></p>
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<p><b>New page</b></p><div></div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=A_Teaching_Temp_Talks_Back&diff=36565&oldid=0A Teaching Temp Talks Back2024-03-17T05:13:12Z<p>Created page with "'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>''' :''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in <a href="/index.php?title=Processed_World:_A_Political_History" title="Processed World: A Political History">''Processed World magazine''</a> between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.'' ''by Sophia F..."</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
:''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in [[Processed World: A Political History|''Processed World magazine'']] between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.''<br />
<br />
''by Sophia Fury''<br />
<br />
''—from Processed World #19, published in April 1987.''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Teaching-temp-talks-back processedworld19.jpg]]<br />
<br />
I work as a part-time instructor at a San Francisco Bay Area community college. The California public university system, which includes universities, state universities and community colleges, was designed in the 1960s (when there was lots of money kicking around) to enable any young Californian who wanted one to get a college degree, regardless of economic level. I myself was a product of the education boom. Thanks to the largesse of financial aid, I armed myself (along with the rest of the hordes) with my liberal arts degree, ready to tackle the world. I'm still tethered to the public university system, but now I'm looking at it from the inside as an employee, and, along with my fellow part time instructors, watching it disintegrate.<br />
<br />
Nowhere do you see the insidious undoing of the promise of equal opportunity as in the current California community college system. With the passage of the tax cutting Proposition 13 and the election of a short-sighted, "bottom-line" governor, the California community colleges had begun their slow decline. Government funds have been reduced to a trickle over the last few years. Administrators moan and groan over the restrictions imposed on them. Classes have been cut. Tuition is raised yearly. Attendance is down. Lowincome teenagers have proven to be a completely expendable commodity in the highly competitive, high-tech job market of the 1980s, and the California system of education has remorselessly abandoned them.<br />
<br />
The university system is also abandoning the very graduates it spawned-the new crop of mainly extraneous teachers in the arts, humanities and social sciences. In the community colleges, the teaching profession is slowly but surely going the route of two-tiered polarization, just like the thousands of traditional, skilled jobs that are currently being degraded. On the top, you have the twenty-year veterans protected by the American Federation of Teachers and an antiquated tenure system in which incompetence, egotism and banality unfortunately run rampant. On the bottom, you have people like me-people who want to teach and therefore accept low-rung jobs working as temporaries in the colleges.<br />
<br />
Budget-minded administrators knew it would be impossible to disturb the sanctity of the "ivory tower," so they found a way to screw the new teachers-by simply not letting them in. In California, whenever a college-level teacher retires, he or she is increasingly replaced by a disposable, cheap, part-time teacher. More than half of the faculty at the college where I work is part-time and temporary. The ratio is even higher at other schools. The "teaching temp" is paid an hourly wage for class room time only. There is no vacation pay, holiday pay, or health or retirement bene fits. Months like December and April are total hell. While the old-timers bask "in the luxury of periodic paid weeks off, part timers get stuck with paychecks about half their normally miserable size. Nor is there compensation for classroom preparation time or "office hours," the customary time in which the teacher and student can talk one-on-one. At the end of the semester they “1et you go”—unless, that is, they keep you on for the next semester... and keep you on for the next summer... and the next... and the next.<br />
<br />
The result is that at the college level these days, half the faculty are walking zombies who are disillusioned, insecure... and tired. Part-timers spend their off-hours scrambling for other part-time jobs that can support their teaching habit. I work as a part-time word processor; an acquaintance of mine tutors high school kids. Many part-timers have families that rely on their income. It's not unusual for them to dash off after class, in a mad race to make a decent living. Most likely they jump in the car, get on the freeway, and drive 45 minutes or an hour to their next class at another school, or else they run home to grade piles of exams and papers, a grueling activity for which they don't get paid.<br />
<br />
As a consequence, part-timers hardly ever see one another. I only know two other part-timers at my school, and I see them very infrequently. The implications are obvious: we are too alienated, isolated and enervated to develop the camaraderie required for serious job organization. The AFT reps encourage us to attend their meetings, but we know they don't really represent us. We know we're going to have to organize ourselves if we want change, yet we're overcome with a paralyzing malaise, underneath which rage battles bum-out. But from day to day we mainly accept things, silently praying that enough of the old-timers will die so that we can get their jobs.<br />
<br />
It's not just the part-timers who are suffering here: it's the whole system of education that's going down the tubes. Parttimers, generally speaking, do not participate in departmental affairs. Curriculum and policy are decided by the twentyyear veterans (the full-timers) who have generally given in to their apathy. A more cynical and beaten bunch you'd be hardpressed to find. For the most part they're appalled at the degradation of education, yet they're overcome by inertia. They shrug apologetically when they see you in the halls, stopping to chat about "how the teaching's going," yet their primary goal is to reduce the amount of work they have to do themselves. Decision-making by the discouraged is a dreary business. Policy is either nondescript or totally inconsistent. Passing the buck has become elevated to an art.<br />
<br />
In addition many full-timers strike me as having completely lost touch with student needs. Wracked by insecurity at being low level professoriate, and despairing at the shrinking level of esteem society affords them, faculty members unconsciously vent frustration on their students. I've been ap palled at the disparaging words exchanged among teachers in reference to the declining abilities of the students. That the students try their best, given inadequate intellectual preparation in high school and at home, isn't much considered. Nor does it strike the full-timers that perhaps building intellectual skills in the classroom first requires recognizing the validity of ignorance and understanding some of its origins.<br />
<br />
It's funny, the community college teachers seem to think that the professors at the university level have it made because students there are "so much more intellectually motivated." But having just arrived at the community college from the university, I know better. Faculty alienation from students—and vice versa—is omnipresent in the university system. Students arrive at college less trained for critical analysis than for stifling obedience from which they understandably long to escape. Oversized classrooms and psychologically insensitive teaching methods have made instruction in the public schools a matter of power and submission. Professors at the college level interpret the younger student's indifference as '1ack of academic ability and interest" rather than a healthy response to bullshit drudgery. Professional egos get bruised ("why should I have to teach incompetents?"), and students are punished for it.<br />
<br />
The academy gets its steam from intellectual self-hatred. Professors rush to the library in their off-hours for research, to convince scrutinizing administrators and fellow academicians they are worthy of tenure. The competition is fierce, the work ethic unbounded. Professors then carry this weak-kneed egotism into the classroom, where they try to impress their poor students with what scholarly hot shit they are. Students are then blamed for not being smart enough to understand abstruse, self-obsessive, disorganized academic mumbo-jumbo. If they give up trying, as so many students have, then they're totally ignored by the education system. Many students have become "bottom-line" thinkers—the value of the intellectual effort is measured by its cost effectiveness ("what’ll this effort get me?").<br />
<br />
The whole milieu for mind expansion and personal growth has become warped beyond belief. Used to be, a professor would hang out in office hours and students would drift in to discuss intellectual issues, learning problems or personal dilemmas. A good teacher could really make a difference in somebody's life. Students often looked to a teacher for encouragement and advice and attention, stuff the student probably wasn't getting a lot of at home. But today, neither full-time nor part-time teachers have the psychic energy required to reach out and inspire. And students often seem more interested in their economic futures than in ideas or abstractions.<br />
<br />
Nevertheless, many of my students strike me as starved for positive feedback, kind words, and strong role models. They're also hungry for something interesting that they can relate to. I myself am torn between my desire to provide them sympathetic guidance and adult friendship, which is so lacking for young people these days, and my unwillingness to donate too many hours of my already busy week. I usually volunteer three or four hours to office time, and I'm glad I do it, but it's not really enough. The sad truth is, with the majority of teachers on the run, the student who is slower or less confident will probably get overlooked. Students with learning disabilities or family problems often drop out.<br />
<br />
Something pretty tragic's going on here: with a few minor exceptions, the personal relationship between student and teacher is becoming a thing of the past. Enrollments are declining as a result, creating more cutbacks, more substandard teaching, and less intellectually capable students. It's a bureaucratic vicious circle that's completely out of control, and virtually paralyzing education. And it's the kind of organizational dysfunction you see everywhere these days.<br />
<br />
The decline of education in America offends me to the core for a couple of different reasons. First of all, it represents the arrival of a new socio-economic lineup here in the richest country in the world. Today, even the myth of America as a "nation of middle-class people" is dying a rapid death. Social classes are polarized and the growing numbers of poor, without access to better opportunities, are mercilessly shut out of the system, Life in the eighties has become a survival-of-the-fittest aerobic scramble to the top, in order to join the closing ranks of the “boomoisie.” The majority is undeniably being left behind.<br />
<br />
But the decline of education has other ramifications that I find equally frightening. Critical thinking and the thirst for knowledge are becoming rare. Mass media has chipped away at intelligent reasoning by offering fluff packages as "information." People are increasingly rendered passive by their ignorance. The old myths have made a comeback. Americans today are accepting responsibility for their own "failure," instead of lashing out at the appropriate instigators who value money over lives. We're at a dangerous crossroads. It'd be easy at this point to give in to fear or despair. I sense that tendency in me on the one hand—but I'm also too fucking angry to give up.<br />
<br />
[[category:Labor]] [[category:Tales of Toil]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:Schools]] [[category:South Bay and Peninsula]] [[category:Excelsior]] [[category:Women]]</div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:Teaching-temp-talks-back_processedworld19.jpg&diff=36564&oldid=0File:Teaching-temp-talks-back processedworld19.jpg2024-03-17T05:09:27Z<p><a href="/index.php?title=User:Ccarlsson" class="mw-userlink" title="User:Ccarlsson"><bdi>Ccarlsson</bdi></a> uploaded <a href="/index.php?title=File:Teaching-temp-talks-back_processedworld19.jpg" title="File:Teaching-temp-talks-back processedworld19.jpg">File:Teaching-temp-talks-back processedworld19.jpg</a></p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div></div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Help,_I%27m_Doing_Hard_Time_in_the_Federal_(or_state_or_county_or_city)_Bureaucracy&diff=36563&oldid=0Help, I'm Doing Hard Time in the Federal (or state or county or city) Bureaucracy2024-03-17T05:06:54Z<p>Created page with "'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>''' :''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in <a href="/index.php?title=Processed_World:_A_Political_History" title="Processed World: A Political History">''Processed World magazine''</a> between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.'' ''by THEMIS,..."</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
:''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in [[Processed World: A Political History|''Processed World magazine'']] between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.''<br />
<br />
''by THEMIS, that complaining bitch over on the fifth floor''<br />
<br />
''—from Processed World #5, published in Summer, 1982.''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Tales-of-toil-pw05.jpg]]<br />
<br />
George Orwell MUST have worked for the government at one time. How else could he have known so much about doublethink, or the fact that 2 + 2 = 4 when you're talking about engineering but 5 when you're talking about the budget.<br />
<br />
We were sitting around the bar talking after (during?) working hours, talking about a promotional exam we had to take. Jerry (all names are naturally fictitious) said how part of the exam was to see if you could write logical, terse, to-the-point para graphs. I said that they should have selected people who could write paragraphs that were as ambiguous as possible, so that when policy changed with changes in administrations. no one would be embarrassed.<br />
<br />
Susie added that she would have picked people who could mention as many supervisors' prejudices as possible, without offending any of them. This is one organization where they pay good money (taxpayers' money, remember?) to send you to school to learn how to write, and then shitcan your letters and documents because they're too honest. "That isn't the way we do things. So-and-so doesn't like that word."<br />
<br />
I could handle it if it was the ordinary business bullshit. What gets to me though is that this is supposed to be an agency that has some responsibility toward environmental protection, and although they glorify it mightily in all their statements of policy, the truth of the matter is that no one could give less of a fuck about the environment, because it just gets in ,the way of the REAL work of the agency, which is building dams or roads, or dislocating Indian tribes, or tearing down neighborhoods, or whatever. So part of my job is to MAKE IT APPEAR that the agency is doing everything humanly possible to comply with our many state, county, and federal environmental regulations, while in ACTUALITY I have to minimize or downright quash or at best find a nice convenient loophole to get around any real environmental problems and hope they don't hit the light of day.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Joan-notes-pw05.jpg]]<br />
<br />
It isn't just my agency that does this. They all do it. I know this because I have to work with them all. But that's just part of it. Part of it is the way you lose your job skills through over-specialization, so that after a couple of years you're as useless on the job market as a dodo bird. Part of it is the crummy and demoralizing work atmosphere. Part of it is being as a "professional" and finding out a computer program could probably do your job... with a good deal less anguish to all concerned. And part of it is the total illogicality of the red tape itself, which somehow transcends mere human pettiness, and becomes something awesome and immovable, like a glacier.<br />
<br />
I once figured out that to do my job according to the book, following all the procedures, would take 32 working days per item. Then I figured out how many were allowed me by all the time limits in the system. 15 working days. So I HAVE to do my job wrong in order to follow the rules. Theoretically, what I'm doing should take thought, analysis, independent judgment, and professional standards. But I don't HAVE THE TIME. If you have 15 days to do a 32 day-job, you don't have time to think. You have time to use buzzwords and recycled phrases from other documents. Then this stuff gets unloaded on the unfortunate public and they complain about gobbledygook. No wonder!<br />
<br />
It took me about a year to figure out why government has the lousiest reputation in the world. Then I realized it's because they're denied even the elemental satisfaction of doing a good job. The politics change too fast. They change the rules in the middle of the project. Things you write, work on for months, disappear and you never see them again. Original thought is about as welcome as a nun in a whorehouse. So after a while you drop out spiritually. You have to keep going there to pay the rent and feed the kids. But nothing in the world can induce you to feel involved, or God forbid, responsible.<br />
<br />
Needless to say, this is not very good for you.<br />
<br />
That's why I spend as much of my working time as possible drunk or stoned. When you're drunk, you don't feel. When you're stoned, you at least have a handle on what's going on. You can watch your mind go CRUNCH as you step in from the sunny streets into the dull, stale smelling building. You can see every body avoiding eye contact. You see how damn programmed everybody is, sitting at their desks, trying to or pretending to work. Not thinking. Daydreaming about the next 3-day weekend. Thinking about that glorious day when they'll be too old to work.<br />
<br />
You watch people deteriorate. Like in any other institution, the longer you stay there, the crazier you get. The 25-year-olds look at each other with terror in their eyes, as the possibility occurs to them that they may be there the rest of their lives. Just like a prison. Or an insane asylum. Except we're respectable. We're government workers.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Collage processedworld05.jpg]]<br />
<br />
[[category:Labor]] [[category:Tales of Toil]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:Civic Center]] [[category:downtown]]</div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:Collage_processedworld05.jpg&diff=36562&oldid=0File:Collage processedworld05.jpg2024-03-17T05:05:49Z<p><a href="/index.php?title=User:Ccarlsson" class="mw-userlink" title="User:Ccarlsson"><bdi>Ccarlsson</bdi></a> uploaded <a href="/index.php?title=File:Collage_processedworld05.jpg" title="File:Collage processedworld05.jpg">File:Collage processedworld05.jpg</a></p>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>''by James Tracy''</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>''by James Tracy''</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>''<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">—from </del>Processed World #2.005, published in Winter, 2005.''</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>''<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">—originally published in [[</ins>Processed World<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">: A Political History|''Processed World'']] </ins>#2.005, published in Winter, 2005.''</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>[[Image:JSmooke03-69no27.jpg|right]]</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>[[Image:JSmooke03-69no27.jpg|right]]</div></td></tr>
</table>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=45_Westpoint:_A_World_of_Possibilities&diff=36557&oldid=045 Westpoint: A World of Possibilities2024-03-12T19:29:57Z<p>Created page with "'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>''' :''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in <a href="/index.php?title=Processed_World:_A_Political_History" title="Processed World: A Political History">''Processed World magazine''</a> between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.'' ''by James Tr..."</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
:''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in [[Processed World: A Political History|''Processed World magazine'']] between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.''<br />
<br />
''by James Tracy''<br />
<br />
''—from Processed World #2.005, published in Winter, 2005.''<br />
<br />
[[Image:JSmooke03-69no27.jpg|right]]<br />
<br />
''Photo: Joseph Smooke''<br />
<br />
Thanksgiving Morning 2003. At the intersection of 30th and Mission an odd assortment of humanity gathered—even by San Franciscan standards. Homeless families, most with strollers in tow, cautiously mingled with trade union activists. College students tried out their Spanish on Latino day laborers. Street punks, checked out the non-profit workers with a sneer that acknowledged “I’ll probably be you one day.” The crowd of about 140 had diversity written all over it—elderly and young, and enough ethnicity to make even the most jaded observer speak about Rainbow Coalitions as if the idea was just invented five minutes ago.<br />
<br />
Protest signs handed out casually read “Let Us In!” below a cartoon of a global village angry mob. The mood remained mellow, maybe strangely so for a group of people who, in an hour’s time would be participating in an illegal takeover of vacant housing; one unit among thousands owned by the San Francisco Housing Authority—the often troubled agency that is charged with providing homes for the city’s most impoverished.<br />
<br />
Announcements are made: the bus chartered to bring the protesters to the secret takeover site is late, but will arrive shortly. The driver of the bus had been reached by cell phone and reported a hangover from which he’d just woken up. He would be stopping for a strong cup of coffee. Even on Thanksgiving Day, there was more than one protest going on in San Francisco. A couple of hundred feet away, United Food and Commercial Workers members picketed Safeway in the ongoing battle over the company’s attempts to do away with healthcare benefits. A delegation went over to wish the unionists well as one nervous housing protester tried to conceal the Safeway logo on her fresh cup of coffee.<br />
<br />
The press showed up early to search for a spokesperson, played today by Carrie Goodspeed, a twenty-four-year-old community organizer with Family Rights and Dignity (FRD), part of the Coalition On Homelessness. She’s nervous at first but then relaxes. “The Authority owns over one thousand units of vacant housing that could be used to house families. We will risk arrest to make this point.”<br />
<br />
“Is this the right thing to do?” blurted one reporter. There’s silence and an expression on Godspeed’s face of someone with second thoughts. Suddenly that expression disappears.<br />
<br />
