No Gods, No Masters, No Allies
A journey through workplace hell of all sorts.
In recent years, autumn has been a disaster season for me. In October 2017, I suddenly found myself anonymously accused of criminal level behavior on an unchecked spreadsheet that became national news. In October 2018, the moving company I had worked for either part-time or full-time for seven years abruptly shut down. In November 2020, weeks before another pandemic lockdown, I was laid off from a left-wing political non-profit where I’d worked full-time for a year and a half.
Each of these developments hammered home just how little organizations, coworkers, colleagues, bosses, professional standards, ethical guidelines, a supposed progressive coalition - any of it - are ever remotely interested in my wellbeing, or have the potential to act as safeguards when things fall apart. Am I jaded? Sure, and with good reason. As corporate power only strengthens, wealth concentrates into fewer and fewer hands, the social safety net frays to nothing, and workers’ rights continue to erode, there’s little reason to believe it’s not everybody for themselves.
Follow along as I chart my path from bright-eyed idealist to blackpilled mercenary for hire.
JOURNALISM
In the waning days of newspaper dominance of print before digital media really took off, I went through the traditional path of journalism school. There’s the argument that having to get a journalism degree is pointless credentialism and gatekeeping. For the most part I agree, though one could also make a case that the decline of standards throughout print journalism the last few years has something to do with many younger employees never having skills and the finer points of news judgment drilled into them. Inuring themselves in tight-knit social environments where posturing advocacy and personal branding is more important than quality work probably hasn’t helped either.
At the same time, journalism schools have always loved to paint a polyannaish picture of the profession. Reporters, editors - hell, even publishers - are intrepid truthseekers, they’ll tell you. I wasn’t so naive to accept that messaging wholesale at the time, yet I did like to believe that more often than not those in the industry were trying their best, respected core values of the trade, had at least some intellectual curiosity about complex matters. Perhaps there was still some vestige of that 15-20 years ago, but I couldn’t imagine selling kids on that idea nowadays. To be brutally honest, unless you’re an Ivy Leaguer or come from money, under no circumstances should you bother with a career in journalism.
In 2008, some 30,000 online years ago, I got myself booted from a crappy, dead-end editorial aide position at The Washington Post for revealing that I was writing naughty sports blogs on the side. Online media then was primitive compared to today at least in terms of lack of professional mores and massively exploitative venture-capital backed firms, not to mention the less than crisp appearance. But what it lacked in sheen and algorithmic design, that era of the Internet more than made up for in collaborative spirit among those who took part, and willingness to take risks. I would never claim there wasn’t any competitive backbiting in those days. Largely, however, there was a sense that a rising tide lifted all boats, so it made sense to root on your contemporaries. Perhaps it was inevitable that fellowship would fall apart as things become more established and structured. It’s still staggering to think of that time compared to now when cancelling people recklessly is just another cheap source of content, and a way to clear the path for oneself.
The era before endless corporatization, the willingness to be supportive for reasons other than professional favors and networking, some actual fun being had - there’s lots of reasons to miss the Internet of those days. Clearly I didn’t have the foresight to see how bad it would get. I can’t be too hard on myself in this regard; how could anyone anticipate exactly what happened to me?
After I’ve been on the wrong end of a massively damaging, incredibly sloppy stunt that was pushed endlessly, enthusiastically, and uncritically by prominent figures in the industry as a PR ploy, how could I think any of the supposed values of the profession meant anything? All those journalistic pieties rammed into my head as a student only to watch them openly and roundly betrayed at my expense 12 years into my career. I waited torturously for more than two years before saying anything, thinking surely someone would look into my side, that it was too big a story to so callously sweep under the rug. So many I helped during their come-up couldn’t possibly turn a blind eye to me.
My faith in reporters and writers still having convictions was clearly misplaced. The careerists won. Journalism is a little like music in today’s culture: worthwhile examples of it still exist, only it’s increasingly rare and you have to be savvy enough to know where to look. Tech destroyed the business model and has its way with what it hollowed out.
THE MOVERS
The trajectory of the small moving company I worked for followed that of my experience writing, so far as fun is concerned. I liked aspects of the job throughout - physical labor, constant motion, challenges far different from those of a sedentary office drone, getting to explore intimate places I wouldn’t otherwise - or I wouldn’t have held it as long as I did. It certainly wasn’t the pay, which maxed out for me around $20/hr plus tips.
