On the
employer/company level, how practical was that, hiring a handful of us temp
workers to assemble annual reports for a week? That must have added up, along with
paying overtime for god-knows-what and sending workers home after 9 PM in
limousine car services.
Ah, the
eighties were times for the luxe life, indeed -- even for the worker bees. No
wonder Reagan was so popular. . . people thought he brought them wealth. To be
kind, I thought that whole mindset was impracticable, though. . . it didn’t
work, in the end, just like Lehman Brothers.
Anyway,
as previously mentioned, office temps never got a raise or a bonus, and most
wages stayed frozen at eighties rates well into the post Y2K world.
That is
why there aren’t career temps, workers who just do temp work, I guess. For me,
it was a viable solution to a creative life: I’d work in offices when I wasn’t
on the road, or work in offices when I was trying to figure out my next
creative move (in words and/or music).
I won’t
keep on ranting here, but in a world where the price of everything else keeps
going up and up except worker wages (the lowly temps!), how is that right? (If
you call that Capitalism, I call it screwed up. . .)
I
always was proud to sing about worker’s rights in the Washington Squares in the
eighties because I was living that dichotomy, and my firsthand experience gave
me added passion. Who better to care for the worker than a sister worker with a
conscience and a voice?
Of
course, I worked at my creative work and prayed for it to “take off” so I could
stop worrying about the rent etc. But as you know, God works in mysterious ways
-- as the stories in this blog surely attest.
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