“Definitely. It’s the right thing to do.”<br />
<br />
TAKEOVER! The caravan consisting of five autos, some bikes and the long-awaited bus arrived at the tip of the West Point Housing Development. Banners in the windows proclaim: “HOMES NOT JAILS FOR HOMELESS FAMILIES,” and “THESE UNITS SIT VACANT WHILE FAMILIES SLEEP ON THE STREETS.” The dwelling was opened up the night before by a team of members of FRD, Homes Not Jails (HNJ), and other assorted individuals. Some were there to pressure the SFHA into rehabilitating the vacant units and have a very politically correct Thanksgiving. Homeless people added another thoroughly practical aspect: “If I get busted, I sleep inside. If I don’t, I sleep inside,” one person remarked.<br />
<br />
A speakout commenced in front of the building. Camila Watson, a resident of the development took the microphone. Watson is one of the reasons this action landed here—due to her outreach most of the neighbors are reasonably supportive.<br />
<br />
When Watson was homeless, she turned for help to [[The Race Card|Bianca Henry]] of FRD, one of the women occupying the apartment. Watson’s name had “disappeared” from the SFHA’s waiting list. Extremely aggressive advocacy on Henry’s part, coupled with a clever media event the previous year, had helped the agency to “find” Watson and offer her a place to live.<br />
<br />
“I used to come by here and think ‘Why can’t I live in apartment 41, or 45, or 47. Give me paint and a hammer and I’ll fix it up.” With housing, other good things have come to pass. Watson now holds down a job, and is doing well at City College. The experience left her determined to fight for those still stuck in the shelter system.<br />
<br />
[[Image:JSmooke03-69-no25.jpg]]<br />
<br />
''Photo: Joseph Smooke''<br />
<br />
“They say these units are vacant because people don’t want to live here. I haven’t met a mother yet that wouldn’t move here over the streets and the shelter.”<br />
<br />
Another woman told a story of how her homelessness began the day the government demolished the public housing development she lived in, and reneged on promises for replacement housing for all tenants. One resident remarked how she feared taking homeless family members into her home, since her contract with the SFHA made that act of compassion an evictable offense. A young poet named Puff spoke in a style that was equal parts poetry slam, evangelical and comical. By the end of her microphone time she managed to connect homelessness, minimum-wage work, consumerism, police abuse, war and genocide. From someone with less passion and less street experience, it might have been indulgent. From Puff, it was a clear-eyed ghetto manifesto, and a call to arms.<br />
<br />
The San Francisco Labor Chorus rallied the group in rousing renditions of post-revolutionary holiday favorites such as “Budget La-La-Land,” stretched to fit “Winter Wonderland,” and “Share the Dough,” set to the tune of “Let It Snow”. At first the very white group of trade unionists seemed a little out of place in the projects.<br />
<br />
As many neighbors stopped by, a trio of young men came down the hill.<br />
<br />
“Is that where the homeless people are going to live?” the tallest one asked.<br />
<br />
“We hope so!” yelled Bianca Henry from the second floor window.<br />
<br />
“How many rooms?”<br />
<br />
“Three!” Henry replied.<br />
<br />
The youngest looking of the three flashed a smile gleeming with gold caps “Happy Thanksgiving, yo!” as the trio continued down the hill.<br />
<br />
'''The San Francisco Housing Authority and Hope VI'''<br />
<br />
Life as San Francisco’s largest landlord and last line of defense against homelessness has never been easy. [[San Francisco Housing Authority 1937-1965: The Early Decades|Born in 1940, the agency]] initially housed returning servicemen and their families. Over the years, it has grown to operate over 6,575 units of housing and administer another 10,000 units in conjunction with other providers.<br />
<br />
In the 1980s then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp announced the creation of the Housing Opportunities For People Everywhere (HOPE) program that would tear down public housing and rebuild it. HOPE was intended to get the feds out of housing provision by transferring ownership to resident cooperatives. President Clinton took most of the hope out of the HOPE program (now called HOPE VI) when requirements for resident participation, return, and unit replacement were stricken from the federal record.<br />
<br />
In San Francisco the HOPE VI program produced very mixed results. When it worked, it worked because tenant organizations forced it to work. Some developments lost units and the agency’s own numbers show that not every former tenant made it back to their former neighborhood. Many residents, some who lived through the “urban removal,” of the 1960s saw the demolition as one more attempt to kick Blacks out of town. It was widely believed that then Executive Director Ronnie Davis gave free reign to his staff to evict outspoken tenants, forge documents, and take bribes. Davis was never convicted of any wrongdoing while in San Francisco, but was convicted of embezzling from his former job—the Cayahuga Housing Authority in Cleveland, Ohio.<br />
<br />
Today, the SFHA is led by Gregg Fortner, who is regarded by most as honest, if a bit inaccessible. Continued federal funding cuts have kept vacated units vacant—about 905 vacant units or 16%, total. To meet the deficit in operating costs, the agency requested proposals from both for-profit and nonprofit developers to redevelop eighteen properties—again raising the specter of displacement—dubbed “The Plan” by activists and residents.<br />
<br />
'''This Town is Headed for a Ghost Town?'''<br />
<br />
Ted Gullicksen, a co-founder of HNJ, knows how to use a bullhorn. Speaking from the broken window he invites the press and anyone else to check out the apartment. “It won’t take thousands of dollars to fix it up.”<br />
<br />
Gullicksen, a working-class Bostonian helped to create HNJ to add a direct action complement to the San Francisco Tenants Union, which he directs. HNJ helps several “survival squats” (buildings seized for shelter not protest) in San Francisco. 45 Westpoint is a “political squat” used to protest the housing crisis, popularize demands, and generally raise a ruckus.<br />
<br />
This ruckus is usually raised on major holidays, especially the very cold ones. San Francisco’s press is usually quick to broadcast sensationalistic stories about homeless people using drugs or having mental health episodes in public places. Such “journalism” has played a major role in mustering public support for punitive anti-homeless legislation.<br />
<br />
On takeover days, the camera is forced to observe pictures of homeless people at their most powerful, not at their most vulnerable. Images of poor people and their allies repairing broken apartments replace one-dimensional images of addiction. HNJ specializes in the strategic use of a slow news day. Throughout the day facts, figures and theories on homelessness are thrown about, yet one message remains constant: “Nothing about us, without us.”<br />
<br />
What about the former residents of 45 Westpoint? What happened to them and who were they? The house holds a few clues. Stickers on the upstairs bedroom door read “Audrina loves Biz.” Judging from the demographic of the development, they were likely Black or Samoan. Large plastic “Little Tykes” toys left behind suggest a child, probably two. A sewing machine, a conch shell and a broken entertainment center might be what’s left of a ruined family, but who knows?<br />
<br />
What caused their exit? Maybe the family left in response to the gang turf wars that periodically erupt on the hill. They may have been recipients of the federal “One Strike Eviction,” Clinton’s Orwellian gift to public housing residents. “One Strike” passed in 1996, allowing eviction on hearsay for crimes committed by an acquaintance. Grandparents have been evicted for alleged crimes of grandchildren. A woman in Texas lost her home after calling the police to end a domestic violence incident in her unit.<br />
<br />
'''Beyond “Services”'''<br />
<br />
Bianca Henry surveys the Thanksgiving rebellion with pride, a grin playing at her lips. This is the first time she has ever committed an act of non-violent direct action. For someone who was raised in the projects and knows first-hand the over-reaching arm of the law, the fact that she is purposely risking arrest for the cause is a small, but dramatic personal revolution.<br />
<br />
Henry’s pride in her work as an organizer is evident throughout. The takeover is part of an ongoing campaign to force the SFHA to house and respect families. Together with other parents, she has done one of the hardest things a community organizer can do: inspire poor people to move beyond “Case Management,” and “Services,” and take things to the next level: collective action, risky, scary, but potentially wonderful.<br />
<br />
By design, the action is separated into two zones: the Arrest Zone (inside the house) and the Safe Zone (on the grass outside). It assumes a social contract with the police to respect Arrest and Safe zones. Henry knows first-hand that even minor brushes with the law can bring the wrath of the C.P.S., I.N.S., P.O.s and PDs and various other Big Brother-like institutions adept at tearing families apart.<br />
<br />
Henry knows that if you want to get anything done, you can’t just wait for the next election. She might have been a Panther in the 1960s but there’s a pragmatic streak in her as well. She can effortlessly rattle off obscure public policy points and arcane aspects of the Code of Federal Regulations as they pertain to housing poor people.<br />
<br />
Starr Smith is Bianca’s co-organizer. A single mom who came to work with FRD when she was still homeless, she’s on the outside fielding questions and dealing with the dozens of unforeseen snafus cropping up by the minute. They make an interesting team. Henry grew up in the thick of gangs and her neighborhood was devastated by the crack cocaine industry. She exemplifies the Tupac generation of young people who grew up in the era where every reform won during previous upheavals was being stripped away. Smith came of age following the Grateful Dead in the final days of Jerry Garcia. Both faced down long-prison sentences and have built the FRD’s housing campaign from scratch. In many ways the eclectic crowd is a reflection of this partnership.<br />
<br />
Later in the afternoon one neighbor the group forgot to outreach to is steaming pissed—the President of the Tenants Association. She confers with Jim Williams, Head of Security of the SFHA. He in turn, asks Jennifer Freidenbach of the Coalition On Homelessness, to please call the agency when the protest is over.<br />
<br />
“We’re not leaving, we’re moving more people in,” Freidenbach answers.<br />
<br />
“Yeah right.” Williams retorted.<br />
<br />
“Really.”<br />
<br />
“Well…Why don’t we have our legal people call yours?”<br />
<br />
Within the next 24 hours, the San Francisco Police Department had indeed cleared 45 Westpoint and the other units that had been reclaimed. This “Autonomous Zone” was finished, but the world of possibilities opened through good old fashioned mutual aid and a crowbar remained.<br />
<br />
'''Rebuilding the Left One Block at a Time'''<br />
<br />
<blockquote>''“More often than not, reliance on voting in periodic elections has sidetracked them from the more powerful weapons of direct action. By engaging in the continuous struggle for justice and human welfare, workers will gain a realistic political education and cast the only ballot worth casting—the daily ballot for freedom for all.”''<br />
<br />
—Bayard Rustin, ''New South…Old Politics''</blockquote><br />
<br />
After the [[Seeing the Elephant in Seattle|1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle]], Elizabeth Betita Martinez, wrote an influential essay entitled “Where Was the Color in Seattle?” Unfortunately, one never needs to ask that question about prisons, slum housing, and homeless shelters. These are some of the most integrated institutions in the United States. Nevertheless, the loosely dubbed “Global Justice Movement” and those actually at the receiving end of global injustice are usually separated by vast cultural, political, and economic spaces.<br />
<br />
For a day or so in San Francisco, this wasn’t the case.<br />
<br />
In September 2003, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that over 34 million people lived in poverty inside the United States. This statistic should have annihilated propaganda that the cause of poverty is personal pathology. In a more honest world, factors such as a shift towards a low-wage service sector, welfare reform and out-of-control military spending would replace such distractions as marital status and personality in discussions of homelessness.<br />
<br />
It could be a very good time for economic justice organizing in this country. Yet, as elections near, actions such as housing takeovers remain isolated by the liberal Left—marginalized by the urgency to “Elect Anyone But Bush.”<br />
<br />
The women of Family Rights and Dignity and the squatters of Homes Not Jails aren’t waiting for the next election. They embody a spirit of past movements, such as the Unemployed Workers’ of the 1930s, which is rooted in the everyday needs of community members. They build direct democracy with crowbars as their ballots and vacant housing as their ballot boxes. Election strategies might occasionally produce short-term good—but survival politics outside of the formal legislative system are better at producing organizers from the ground-up. That builds movements without illusions—ready to rumble no matter a Bush or Kerry victory.<br />
<br />
As an action initiated mostly by working-class women of color it also shows alliances can be built between America’s different dissident factions. It begins with supporting self-organized actions such as this and respecting the fact the communities who find themselves under the boot of poverty need people to have their back—not to act as spokespeople for their cause. Despite gentrification spasms, the city functions in a way similar to factories of old: a place where people of disparate backgrounds can meet, find common grievances and hopefully common collective action.<br />
<br />
P.S. 45 Westpoint was made available to homeless families in late February 2004. <br />
<br />
[[category:Housing]] [[category:Bayview/Hunter's Point]] [[category:2000s]] [[category:African-American]] [[category:Racism]] [[category:Homeless]] [[category:Gentrification]]</div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:JSmooke03-69-no25.jpg&diff=36556&oldid=0File:JSmooke03-69-no25.jpg2024-03-12T19:23:16Z<p><a href="/index.php?title=User:Ccarlsson" class="mw-userlink" title="User:Ccarlsson"><bdi>Ccarlsson</bdi></a> uploaded <a href="/index.php?title=File:JSmooke03-69-no25.jpg" title="File:JSmooke03-69-no25.jpg">File:JSmooke03-69-no25.jpg</a></p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div></div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:JSmooke03-69no27.jpg&diff=36555&oldid=0File:JSmooke03-69no27.jpg2024-03-12T19:20:50Z<p><a href="/index.php?title=User:Ccarlsson" class="mw-userlink" title="User:Ccarlsson"><bdi>Ccarlsson</bdi></a> uploaded <a href="/index.php?title=File:JSmooke03-69no27.jpg" title="File:JSmooke03-69no27.jpg">File:JSmooke03-69no27.jpg</a></p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div></div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Del_Monte_Complaints&diff=36554&oldid=35010Del Monte Complaints2024-03-07T21:09:26Z<p>added to Tales of Toil category</p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 14:09, 7 March 2024</td>
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</table>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Ambivalent_Memories_of_Virtual_Community&diff=36553&oldid=31842Ambivalent Memories of Virtual Community2024-03-06T07:13:02Z<p></p>
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</table>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=I_Live_in_the_Past:_The_Rent_is_Cheaper!&diff=36552&oldid=36551I Live in the Past: The Rent is Cheaper!2024-03-06T07:03:26Z<p></p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 00:03, 6 March 2024</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>:''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in [[Processed World: A Political History|''Processed World magazine'']] between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.''</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>:''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in [[Processed World: A Political History|''Processed World magazine'']] between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.''</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"></del></div></td><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-added"></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>''by Zoe Noe''</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>''by Zoe Noe''</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>I used to think sometimes, after visiting a place like New York, how thankful I was to have wound up in San Francisco. New York seemed the kind of place you’d get buried alive if you weren’t careful and didn’t have a plan, but San Francisco afforded me the chance to spend years basically bumbling around without a clue about what I might <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">eventual- ly </del>want to do. I had a poignant moment last summer when we needed to fill a room for a couple months. No friends were expressing interest, so we posted an ad on <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">craigslist</del>.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>I used to think sometimes, after visiting a place like New York, how thankful I was to have wound up in San Francisco. New York seemed the kind of place you’d get buried alive if you weren’t careful and didn’t have a plan, but San Francisco afforded me the chance to spend years basically bumbling around without a clue about what I might <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">eventually </ins>want to do. I had a poignant moment last summer when we needed to fill a room for a couple months. No friends were expressing interest, so we posted an ad on <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Craigslist</ins>.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>I was unprepared for the response. The phone ringing off the hook. Hundreds of emails. The answering machine tape filled up within the hour. I got home from work to find that my roommate had told everyone who called to just come on over that evening between 8 and 10 and take a look at the room.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>I was unprepared for the response. The phone ringing off the hook. Hundreds of emails. The answering machine tape filled up within the hour. I got home from work to find that my roommate had told everyone who called to just come on over that evening between 8 and 10 and take a look at the room.</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>I was anything but focused in those days. In my first couple of years here, I think I had close to 30 jobs; some lasting only a matter of hours, others dragging on for several months. (See “Lose Jobs Now, Ask Me How!”) One week it might be conducting telephone surveys, another substitute teaching at a day program for retarded adults. (More like glorified babysitting; it didn’t seem to matter that I lacked formal qualification. I showed them a few “letters of recommendation” that I’d instructed a classroom of 3rd graders to write for me on April Fool’s Day at a Catholic school in the Mission District.)</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>I was anything but focused in those days. In my first couple of years here, I think I had close to 30 jobs; some lasting only a matter of hours, others dragging on for several months. (See <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">[[Lose Jobs Now! Ask Me How!|</ins>“Lose Jobs Now, Ask Me How!”<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">]]</ins>) One week it might be conducting telephone surveys, another substitute teaching at a day program for retarded adults. (More like glorified babysitting; it didn’t seem to matter that I lacked formal qualification. I showed them a few “letters of recommendation” that I’d instructed a classroom of 3rd graders to write for me on April Fool’s Day at a Catholic school in the Mission District.)</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Job security was not a concept I could relate to. But then my rent was only $100 a month for a tiny converted laundry room with a loft in the back of a huge, rambling flat on Haight St. As many as 12 people lived there, all sharing the same phone line with no answering machine, amazingly enough. Hardly anyone had a regular job, quite a few were unemployed, and some dealt drugs to get by * (*Folks still deal drugs to get by, although the price of pot has kept pace with San Francisco rents!)</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Job security was not a concept I could relate to. But then my rent was only $100 a month for a tiny converted laundry room with a loft in the back of a huge, rambling flat on Haight St. As many as 12 people lived there, all sharing the same phone line with no answering machine, amazingly enough. Hardly anyone had a regular job, quite a few were unemployed, and some dealt drugs to get by * (*Folks still deal drugs to get by, although the price of pot has kept pace with San Francisco rents!)</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>[[category:Housing]] [[category:Tales of Toil]] [[category:<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">1990s</del>]] [[category:2000s]] [[category:Haight-Ashbury]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:Technology]] [[category:Media]]</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>[[category:Housing]] [[category:Tales of Toil]] [[category:<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">1980s</ins>]] [[category:2000s]] <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"> </ins>[[category:Haight-Ashbury]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:Technology]] [[category:Media]]</div></td></tr>
</table>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=I_Live_in_the_Past:_The_Rent_is_Cheaper!&diff=36551&oldid=0I Live in the Past: The Rent is Cheaper!2024-03-06T07:00:32Z<p>Created page with "'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>''' :''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in <a href="/index.php?title=Processed_World:_A_Political_History" title="Processed World: A Political History">''Processed World magazine''</a> between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.'' ''by Zoe Noe..."</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
:''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in [[Processed World: A Political History|''Processed World magazine'']] between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.''<br />
<br />
<br />
''by Zoe Noe''<br />
<br />
''—from Processed World #2.001, published in Summer, 2001.''<br />
<br />
I used to think sometimes, after visiting a place like New York, how thankful I was to have wound up in San Francisco. New York seemed the kind of place you’d get buried alive if you weren’t careful and didn’t have a plan, but San Francisco afforded me the chance to spend years basically bumbling around without a clue about what I might eventual- ly want to do. I had a poignant moment last summer when we needed to fill a room for a couple months. No friends were expressing interest, so we posted an ad on craigslist.<br />
