The Ghost of Employment's Past

Many years ago, before everything was automated, I worked as a long distance operator. We sat at a long board with repeating sets of panels, inserting cords into lights to take a call. Each of us was "the operator," the woman who answered whenever a customer dialed O. The job wasn't physically difficult but it was otherwise awful.

Every operator was a woman because those jobs were posted in the "Female Help Wanted" section of the newspaper Want Ads (in those days, the only way, apart from going to an agency, to search for a job). Our supervisors, with BAs in business administration, were fresh out of college, none older than 25. (I suppose they "interned" at the phone company and immediately went on to brighter futures.) Many of the operators, however, were over forty, some in their fifties and sixties. Nevertheless, the young snots addressed every operator, no matter how senior, solely as "Miss [whatever]".

Supervisors spent part of their day spying. They would sit at one end of the long board, listening in for breaches of protocol. Each operator was instructed to use a particular set of words as she responded to a customer's question or request. Any deviation from the established dialogue drew a stern warning. That warning was delivered in the following way: Every operator station along the board sported two jacks, the first for the operator herself, the second for the supervisor. That individual would slam her headset into the jack, simultaneously barking through her microphone: "Keep your eyes on the board, Miss [whatever]," followed by, "What did you tell that customer?" This question was, of course, superfluous, since the supervisor had come over precisely because of what had been said. But it served to further humiliate and intimidate the operator.

This form of bullying was merely half of the bully sandwich long distance operators endured daily. The other half came from customers who took advantage of what they perceived to be their own anonymity to scream and curse the operator. I encountered one such customer on a Monday. His complaint was that I hadn't picked up quick enough: "The weekend's over, bitch."

That was a very funny thing for him to say. Operators didn't get "a weekend." We worked sometimes for eight or nine days straight. Our schedules were complex, listed on sheets of paper posted on a bulletin board. The listings, in nine-point type, showed names followed by a string of four and five digit numbers in several tiny boxes. Each number had to be looked up in one of several binders, one for regular weekdays, one for weekends, one for holidays. If you made a mistake and searched the wrong binder, for some reason you might find a number corresponding to the one in the binder you should have checked, but listing an entirely different schedule. The schedule specified arrival time (often something as ludicrous as 6:43 AM), break time (ten minutes), lunch half hour, second break, and departure time. Shifts might be split so that an operator worked for four hours, went home, returned four hours later to work another four hours. Try having a life on that schedule.

Even though the number in the wrong book matched the number in the right book, the operator would arrive for her workday at the wrong time. (Every day each operator's schedule changed—she knew only what hours she would work for the immediate week ahead, once the schedule was posted.) When an operator arrived at the wrong time, she was threatened with dismissal. If she arrived twice at the wrong time, she was dismissed.

This was effective terrorism. No weapons were used (or hidden). Operators came from the lowest economic rung of the working class. Individually, they saw few options for alternative employment. Those who were over forty saw no options for alternative employment. Apart from working a switchboard, they had no skills. Pacific Telephone and Telegraph's switchboard was dead simple, which prevented operators from learning enough to make them employable at a private business with its own operator receptionists. Those boards were far more complex.

Terror was built into Pacific Telephone and Telegraph's employee management systems. Keeping a worker fearful keeps her fully compliant. Since the union had been started by the company and danced to the company's tune, there was no chance of mass action. Wages were pathetically low, harassment routine, and the phone company permitted only one person in an operator's life to wield more authority than they did: her husband.

I saw an operator sent to the "quiet room" for fifteen minutes for fainting because she had hepatitis. Another pregnant operator went into premature labor. Her supervisor rode in the ambulance with her, telling her (as she later reported) that if she didn't lose the baby, she would lose her job.

