For Here or To Go:
Life in the Service Industry
edited by Leah Ryan
2004
ISBN: 1891053442
$15.95 + $1 postage
Excerpt from
the forward
by Leah Ryan
I have wanted to do a book like this one for many years. Not so much to gripe, complain, or expose the evil establishment -- if those things happen as a by-product, so be it. But my motive was (and still is) to tell stories, and to create a place for stories to be told.
How many times have I been at work, or out in the world watching people work and found myself thinking, 'Oh my god. I just wish someone could see this. Why is nobody watching this?'
I don't think that this book romanticizes work in the service industry. But among the ugly stories of low pay and sweaty, difficult work, there is another, more positive common thread: the ability that people have, regardless of their professions, to find something good in their work. It usually doesn't last, but that's often not the worker's fault. We've all seen the disgruntled worker stereotype: The pissed off clockwatcher leaning on his broom. The fed-up cook spitting in the food (a popular urban legend that I've never actually seen happen). The harried waitress throwing a quart of gravy on an innocent family of four. And now we have the postal worker jokes -- "Don't piss her off, or she'll go postal," and so on.
Of course sometimes it's this simple: Your job sucks, there's no joy in it whatsoever, the pay sucks, the boss sucks, it's pointless and horrible. But what's truly remarkable about many of the people I have known, and the people I've learned about since starting this project, is that they really care about their jobs. If you ask white-collar workers what they hate about their jobs, they'll often tell you about the thing that's preventing them from doing the best work they can do. Many service industry workers complain about the same things. No matter how crappy the job is, people tend to look for the higher good in what they do. And the perks are few and far between.
The stories in this volume span decades. The minimum wage was a little under three dollars an hour when I started working, in the late 1970s. Now, it's still only five dollars and fifteen cents an hour. The last time it went up was 1997. It barely budged during the Reagan/Daddy Bush years. Imagine working for a company, any company, for thirty years, while the cost of living skyrockets and your hourly wage, in those thirty years, increases by about three dollars per hour?
I have a feeling that if you took an informal poll of middle-class white-collar folks, a lot of them wouldn't be able to tell you waht the minimum wage is, unless they have to deal with hiring and firing themselves. Even then, in the corporate world, a lot of that hiring and firing is handled by temp agencies. I have had numerous conversations with people who seem to think that the minimum wage is 10 or 12 dollars an hour. Where do they get this from? Why are they so misinformed?
All rights reserved.
Garrett County Press