<br />
I was unprepared for the response. The phone ringing off the hook. Hundreds of emails. The answering machine tape filled up within the hour. I got home from work to find that my roommate had told everyone who called to just come on over that evening between 8 and 10 and take a look at the room.<br />
<br />
During our insane impromptu open house, with my attention flitting from one desperate seeker to another (and some who were just taking in the scene, I got into a conversation with a 22-year-old, who had just moved out here from St. Louis. He reminded me a lot of me when I first arrived. I was 22, from the Midwest: gentle, soft-spoken, full of hope and curiosity. The biggest difference was that he came with $4,000 saved up, Internet job contacts arranged ahead of time; yet he had been couch-surfing for months in San Mateo, chasing after that elusive place in the city. I couldn’t help thinking how different it was for me when I came here in 1981, fresh off a Greyhound with $300 in my pocket.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Glenn w greyhound.png|400px|right]]<br />
<br />
I was anything but focused in those days. In my first couple of years here, I think I had close to 30 jobs; some lasting only a matter of hours, others dragging on for several months. (See “Lose Jobs Now, Ask Me How!”) One week it might be conducting telephone surveys, another substitute teaching at a day program for retarded adults. (More like glorified babysitting; it didn’t seem to matter that I lacked formal qualification. I showed them a few “letters of recommendation” that I’d instructed a classroom of 3rd graders to write for me on April Fool’s Day at a Catholic school in the Mission District.)<br />
<br />
Job security was not a concept I could relate to. But then my rent was only $100 a month for a tiny converted laundry room with a loft in the back of a huge, rambling flat on Haight St. As many as 12 people lived there, all sharing the same phone line with no answering machine, amazingly enough. Hardly anyone had a regular job, quite a few were unemployed, and some dealt drugs to get by * (*Folks still deal drugs to get by, although the price of pot has kept pace with San Francisco rents!)<br />
<br />
If you were broke it was easy to scam on MUNI. (We had a complete set of the color-coded transfers they were using at the time—we’d find out what transfer they were using that day, then consult our collection, or paste like-colored transfers together to make them longer. Some months we’d be styling with color xeroxed fast passes. I went two whole years once without paying fare!)<br />
<br />
[[Image:Red e or not.png|375px|left]]<br />
<br />
Food stamps were easier to get then, and there were numerous soup kitchens, plus the fun free feast on Saturdays at the [[Kaliflower and the Dream Continues|KaliFlower Kollective]] that was both soup kitchen and cabaret—very theatrical! Failing that, one of the roommates would often show up with one of those huge plastic bags filled with day-old bagels.<br />
<br />
Being so sketchily employed meant having time to spare. I could put in lots of time on ''Processed World'', and do the street theatre/magazine hawking every Friday lunchtime in the Financial District. There was time to indulge flights of whim—take a Super-8 film class at City College, sew a rug out of carpet samples, or just walk in the park.<br />
<br />
There is still the occasional sweet deal that manages to slip through the cracks in the real estate market (though usually it means you need to have lived here a long time to even know about it, and then you can never move again). About six years ago I was fortunate to move into a revolving house- hold which had held the same lease since the mid 1980s. The landlord was a cranky old Irishman who took care of his body like he took care of his buildings, which is to say largely by neglect.<br />
<br />
The Dept. of Inspections kept trying to nail him, but he always ignored them or told them to fuck off. I found an inspection report from 1985 urging replacement of the back stairs, which still hadn’t been done when he passed away in 2000 (at the height of the dot-com juggernaut on the city’s neighborhoods). Oh, Fix—he patched them up numerous times; some oddly-spaced planks pounded in here, a little All there.<br />
<br />
He would usually shuffle through with a kind word, and he kept the rent cheap. I’m not even sure if he knew just what market rents were, as his were about 10 years behind the times, and most years he would forget to years of being deflected, and started tightening the screws. After he ignored another hearing, they seized his three houses and put them in court-appointed receivership. I think that’s what killed him. His health, which never had been robust in the time that we knew him, suddenly declined precipitously. Cancer spread like wildfire, and he was dead within three weeks. The house has been in a strange state of limbo since then— which has been advantageous for us despite the lingering uncertainty. Our rent has stayed the same. We pay it to the receiver, who has ostensibly used it to fund the repairs that Mike had been so delinquent on. We’ve been satisfied to see the repairs drag on and on, since the building can’t really go on the open market until it’s out of receivership, and the San Francisco housing market has cooled considerably.<br />
<br />
Now it seems that raise it. Legends abounded about his generosity. When San Francisco has become much more like New York, and a young person arriving today our friend Tyrrell first went to meet him and see the apartment, she showed up in her peasant dress and lively Irish smile, and he was so charmed that he rented the place to her and told this pair of uptight yuppies to beat it. Or another time, later, when a bunch of extra folks were crashing at the apartment, Tyrrell got nervous that he might find out how many people were staying at the flat. He did find out—and he actually commended her for taking in all these extra people and putting a roof over their heads—and even gave her back $100 of the rent!<br />
<br />
The Dept. of Inspections finally caught up with him after hardly has the same options I did; to land in San Francisco with only $300 and know everything will be alright. A luxury of unstructured time that San Francisco used to be so generous in giving. (It’s weird to think of it as a luxury!) The San Francisco I’m eulogizing hasn’t completely disappeared, but you have to be damn lucky to find it.<br />
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<br />
[[category:Housing]] [[category:Tales of Toil]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:2000s]] [[category:Haight-Ashbury]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:Technology]] [[category:Media]]</div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:Red_e_or_not.png&diff=36550&oldid=0File:Red e or not.png2024-03-06T06:59:13Z<p><a href="/index.php?title=User:Ccarlsson" class="mw-userlink" title="User:Ccarlsson"><bdi>Ccarlsson</bdi></a> uploaded <a href="/index.php?title=File:Red_e_or_not.png" title="File:Red e or not.png">File:Red e or not.png</a></p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div></div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:Glenn_w_greyhound.png&diff=36549&oldid=0File:Glenn w greyhound.png2024-03-06T06:55:14Z<p><a href="/index.php?title=User:Ccarlsson" class="mw-userlink" title="User:Ccarlsson"><bdi>Ccarlsson</bdi></a> uploaded <a href="/index.php?title=File:Glenn_w_greyhound.png" title="File:Glenn w greyhound.png">File:Glenn w greyhound.png</a></p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div></div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=My_Life_in_the_Search_Engine&diff=36548&oldid=0My Life in the Search Engine2024-03-06T06:38:20Z<p>Created page with "'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>''' :''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in <a href="/index.php?title=Processed_World:_A_Political_History" title="Processed World: A Political History">''Processed World magazine''</a> between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.'' ''by Netizen..."</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
:''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in [[Processed World: A Political History|''Processed World magazine'']] between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.''<br />
<br />
<br />
''by Netizen X''<br />
<br />
''—from Processed World #2.001, published in Summer, 2001.''<br />
<br />
We all came to the Internet because it was cool. Like moths to a bug lamp we swarmed around the exciting new technology, which allowed any average schmuck to get up and say his thing online. All you had to learn was some basic HTML and get a few pictures up there and then you could rant about anything you wanted to go off on. It was a level playing field and an open forum.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Pw2001 Minna-Eloranta Life in Search Engine-2.jpg|350px|right]]<br />
<br />
''Graphic: Minna Eloranta''<br />
<br />
I moved to San Francisco to find out what multimedia was and get into it. Lots of fresh young college grads like me were learning some software and making a living on the Internet. It was emergent—it was uncharted territory and big corporations that didn’t know exactly what was going on were throwing money at young people in the Bay Area to “create their online presence” and forge new territory in a new medium they did not yet understand. We were only happy to take their money.<br />
<br />
First, I worked as a reviewer for a company called Netguide that aimed to be ''TV Guide'' of the Internet. They sent us out—brave collegians—to review hundreds of thousands of Web sites for their comprehensive online directory. They appeared to want to catalogue the entire Internet, because they had us reviewing entirely trivial sites, like the home pages of Pakistani grad students who had posted pictures of their cats. The World Wide Web seemed like a small place back then… entirely categorizable. We clattered away on the night shift, turning in review after review of sites great and small. They paid us well (for writers) and periodically threw open-bar parties where everybody got shitfaced. It was a good job for the slacker mentality, leaving plenty of room for games of Duke Nukem.<br />
<br />
But it could not last. Eventually, the parent company in New York grew weary of shelling out cash on a company that showed no signs of profitability in the near future. They axed us in mass, but my friend Stuart and I just laughed. This gravy train had pulled into the station. What’s funny is that, if the company had just stayed the course, they would have been miles ahead of all the subsequent companies trying to be the welcome mat to the Internet. The term ''du jour'' was “portal.” All companies wanted to be the first stop on the Internet. All companies wanted to be Yahoo! Instead, they bailed and simply threw away their wads of venture capital. But who really cares anyway?<br />
<br />
I went to work for CNET. They told me I was working on a top-secret project that would shake the foundation of the Internet with its originality. It would be the portal of portals. All people would turn to it for guidance on the World Wide Web. They gave the project the code name “Gunsmoke” and they made us swear that we would not dis- cuss it with friends or family. Eventually the project would be knighted “Snap!” to give it the same exclamatory immediacy of Yahoo!, I suppose. They implied that we would all have nice tasty slices of the pie for our extra time and energy. They cajoled us into working weekends and holidays, extolling the virtues of sacrifice and subtly threatening our job security for lack of enthusiasm.<br />
<br />
It was the one time in my entire tour of the industry that employees discussed forming a union. One friend of mine, who, like so many of us, had hauled over from Netguide, called an impromptu meeting of producers to discuss the veiled threats of management. There was the snap! of discontent in the air—a collective feeling of disgust at the scare tactics of management forces. The time had come to put a foot down and declare that there is at least some bullshit that won’t fly.<br />
<br />
But, like so many worker kvetch-ins, it blew over. The employees at the meeting decided not to press the issue and the ardent sense of injustice fizzled. After it got wind of the meeting, management successfully completed a program of divide-and-conquer that eventually ran troublesome elements out of the company, to be replaced by those who would dance to their tune.They introduced some new benefits, like back massages, to caress that nagging feeling of exploitation away. Eventually, it was only the yes-men that remained.<br />
<br />
I left the company on no particular terms with anyone. I had successfully made myself invisible in the office, coasting on my blind acceptance of mediocrity and voicing no adverse opinions. Eventually, my self-loathing and complete disregard for the project at hand forced me to quit, even though I had no other job to fall back on. At that point, I was numb to my desires, because they had no relation to what I did for a living. I had become a Dilbert.<br />
<br />
In my final week in the company, they put up one of those scrolling LED displays to flash information down on us.The wise-ass who installed it posted comical messages on it, like “Get back to work, slaves!” It was funny because, at that point, it simply acknowledged the actual situation. A rare bit of office honesty.<br />
<br />
After a brief stint of trying to do my own thing, I re- entered the Internet corporate world through the doors of LookSmart.This time I wore the hat of HTML coder, but, factually, I was little more than a glorified temp, commissioned to the most repetitive and mindless tasks. I justified it to myself, saying I needed the experience, eyeing the options, and taking solace in the steady paycheck. The work was monotonous, to say the least, but the atmosphere was not overly oppressive. In the beginning…<br />
<br />
After a few months, we were moved to a Soma building that had recently been converted from a sweat shop. Employees made jokes about how it had just become a different kind of sweat shop, but—all jokes aside—it was not pleasant.There was no air conditioning during the summer months and the whirring fans could do little more than stir hot air around. In order to get any ventilation, we had to keep the windows open on a construction site where a pneumatic pile driver would ceaselessly clang through the day. I recall one day in particular when a pipe in the middle of the room suddenly began hissing violently and half the office jumped out of their chairs and made for the door.<br />
<br />
It is the sacrifice that a start-up expects of you. Employees have to suck it in for the good of the company and give their all and not complain about unreasonable working conditions because the big payoff is around the bend.There’s no room for slackers or complainers here, only self- starter problem solvers. That was all well and good, except that LookSmart had been around for four years. I also hasten to point out that the offices of marketing and advertising were pleasant and cool.<br />
<br />
I coded away through the year, keeping out of office politics and waiting for the ballyhooed Initial Public Offering. When the company went public, the stock price floated nicely and everyone let out a huzzah of success. Unfortunately, when the stock price was nice and high, many of us could not act on it because our options had not yet vested; by the time they had, the stock had dropped to around half its value and by the time the imposed holding period was over, it was already headed down the crapper. Today, the stock price hangs out at around $2, which is less than what I paid for it. Many people suffered the same fate, in addition to facing severe tax liabilities for exercising their options when the price was high.The giddy intoxication of the IPO faded away into the sober reality of the Internet stock-market plummet.<br />
<br />
After the IPO, LookSmart moved to shiny new offices on 2nd Street. We were moved to lovely new half-cubes in a converted SOMA warehouse and there was plenty of hot cocoa in the concession room. No longer did we hear the incessant banging of the pile driver—just the occasional crowd roar from the newly renovated [[Pac Bell Ballpark|Pac Bell park]]. Now that it was a public company, LookSmart had to straighten its proverbial tie and institute certain corporate features to make sure it was reaching maximum productivity. All of sudden, there seemed to be four meetings a day about monetizing every page, maximizing dollar amounts on every ad-banner click- thru, and massaging the design needs of our many corporate partners. The business department was cutting affiliate deals and dumping work on the production team that we really couldn’t handle. With each new step toward productivity, I felt more and more uncomfortable with my working environment. I felt shaggy and unkempt and increasingly irrelevant. I found myself in more and more meetings where I appeared to have absolutely no idea what was going on and could not bring myself to find out. I was doing the bare minimum to stay employed and had long since lost interest in creating the Internet’s best Web portal. I could really give a rat’s ass. Meanwhile, they put up a sign at the entry hall to the building with the company logo, peppered with inspirational descriptors that had presumably popped out of the mouths of satisfied LookSmartians. “Fun!” “Focused!” “Savvy!”, etc. It was supposed to put a little spring in your step on the way to the grind, but I took it more as a sign that I needed to be leaving the company.<br />
<br />
I went on to another start-up that is now moribund and bears no mention. It was, in fact, a good job, insofar as I worked only part-time and nobody seemed to care that I didn’t really give a shit. I was in the first round of layoffs, which was really no surprise, considering my status and attitude. Part-timers and contractors usually get the axe first. However, the market is now sputtering and there is very little work to be had. A year ago I could have bounced into my next job with a couple of well-placed e-mails. Instead, I’ve been out of work for two months now and nothing’s on the horizon.<br />
<br />
But there is very little sympathy for the belly-aching Dot Bomb casualties, and why should there be? The Internet workers, originally so hip and groovy, came to be seen as money-grubbing carpetbaggers with oversized cars and little imagination. They bought up artist spaces, co-ops and cafes and turned them into offices. They ran the rents up sky high and ran the poor people out of town. If I wasn’t an SUV-driving yuppie, I was still digging for gold along with everybody else and came up with a fistful of empty promises. I got screwed, but can I ask you to cry for me? Does anybody want to hear my rendition of the “Dot Bomb Blues”? If I wasn’t part of the solution, was I part of the problem?<br />
<br />
You can bring it up at my next peer review…<br />
<br />
[[category:Labor]] [[category:Tales of Toil]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:2000s]] [[category:SOMA]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:Technology]] [[category:Media]]</div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:Pw2001_Minna-Eloranta_Life_in_Search_Engine-2.jpg&diff=36547&oldid=0File:Pw2001 Minna-Eloranta Life in Search Engine-2.jpg2024-03-06T06:36:55Z<p><a href="/index.php?title=User:Ccarlsson" class="mw-userlink" title="User:Ccarlsson"><bdi>Ccarlsson</bdi></a> uploaded <a href="/index.php?title=File:Pw2001_Minna-Eloranta_Life_in_Search_Engine-2.jpg" title="File:Pw2001 Minna-Eloranta Life in Search Engine-2.jpg">File:Pw2001 Minna-Eloranta Life in Search Engine-2.jpg</a></p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div></div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Chinese_Temples_in_San_Francisco&diff=36546&oldid=17702Chinese Temples in San Francisco2024-03-06T00:16:12Z<p></p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 17:16, 5 March 2024</td>
</tr><tr><td colspan="4" class="diff-multi" lang="en">(One intermediate revision by the same user not shown)</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-lineno" id="mw-diff-left-l19">Line 19:</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>'''<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">[[</del>Buddha's Universal Church<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">: 720 Washington|Buddha</del>'<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">s Universal Church]]</del>, 720 Washington Street at Kearny<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">'''</del>. This church, the largest Buddhist church in the United States, has a historical library available for researchers interested in Chinese philosophy. The library is rumored to contain books harboring esoteric secrets known only to a few initiated adepts.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>'''Buddha's Universal Church'<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">''</ins>, 720 Washington Street at Kearny. This church, the largest Buddhist church in the United States, has a historical library available for researchers interested in Chinese philosophy. The library is rumored to contain books harboring esoteric secrets known only to a few initiated adepts.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>'''A Feast for the Gods: Where Deities are Fed by Taoists--Lotus Garden Temple''', 532 Grant Avenue (upstairs), in the Lotus Garden Restaurant. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Free admission. One of this mean ole planet's gentler religious philosophies is Taoism (pronounced dow-ism), a Chinese-based teaching which seeks to harmonize human activity with the inscrutable flow of nature:</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>'''A Feast for the Gods: Where Deities are Fed by Taoists--Lotus Garden Temple''', 532 Grant Avenue (upstairs), in the Lotus Garden Restaurant. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Free admission. One of this mean ole planet's gentler religious philosophies is Taoism (pronounced dow-ism), a Chinese-based teaching which seeks to harmonize human activity with the inscrutable flow of nature:</div></td></tr>
</table>Lisaruthhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Category:Tales_of_Toil&diff=36544&oldid=36490Category:Tales of Toil2024-03-05T22:11:06Z<p></p>
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</table>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Disappeared_of_Silicon_Valley&diff=36543&oldid=36541Disappeared of Silicon Valley2024-03-05T22:10:30Z<p></p>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>''Graphic: <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Chris Carlsson</del>''</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>''Graphic: <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Hugh d'Andrade</ins>''</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>I found this extremely odd, for I had bought into the Silicon Valley myth that it’s OK to fail and everyone jokes about it and moves on and we are not hidebound scaredy-cats like those old smokestack Dow Jones Industrials corporate drones Back East—so I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I wasn’t on assignment for the ''National Enquirer''; I had a reputation for being fair, even if folks didn’t always like what I had to say. The only other time I had run into such stonewalling was when I played classic investigative reporter for a ''Wired'' profile on Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. In that case, many people had a stake in keeping their sugar daddy pacified and distracted, and not letting certain disquieting facts be known. But as I wasn’t focusing on any one particular person, and don’t generally believe in conspiracy theories, I was puzzled.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>I found this extremely odd, for I had bought into the Silicon Valley myth that it’s OK to fail and everyone jokes about it and moves on and we are not hidebound scaredy-cats like those old smokestack Dow Jones Industrials corporate drones Back East—so I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I wasn’t on assignment for the ''National Enquirer''; I had a reputation for being fair, even if folks didn’t always like what I had to say. The only other time I had run into such stonewalling was when I played classic investigative reporter for a ''Wired'' profile on Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. In that case, many people had a stake in keeping their sugar daddy pacified and distracted, and not letting certain disquieting facts be known. But as I wasn’t focusing on any one particular person, and don’t generally believe in conspiracy theories, I was puzzled.</div></td></tr>