What enabled Pacific Tel & Tel to treat people like this? Let me count their advantages:

• 1) The people were women in an era when women were barred from more lucrative forms of employment
• 2) Jobs for unskilled/uneducated workers paid poorly so if a woman who built up any seniority at all was better off staying than starting all over again
• 3) The phone company ensured that its workforce was compliant by not hiring anyone who could pass a simple writing skills and math test. I know this because I deliberately flunked it in order to get hired.
• 4) Most operators lacked sufficient education to make them qualify as front office representatives for large, better paying corporations.

Challenging the wall between women's work and men's has been a major accomplishment of the last forty years, challenging barriers to black employment another. As a nation we are engaged in taking sides in class war, although so many of us (desperately hoping for upward mobility even as upward mobility ceases to be a feature of our economy) deny that.

When the Republicans held tax breaks for the wealthy hostage to help for the unemployed, the nature of the class war became more obvious. The class represented by the Republican Party has its act together. Those targeted to pay for the elite's fine dinners, furs, yachts, and European spas, are floundering, having been successfully persuaded that no class war exists.

If Pacific Tel & Tel could treat its women employees so badly in an era of low unemployment, what do today's workers have to look forward to? I shudder to think of it.

Debt and Aristocrats

A hard year is coming to a close, although the year ahead doesn't appear much brighter—not much brighter, that is, unless you work on Wall Street or in a bank. Or you live on your inherited wealth.

For perhaps twenty percent of what is commonly known as our workforce, 2010 has been devastating. Ten percent actively looking for work with another ten percent either giving up or under-employed, scraping by on less than needed to feed themselves let alone buy health insurance or maybe even rent a roof to keep out the snow.

Who did 2010 disappoint?

1) Those Americans (once a reported majority) looking for a single-payer health plan

2) Families facing losing their homes financed through Countrywide and other scam mortgage outfits

3) People facing foreclosure whose efforts to obtain a re-structured loan have been thwarted (for example, the couple who purchased their home for $549,000 and had it seized by Wells Fargo and sold to an investor for $100,000)

4) Home owners who were not in default and in some cases owned their homes outright but had them seized, looted, and sold—in error—"Only a few," Bank of America insists, because "a few" (and who knows the definition) aren't worth thinking about

5) Taxpayers, bombarded by political speeches about the horrendous deficit and the horrific debt, watching those political speakers hand over to the richest 1% of Americans all the money needed to put our country back into solvency

6) Small business owners whose portion of the "Great Tax Compromise" will cause many of them to go bust

7) Senior citizens who see the handwriting on the wall for hard-won programs to keep them off the streets or prevent them from dying of a treatable untreated disease in some hovel—after all, someone will have to make the country solvent again and it sure isn't going to be the wealthy

8) Everyone (or at least those who aren't comatose) who voted for Barack Obama

That final blow, a vote for "change," I personally didn't cast. Long ago I registered black voters in the South in an effort to keep the "warmonger," Barry Goldwater, out of the White House. Lyndon Johnson promised peace, got into office and escalated the Viet Nam debacle far beyond what anyone had imagined, turning thousands of Americans into cannon fodder and thousands of Vietnamese into toast. I told myself, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

But then, years later, I did get fooled again. I voted for Bill Clinton. Bill accomplished what no Republican had been able to ram through: He destroyed welfare (replacing it with a huge subsidy to corporations called "workfare"), killed the chances of single payer health insurance or at least delayed it for many more years, and stuffed his cabinet with more millionaires than George Bush knew. At the time he was caught with his pants down he had a committee working on how to privatize Social Security. Nevertheless, the most egregious betrayal, from my point of view, involved the promise he made that drew a vote for him out of me: He promised to support a woman's right to choose but when he had the Office, he appointed anti-choice judges to the federal courts because, he said, "it wouldn't be fair to be partisan."

Promise them anything but give them the back of your hand.

