Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America Read Online Free PDF Page A

me and over three hundred square feet to cover, and there are shoppers everywhere and not enough racks for all this shit to begin with.
    My shoe size actually changed with the quality of the jobs I’ve had. The better ones let me sit down sometimes. At the not-so-nice ones, I’ve stood for eight to ten hours, and my feet have gotten so swollen that my shoes don’t fit.
    The mandatory cheerleading is why I never worked for Wal-Mart. Apparently this has changed now, but during employee meetings, they used to require their people to actually cheer. With pelvic thrusting. (Go watch the YouTube videos. It must be seen to be believed.) In those not long ago days, if you didn’t wiggle your ass with sufficient vigor, you’d find yourself on the wrong side of management and then brought to the front to lead the cheer yourself. Sure, give me a W and an A and an L and a squiggly (or I guess now it’s an asterisk since they rebranded), and I will happily shove them straight up your ass. Friends of mine will swear that they never got demerits until after they upset management by lacking enthusiasm. (To be fair to Wal*Mart, my friends weren’t actually let go because they wouldn’t wiggle enough. They can’t prove causation. It’s just that they didn’t start getting demerits until they stopped wiggling.)
    At work, I’m often told what words to say, and I will be written up if I deviate from the script or combine two steps to save time. In retail, we must acknowledge a customer who comes within a set radius of us with a certain tone and tenor in our voices. In telemarketing, our every word might be scripted. In fast food, we’re typically given three greetings to choose from. At one large fast-food chain (let’s call it LFC for short), the choices were these:
    1) Welcome to LFC, how can I help you?
    2) Welcome to LFC, would you like to try a delicious chicken meal today for only $4.99?
    3) Welcome to LFC, what can we make fresh for you today?
    The company even sent in undercover customers to make sure we stayed on script.
    All of our actions are carefully dictated to us. I assume this is because employers think we have monkey brains and are incapable of making decisions. This means that they’re paying me to pretend I’m not me and also that I care about you.
    And as long as we’re on the topic of insane things your bosses can do, you should be aware that you have no legal right to take breaks in America. Go ahead, Google it. Some states mandate breaks. Some farmwork has a federal break mandate. But overall, you’ve no right to demand a lunch break or a break at all. That’s all at the discretion of your employer.
    Some people have the luxury of asking themselves whether a job fulfills their career hopes and ambitions. I’ve got my own metric to gauge the fabulosity of a job: Does that job require me to keep my boss informed of the inner workings of my gastrointestinal system, or am I allowed to go to the bathroom at will? It’s physically uncomfortable to hold it forever, and it sucks to stand by for the okay like a dog waiting for someone to open the door. But for me, the indignity of the whole thing is less about the potential bladder infections. It’s more what the requirement for that kind of notification reveals about the tone of the place. In my experience, the jobs where the boss regulates your urinary tract also tend to demand a bunch of other degrading stuff.
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    We all know that a lot of folks think that poor people are lazy and incompetent. They think we get fired from jobs because we don’t know how to behave, or we’re always late, or we just don’t care. But what rich people don’t realize is how unbelievably easy it is to get fired. And a lot of times what gets you fired is that you’re working more than one job.
    Whenever you are working for the kind of place that has a corporate office, you’re typically given the fewest possible hours—definitely less than full-time, because then they’d