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<td colspan="2" class="diff-lineno">Line 46:</td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Just as I had finally let go, someone finally did surface from all the networking I’d done who was willing to talk about his bruising startup experience. He was smart, self-aware, rueful—and married to a minister and displayed an overall level of psychological insight and emotional maturity that’s very narrowly distributed in the general population—and is kazillion times more rare in high-tech. For in high-tech, introspection and attention to interpersonal dynamics are not fungible assets. In fact, they get in the way of being on on on all the time and selling all the time to investors and potential employees and maybe even customers and and and...</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Just as I had finally let go, someone finally did surface from all the networking I’d done who was willing to talk about his bruising startup experience. He was smart, self-aware, rueful—and married to a minister and displayed an overall level of psychological insight and emotional maturity that’s very narrowly distributed in the general population—and is kazillion times more rare in high-tech. For in high-tech, introspection and attention to interpersonal dynamics are not fungible assets. In fact, they get in the way of being on on on all the time and selling all the time to investors and potential employees and maybe even customers and and and...</div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"></ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">[[Image:Told me I was skilled.png]]</ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"></ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">''Graphic: Chris Carlsson''</ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>My Deep Throat had worked on Wall Street and did have the requisite Stanford MBA. He told me the sad complex story of how his startup did well initially then got screwed over by bad management. He spoke of the damage to health and relationships and family life of going the start-up way. He reminded me that most startups are not high-tech and are not venture-funded. He emphasized that you can lose your savings, your salary, and your sanity. He went on about the looting and lying that often characterize startups and that the heroes of a new company—the unsung techies or managers who actually get the work done—often get screwed when the company folds or gets acquired at a discount or goes public then tanks. He had put his life savings into the company and was still in deep personal debt when I talked to him (his parents had needed to help him out with his wedding celebration).</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>My Deep Throat had worked on Wall Street and did have the requisite Stanford MBA. He told me the sad complex story of how his startup did well initially then got screwed over by bad management. He spoke of the damage to health and relationships and family life of going the start-up way. He reminded me that most startups are not high-tech and are not venture-funded. He emphasized that you can lose your savings, your salary, and your sanity. He went on about the looting and lying that often characterize startups and that the heroes of a new company—the unsung techies or managers who actually get the work done—often get screwed when the company folds or gets acquired at a discount or goes public then tanks. He had put his life savings into the company and was still in deep personal debt when I talked to him (his parents had needed to help him out with his wedding celebration).</div></td></tr>
</table>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:Pw2001_hugh-w-disappeared.jpg&diff=36542&oldid=0File:Pw2001 hugh-w-disappeared.jpg2024-03-05T22:09:38Z<p><a href="/index.php?title=User:Ccarlsson" class="mw-userlink" title="User:Ccarlsson"><bdi>Ccarlsson</bdi></a> uploaded <a href="/index.php?title=File:Pw2001_hugh-w-disappeared.jpg" title="File:Pw2001 hugh-w-disappeared.jpg">File:Pw2001 hugh-w-disappeared.jpg</a></p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div></div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Disappeared_of_Silicon_Valley&diff=36541&oldid=0Disappeared of Silicon Valley2024-03-05T22:08:34Z<p>Created page with "'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>''' :''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in <a href="/index.php?title=Processed_World:_A_Political_History" title="Processed World: A Political History">''Processed World magazine''</a> between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.'' <big>'''(or,..."</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
:''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in [[Processed World: A Political History|''Processed World magazine'']] between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.''<br />
<br />
<big>'''(or, why I couldn’t get that story)'''</big><br />
<br />
''by Paulina Borsook''<br />
<br />
''—from Processed World #2.001, published in Summer, 2001.''<br />
<br />
It began innocently enough in early winter 1999. I had been working on a book for three years, and wanted to take a break by doing something shorter and not so wholly excavated from my own grim brain. So I called Kerry Lauerman, then an editor at ''Mother Jones''. Lauerman told me they had been kicking around the idea of doing the anti-free-agent-nation story, about the people for whom being way-new-kewl-entrepreneurial just hadn’t worked out. I told him he had to let me pursue this: being contrarian, and fond of underbellies, I leapt at the chance to work on such a piece.<br />
<br />
I didn’t anticipate huge problems: I had been knocking around high-tech since the early 1980s, had written for the trades and for corporations and for Wired and had a habit of overreporting, which meant I always talked to 10 people where most folks would talk to one. All of which meant I felt confident that my mesh of connections would serve well enough to find the people who might have revelatory things to say.<br />
<br />
So I went to work, tracking down developers from game companies gone broke, founders of companies that died. I talked with bankruptcy lawyers and current employees of Hewlett-Packard in contact with ex-employees of Hewlett-Packard. I even interviewed my boyfriend’s father, a worker in Silicon Valley’s satellite industry since the 60s, figuring he’d know displaced older electronics industry workers. I was on the case daily and I was getting nowhere: no one wanted to talk to me.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Told me I was skilled.png]]<br />
<br />
''Graphic: Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
I found this extremely odd, for I had bought into the Silicon Valley myth that it’s OK to fail and everyone jokes about it and moves on and we are not hidebound scaredy-cats like those old smokestack Dow Jones Industrials corporate drones Back East—so I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I wasn’t on assignment for the ''National Enquirer''; I had a reputation for being fair, even if folks didn’t always like what I had to say. The only other time I had run into such stonewalling was when I played classic investigative reporter for a ''Wired'' profile on Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. In that case, many people had a stake in keeping their sugar daddy pacified and distracted, and not letting certain disquieting facts be known. But as I wasn’t focusing on any one particular person, and don’t generally believe in conspiracy theories, I was puzzled.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Lauerman left ''Mother Jones'', so I approached the good and wise Scott Rosenberg of ''Salon'', then the editor of the publication’s technology section, and asked him if he would be interested in the story I had come to think of as “the disappeared of Silicon Valley”—for if, as the long-established statistic stated, nine out of 10 startups fail, and many companies limp along as zombies (that is, they never go public but they never abjectly fail and they stumble on for years) or get folded into other companies at rates that in no way compensate founders and original employees for their labor and lost lives—where were these people? Rosenberg agreed to take over the assignment, so to speak, and I kept trying.<br />
<br />
I contacted Career Action Center (CAC) in Cupertino, Silicon Valley’s main vocational-counseling resource. The counselor I talked to thought the story was a great idea, that it would make her clientele feel less alone, less prone to self-blame. She said she’d ask around to see if anyone was willing to talk. No one was. Same thing happened when I spoke with Alumnae Resources, the well-respected CAC San Francisco analog, and when I talked to a psychologist whose private practice was focused on helping people with career issues and reconstructing themselves after a business failure. Again, radio silence.<br />
<br />
Flailing about and getting nowhere, I ran into Heidi Roizen, a former software company founder/CEO whom I had gotten to know as a source when she had been vice-president at Apple, and who had since gone on to be a world-class high-tech professional investor. When I explained what I was trying to do, she agreed that it was a story that needed to be told. Did she think any of her friends for whom the culture of startup and cash-out hadn’t worked would be willing to talk to me? No, even though she did know folks who’d lost their houses or faced bankruptcy—but she did suggest I talk to one of her closest friends, a nice man named Tom Koznik, a consultant and business professor who taught entrepreneurship and marketing at the engineering school at Stanford.<br />
<br />
Koznik invited me to sit in on his classes—where students worked on marketing plans and VCs gave guest-lectures—and spent a lot of time talking with me and trying to set me up with folks from his vast network who might be willing to talk.<br />
<br />
Koznik had been a professor and a high-tech consultant for a long time, but even so, out of his huge network of connections, only two possible native informants for my piece came forward, each currently one of his students. As background, it’s important to know that graduates of Stanford engineering have pretty much been guaranteed their choice of $100,000 per year jobs, plus options and sign-on bonuses. They are young, mostly mortgage- and offspring-free, and are at the time in their lives where when young adults are generally reserved the right to deviate and flounder. Job security just cannot realistically be a concern of theirs.<br />
<br />
But Silicon Valley, and Stanford in particular, has been a place where the specter of Yahoo founder/former Stanford graduate student Jerry Yang stalks the land; it’s so obvious and it’s so easy to make a billion dollars only the morally and intellectually defective can’t make it. Never stated anywhere explicitly, it’s been a statement of high-tech faith that’s everywhere implicit.<br />
<br />
One of the two kids who originally volunteered backed down, deciding he didn’t want to talk to me about his experience with a failed venture. I promised anonymity, stating the amazing true fact that I have never broken my word to a source and always honored confidentiality. But no, he wouldn’t talk, word came through to me a third-party that he was just too worried that what he told me might get traced to him and jeopardize his future. This, from an undergraduate, living in the longest peace-time boom the U.S. has seen, in the economic hotspot of the globe. The other young man actually did let me interview him: a Ph.D. candidate, he left graduate school to self-fund his idea; it didn’t work out; and he had to spend a year or so working full-time to pay down his debt before returning to school. Nothing tragic here—but the strange part came when he told me that I was one of the first people he’d told about it all, his friends and family really hadn’t known much about it. Failure is too inconceivably shameful in his world.<br />
<br />
As I was about to admit defeat on the piece, I was coincidentally given an assignment for ''San Francisco'' magazine to write about the endless stream of high-tech business books that all seemed to follow the same format where the heroic entrepreneur overcomes all obstacles, asserts individualistic behavior, and is rewarded with scads of money and inflated self-concept. What I realized, and what I wrote about for their September 1999 issue, is that these books were business-porn, as strict in their conventions as emotion-porn is vis-a-vis Harlequin Romances or action-porn is for Tom Clancy novels.<br />
<br />
And thus, I reasoned, if all people were being fed in their media diet can be represented by the business porn that is “Business 2.0” and “Fast Company”, and high-tech reportage in mainstream business mags has been just as breathless and celebratory, and newspaper business-reporting on high-tech equally gushy about what those rich crazy kids were up to next—how could anyone, for whom things hadn’t worked out possibly feel anything but a deep personal shame that would require affirmations far beyond what Stuart Smalley could offer?<br />
<br />
What I realized is that if you are of the elect, you can fail as the Silicon Valley myth has it. But if you are not, it’s doubly unbearable because all you’ve heard is the success stories. It’s rather like going through the pain of divorce but living in a culture where only happy marriages are ever described; or trying desperately and unsuccessfully to have kids when all about you all you hear is about large families. In fact, one of the people who did talk to me about her failed startup, shrugged off the experience as ‘that’s just life, it’s like when a relationship fails.” But when a relationship fails, all culture, friends, and family understands, sanctions your right to grieve and suffer, knows it will take time to heal, that you’ve undergone something wrenching and awful. But not so in Silicon Valley—if you’ve failed, you can’t talk about it, it’s no big deal, and it never happens anyway. Never mind that start- ups demand heart, soul, and life—so if they crash, burn, or drive you away, what has happened to that heart, soul, life?<br />
<br />
There was a perverse timeliness to the conclusion I was coming to, for Po Bronson had just published his best-selling “Nudist on the Late Shift”, true tales of winning in Silicon Valley. In that summer of 1999, Bronson also wrote a ''New York Times'' magazine story, “Instant Company,” which was a classic of the ‘it’s all so easy/we strike it rich to beat the band’ genre. Bronson, whose prose is graceful, smart, and funny, probably didn’t realize what his feature really said: that if you worked at a glam startup (such as Yahoo before it went public) or for a major Wall Street i-bank or previously for a VC or have a pedigree that includes an MBA or CS degree from one of the Silicon Valley designated-hitter institutions of higher learning—then all is well. But reading his piece—where all the founders of the high-concept, if unimaginative, epinions (let’s use collaborative filtering so that we can make money off other people doing the work/providing the content!) had just such elite pedigrees—was rather like reading C. Wright Mills’ ''The Power Elite'', updated for Internet Age. Of course these guys can raise money, never need flounder, are damage-proof. How different, really, was their fate from that of George W. Bush, who didn’t really have the qualifications for Andover nor Harvard Business School, but got in anyway because he had been anointed?<br />
<br />
When I finally gave up—or rather, realized the real story was a meta-story, about how and why the story I had wanted to do couldn’t be written—was after a phone interview with one of my long-time excellent sources whom I always keep anonymous. A high-end high-tech headhunter who had been of great help to me in times past, she sympathized with what I was trying to do but told me that someone from ''The Wall Street Journal'' had tried to do the same story a few years before—and that reporter hadn’t gotten anywhere, either.<br />
<br />
Just as I had finally let go, someone finally did surface from all the networking I’d done who was willing to talk about his bruising startup experience. He was smart, self-aware, rueful—and married to a minister and displayed an overall level of psychological insight and emotional maturity that’s very narrowly distributed in the general population—and is kazillion times more rare in high-tech. For in high-tech, introspection and attention to interpersonal dynamics are not fungible assets. In fact, they get in the way of being on on on all the time and selling all the time to investors and potential employees and maybe even customers and and and...<br />
<br />
My Deep Throat had worked on Wall Street and did have the requisite Stanford MBA. He told me the sad complex story of how his startup did well initially then got screwed over by bad management. He spoke of the damage to health and relationships and family life of going the start-up way. He reminded me that most startups are not high-tech and are not venture-funded. He emphasized that you can lose your savings, your salary, and your sanity. He went on about the looting and lying that often characterize startups and that the heroes of a new company—the unsung techies or managers who actually get the work done—often get screwed when the company folds or gets acquired at a discount or goes public then tanks. He had put his life savings into the company and was still in deep personal debt when I talked to him (his parents had needed to help him out with his wedding celebration).<br />
<br />
I admired him for talking to me, but I couldn’t figure out how to use one person to peg an entire piece. And professionally, I got overtaken by other projects and needed to be working on other things. As mercifully quirky as ''Salon'' is, I just couldn’t see how a story about how a story about how I couldn’t get the story, could interest them. And that was that.<br />
<br />
But the failed entrepreneur who had come through for me checked back in the late autumn of 1999, wanting to know what I’d been able to do with his so-valuable confession. I told him that a story about how I couldn’t get that story would only matter to cultural-studies types and journalism professors; that the concepts of self-censorship and the importance of what’s there but that you don’t hear about were too abstract, and not what most people want to read. He was sorry that the piece wouldn’t run.<br />
<br />
But the more I thought about it, as ''The Industry Standard'' was growing ever fatter and Time Inc. launched a new magazine solely devoted to the New New Economy, ''“E- Company”'', the more important it seemed that I did try to talk about what no one wanted to talk about. That the stigma of failure exists and is cruel in Silicon Valley, maybe more so because no one admits it’s there. Folks may not have filed bankruptcy petitions but may have taken on an impossibly burdensome second mortgage; or have sacrificed their personal life to no end; or had to move away because it didn’t work out—these are the disappeared of Silicon Valley.<br />
<br />
What I thought was the validating, if bittersweet, coda to my failure came at the monthly dinner I attend from time to time in San Francisco peopled by an ever-changing cast of sweet smart nerds. There, I ran into a guy I knew from one of his earlier lives as a telecommunications policy wonk. He’s since cycled through the public sector to academia into think-tank land and is now into startupsville. As a consequence, he’s now involved with Silicon Valley’s Entrepreneur’s Forum (self-help and mentoring for the startupiste on the go). When I mentioned to him about my unfinished business writing about the shame-ridden disappeared of Silicon Valley, he nodded in recognition.<br />
<br />
“We’ve tried to get those guys to come talk to our group about how they’ve dealt with failure.”<br />
<br />
“I know,” I said, “They won’t talk until they’re back up on top.”<br />
<br />
“No,” he explained,“they won’t talk to us at all about their failures, even when they’ve succeeded once again.”<br />
<br />
“Even the billionaires?” “Even the billionaires.”<br />
<br />
But the story didn’t end quite then. This very same tale of media collusion and market-timing in post-Netscape IPO irrational exuberance was eventually commissioned for ''Brill’s Content''. But alas, it was killed as it was heading from fact-checking to galleys by its Bright Young Editor-in-Chief (newly arrived from Tina Brown mentorship) in June 2000, because the first stories had started appearing in the national media about the shakeout from the NASDAQ crash of March 2000. Fashion (and timing) is everything.<br />
<br />
'''EPILOGUE''': Of course, in spring 2001, the stories of dotbombs and dotgones and vulture capitalists have replaced in the media the earlier techno-utopian free-market fairy stories. A website deadpool, www.fuckedcompany.com, allows people to rant and rave about the specifics of the collapse of the Ponzi scheme high-tech economy of the roaring 90s, how paperthin and Potemkin-village it has been. But when I read those postings on FC’s Happy Fun Slander Corner, I have the disquieting feeling of reading daily transcripts from the trials of French war criminals. It’s been said that when the Nazis invaded France, 90 per- cent of the French collaborated. But by the time the Allies invaded Normandy, 90 percent of the French were with the Resistance. No one much spoke up or out when their friends and neighbors were hauled away and the trains kept running East during the War, but everyone after the War proclaimed it was all such a pity, about the Disappeared.<br />
<br />