What befuddles me about the political scene, quite frankly, is the blatancy of its betrayals. The Republicans under Dubya spent the country into this recession. all the while sneering at the "tax and spend Democrats". Oh really? This after Clinton restored the economy Reagan had pitched toward the great swirling toilet bowl. The Republicans successfully removed the minimal controls that had kept the financial industry from fully exercising the criminal level of its greed. The Republicans launched two wars we couldn't afford while stripping resources from public service programs and infrastructure. When the Republicans left office—briefly—the economy was crumbling. Now, giving in to the Republican wet dream of endless freedom from taxation, we see Moody's poised to downgrade the US as an investment. (http://www.care2.com/news/member/181228268/2675185) No problem for our "fiscally responsible" party. It boggles the mind.

But, anyway, in come the Democrats, promising CHANGE. Transparency to rid the government of George Bush's era of secrecy. Yeah? Disgruntled voters who had been paying attention and staying away from the polls because they were tired of voting for the lesser of two evils only to have it turn into the same of two evils—they came out in droves to support CHANGE. Yay, Barack Obama! Our man at last in White House.

So the first thing he does is go to court to hold onto many of the extra-judicial powers Bush had taken for the White House. Why give up power just because you said you would? He goes to court to protect the right to engage in certain forms of torture (excuse me, "harsh interrogation"). He goes to court to challenge the ruling that Don't Ask, Don't Tell is unconstitutional. And now Obama's frantically searching for a way to indict Julian Assange, even considering an ex post facto law to get him. If all else fails, they're sure that by labeling him a terrorist they'll kill two birds: First bird, public outrage which dies over the question of "national security." Second bird: They get to do whatever they want to when the target is an "enemy combatant." So much for transparency. Oh yes. And CHANGE.

Question: If Julian Assange is a targeted enemy of the United States for telling its citizens what its government is up to, whither goes the press? In particular, the New York Times, which collaborated with Assange to publish his material?

The new year's coming. Europe's boiling over with working people and students fighting their governments over the swill our country imbibes with a shrug: The rich keep getting richer and the rest keep getting gouged. We dither about whether diplomacy is compromised by the release of Wikileaks documents but not over the content of those documents. We aren't horrified to think about the criminal acts of our government or even about the coming abrogation of treasured rights sanctified by our eroding Constitution.

We are merely annoyed. Darn.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Americans were pioneers. They committed atrocities, certainly, but they also had a spirit that Europe could admire—the spirit of adventure and an idealism (albeit confined to white men) about the life they wanted to live. It's time to look to Europe for guidance. They've got civilization. What've we got left? Debt and a handful of corrupt self-made aristocrats.

Battling Insult and Injury . . . and Losing

New post coming Wednesday. I'm on a trip.

Oh what craven slaves we bee

To our bodee chemistree

Studies to determine the efficacy of serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs), can't incorporate scientific measurement of the biochemistry involved (or implicated) in depression. Aside from actual suicide, effectiveness of any psychological drug regimen's success must rely almost solely on self-reported data. Most of us would have difficulty assessing whether we are more or less content today than we were three months ago (the time lag for antidepressants to show results). For the depressed, that self-assessment is further complicated by the tendency (associated with depressive personalities) to think negatively. Depression itself, of course, exacerbates this inclination.

I am no friend of the pharmaceutical industry. Its corporate capacity and willingness to do harm is surpassed only by that of the military. Deep-sixing negative results is not an occasional practice but SOP (standard operating procedure) among drug companies and conducting experiments on unwitting "guinea pigs" is not unheard of. Worst of all, the industry reaps obscene profits from American sickness:

“Pharmaceutical companies have a profit margin of 16.4 percent,” Newman reports, “seventh highest of the 215 industries that Morningstar [a company that rates mutual funds] tracks.”

http://www.healthbeatblog.com/2009/08/who-is-making-the-biggest-profits-from-us-healthcare-you-might-be-surprised-.html

That fat profit margin derives from gouging Americans, including American insurance companies that extend drug coverage.

“[T]here is now unanimous agreement that the mean difference between response to SSRI antidepressant drugs and response to inert placebo is very small. It is so small that, despite sample sizes involving hundreds of participants, 57% of the SSRI trials funded by the pharmaceutical industry failed to show a significant difference between drug and placebo. Most of these negative data were not published and were accessible only by gaining access to US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) documents.

