Thread by @Gregory_Pecked

I’ve seen people discussing jobs for Labor Day and it made me think of my first job out of High School. It was an eye-opener, doing data entry for medical manufacturer Schering-Plough in Kenilworth, NJ. I was making $7.25 an hour, which was above minimum wage back then.

It was a giant warehouse operation packing gift-boxes for doctors with trials of drugs and all sorts of trinkets - golf balls and crystal mugs and travel metal detectors and whatever would make the doctor remember the product because performance is meaningless.

I got the job through a temp agency. Everyone who worked there full time hated it and generally tried to pawn off responsibility. I could type, so they offered me a chair for the Summer. They started loading me up with other responsibilities, especially the difficult ones.

I would arrive early in the morning, hours before the assembly line was supposed to get started, and check to see what orders were going to get processed. Depending on that I would know how many people were needed on the line. It was up to me to pick names from a list to call.

There I was, a fairly privileged white 18 year old trying to decide who on this list would get work that day. I got to know these people. Parents. Grandparents. Some spoke English. All were desperate. They all needed work. If they didn’t hear from me by 7:45am they’d call.

I remember trying to decide wether Sam, who needed money for his meds, or Rita, who had two kids to feed, would get work that day. It was awful. They took a bus hours each way from Jersey City to pack kitschy toys and antihistamines in boxes for ten hours and thanked me for it.

Telling people there was no work on the line was like delivering a death sentence. I would try to convince my boss to squeeze an extra person in, or to expand the order, or come up with busy work. At least one person cried on the phone every morning. Sometimes they were angry.

My boss was named Dan. He was in his late thirties and drove a brand new Camaro and had spiky hair with too much mousse and talked all the time about the glory days when he was a DJ. He never really worked but would listen to the radio that played through the whole warehouse.

So Dan, in his manic way, loved the song “Barbie Girl” by Aqua. Yeah, the bad pop song. He loved it so much that if it came on he would jump up and dance. And he wanted everyone else to dance. Even the people on the line. The belt would stop and the music got turned way up.

I remember sitting by the belt, listening to that neon pop schmaltz blasting with Dan giddily grinning and whirling by as the poor workers on the line took the moment to rest their weary hands and pretended to smile. Dan would ask Rita if she liked the song. It was surreal.

Then the music would end, the belt would start again, and Rita would continue putting Ray Ban sunglasses worth three times what she’d make that day in a gift box for a doctor to sell drugs. She would thank me on her way out the door to catch her long bus ride home to her kids.

That job taught me about labor and how it is valued in this country. It taught me about power dynamics and the way people are caught by them. It taught me about visceral need, and how indifferent the systems that contain us can be.

I still hate that song.

Happy Labor Day.