[[category:Labor]] [[category:Tales of Toil]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:2000s]] [[category:South Bay and Peninsula]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:Technology]] [[category:Media]]</div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:Told_me_I_was_skilled.png&diff=36540&oldid=0File:Told me I was skilled.png2024-03-05T21:57:41Z<p><a href="/index.php?title=User:Ccarlsson" class="mw-userlink" title="User:Ccarlsson"><bdi>Ccarlsson</bdi></a> uploaded <a href="/index.php?title=File:Told_me_I_was_skilled.png" title="File:Told me I was skilled.png">File:Told me I was skilled.png</a></p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div></div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=On_the_Bleeding_Edge&diff=36539&oldid=36538On the Bleeding Edge2024-03-05T06:54:53Z<p></p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 23:54, 4 March 2024</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>And we do indeed have a “product”—pictures. We sell aerial and satellite imagery both from a web site and on CD/DVD. The company does not produce the images—they are bought or rented from companies that have satellites or fly the aircraft that take the pictures. My job is making sure that when some client (an architect, a district attorney, a city planner, a “hi-tech” worker in India digitizing maps of roads, etc.) looks at a picture of some sagebrush outside of Phoenix, we know how much money we got for it, and that the proper cut goes to the owner of the image (“Royalty Check, honey” in Frank Zappa’s words). At peak we produce about 25 images a second, which can work out to a lot of companies accumulating absurdly small amounts of money (forty percent of one-third of one-half cent). But hey, no amount of money is absurd, it adds up, right?</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>And we do indeed have a “product”—pictures. We sell aerial and satellite imagery both from a web site and on CD/DVD. The company does not produce the images—they are bought or rented from companies that have satellites or fly the aircraft that take the pictures. My job is making sure that when some client (an architect, a district attorney, a city planner, a “hi-tech” worker in India digitizing maps of roads, etc.) looks at a picture of some sagebrush outside of Phoenix, we know how much money we got for it, and that the proper cut goes to the owner of the image (“Royalty Check, honey” in Frank Zappa’s words). At peak we produce about 25 images a second, which can work out to a lot of companies accumulating absurdly small amounts of money (forty percent of one-third of one-half cent). But hey, no amount of money is absurd, it adds up, right?</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"> </del>There are interesting contradictions in this product. We spend more computer time (which may in a sense be equated with money) making a large image than a small one, so the company likes to charge by size. Sensible enough, as far as it goes. But whenever someone looks at our imagery—whether browsing or just window-shopping—we splash a logo over it to make it worthless for resale. In so doing we “burn quite a few cycles,” i.e. spend computer time to add the watermarks. Of course, sometimes there is a charge for nothing at all; we charge extra money to show little lines with text—representing roads, for instance—because it takes additional cycles to figure what roads are in the area, but if you use this feature and draw an image of a place with no roads, you still get charged—knowing that nothing is there is information, too.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>There are interesting contradictions in this product. We spend more computer time (which may in a sense be equated with money) making a large image than a small one, so the company likes to charge by size. Sensible enough, as far as it goes. But whenever someone looks at our imagery—whether browsing or just window-shopping—we splash a logo over it to make it worthless for resale. In so doing we “burn quite a few cycles,” i.e. spend computer time to add the watermarks. Of course, sometimes there is a charge for nothing at all; we charge extra money to show little lines with text—representing roads, for instance—because it takes additional cycles to figure what roads are in the area, but if you use this feature and draw an image of a place with no roads, you still get charged—knowing that nothing is there is information, too.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>I get paid well—about twice the median income of people in the San Francisco area; when I was hired three years ago it was on the upper side of wages for comparable work; with no raises since then my real income has decreased by a measurable percentage. Bonus ? You get to keep working next year (actually, I was given a Christmas bonus for 2003—$100.00!). The dollar amount disguises the long hours—lots of our work needs to be done at night at home because the computers are less busy and we will cause less disruption to paying clients. On the other hand, management never can trust the worker to work, so we all have to spend 25+ hours at our desks just so they can see and feel reassured. People commute from the Central Valley—Modesto and Tracy for instance—and are spending hours driving back and forth when they could be working; a terrible loss to business. It is a rare week that any of us logs less than 50 hours; some tend more towards the 70+ work week. Perhaps not coincidentally, there were major layoffs in spring 2002—one-third of the company. Since I started, no less than half of the jobs have been eliminated with a few new hires in sales.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>I get paid well—about twice the median income of people in the San Francisco area; when I was hired three years ago it was on the upper side of wages for comparable work; with no raises since then my real income has decreased by a measurable percentage. Bonus ? You get to keep working next year (actually, I was given a Christmas bonus for 2003—$100.00!). The dollar amount disguises the long hours—lots of our work needs to be done at night at home because the computers are less busy and we will cause less disruption to paying clients. On the other hand, management never can trust the worker to work, so we all have to spend 25+ hours at our desks just so they can see and feel reassured. People commute from the Central Valley—Modesto and Tracy for instance—and are spending hours driving back and forth when they could be working; a terrible loss to business. It is a rare week that any of us logs less than 50 hours; some tend more towards the 70+ work week. Perhaps not coincidentally, there were major layoffs in spring 2002—one-third of the company. Since I started, no less than half of the jobs have been eliminated with a few new hires in sales.</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>My stock in trade, as it were, is not the imagery itself—some 25-30 terabytes1 of highly compressed imagery in all. My interest is information about the images—their spatial coordinates, when they were taken, their origin. The databases contain detailed maps of every block of every road in the United States. I’m responsible for moving the data around, keeping it backed up and making sure it’s available when needed. Clerical work at its finest.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>My stock in trade, as it were, is not the imagery itself—some 25-30 terabytes1 of highly compressed imagery in all. My interest is information about the images—their spatial coordinates, when they were taken, their origin. The databases contain detailed maps of every block of every road in the United States. I’m responsible for moving the data around, keeping it backed up and making sure it’s available when needed. Clerical work at its finest.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"> </del>In addition to the administrative chores there is a constant pressure from a source familiar to any reader of Capital—the foremost mechanism by which the industrialists make more money is by renovating their plants, whether by upgrading or by discarding old ones in favor of new ones. And so it is in the computer shop, supposedly so far from the industrial revolution—“silicon” is our avatar, not iron.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>In addition to the administrative chores there is a constant pressure from a source familiar to any reader of Capital—the foremost mechanism by which the industrialists make more money is by renovating their plants, whether by upgrading or by discarding old ones in favor of new ones. And so it is in the computer shop, supposedly so far from the industrial revolution—“silicon” is our avatar, not iron.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>And yet, curiously, the machines themselves are sometimes referred to as “iron”—as in “heavy iron,” meaning fast computers. They are called, again an echo of earlier relationships, “servers” and are kept in “cages” (because they are dangerous?) on a “farm”in Silicon Valley. I’ve never been to our cage, but I’ve seen photos. It is a chain-link cage in a large building run by some corporate giant. While we are isolated in cubicles, our machines are kept on racks connected to each other (and us) with cables, “switches” and “routers” (specialized computers that move data)—even the simple drawings of our “architecture” are complex.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>And yet, curiously, the machines themselves are sometimes referred to as “iron”—as in “heavy iron,” meaning fast computers. They are called, again an echo of earlier relationships, “servers” and are kept in “cages” (because they are dangerous?) on a “farm”in Silicon Valley. I’ve never been to our cage, but I’ve seen photos. It is a chain-link cage in a large building run by some corporate giant. While we are isolated in cubicles, our machines are kept on racks connected to each other (and us) with cables, “switches” and “routers” (specialized computers that move data)—even the simple drawings of our “architecture” are complex.</div></td></tr>
</table>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=On_the_Bleeding_Edge&diff=36538&oldid=0On the Bleeding Edge2024-03-05T06:53:42Z<p>Created page with "'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>''' :''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in <a href="/index.php?title=Processed_World:_A_Political_History" title="Processed World: A Political History">''Processed World magazine''</a> between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.'' ''by Greg Wil..."</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
:''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in [[Processed World: A Political History|''Processed World magazine'']] between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.''<br />
<br />
''by Greg Williamson (Primitivo Morales)''<br />
<br />
''—from Processed World #2.005, published in Winter, 2005.''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Commute-work-sleep.jpg|right]]<br />
<br />
It’s a decent job—lots of “bleeding-edge” technology and every day is a learning experience. Of course, half the time I would tell you it’s horrible. On balance, since I sometimes refer to the company as “we,” it is apparently a good enough job to seduce my on-and-off allegiance.<br />
<br />
I am, in essence, a glorified file clerk: a Database Administrator, or DBA. Actually, my business card calls me a “Database Engineer” but I think that’s either wishful thinking on the part of my employers or one of those “title-instead-of-money” deals. My job is to keep track of a lot of information—no different than any other clerk’s tasks.<br />
<br />
Traditional file clerks usually only deal with small amounts of documents—a few hundred thousand, maybe. The Pentagon devised a unit of measurement called a “linear drawer foot”—one foot of closely packed documents—to describe the total capacity of some of their stores of documents, which even in the 1970s were measured in miles. The principles remain the same—be able to find “stuff” quickly.<br />
<br />
A vague analogy can be made with pilots on combat missions; long periods of boredom interspersed with moments of terror. OK, my terror is not for my life but the principle remains the same. For example, about once a week I am “on call,” meaning computers that I have never seen send me messages about problems I don’t understand. I have a list of instructions to follow which mostly resolves the issues. Most of the problems can be passed on to someone else—networking issues, for instance. But others become “mine” and we then enter into an intimate relationship, the problem and I. So far I have resolved, or at least explained away, all of these. But one day I may be handed a problem I can’t solve and then the company will replace me with someone who can.<br />
<br />
Busy doing what, you might ask ? Or does it really matter? The conditions I am describing exist throughout the industry from Silicon Valley through “Silicon Gulch” (Austin) all the way to the 128 corridor around Boston, and for all I know, all the way to Mumbai. The ‘product’ is of little importance, as long as it makes a profit.<br />
<br />
A goodly portion of my work for many years is best summed up as “helping businessmen count money faster and more accurately” (I’ve worked in banks and for VISA, among other esteemed handlers of currency). This is the core of most computer professionals’ jobs, at least in the “applications” world; people who make operating systems and other tools are more akin to workers who make the machine tools that companies like GM use to make cars.<br />
<br />
And we do indeed have a “product”—pictures. We sell aerial and satellite imagery both from a web site and on CD/DVD. The company does not produce the images—they are bought or rented from companies that have satellites or fly the aircraft that take the pictures. My job is making sure that when some client (an architect, a district attorney, a city planner, a “hi-tech” worker in India digitizing maps of roads, etc.) looks at a picture of some sagebrush outside of Phoenix, we know how much money we got for it, and that the proper cut goes to the owner of the image (“Royalty Check, honey” in Frank Zappa’s words). At peak we produce about 25 images a second, which can work out to a lot of companies accumulating absurdly small amounts of money (forty percent of one-third of one-half cent). But hey, no amount of money is absurd, it adds up, right?<br />
<br />
There are interesting contradictions in this product. We spend more computer time (which may in a sense be equated with money) making a large image than a small one, so the company likes to charge by size. Sensible enough, as far as it goes. But whenever someone looks at our imagery—whether browsing or just window-shopping—we splash a logo over it to make it worthless for resale. In so doing we “burn quite a few cycles,” i.e. spend computer time to add the watermarks. Of course, sometimes there is a charge for nothing at all; we charge extra money to show little lines with text—representing roads, for instance—because it takes additional cycles to figure what roads are in the area, but if you use this feature and draw an image of a place with no roads, you still get charged—knowing that nothing is there is information, too.<br />
<br />
I get paid well—about twice the median income of people in the San Francisco area; when I was hired three years ago it was on the upper side of wages for comparable work; with no raises since then my real income has decreased by a measurable percentage. Bonus ? You get to keep working next year (actually, I was given a Christmas bonus for 2003—$100.00!). The dollar amount disguises the long hours—lots of our work needs to be done at night at home because the computers are less busy and we will cause less disruption to paying clients. On the other hand, management never can trust the worker to work, so we all have to spend 25+ hours at our desks just so they can see and feel reassured. People commute from the Central Valley—Modesto and Tracy for instance—and are spending hours driving back and forth when they could be working; a terrible loss to business. It is a rare week that any of us logs less than 50 hours; some tend more towards the 70+ work week. Perhaps not coincidentally, there were major layoffs in spring 2002—one-third of the company. Since I started, no less than half of the jobs have been eliminated with a few new hires in sales.<br />
<br />
In the past week, as I write this, my boss has quit. Apparently the thinking (if you can call it that) was that her job would get spread over two other people and there would be no impact on delivery dates or site performance. On her last day there was a clash between her sidekick (the head of operations per se, and a very knowledgeable fellow) and management. Sometime between 10:30 and noon he was removed from email and had his accounts shut off. The rest of us responded by drinking rum for the remainder of the day. It will be interesting to see if management continues its policy of reality denial and fantasy. As least part of their psychosis is the belief that software, and the workforce that produces it, is standardized in the same way automotive parts have been. Interchangeability is not simple in the world of computers, or at least outside of the assembly lines that produce the hardware itself. The creation of programs is much more like the craft industries of the mid-nineteenth century. In the meantime, the rest of us are busy trying to do our jobs as well as covering for others.<br />
<br />
My stock in trade, as it were, is not the imagery itself—some 25-30 terabytes1 of highly compressed imagery in all. My interest is information about the images—their spatial coordinates, when they were taken, their origin. The databases contain detailed maps of every block of every road in the United States. I’m responsible for moving the data around, keeping it backed up and making sure it’s available when needed. Clerical work at its finest.<br />
<br />
In addition to the administrative chores there is a constant pressure from a source familiar to any reader of Capital—the foremost mechanism by which the industrialists make more money is by renovating their plants, whether by upgrading or by discarding old ones in favor of new ones. And so it is in the computer shop, supposedly so far from the industrial revolution—“silicon” is our avatar, not iron.<br />
<br />
And yet, curiously, the machines themselves are sometimes referred to as “iron”—as in “heavy iron,” meaning fast computers. They are called, again an echo of earlier relationships, “servers” and are kept in “cages” (because they are dangerous?) on a “farm”in Silicon Valley. I’ve never been to our cage, but I’ve seen photos. It is a chain-link cage in a large building run by some corporate giant. While we are isolated in cubicles, our machines are kept on racks connected to each other (and us) with cables, “switches” and “routers” (specialized computers that move data)—even the simple drawings of our “architecture” are complex.<br />
<br />
But having gotten it to work is not enough, we have to replace various bits and pieces. Because of changes in hardware (out go the leased Sun servers, in come the purchased Dell servers), software (Linux instead of Solaris, mostly) and applications (postGres, an Open Source database, replacing Informix, now owned by IBM; old image servers that depended on expensive licensed “libraries” being replaced by new code written in-house, etc.) we have been spending a lot of time replacing almost every component while it is running. Imagine changing almost everything on your car except the chassis and the license plate while driving down the freeway.<br />
<br />
At work we use the analogy of driving down a freeway, almost always in the context of driving by looking only in the rear-view mirror. We are constantly monitoring the site but from a certain distance. Billing issues tend to take a day to be seen, while our computer monitors show nice graphs that are only a few minutes out of date at any given instant. To really see what is happening takes actual people. And when something unexpected (i.e. unpleasant) is happening, four or five or more of us will be communicating by voice, phone, email and instant message, sometimes simultaneously. After a frantic spasm of intensely cooperative work we return to our usual tasks.<br />
<br />
The daily work is itself intensely collaborative, yet also curiously alienated. Each of us has a focus; the operations people deal with various aspects of the site as a whole, the content people set up new imagery, programmers work on different aspects of the software, quality assurance tests and retests things. This is not a company in which the bosses or managers don’t have a clue—my boss knew her stuff, and the head of the company, although not primarily a computer geek, certainly knows the remote sensing/GIS (Geographic Information Systems) business well. Ergo, mistakes are hard to cover up. As the DBA I need to “work closely with” (i.e. get ordered around by) virtually everyone in the company, from accounting and sales, programmers and ops people. Even my boss and the CEO occasionally give me direct tasks.<br />
<br />
There is the usual grousing about conditions common to most workplaces. Yet there is no feeling of solidarity, even among the people I have the most in common with (shared interest in jazz, or cooking, etc.). There’s a shared inaction based in part in the sense that there’s nothing we can do and in part on a lack of trust. Confronted with the inexorable logic of business and cost containment, the ideology of “professionalism” becomes paralyzing. Professionalism means quite a few things—a vaguely positive attitude is a must, and a positive disdain for direct confrontation is mandatory. We adopt the common face and voice to discuss the “problems”—all of which have been specified before we confront them and as such have already had all possible solutions defined before we even see them.<br />
<br />
In one of the odd contradictions of such a “professional” environment, we are treated with a certain degree of respect, but we’re all expendable. Even as we watch one of our people hustled out the door after a summary layoff, the most we might do is have a sotto-voce discussion, usually with a friend of the departed.<br />
<br />
My attitude is not the best, and I’ve been officially warned that the only reason I am still employed is because everyone who works with me thinks I do a stellar job. The problem? Apparently an anonymous someone has taken offense at some of my emails or IM sessions—no serious vulgarities but perhaps a mild expletive or two. That’s enough, along with management’s irritation at my continuous asking of the old utilitarian “qui bono?” (whose good—who benefits?) when confronted with stupid decisions. We get more and more of those, as the company is owned by a real estate company whose computer types are particularly clueless—they like to put “MSCE” after their names … bragging about being a Microsoft Certified Engineer!<br />
<br />
So people show a certain wariness in endorsing my opinions now, at least in public; it is not unusual for people to support me privately, after the fact. Although not allowed to formally question some business decisions, I can at least greet them with all the warmth that they deserve. Not much of a weapon.<br />
<br />
But the battle is not necessarily totally one-sided. A slight plus in our column as workers in the software industry is that the process is not well rationalized—not “Taylorized.” It is very hard to predict how long a given (non-trivial) software project will take even for people who know the tools and problem well. There are no easy methods for determining productivity—counting key strokes works for typists but not for programmers—and because the problems are often ill-defined, we can sometimes get time back from the job, help each other by passing the buck on responsibilities and covering for each other. Such small actions do help build the sense of trust, or at least of common ground, that is a prerequisite for more meaningful solidarity.<br />
<br />