Various methods were used to manipulate the results of SSRI drug studies to insure a favorable outcome:

1) Responders to the placebo are eliminated at the beginning of the study. (Placebo washout)

2) Benzodiazepine sedatives were given to mask the SSRI induced agitation.

3) Unfavorable drug studies are buried in the file cabinet and not disclosed to the public.

4) Miscoding suicidal events as “emotional lability”, and homicidal events as “aggression” to hide suicidal events from regulators.

5) False attribution of suicide to the placebo arm.

6) Hiring ghost writers to make the medical articles more favorable.

7) Cash settlements for SSRI drug litigants which seals records and withholds unfavorable drug studies from the public.

http://psychiatricnews.wordpress.com/2007/03/20/ssris-dont-work/

The same discussion reports the standard view among psychological practitioners that the majority of depressed patients will improve on their own within six months. In cases of situational depression, such an assumption will probably hold, assuming the individual does not off him/herself. Yet it is a sanguine assumption arising from a place that bears no resemblance to the darkness in which the depressed huddle, away from touch and sound. I can recall my own depression following a devastating loss in my life and I hear an insensitive friend telling me, "You'll feel better in a year." My laugh must've sounded more like a bark. I said, "No, I won't. Because if it takes a year of this, I'll be dead."

Apart from the vultures in the pharmaceutical industry and the Polyannas of the "antidepressants don't work" conviction, perhaps someone can find a solution to chronic debilitating psychic pain. I am not convinced that antidepressants do work but I believe there are many reasons to be suspicious of assertions that they do not. In this regard, I would have to say I am agnostic.

Perhaps drug therapy, to the extent that it may work, would be better perceived, by the depressed and the non-depressed alike, if it were more accurately named "anti-despair" treatment. If a regimen of drug treatment for depression is prescribed, its goal should not be the alleviation of all depression. Without major intervention in habits of thought, that goal can't be achieved. But a safety net may be possible. The obstacle is that each antidepressant has its own interaction with each patient's biochemistry. In some cases, nothing seems to happen so the dosage is progressively increased--and that may not work either. In others, suicidal thoughts emerge and sometimes even suicide occurs. When one drug seems to be failing, which will take at least a few months to ascertain, another will be prescribed (after the first drug clears the patient's system), all of this out of medical practices akin to alchemy. With diabetes, the physician can measure the sugar in the blood and make specific adjustments to insulin treatment. But with depression, he might as well resort to the old "eeny meeny miny mo" technique of selecting an appropriate drug. He has no idea what might work, if anything.

Exodus from a habitual state is probably the most daunting challenge any of us ever face. Smoking is addictive at least in part because of the physical and psychological rituals surrounding it, such as post-coital smoking. Certain situations trigger the ritual of smoking. With depression, an individual habituates herself to the feeling of being down. There is a certain comfort in the misery you know, as opposed to the possible misery you have yet to experience. Depression shrinks the world and thus opportunities for the world to inflict pain. This can be reassuring, even as a person lies on his bed and feels it might be better to be dead.

Western civilization tends to separate the functions of the body from the operations of the mind. Our insistence that mind and brain are separate entities makes only limited sense. We know that brain injury alters the functioning of the mind. That's a given. Of course, one can reasonably argue that any chronic illness hampers the functioning of the mind. Someone who has suffered a devastating injury leading to paralysis, for example, may find their personality altered. A formerly upbeat person may well fall into chronic gloominess. However, coming to terms with a disability is possible and will lead to a restoration of the personality in a way that cannot happen with a secure brain injury.

Putatively the mind is non-material while the brain is an object. This conceit arises, I believe, from our need to believe in ourselves as spiritual being, which, by definition, cannot be entirely corporeal. I once had an acquaintance, a fan of Edgar Cayce, who argued that taking aspirin was a violation of the self. He rejected his own physical being in pursuit of a higher state.

