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

have to pay you benefits. (Full-time is often in the twenty-eight- to thirty-two-hours-a-week range, to boot.) But even though your employer might schedule you for twenty hours a week, you might wind up working ten, or thirty. It depends on how busy it is—when it’s slow, they send you home, and when it’s busy, they expect you to stay late. They also expect you to be able to come in to cover someone’s shift if a co-worker gets sick at the last minute. Basically, they’re expecting you to be available to work all the time. Scheduling is impossible.
    At one chain, I was required to sign a contract stating that I was an at-will employee, that I would be part-time with no benefits, and that if I took another job without permission, I would be subject to termination because the company expected me to be able to come in whenever they found it necessary. And yes, this is legal in the United States of America.
    It’s unavoidable; even I have had to admit the impossibilityof this system and let people go, one an employee that I actually liked very much. Competent, friendly, good sense of humor. But her other boss simply would not post the schedule far enough in advance for me to give the woman any hours. If the workweek started Monday, the schedule at her other job went up Sunday night. I tried to do my scheduling a week or more in advance, and when I called the other restaurant to discuss the issue, the manager told me that she didn’t actually feel any need to change her routines and that it was my problem to deal with. I simply had to let the woman go, because her other boss wanted the availability.
    How is that legal, you ask? Well, a huge number of jobs in this country—and a crazy high percentage of the jobs that poor people hold down—are considered at-will. Sometimes you’ll sign a paper stating that you understand what that means, sometimes not. It depends on the sophistication and size of the business hiring you. What “at-will” means is that your boss can decide that your eyes are too brown one day and let you go on the spot. As long as they’re not in violation of civil rights law, they don’t have to give you a reason, and they can decide that anything is a fireable offense. I’ve been fired because my boss made a mistake on some paperwork. I’ve been fired because I had the flu. I’ve been fired because I wouldn’t sleep with someone. I’ve been fired because I
did
sleep with someone. I once saw a stripper fired because she couldn’t afford breast implants and the club manager didn’t find her natural breasts alluring enough to dance topless for drunken construction workers.
    So let’s break this down: You’re poor, so you desperately need whatever crappy job you can find, and the nature of that crappy job is that you can be fired at any time. Meanwhile, your hours can be cut with no notice, and there’s no obligation on the part of your employer to provide severance regardless of why, how, or when they let you go. And we wonder why the poor get poorer?
    Of course not every firing is part of an intricate plot by the plutocrats. I’ve also been fired for calling off work too much (“calling off work,” for those unfamiliar with the vernacular, just means that you call your boss to say you’re not coming in). Usually I’ve called off because I was legitimately sick, because I rarely miss work more than I can help. But sometimes it was because my car wouldn’t start or because I just couldn’t face it. It doesn’t matter what you say, and your boss doesn’t care; the point is whether you do it too much, not whether your reasons are legit.
    I admit it—I’ve been fired for doing some stupid shit. I’ve been fired for consistent tardiness because I simply didn’t care, and more than once because I gave my boss the finger. And as a manager, I’ve fired people for being dumbasses—stuff like showing up to work too hung over to stand up straight. Once I had to fire a guy because he went