We also have a shared interest in reliable tools and processes, and the advent of Open Source software—typically software whose “source-code” (original instructions, as opposed to a “compiled” program) is available to all. There are usually groups of people committed to a given tool who work collaboratively for its improvement, even though they may never meet. Applications that are available include graphics manipulation programs, office tools like spreadsheet and word processor, operating systems and HTML servers such a Linux or Apache, programs for creating maps or plotting spatial data, databases and so on. Because the people who create tools have an inherent interest in them there is little need for an incomplete or flawed version of the software to be released simply to meet a schedule. Problems tend to be well-documented and discussed, as opposed to the corporate model, where issues are often hard to discover because of non-disclosure contracts and company perversity. The programs themselves sometimes lack the bells-and-whistles of commercial products, but because the source code is available it can be extended or modified, and there are many people to help with support issues.<br />
<br />
As a programmer I gain a better tool; as a person I am sharing in something that has an end result other than some money. It also helps to undermine the arrogant behemoths such as Microsoft and Oracle. The company gets quality software without having to pay endless license fees. One source of tension though, is that the company is benefiting from other organization paying to develop software (the spatial data tool we use was developed by a Canadian company paid by the Canadian government, which did not want to continue to pay large fees to US companies). Yet my bosses are agonized when faced with the need to spend a small amount of money to improve the tool—some other business might be able to benefit from this money! Amazingly short sighted—spend a few thousand to save a few hundred thousand dollars, and then whine about it.<br />
<br />
Recent events give me more of a sense of how my co-workers regard the company. A few months ago we were subjected to a company-wide survey conducted by a consultant using a web site. They claimed that all answers would be confidential, but the way we logged in guaranteed that they could track who had said what. So I suspect that the answers they got were slanted in the company’s favor. On the last possible day I answered most of the questions, mostly honestly, after my then-boss got in my face about her group’s low participation rate.<br />
<br />
Afterwards, corporate sent a person from “Human Resources” to explain (away) the results. We were generally in line with the company on most of the survey but had responses in two major areas wildly lower than the company averages: benefits and company support for us. Now, keep in mind that the parent company is in the real-estate business, which has a peculiarly exploitative relationship with its workers—real estate agents, for instance, typically get only a commission and then have to pay money to “their”office to rent a desk, etc.<br />
<br />
In the session I was in, everyone criticized the benefits. Sales, engineering and operations all criticized the insurance as expensive, “substandard” (this from someone who knows the insurance industry) and difficult to use. Everyone had harsh words for the “401K” plan: 6% is not “matching” the employees’ contributions, and their proposed scheme actually seemed to ignore federal law about limits on employee contributions. Everyone had critical words for our time-off policy as well, again ranging from “illegal” (they don’t roll unused vacation time over to the new year, nor do they pay you for it) to “cheap” and “outrageous.”<br />
<br />
The company’s pretty words don’t ever seem to have any money behind them. Fellow employees were not delighted with their pay, either, as most have had no raises for years. On paper the management supports employee’s education, but in practice they have no money for technical classes of the sort I might need (typically one week with about 40 hours of instruction, costing between two and five thousand dollars, depending). We actually got this worthy functionary to laugh when, in the course of discussing how the company does not give us adequate support, we told her that our high-tech company gets hand-me-downs from a local (bankrupt) school system.<br />
<br />
I am sure that in subsequent surveys we will simply be asked if we have been adequately informed about our crappy benefits, rather than the more risky ground exposed by the open-ended questions. And because the company is actually making money now on a month-by-month basis, they may actually provide us more of the tools we need to make them more money.<br />
<br />
In the short run, however, we’ve had a Company Meeting in which they tried a smoke & mirrors production to pump us up—poorly mixed and stale rock tunes played over a slide show of company content and tools. This was followed with a passionate speech by the president about how hard he had fought for us, the ungrateful employees, when the company was sold to the tejanos. He pointed out that he had no stock or other vesting in the parent company, and was an employee just like us.<br />
<br />
This may be true, as far as it goes, but management still is in denial: he was frustrated that only thirty percent of our projects were delivered on time. Given the sparse resources and constantly shifting requirements, doing a third of our deliveries on time is an excellent statistic. According to them, the problem is “communication” so now we’ll spend more time in meetings. As one engineer said to me, “I spend 7 hours in one day now on meetings—how long until they realize that that is seven hours that I am not working?”<br />
<br />
We have been put on committees with no power that will be able to make recommendations that management will be free to ignore; or if they are implemented it will be “at manager’s discretion,” a nice way of saying “never.”<br />
<br />
It is possible that we can gain some leverage over the situation now. It is clear that there is widespread dissatisfaction, but what exactly can be done is not clear. Hopes of controlling our local bosses are a bit thin; bringing our Texican masters to heel is a rather remote possibility. I can’t see us actually having a picket line, but I think some combination of working only forty hours a week, declining those extra work shifts, and perhaps proposing that we all take time off together might provide leverage. Or perhaps not—there are no guarantees.<br />
<br />
Well, it’s 1:30 in the morning, and I have puzzles to solve before I sleep.<br />
<br />
'''Can you Tell Which Woman is A'''<br />
[[Image:Pw can-you-tell.jpg|left]]<br />
'''Treehugger? / Suicide Bomber? / Outside Agitator? '''<br />
<br />
<br />
<hr><br />
<br />
<big>'''the digital salute'''</big><br />
<br />
Dissatisfaction tends to make itself known, although sometimes in ways that are hard to see. For example, one company that makes digital maps of streets found a curious set of lines in some work. The regular QA people had found no problems, but there was an automated QA process that examined all of the incoming work, and it applied rules that would be impossible for a human: in a computer model of roads there will never be a road segment that is not attached to other segments. Yet in this particular batch they found a number of lines attached to nothing else. When they zoomed all the way in they could see these lines with no labels or other data, but they made no sense. When they zoomed out to look at the whole US the lines couldn’t be seen because of the way scaling and zooming work. Eventually they wrote a special filter to show just the lines with no connections. It made a large sketch of a big “fuck you” with an upraised finger in salute. Alas, these lines were removed before the world at large ever saw them, but it makes you wonder what else might be out there.<br />
<br />
[[category:Labor]] [[category:Tales of Toil]] [[category:2000s]] [[category:East Bay]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:Technology]]</div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:Pw_can-you-tell.jpg&diff=36537&oldid=0File:Pw can-you-tell.jpg2024-03-05T06:52:26Z<p><a href="/index.php?title=User:Ccarlsson" class="mw-userlink" title="User:Ccarlsson"><bdi>Ccarlsson</bdi></a> uploaded <a href="/index.php?title=File:Pw_can-you-tell.jpg" title="File:Pw can-you-tell.jpg">File:Pw can-you-tell.jpg</a></p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div></div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Trauma_Tango&diff=36536&oldid=36534Trauma Tango2024-03-05T06:51:46Z<p></p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 23:51, 4 March 2024</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>13. Despite my ambivalence towards the union, I’ll do what I can to help when the fight comes, if for nothing other than solidarity with the people I work with everyday who tend to the sick, the crazy, the suicides, the junkies and drunks, and the ever-growing numbers of those who are working but uninsured that wind up jammed into the waiting room, staring up with glazed, sick expressions at reality programs on the ceiling-mounted television.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>13. Despite my ambivalence towards the union, I’ll do what I can to help when the fight comes, if for nothing other than solidarity with the people I work with everyday who tend to the sick, the crazy, the suicides, the junkies and drunks, and the ever-growing numbers of those who are working but uninsured that wind up jammed into the waiting room, staring up with glazed, sick expressions at reality programs on the ceiling-mounted television.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>[[category:Labor]] [[category:Tales of Toil]] [[category:<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">1980s</del>]] [[category:Mission]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:Public Health]]</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>[[category:Labor]] [[category:Tales of Toil]] [[category:<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">2000s</ins>]] [[category:Mission]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:Public Health]]</div></td></tr>
</table>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:Commute-work-sleep.jpg&diff=36535&oldid=0File:Commute-work-sleep.jpg2024-03-05T06:49:00Z<p><a href="/index.php?title=User:Ccarlsson" class="mw-userlink" title="User:Ccarlsson"><bdi>Ccarlsson</bdi></a> uploaded <a href="/index.php?title=File:Commute-work-sleep.jpg" title="File:Commute-work-sleep.jpg">File:Commute-work-sleep.jpg</a></p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div></div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Trauma_Tango&diff=36534&oldid=36533Trauma Tango2024-03-05T06:46:32Z<p></p>
<table style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122;" data-mw="interface">
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 23:46, 4 March 2024</td>
</tr><tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-lineno" id="mw-diff-left-l30">Line 30:</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>4. The pay decrease got to me, and I thought to myself, “Someone ought to do something.” Then it occurred to me that this in of itself isn’t a particularly helpful sentiment. Terry Pratchett quipped that this thought is never followed up with the rider “and that someone is me.” I’d been reading Saul Alinsky for some odd reason and I decide I want to rile people up, so I distribute flyers and petitions slamming the union for not fighting, and demanding action. I get a bunch of signatures and people call the Union griping, so they contact me and set up a meeting about what to do.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>4. The pay decrease got to me, and I thought to myself, “Someone ought to do something.” Then it occurred to me that this in of itself isn’t a particularly helpful sentiment. Terry Pratchett quipped that this thought is never followed up with the rider “and that someone is me.” I’d been reading Saul Alinsky for some odd reason and I decide I want to rile people up, so I distribute flyers and petitions slamming the union for not fighting, and demanding action. I get a bunch of signatures and people call the Union griping, so they contact me and set up a meeting about what to do.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"> </del>5. A homeless Haight Street kid maybe 17 years old is brought in by the police. His friends were worried about him because he had what looked like burns all over his body. The police didn’t like the way he looked so they brought him down. He has a pretty high fever and he tells me he thinks he fell asleep in the sun or something. The docs are puzzled and wonder if maybe a speed lab blew up on him. I talk with him a while and he tells me he ran away from home, which was a trailer park somewhere in the Midwest. He has one of those squatter symbols badly tattooed on his arm. He’s quite frightened and tells me he really wants to get into a drug treatment program so I agree to help him once he’s better. I take my half-hour regulation dinner and when I come back the room he is in is packed with doctors and he has a breathing tube in. They don’t know what’s wrong with him but it appears he is suffering from some sort of systemic sepsis. He dies that night of complications from necrotizing fasciitis, aka “flesh-eating bacteria”, which he got from a dirty needle.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>5. A homeless Haight Street kid maybe 17 years old is brought in by the police. His friends were worried about him because he had what looked like burns all over his body. The police didn’t like the way he looked so they brought him down. He has a pretty high fever and he tells me he thinks he fell asleep in the sun or something. The docs are puzzled and wonder if maybe a speed lab blew up on him. I talk with him a while and he tells me he ran away from home, which was a trailer park somewhere in the Midwest. He has one of those squatter symbols badly tattooed on his arm. He’s quite frightened and tells me he really wants to get into a drug treatment program so I agree to help him once he’s better. I take my half-hour regulation dinner and when I come back the room he is in is packed with doctors and he has a breathing tube in. They don’t know what’s wrong with him but it appears he is suffering from some sort of systemic sepsis. He dies that night of complications from necrotizing fasciitis, aka “flesh-eating bacteria”, which he got from a dirty needle.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>6. I meet with the rep and some other activists on the very day Schwarzenegger is elected governor. They all have stunned, tired expressions on their faces and have been precinct-walking and rushing from meeting to meeting for years, probably. With a sinking heart I imagine myself clutching a tattered datebook, or even a palm pilot packed full of meetings and rallies, public forums, and phone banking. This is unattractive to me in the extreme and I decide to play music and spend time with my fiancé instead.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>6. I meet with the rep and some other activists on the very day Schwarzenegger is elected governor. They all have stunned, tired expressions on their faces and have been precinct-walking and rushing from meeting to meeting for years, probably. With a sinking heart I imagine myself clutching a tattered datebook, or even a palm pilot packed full of meetings and rallies, public forums, and phone banking. This is unattractive to me in the extreme and I decide to play music and spend time with my fiancé instead.</div></td></tr>
</table>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Trauma_Tango&diff=36533&oldid=0Trauma Tango2024-03-05T06:45:26Z<p>Created page with "'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>''' :''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in <a href="/index.php?title=Processed_World:_A_Political_History" title="Processed World: A Political History">''Processed World magazine''</a> between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.'' ''by Tom Mess..."</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
:''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in [[Processed World: A Political History|''Processed World magazine'']] between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.''<br />
<br />
''by Tom Messmer''<br />
<br />
''—from Processed World #2.005, published in Winter, 2005.''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Raven-buffalo-in-Manhattan.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Buffalo in Manhattan.'''<br />
<br />
''Collage by Raven''<br />
<br />
::“The apocalypse has been announced so many times that it cannot occur. And even if it did it would be hard to distinguish it from the everyday fate already reserved for individual and community alike.”<br />
:::—Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit<br />
<br />
::“They hang the man and flog the woman<br />
::who steal the goose from off the common<br />
::But let the greater villain loose<br />
::who steals the common from the goose”<br />
:::—English folk poem, 17th century<br />
<br />
1. I’m outside waiting for an ambulance to bring in another trauma. It’s one of those foggy-yet-sunny, surreal San Francisco afternoons that occur in the fall, which is actually somehow our summer. I noticed a few pigeons congregating to my left and as I glanced over I realized to my horror that they were all happily dining on human blood and tissue from an ambulance backboard.<br />
<br />
2. The budget crisis in San Francisco has become truly dire, and according to the folks who calculate such things, sacrifices are in order. What amounts to a 7.5% pay decrease is proposed for many who work for the city in such job capacities as health aides, janitors, groundskeepers, and, in my case, social workers. The union puts this proposal to a vote and it narrowly passes. For some reason the union was unprepared to propose any alternative to this pay cut for the lowest-paid workers in the city. And the membership was frightened by the prospect of layoffs: many have recently bought homes in the Bay Area and are deeply in debt. Still, many are pissed about this, particularly since a large pay increase simultaneously came through for the city supervisors.<br />
<br />
3. A man jumped off a freeway overpass and fell 740 feet onto the roadway. He was quite dead, but they attempted to revive him as a matter of course. I walked into the trauma room after they officially pronounced him dead, the floor was covered with blood and bloody footprints, he was partially covered with a sheet. Medical staff stood about quietly filling out paperwork. For some reason someone was pumping music throughout the hospital’s PA system and the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” was blaring in the room. I went back into the room a few minutes later and they were playing Aretha’s “Natural Woman” and a nurse was actually singing and dancing to the music.<br />
<br />
4. The pay decrease got to me, and I thought to myself, “Someone ought to do something.” Then it occurred to me that this in of itself isn’t a particularly helpful sentiment. Terry Pratchett quipped that this thought is never followed up with the rider “and that someone is me.” I’d been reading Saul Alinsky for some odd reason and I decide I want to rile people up, so I distribute flyers and petitions slamming the union for not fighting, and demanding action. I get a bunch of signatures and people call the Union griping, so they contact me and set up a meeting about what to do.<br />
<br />
5. A homeless Haight Street kid maybe 17 years old is brought in by the police. His friends were worried about him because he had what looked like burns all over his body. The police didn’t like the way he looked so they brought him down. He has a pretty high fever and he tells me he thinks he fell asleep in the sun or something. The docs are puzzled and wonder if maybe a speed lab blew up on him. I talk with him a while and he tells me he ran away from home, which was a trailer park somewhere in the Midwest. He has one of those squatter symbols badly tattooed on his arm. He’s quite frightened and tells me he really wants to get into a drug treatment program so I agree to help him once he’s better. I take my half-hour regulation dinner and when I come back the room he is in is packed with doctors and he has a breathing tube in. They don’t know what’s wrong with him but it appears he is suffering from some sort of systemic sepsis. He dies that night of complications from necrotizing fasciitis, aka “flesh-eating bacteria”, which he got from a dirty needle.<br />
<br />
6. I meet with the rep and some other activists on the very day Schwarzenegger is elected governor. They all have stunned, tired expressions on their faces and have been precinct-walking and rushing from meeting to meeting for years, probably. With a sinking heart I imagine myself clutching a tattered datebook, or even a palm pilot packed full of meetings and rallies, public forums, and phone banking. This is unattractive to me in the extreme and I decide to play music and spend time with my fiancé instead.<br />
<br />
7. I receive a subpoena from a lawyer about a case I worked on in which a 2-year-old Latino child was injured in her apartment in the Mission district. The family is suing the landlord and the landlord’s lawyer tells me that the kid is really OK and that the family is trying to take advantage of his client, an “honest, hard-working landlord” who happens to live in the wealthy Marina district. I tell him that I can’t recall a single fact from the case, but that I’ve lived in those Mission tenements and that none of my landlords tended to the buildings very well. For some reason they don’t call me to testify.<br />
<br />
8. I’m speaking to a homeless man who is what is referred to as a “frequent flyer”. He is in the ER at least 3 times a week, mostly for alcohol intoxication or being the victim of an assault. Between the alcohol and blunt head trauma he has become profoundly demented, and his mental capacity is about that of a ten year old, with a short-term memory that lasts 5 minutes. If I find him a shelter bed and ask him to wait for the van to come pick him up and bring him down there he will either a) wander off and get drunk; b) go back to the triage window and re-register, forgetting that he’s already been seen (interestingly, if a shift has changed recently, oftentimes the triage nurses won’t notice that he’s left the hospital); or c) sit in the chair all night staring at the television. There is not one, or two, but a dozen or more people like this who come to the ER regularly.<br />
<br />
9. One of my favorite websites is called [https://www.thecommoner.org.uk/ The Commoner], a commie website which recently featured a discussion of the ancient notion of “The Commons.” It occurs to me that health and caring for others’ bodies must be part of this. If it isn’t, what could be? The Commons are simply those things that ought not to be part of the marketplace. In the United States in 2004 this concept is viewed by some as close to treason, and by most with suspicion. We seem to have learned our lessons well, though if I suggest to one of the hospital police officers that his job may some day be privatized, indeed that it almost certainly will be, he scoffs. Could the sort of sentimentality Americans reserve for police and fire fighters be enough to stave off another Enclosure, or will we return to the days where the rich have private security and fire fighters and everyone else has what they happen to be able to pay for? Will the poor have to rely on bucket brigades?<br />
<br />