That man died on the floor of his living room of a massive heart attack for the early signs of which he rejected medical intervention. I can't help but wonder if he wasn't finally shocked by the delicacy of his own existence.

There will, in my opinion, never be a drug cure for depression. At the same time, I am convinced, there will never be a "talking" cure for depression. Situationally depressed people will of course come out of it, if they survive it. Chronically depressed people must await the universal recognition that chemistry and habits of the personality combine to create their misery. From there, at a minimum, palliative care may eventually become available.

Going Back to the Future

Many years ago, before our world went cyber, I worked as a long distance operator. In those days, operators sat at a room-long board with repeating sets of panels, inserting cords into lights in order to take a call. Each of us was "the operator," the woman who answered whenever a customer dialed O. The job wasn't physically difficult, but it was emotionally grueling.

Every operator was a woman because the jobs were posted in the "Female Help Wanted" section of the Want Ads. Our supervisors, with BAs in business administration, were just out of college. Few were older than 25. Many of the operators were over forty, several already grandmothers. Nevertheless, these younger women would invariably address their seniors, regardless of marital status, as "Miss".

Supervisors spent part of each day spying. They would sit at one end of the long board listening in for breaches of dialogue protocol. Each operator was instructed to use a particular set of phrases as she responded to a customer's question. Any deviation drew a stern warning. That warning was administered in the following way: Every seat along the board had two jacks, the first for the operator, the second for the supervisor. That individual would slam her jack in while simultaneously barking in response to the operator turning to look, "Keep your eyes on the board, Miss [surname]," followed by, "What did you tell that customer?" This question was, of course, superfluous, since the supervisor had come over precisely because of what had been said. But the question served to further humiliate the operator and no doubt Pacific Telephone and Telegraph fully intended this outcome in the wording of the dialogues it mandated for its supervisors.

This form of bullying, heavy as it was, was only the major part of the bully sandwiches rammed down the throats of long distance operators daily in those days. The remainder came from customers who took advantage of what they perceived to be their anonymity to scream and curse at the operator. I encountered one such customer on a Monday. His complaint was that I hadn't picked up quick enough: "The weekend's over, bitch."

Which was a very funny thing for him to say. Operators didn't get weekends off on any regular basis. Shifts were sometimes split, which meant we worked four hours, went home, returned four hours later and worked another four hours. Every day followed a different schedule. Our schedules, in nine-point type, were posted on sheets of paper. Each operator name was followed by a string of four and five digit numbers in tiny boxes. Every week we stood around the bulletin board, jockeying for position, holding a tablet and pencil and squinting at the line of numbers that followed our names. It was easy to mistakenly write down the numbers of the operator below your own name. Big mistake. The phone company didn't tolerate errors in attendance.

Each number had to be looked up in one of several binders, one for regular weekdays, one for weekends, one for holiday weekdays and one for holiday weekends. If you made an error and searched the wrong binder, for some reason you would find a number corresponding to the one in the binder you should have checked.

Even though the number in the wrong book matched the number in the right book, the operator would arrive for her workday at the wrong time—because the numbers represented two different schedules. When she arrived at the wrong time, she was always threatened with dismissal. If she did it twice, she was dismissed.

I can think of no good reason for this complex system other than to intimidate, something built into Pacific Telephone and Telegraph's employee management system. Keeping a worker fearful keeps her compliant.

I saw one operator sent to the "quiet room" for fifteen minutes to rest up from hepatitis. Had she not returned to her post, from which she'd fainted, she would've lost her position. A pregnant operator went into premature labor. Her supervisor rode in the ambulance with her, telling her (as the operator later reported) that if she didn't lose the baby, she would lose her job.