10. A rapacious local “public” university that is also somehow a famous private research hospital system is increasingly involved in the operations of the hospital where I work. One proposal calls for a relocation of the entire hospital to the area that included Mission Rock, a former hellhole of a homeless shelter where murder, extortion, drug dealing, and pimping were everyday occurrences. It is common knowledge that the move is being driven in part by top-tier physicians who complain of parking problems at the current facility. This hospital has recently proposed a new initiative in their world-famous cardiology program in which wealthy donors could gain “enhanced access” to same-day appointments, house calls(!), a special hotline, even physicians’ private pager numbers in case of emergency. These donors include the elite of our society, CEOs of major corporations, national political figures, the usual suspects. This boutique medical system may be the wave of the future, despite local outcry, even from the physicians forced to play a part in it.<br />
<br />
11. I’m waiting at the ambulance bay for another trauma to come in. As the ambulance pulls up and the EMTs open the door I find myself looking into the eyes of a dead black teenager from some particularly violent local projects. He has a bullet hole directly in the middle of his forehead. I can feel myself about to faint as my stomach is empty and the shock hits me hard. I grab something quick to eat and wait for the crowd of family and friends to arrive. As a social worker I earn my pay by somehow offering comfort and assistance in situations exactly like this. But what can one say? I do a lot of listening and nodding; sometimes I’ve broken down and cried with people, not your stereotypical civil servant response. I’m paid to maintain a human presence in the midst of real horror. I ask myself what kind of system we have created that requires us to pay someone to remain human.<br />
<br />
12. I’m walking through the ER on my rounds and realize that just about every bed is occupied by someone who has actually been admitted to the hospital but is simply parked in the ER waiting for a bed to become available upstairs. There are so many sick people out in the community not getting regular medical care that many come to the ER as a last resort, and when they do they are often very ill and in need of hospitalization. Many of these folks are there with such preventable diseases as diabetes and heart and lung diseases from smoking. The deep love affair our society has with privatization, and the equally deep denial that the market’s hand is neither invisible nor particularly benign, are nowhere more obvious than in an emergency room in the year 2004.<br />
<br />
13. Despite my ambivalence towards the union, I’ll do what I can to help when the fight comes, if for nothing other than solidarity with the people I work with everyday who tend to the sick, the crazy, the suicides, the junkies and drunks, and the ever-growing numbers of those who are working but uninsured that wind up jammed into the waiting room, staring up with glazed, sick expressions at reality programs on the ceiling-mounted television.<br />
<br />
[[category:Labor]] [[category:Tales of Toil]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:Mission]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:Public Health]]</div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:Raven-buffalo-in-Manhattan.jpg&diff=36532&oldid=0File:Raven-buffalo-in-Manhattan.jpg2024-03-05T06:40:56Z<p><a href="/index.php?title=User:Ccarlsson" class="mw-userlink" title="User:Ccarlsson"><bdi>Ccarlsson</bdi></a> uploaded <a href="/index.php?title=File:Raven-buffalo-in-Manhattan.jpg" title="File:Raven-buffalo-in-Manhattan.jpg">File:Raven-buffalo-in-Manhattan.jpg</a></p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div></div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Temporary_Coding&diff=36531&oldid=36528Temporary Coding2024-03-01T05:31:01Z<p></p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 22:31, 29 February 2024</td>
</tr><tr><td colspan="4" class="diff-multi" lang="en">(2 intermediate revisions by the same user not shown)</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-lineno" id="mw-diff-left-l17">Line 17:</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>You forfeit your rights when you start work as a temp in a law firm. You're asked to sign a statement that looks like a confession, swearing you will divulge absolutely nothing about the case you're working on to any person for any reason. According to the warning, if you so much as mention the case to anybody, the full weight of the law will descend on you. "You might be able to plead spousal immunity," flecked one supervisor after threating us with merciless fines and jail time.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>You forfeit your rights when you start work as a temp in a law firm. You're asked to sign a statement that looks like a confession, swearing you will divulge absolutely nothing about the case you're working on to any person for any reason. According to the warning, if you so much as mention the case to anybody, the full weight of the law will descend on you. "You might be able to plead spousal immunity," flecked one supervisor after threating us with merciless fines and jail time.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Law firms "hire" temps, when need arises, to do what they haven't got machines to do yet, or what they can't get their other employees to do: the most monotonous, labor-intensive tasks involved in labeling, indexing, storing and retrieving vast quantities of documents.Whole weeks of my life have been consumed by "bates stamping,<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">'' </del>a task in which a small numbered sticker is transferred by hand from a computer-generated sheet onto another piece of paper, thus making it a "document." Repeated thousands of times eight hours a day, five days a week, this would give anybody repetitive stress injury as well as brain damage. I recently did this seven days a week, twelve hours a day, while a beserk legal assistant badgered me to "Go faster! Go faster!" so that I wouldn't "cost the client (Cetus Corporation, a biotech giant) so much money."</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Law firms "hire" temps, when need arises, to do what they haven't got machines to do yet, or what they can't get their other employees to do: the most monotonous, labor-intensive tasks involved in labeling, indexing, storing and retrieving vast quantities of documents.Whole weeks of my life have been consumed by "bates stamping,<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">" </ins>a task in which a small numbered sticker is transferred by hand from a computer-generated sheet onto another piece of paper, thus making it a "document." Repeated thousands of times eight hours a day, five days a week, this would give anybody repetitive stress injury as well as brain damage. I recently did this seven days a week, twelve hours a day, while a beserk legal assistant badgered me to "Go faster! Go faster!" so that I wouldn't "cost the client (Cetus Corporation, a biotech giant) so much money."</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>A common task I perform is called "coding." That means reading each document (usually something like an invoice) for information (date, names, subject) and entering it onto a form. Its then sent to a word processor, who puts it into a tidy data base which the lawyers can access with the stroke of a finger.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>A common task I perform is called "coding." That means reading each document (usually something like an invoice) for information (date, names, subject) and entering it onto a form. Its then sent to a word processor, who puts it into a tidy data base which the lawyers can access with the stroke of a finger.</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Occasionally while coding I'll see an internal memo which reveals the prepubescent character of your typical lawyer or executive, giving me a bitter laugh. I remember one top honcho drawing analogies between the services his company provides and the superhuman qualities of his favorite toy, Action Man, which he proceeded to describe in admiring detail, as advertised on one of his favorite Saturday morning cartoons.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Occasionally while coding I'll see an internal memo which reveals the prepubescent character of your typical lawyer or executive, giving me a bitter laugh. I remember one top honcho drawing analogies between the services his company provides and the superhuman qualities of his favorite toy, Action Man, which he proceeded to describe in admiring detail, as advertised on one of his favorite Saturday morning cartoons.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>My experience at one law firm (appropriately named "Cooley"), coding on a Genentech case, was not an easy job. We were segregated from the main office in a gloomy warehouse down the block, over a hundred of us, working at crowded tables in two six-hour shifts, six days a week. It was explained to us that six hours was the maximum amount of time in a day that a human being could reasonably be expected to perform this mind-mulching work, though later we were put on eight-hour shifts with the expectation that we would do overtime. To read the documents we had to peer into the dim greenish light of a microfilm machine that caused vicious eyestrain. In an office behind us, the supervisor, an insolent, condescending shmuck with an unconscious twitch in his hands as if he was suppressing the urge to strangle somebody, scrutinized us from his window, making sure that no deviation from the work took place. Data entry was done "off- shore<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">'' </del>(i.e., the Philippines).</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>My experience at one law firm (appropriately named "Cooley"), coding on a Genentech case, was not an easy job. We were segregated from the main office in a gloomy warehouse down the block, over a hundred of us, working at crowded tables in two six-hour shifts, six days a week. It was explained to us that six hours was the maximum amount of time in a day that a human being could reasonably be expected to perform this mind-mulching work, though later we were put on eight-hour shifts with the expectation that we would do overtime. To read the documents we had to peer into the dim greenish light of a microfilm machine that caused vicious eyestrain. In an office behind us, the supervisor, an insolent, condescending shmuck with an unconscious twitch in his hands as if he was suppressing the urge to strangle somebody, scrutinized us from his window, making sure that no deviation from the work took place. Data entry was done "off-shore<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">" </ins>(i.e., the Philippines).</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Temps regularly endure periodic purges, the random process by which you or your co-workers are suddenly "let go.<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">'' </del>You don't get sentimental about getting laid off from a lousy job, but suddenly being unemployed in the middle of the month and not knowing where you're going to get the rent sucks.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Temps regularly endure periodic purges, the random process by which you or your co-workers are suddenly "let go.<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">" </ins>You don't get sentimental about getting laid off from a lousy job, but suddenly being unemployed in the middle of the month and not knowing where you're going to get the rent sucks.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The first layoffs at Cooley took place the day before Christmas Eve (holidays being a good time to cut temp costs). About a third of the temps went home from work to find messages on their answering machines giving them the axe. This is the preferred method of termination, I was informed by a temp who had been there for five years (known as a "permanent temporary<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">''</del>). The theory, probably correct, being that if told ahead of time or on location, vengeful temps would trash the place in a desperate effort to get even with all the abuses they had endured.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The first layoffs at Cooley took place the day before Christmas Eve (holidays being a good time to cut temp costs). About a third of the temps went home from work to find messages on their answering machines giving them the axe. This is the preferred method of termination, I was informed by a temp who had been there for five years (known as a "permanent temporary<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">"</ins>). The theory, probably correct, being that if told ahead of time or on location, vengeful temps would trash the place in a desperate effort to get even with all the abuses they had endured.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Those of us who remained were selected because our handwriting was considered legible enough for a Tagalog-speaking word processor to decipher. Over the next couple of months, they weeded out more and more of us, until the last five masochists were called into Psycho Boss's office and informed that we were now on Cooley's payroll. <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">"</del>"We can finally start to make some money off you now,<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">'' </del>he said. There was no change in our <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">status- -we </del>still were denied paid holidays, sick days and vacations; still without benefits of any kind. The only difference was that we no longer had temporary status and were now Cooley property. Outraged, I called the job placement lady at the agency, Gratified Flex-staff.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Those of us who remained were selected because our handwriting was considered legible enough for a Tagalog-speaking word processor to decipher. Over the next couple of months, they weeded out more and more of us, until the last five masochists were called into Psycho Boss's office and informed that we were now on Cooley's payroll. "We can finally start to make some money off you now,<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">" </ins>he said. There was no change in our <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">status—we </ins>still were denied paid holidays, sick days and vacations; still without benefits of any kind. The only difference was that we no longer had temporary status and were now Cooley property. Outraged, I called the job placement lady at the agency, Gratified Flex-staff.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>"They just told us we're working for them now," I gasped. "I don't want to work for them! I want another assignment."</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>"They just told us we're working for them now," I gasped. "I don't want to work for them! I want another assignment."</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The old crow officiated. "Ohhhh, what kind of assignment?" I was never informed of it, but Cooley had paid a substantial amount of money to Gratified to buy my services off them, and she was probably amused at my stupidity.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The old crow officiated. "Ohhhh, what kind of assignment?" I was never informed of it, but Cooley had paid a substantial amount of money to Gratified to buy my services off them, and she was probably amused at my stupidity.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>"One where I don't have to work too hard,<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">'' </del>I told her, in all honesty, figuring that since now I was on Cooley's payroll I had a bit of clout with them. She feigned shock. I never saw a penny of that money I was auctioned for.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>"One where I don't have to work too hard,<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">" </ins>I told her, in all honesty, figuring that since now I was on Cooley's payroll I had a bit of clout with them. She feigned shock. I never saw a penny of that money I was auctioned for.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The relation of temp to agency is one of indentured servitude. The temp agency puts the most positive spin possible on it: they offer ""<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">flexibility'' </del>to workers who are <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">"</del>"in between<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">'' </del>jobs. They get you a job in exchange for a hefty cut of your wages. Usually, the temp agencies have a monopoly on the job market in the form of contracts with employers; job-seekers who go to law firms looking for benefits (usually older people for whom such things are a necesity) are told that the quickest way to permanent status is through a temp <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">job--which </del>could last for years. Or a few days. Temp agencies start you out with the worst assignments, jerk you from place to <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">place--each </del>of which writes a review of your performance for the agency--until they figure out how much you're worth. Because the work is erratic, temps are assumed to be eager to do as much overtime as humanly possible. You're usually called in right before a deadline and worked around the clock. Most times you're desperate for the money since its usually several weeks between jobs.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The relation of temp to agency is one of indentured servitude. The temp agency puts the most positive spin possible on it: they offer "<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">flexibility</ins>" to workers who are "in between<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">" </ins>jobs. They get you a job in exchange for a hefty cut of your wages. Usually, the temp agencies have a monopoly on the job market in the form of contracts with employers; job-seekers who go to law firms looking for benefits (usually older people for whom such things are a necesity) are told that the quickest way to permanent status is through a temp <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">job—which </ins>could last for years. Or a few days. Temp agencies start you out with the worst assignments, jerk you from place to <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">place—each </ins>of which writes a review of your performance for the agency--until they figure out how much you're worth. Because the work is erratic, temps are assumed to be eager to do as much overtime as humanly possible. You're usually called in right before a deadline and worked around the clock. Most times you're desperate for the money since its usually several weeks between jobs.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The only real function that the agency plays is to screen potential temps to make sure they aren't sending drooling zombies out on assignments. Its now common for employers to request an additional interview, even for a week-long assignment.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The only real function that the agency plays is to screen potential temps to make sure they aren't sending drooling zombies out on assignments. Its now common for employers to request an additional interview, even for a week-long assignment.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-lineno" id="mw-diff-left-l51">Line 51:</td>
<td colspan="2" class="diff-lineno">Line 51:</td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Fortunately I don't have to deal with attorneys, although riding in the elevators with these jackoffs, listening to them boast about the macho magnitude of their settlements, give me fantasies of ultra-violence.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Fortunately I don't have to deal with attorneys, although riding in the elevators with these jackoffs, listening to them boast about the macho magnitude of their settlements, give me fantasies of ultra-violence.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>One time I worked as a filer for a fascist Cuban named Carlos Bea, a multi-millionaire "exile<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">'' </del>whose family owned a roof-tile manufacturing business. He considered being a lawyer a past-time befitting a man of his station, and specialized in giving his secretaries nervous breakdowns. A member of such illustrious organizations as Nixon's CREEP and the Bohemian Club, he spent his time soaping up powerful people who could do him political favors; I remember a personal letter he wrote to Ed Meese, who was staying at his castle in Spain, warning about Basque terrorism. Evidently, his cronyism paid off. His friend Governor Deukmejian appointed him to replace a retiring district judge in San Francisco. When his term was over, an expensive election campaign was run on his behalf, covering the streets with his smiling face, his name seemingly everywhere: buses, streetlights, billboards. It was torture.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>One time I worked as a filer for a fascist Cuban named Carlos Bea, a multi-millionaire "exile<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">" </ins>whose family owned a roof-tile manufacturing business. He considered being a lawyer a past-time befitting a man of his station, and specialized in giving his secretaries nervous breakdowns. A member of such illustrious organizations as Nixon's CREEP and the Bohemian Club, he spent his time soaping up powerful people who could do him political favors; I remember a personal letter he wrote to Ed Meese, who was staying at his castle in Spain, warning about Basque terrorism. Evidently, his cronyism paid off. His friend Governor Deukmejian appointed him to replace a retiring district judge in San Francisco. When his term was over, an expensive election campaign was run on his behalf, covering the streets with his smiling face, his name seemingly everywhere: buses, streetlights, billboards. It was torture.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>An assignment coordinator from Gratified once informed my supervisor (in my presence) that she "tries to group people together who I don't think will have anything in common so they'll be less likely to talk.<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">'' </del>Not much opportunity for collective action when you're deliberately stuck with people you'll probably hate.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>An assignment coordinator from Gratified once informed my supervisor (in my presence) that she "tries to group people together who I don't think will have anything in common so they'll be less likely to talk.<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">" </ins>Not much opportunity for collective action when you're deliberately stuck with people you'll probably hate.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>There seemed to be a different spirit among the temps I encountered four years ago. They were more likely to be struggling punk rock musicians, ne'er-do-wells or students. Now temping seems to be more of a way for careerist office drones to a gain a foothold into a big corporation. Temps tend to be older, people suddenly out of work or law students awaiting their bar scores.Temps can be cutthroat. Most would rat on you in a minute for the slightest crime if it meant enhancing their status with the boss. "Permanent" jobs are secured through these means. I was once fired from a job thanks to a goateed and granny glassed temp supervisor who I thought was my friend, sharing a common interest in Latin American fiction.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>There seemed to be a different spirit among the temps I encountered four years ago. They were more likely to be struggling punk rock musicians, ne'er-do-wells or students. Now temping seems to be more of a way for careerist office drones to a gain a foothold into a big corporation. Temps tend to be older, people suddenly out of work or law students awaiting their bar scores.Temps can be cutthroat. Most would rat on you in a minute for the slightest crime if it meant enhancing their status with the boss. "Permanent" jobs are secured through these means. I was once fired from a job thanks to a goateed and granny glassed temp supervisor who I thought was my friend, sharing a common interest in Latin American fiction.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-lineno" id="mw-diff-left-l65">Line 65:</td>