What enabled Pacific Tel & Tel to treat people like this? Let me count their advantages:

• The people were women in an era when women were barred from more lucrative forms of employment
• Jobs for unskilled/uneducated workers paid poorly so if a woman who built up any seniority at all was better off staying than starting all over again
• The phone company ensured that its workforce was compliant by not hiring anyone who could pass a simple writing skills and math test. I know this because I deliberately flunked the tests in order to get hired.
• The women operators learned a skill (running a switchboard) that most of them couldn't parlay into an office job because their lack of education made them unsuitable as front office representatives for most corporations

But the biggest thing that enabled the phone company to oppress all those women all those years was that the women bought into the notion of a "classless" society. They blamed themselves for their poverty and the difficulty of their circumstances. And if someone didn't have a job, they blamed the unemployed individual. As Americans we feel positive we are in control of our individual fate. Yet since the election of Obama, who promised us change, it's become clearer that American workers and those seeking work are in charge of nothing. Their vote was wasted on a man who listened too closely to "Promise her anything, but give her Arpege."

If Pacific Tel & Tel could treat its women employees so badly in an era of low unemployment, what do workers have to look forward to in this era of 10% reported unemployment, with unreported probably making that figure twice as high?

The real danger of this situation is that loonies such as Sarah Palin and the Tea Party will successfully co-opt the anger working people justifiably feel. The real danger in our collapsing economy is fascism, sneaking in on the coattails of populism.

The Tea Party is the US version of the German DAP, front-runner for a fascist state—one in which civil rights and liberties have been extinguished, healthcare is the privilege of chosen people, and the rest—rubbish—can be safely left in the street to freeze and/or starve.

CHRISTIANS, 0, ATHEISTS, 0

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. --Sam Harris http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/harris06/harris06_index.html

The United States is the most religious nation in the developed world, if religiosity is measured by belief in all things supernatural -- from God and the Virgin Birth to the humbler workings of angels and demons. Americans are also the most religiously ignorant people in the Western world. Fewer than half of us can identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible, and only one third know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/01/AR2007030102073.html

This juxtaposition of American ignorance and American faith raises troubling questions about our society. Previously I quoted de Tocqueville on American political placidity. It seems the roots of our herd instinct go way back.

How odd is it that a country with a history of innovation and ingenuity, populated by citizens who routinely characterize themselves as fearless and independent—how is it that such a country winds up mired in superstition and cowardice?

How is it that a nation, predominately Christian, promotes greed, worships selfishness (a la Ayn Rand), and despises immigrants and the poor? The schism between professed beliefs and contradictory behavior can't be dismissed as merely the product of human weakness. First of all, it's consistent; that is, everywhere we encounter loud, pushy Christianity, we simultaneously encounter bigotry, hatred, and greed. The most aggressive resistance to a "nanny state" appears to come from those who want to force the rest of us to worship their god (one who incidentally subscribes heavily to "I am my brother's keeper," not his loan shark) and to bring their police into our bedrooms. According to these believers, we should be free to consume poisonous food (unimpeded by the Food & Drug Administration) but not to have unapproved consensual sex.

Don't mistake me. While I dislike the fanatical Christians, I also dislike fanatical atheists, who, in my opinion, are the faithless equivalent of evangelical Protestants. By raising these questions, I don't wish to trample on anyone's private faith. I resent having the beliefs of others rammed down my throat, and so I want to refrain from ramming my own denial of faith down anyone else's. Furthermore, the conceit of rabid atheists that everything in this world is ultimately knowable strikes me as arrogance of the sort that leads individuals to believe God rescued them from a plane crash while letting the other passengers perish. Reason, like objectivity, takes us only so far in comprehending the magical universe. We can pursue scientific explanation without the trivializing insistence that all things are knowable.

I choose to admit the possibility of many things—although not of unicorns or gods— without ideologically investing my individual existence with intrinsic meaning. This doesn't absolve me of the need to create meaning. If anything, it intensifies that obligation.

NOTE: Last week's blog did not get written because of a personal loss. I am still grieving but hope to post something of more substance next Monday.