<td colspan="2" class="diff-lineno">Line 65:</td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The temp agency, the law firm, other temps, every financial district lifer expects me to have an alibi for temping. It's not enough that I'm trying to keep a roof over my head while I pursue my interests, I have to have some deeper reason to explain why I'm not pursuing a career. They're worried that there might be people who have no work ethic.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The temp agency, the law firm, other temps, every financial district lifer expects me to have an alibi for temping. It's not enough that I'm trying to keep a roof over my head while I pursue my interests, I have to have some deeper reason to explain why I'm not pursuing a career. They're worried that there might be people who have no work ethic.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>By the estimate of one big law firm I worked at (Heller, Ehrman) ninety percent of the labor on a big case is what's called "discovery"—that's the paper-shuffling that temps do. The other ten percent—meeting with clients, legal research, drafting <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">pleadings -- —is </del>supposedly done by lawyers, though most of that is done by secretaries and legal assistants. Legal assistants boss around temps.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>By the estimate of one big law firm I worked at (Heller, Ehrman) ninety percent of the labor on a big case is what's called "discovery"—that's the paper-shuffling that temps do. The other ten percent—meeting with clients, legal research, drafting <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">pleadings—is </ins>supposedly done by lawyers, though most of that is done by secretaries and legal assistants. Legal assistants boss around temps.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>When I was at Heller there were over 50 temps working full-time. Heller specializes in suing insurance companies, so they keep their fees (which temps contribute to) as high as possible. They milk their client to give them the incentive to settle. They then sue the insurance company, thus generating a whole new round of litigation and legal costs.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>When I was at Heller there were over 50 temps working full-time. Heller specializes in suing insurance companies, so they keep their fees (which temps contribute to) as high as possible. They milk their client to give them the incentive to settle. They then sue the insurance company, thus generating a whole new round of litigation and legal costs.</div></td></tr>
</table>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Temporary_Coding&diff=36528&oldid=0Temporary Coding2024-03-01T05:21:57Z<p>Created page with "'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>''' :''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in <a href="/index.php?title=Processed_World:_A_Political_History" title="Processed World: A Political History">''Processed World magazine''</a> between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.'' ''by Mickey D..."</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
:''"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in [[Processed World: A Political History|''Processed World magazine'']] between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.''<br />
<br />
''by Mickey D.''<br />
<br />
''—from Processed World #28, published in August, 1991.''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Ghost man.gif|400px|right]]<br />
<br />
I always worked as a temp, usually doing light industrial work, but it wasn't until I moved to San Francisco that I got a job in a law firm. I had no relevant experience or interest in law; my last job before moving here was cleaning up rat feces in a Lipton warehouse. I got my first job interview through a "clerical" help wanted ad. When I showed up for my interview, I was an hour late, I had holes in my shoes, and I flunked the office competency test. Much to my surprise, I was working right away at one of the biggest law firms in California. Later I realized that the only worthwhile advice I'd been given about job interviews--lie through your teeth—had paid off: I told them I was "thinking about" law school. Truth was, I was thinking about the least painful way to make a buck, and working in a posh office seemed better than crawling around with a Dust Buster in a damp gloomy warehouse looking for piles of rat shit.<br />
<br />
Having stood for hours at photocopiers, my eyes nuked by the rolling strobe light, I've had plenty of time to contemplate my naivete. I always get stuck where no one else will work, so I either fry in direct sunlight behind a plate glass window or freeze in a room with out-of-control air-conditioning. I once worked in an office that every day at 11:30 filled with a mysterious noxious-smelling gas from a vent; despite my numerous complaints, nobody ever responded. So instead of screwing caps on deodorant cans one after another, I'm turning pages of paper. At least I have some energy left at the end of the day to pursue other things. A short stint as a furniture mover cured me of any fond illusions about manual labor (something I often hear among male office workers). As a temp, there's always the hope that you might land an easy job where you can get away with a lot of fucking off; I've had a few.<br />
<br />
For the last four years, off and on, I've temped in about twenty big law firms in the San Francisco financial district. Assignments have varied in length of time from nine months to nine minutes, but the introduction is always the same: you are under suspicion, a likely pick-pocket or information thief.<br />
<br />
You forfeit your rights when you start work as a temp in a law firm. You're asked to sign a statement that looks like a confession, swearing you will divulge absolutely nothing about the case you're working on to any person for any reason. According to the warning, if you so much as mention the case to anybody, the full weight of the law will descend on you. "You might be able to plead spousal immunity," flecked one supervisor after threating us with merciless fines and jail time.<br />
<br />
Law firms "hire" temps, when need arises, to do what they haven't got machines to do yet, or what they can't get their other employees to do: the most monotonous, labor-intensive tasks involved in labeling, indexing, storing and retrieving vast quantities of documents.Whole weeks of my life have been consumed by "bates stamping,'' a task in which a small numbered sticker is transferred by hand from a computer-generated sheet onto another piece of paper, thus making it a "document." Repeated thousands of times eight hours a day, five days a week, this would give anybody repetitive stress injury as well as brain damage. I recently did this seven days a week, twelve hours a day, while a beserk legal assistant badgered me to "Go faster! Go faster!" so that I wouldn't "cost the client (Cetus Corporation, a biotech giant) so much money."<br />
<br />
A common task I perform is called "coding." That means reading each document (usually something like an invoice) for information (date, names, subject) and entering it onto a form. Its then sent to a word processor, who puts it into a tidy data base which the lawyers can access with the stroke of a finger.<br />
<br />
The emphasis on secrecy is absurd. I'm kept in the dark beyond what's necessary for the job; I have no idea to what ultimate purpose my labor contributes except the meaningless perpetuation of bureaucracy.<br />
<br />
Occasionally while coding I'll see an internal memo which reveals the prepubescent character of your typical lawyer or executive, giving me a bitter laugh. I remember one top honcho drawing analogies between the services his company provides and the superhuman qualities of his favorite toy, Action Man, which he proceeded to describe in admiring detail, as advertised on one of his favorite Saturday morning cartoons.<br />
<br />
My experience at one law firm (appropriately named "Cooley"), coding on a Genentech case, was not an easy job. We were segregated from the main office in a gloomy warehouse down the block, over a hundred of us, working at crowded tables in two six-hour shifts, six days a week. It was explained to us that six hours was the maximum amount of time in a day that a human being could reasonably be expected to perform this mind-mulching work, though later we were put on eight-hour shifts with the expectation that we would do overtime. To read the documents we had to peer into the dim greenish light of a microfilm machine that caused vicious eyestrain. In an office behind us, the supervisor, an insolent, condescending shmuck with an unconscious twitch in his hands as if he was suppressing the urge to strangle somebody, scrutinized us from his window, making sure that no deviation from the work took place. Data entry was done "off- shore'' (i.e., the Philippines).<br />
<br />
Temps regularly endure periodic purges, the random process by which you or your co-workers are suddenly "let go.'' You don't get sentimental about getting laid off from a lousy job, but suddenly being unemployed in the middle of the month and not knowing where you're going to get the rent sucks.<br />
<br />
The first layoffs at Cooley took place the day before Christmas Eve (holidays being a good time to cut temp costs). About a third of the temps went home from work to find messages on their answering machines giving them the axe. This is the preferred method of termination, I was informed by a temp who had been there for five years (known as a "permanent temporary''). The theory, probably correct, being that if told ahead of time or on location, vengeful temps would trash the place in a desperate effort to get even with all the abuses they had endured.<br />
<br />
Those of us who remained were selected because our handwriting was considered legible enough for a Tagalog-speaking word processor to decipher. Over the next couple of months, they weeded out more and more of us, until the last five masochists were called into Psycho Boss's office and informed that we were now on Cooley's payroll. ""We can finally start to make some money off you now,'' he said. There was no change in our status- -we still were denied paid holidays, sick days and vacations; still without benefits of any kind. The only difference was that we no longer had temporary status and were now Cooley property. Outraged, I called the job placement lady at the agency, Gratified Flex-staff.<br />
<br />
"They just told us we're working for them now," I gasped. "I don't want to work for them! I want another assignment."<br />
<br />
The old crow officiated. "Ohhhh, what kind of assignment?" I was never informed of it, but Cooley had paid a substantial amount of money to Gratified to buy my services off them, and she was probably amused at my stupidity.<br />
<br />
"One where I don't have to work too hard,'' I told her, in all honesty, figuring that since now I was on Cooley's payroll I had a bit of clout with them. She feigned shock. I never saw a penny of that money I was auctioned for.<br />
<br />
The relation of temp to agency is one of indentured servitude. The temp agency puts the most positive spin possible on it: they offer ""flexibility'' to workers who are ""in between'' jobs. They get you a job in exchange for a hefty cut of your wages. Usually, the temp agencies have a monopoly on the job market in the form of contracts with employers; job-seekers who go to law firms looking for benefits (usually older people for whom such things are a necesity) are told that the quickest way to permanent status is through a temp job--which could last for years. Or a few days. Temp agencies start you out with the worst assignments, jerk you from place to place--each of which writes a review of your performance for the agency--until they figure out how much you're worth. Because the work is erratic, temps are assumed to be eager to do as much overtime as humanly possible. You're usually called in right before a deadline and worked around the clock. Most times you're desperate for the money since its usually several weeks between jobs.<br />
<br />
The only real function that the agency plays is to screen potential temps to make sure they aren't sending drooling zombies out on assignments. Its now common for employers to request an additional interview, even for a week-long assignment.<br />
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If you misbehave, talk back to your boss, cheat on your hours, or even turn down an assignment, you get blacklisted by the agency. I had a friend who was working in an office that was destroyed by an out-of-control crane from a nearby construction site; if he had been sitting just yards from where he was, he would have been killed instantly. When he told the agency he didn't want to return to that job, they were pissed that they lost a valuable contract. He never got another job, even though he worked for Gratified for years.<br />
<br />
Receiving unemployment insurance is next to impossible if you're a full-time temp. The agencies balk at nothing to make a case against you. They once called my roommates to ask questions about my whereabouts in order to (successfully) contest a claim I made with the EDD for $120. I've never seen more than $11,000 a year. Sweetheart contracts enrich both the temp agencies and the law firms. At my last job, I was getting paid $10 an hour. The temp agency was billing the law firm $20 an hour. The law firm, in turn, was billing their client $40 an hour. Other than what I earned hourly, I got zilch. Once I got a plastic coffee cup with the Gratified logo emblazoned on it in order to "increase [my] environmental awareness for Earth Day," as I was told in all seriousness by my "assignment cooordinator."<br />
<br />
Another benefit to the two employers' partnership is that whenever a problem comes up, they can pass the buck endlessly. If there's ever a pay discrepancy or a raise due, the ball is always in the other court. They wear you out going back and forth.<br />
<br />
Fortunately I don't have to deal with attorneys, although riding in the elevators with these jackoffs, listening to them boast about the macho magnitude of their settlements, give me fantasies of ultra-violence.<br />
<br />
One time I worked as a filer for a fascist Cuban named Carlos Bea, a multi-millionaire "exile'' whose family owned a roof-tile manufacturing business. He considered being a lawyer a past-time befitting a man of his station, and specialized in giving his secretaries nervous breakdowns. A member of such illustrious organizations as Nixon's CREEP and the Bohemian Club, he spent his time soaping up powerful people who could do him political favors; I remember a personal letter he wrote to Ed Meese, who was staying at his castle in Spain, warning about Basque terrorism. Evidently, his cronyism paid off. His friend Governor Deukmejian appointed him to replace a retiring district judge in San Francisco. When his term was over, an expensive election campaign was run on his behalf, covering the streets with his smiling face, his name seemingly everywhere: buses, streetlights, billboards. It was torture.<br />
<br />
An assignment coordinator from Gratified once informed my supervisor (in my presence) that she "tries to group people together who I don't think will have anything in common so they'll be less likely to talk.'' Not much opportunity for collective action when you're deliberately stuck with people you'll probably hate.<br />
<br />
There seemed to be a different spirit among the temps I encountered four years ago. They were more likely to be struggling punk rock musicians, ne'er-do-wells or students. Now temping seems to be more of a way for careerist office drones to a gain a foothold into a big corporation. Temps tend to be older, people suddenly out of work or law students awaiting their bar scores.Temps can be cutthroat. Most would rat on you in a minute for the slightest crime if it meant enhancing their status with the boss. "Permanent" jobs are secured through these means. I was once fired from a job thanks to a goateed and granny glassed temp supervisor who I thought was my friend, sharing a common interest in Latin American fiction.<br />
<br />
Law firms extract an amazing degree of ideological loyalty ("positive attitude") from their employees. Even temps who work on a case for no more than 10 minutes refer to "us" as in "which side are we on?" Most yearn to work on a pro-bono case which they imagine will be socially beneficial.<br />
<br />
I've heard few inspiring ideas from temps about challenging our degrading situation. One (a law school grad) made a lot of noise about how he was going into politics so he could go to Washington D.C. and get a law passed prohibiting the grosser aspects of temp exploitation; another wanted temps to organize a union. Given that both the government and the unions are big contractors of temp labor, I considered these ideas unfeasible; large institutions don't slash their own throats. In any event, temps move around so much that conventional workplace organizing is futile.<br />
<br />
Actually, what makes temping bearable for me is the tenuous nature of the employment. I don't participate in the ass-kissing, smiley face office etiquette. I've never worn a tie in all my years of "white collar" employment. A necessary tool of the trade is a walkman, for 1) giving me some sort of sensual stimulation so that I know I'm not dead and 2) sending a symbolic "fuck you" to my surroundings.<br />
<br />
The temp agency, the law firm, other temps, every financial district lifer expects me to have an alibi for temping. It's not enough that I'm trying to keep a roof over my head while I pursue my interests, I have to have some deeper reason to explain why I'm not pursuing a career. They're worried that there might be people who have no work ethic.<br />
<br />
By the estimate of one big law firm I worked at (Heller, Ehrman) ninety percent of the labor on a big case is what's called "discovery"—that's the paper-shuffling that temps do. The other ten percent—meeting with clients, legal research, drafting pleadings -- —is supposedly done by lawyers, though most of that is done by secretaries and legal assistants. Legal assistants boss around temps.<br />
<br />
When I was at Heller there were over 50 temps working full-time. Heller specializes in suing insurance companies, so they keep their fees (which temps contribute to) as high as possible. They milk their client to give them the incentive to settle. They then sue the insurance company, thus generating a whole new round of litigation and legal costs.<br />
<br />
Legal assistants are usually nephews and nieces of lawyers who participate in a carefully cultivated preppy culture (skiing in Tahoe on weekends, lunches at the Hard Rock Cafe) meant to instill the ethics of the law business. One legal assistant took the ethic too seriously. She did nothing for six months and billed enormous overtime, accruing a small fortune before her boss got wise. Heller was happy with the booty, but she made the error of indiscretion so they fired her. She threatened a wrongful termination suit in which she would drag Heller's dirty laundry into the courtroom. She settled out-of-court for $14,000 shut up money.<br />
<br />
I managed my own form of revenge, by stealing my life back. The whole time I worked at Heller, I never took less than a two and a half hour lunch and always took several hour long breaks during the day. When the Gulf war began I got paid for two days of disruptive activity in the streets of SF. Still, given the rules of the game, my fictitious labor time contributes to enriching the parasites who suck me dry day after day. What would bother them is that I found the loopholes in the rules governing their office. Drinking a beer in the park, I toasted the loopholes. <br />
<br />
[[category:Labor]] [[category:Tales of Toil]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:Downtown]] [[category:Dissent]]</div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:Ghost_man.gif&diff=36527&oldid=0File:Ghost man.gif2024-03-01T05:20:50Z<p><a href="/index.php?title=User:Ccarlsson" class="mw-userlink" title="User:Ccarlsson"><bdi>Ccarlsson</bdi></a> uploaded <a href="/index.php?title=File:Ghost_man.gif" title="File:Ghost man.gif">File:Ghost man.gif</a></p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div></div>Ccarlssonhttps://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Lose_Jobs_Now!_Ask_Me_How!&diff=36526&oldid=36519Lose Jobs Now! Ask Me How!2024-03-01T05:10:31Z<p></p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 22:10, 29 February 2024</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>My worst job experiences were in food handling, and I've never escaped any of them on my own prompting. When the manager at McDonald's fired me, he said, "You're a good worker, but you just don't fit the McDonald's image." I lasted 4 days bussing tables at a suburban Chinese restaurant before the owner handed me $50 in cash and told me to beat it.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>My worst job experiences were in food handling, and I've never escaped any of them on my own prompting. When the manager at McDonald's fired me, he said, "You're a good worker, but you just don't fit the McDonald's image." I lasted 4 days bussing tables at a suburban Chinese restaurant before the owner handed me $50 in cash and told me to beat it.</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>During a disastrous week-long stint at the SF State dorm cafeteria, I arrived at 11:00 instead of 10:00 one morning, and sneaked into the basement to avoid my boss, slip into my uniform and pretend I'd been there working the whole time. Who did I run into downstairs but my asshole boss, who shocked me by asking, "What are you doing here? You're not supposed to be here until 3:00! " I never ran out of any place so fast as I did at that moment. It was the kindly manager of a 24-hour breakfast place called Waffle House (which we affectionately dubbed the ''Awful Waffle'') who did me a favor when he fired me by strongly suggesting that I try something other than restaurant work for a living.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>During a disastrous week-long stint at the SF State dorm cafeteria, I arrived at 11:00 instead of 10:00 one morning, and sneaked into the basement to avoid my boss, slip into my uniform and pretend I'd been there working the whole time. Who did I run into downstairs but my asshole boss, who shocked me by asking, "What are you doing here? You're not supposed to be here until 3:00! " I never ran out of any place so fast as I did at that moment. It was the kindly manager of a 24-hour breakfast place called Waffle House (which we affectionately dubbed the ''Awful Waffle'') who did me a favor when he fired me by strongly suggesting that I try something other than restaurant work for a living.</div></td></tr>
</table>Ccarlsson