The early days of working there were chaotic in mostly positive ways. I’d spend all day trading stupid jokes with my crew and the customer, shouting out radio hits in the truck cab. Guys would return to the office after completing multiple moves, get trashed together, maybe punch a hole in the drywall. It was so fun I could occasionally overlook the fact that I had to keep very close tabs on my hours and charged tips because otherwise they would be missing from my paycheck and I couldn’t contest it without evidence. The owner played favorites with a kid from his church of about 19, had a rough childhood and poor impulse control, keeping him around despite an ever-growing litany of reasons to fire him. This kid could be a pain in the field but on some level I respected that the owner was looking out for this troubled dumbass. Besides, it was fun to clown on him.
It was inevitable that any small business with designs on expansion would have to become more structured and - how shall I put this? - less openly flouting laws, but the company only became stricter and more disciplined in ways that the owner abitrarily dictated, not necessarily what would be helpful. Wage theft remained rampant, selective rules became stringent while others didn’t, office politics emerged even among the dumb grunts.
Nevertheless, it remained a perfectly decent whatever job to have until the last year or so of operation. The company’s second-in-command made a poor decision convincing the owner to rent an office that was far too large and costly for our needs, tried to push storage as another revenue stream that never took off. The staff suffered the consequences, whether it was booking large disaster jobs that other movers in the region didn’t want or trying to cut corners all over the place. The owner still played favorites but now it was with a guy I was usually paired with who drank heavily on the job almost always. The owner knew about his alcoholism and multiple DUIs, of course. I liked this guy well enough, we had similar sense of humor, and certainly I would never snitch on him, though he could get sloppy in the field (luckily I was the driver), and would occasionally leave evidence of his drinking in the truck for others to find. The owner confronted me about it like it was my job to stop him from drinking. How can I stop him when the owner of the company essentially gave him the green light? How are you offloading responsibility for this to me?
Eventually the owner tried coming for our pay, further cutting back hours for which we could count as on the clock. Wage theft was a constant there but they wanted to make it worse, and were selling the notion to employees as “doing their part to help the company survive.” Never mind we were never given a look at the finances underpinning the decision. I’m proud that I stood my ground. The only other employee I could get to join me in my confrontation with management was my constantly drinking companion, but that was enough to prevail upon management that what they were doing was wrong and we wouldn’t stand for it. If you’re only going to get one guy on your side, might as well be the owner’s fave.
I suspected the company was on borrowed time for a while toward the end. After breaking the lease with the huge office, the company bounced around a few tiny ones before eventually setting up shop at a junkyard-like parking lot of a rundown storage facility. The possibility that the owner was just trying to minimize his obligations, cash out, and ditch us was one I considered, especially as the busy season in the summer ended and the slower cold-weather months crept up. On a Thursday in October, at the end of the workday, the owner sent out a mass email saying the company was closing effective immediately and he wasn’t sure we would get our paychecks the following day. We did thankfully get them a couple days later, yet I’m still blown away - what an unbelievably cowardly way to go out.
CANVASSING
I joined a statewide progressive non-profit that organizes working class communities of color as a canvasser in the spring of 2019, after bouncing around a few bad throwaway jobs after the movers closed down, including a few months of janitorial work at a Dave & Buster’s. While I’m plenty familiar with the prevalence of scams among the non-profit sector, this one at least seemed to have the potential to do a little good. I felt the urgency of the Trump years, that I should help in any way that I could. Plus, y’know, it was a job and I needed one.
Their starting pay of $15/hr was just enough to make sure the organization wasn’t openly hypocritical about pushing for a $15 minimum wage. As I got more experience there, I noticed more and more how aggressively the salaried employees policed the pay of those who made hourly wage going out into the field to confront some real dangers. Several of our canvassers of color reported people threatening to call the cops on them. One other white guy mentioned a man chased him off his property in Loudoun County with a shotgun. We did get a gas stipend but it rarely ended up covering what we would use traversing one or more suburban counties on a given day.
My immediate supervisor, in addition to being a micromanager in general, was obsessive about the time sheets. If you showed up at 12:01, he wouldn’t let you sign in at 12:00. A salaried employee himself, he was always looking for ways to penny pinch on behalf of the organization and cut workers’ hours. One week I was missing 10 hours from my paycheck. When I reported it, the HR rep, instead of simply rectifying the error, initially refused and lectured me about not taking my lunch break a few times. God forbid anyone ever try to get overtime. One woman I was friends with there, who the organization was using for some unpaid Spanish translating work in their organizing efforts, accidentally went slightly over 40 hours one week. They fired her.
When the Virginia legislature flipped in 2019, I felt good about busting my ass for months knocking on doors, registering voters, driving around all summer in a car with broken AC, having a few good stories like folks ripping up my lit in my face and getting chewed out for waking up some guy who ran a pie food truck. “You woke me up from my nap while the pies were cooling!” Of course the salaried employees there are always prepared to blow smoke up your ass about the good work you’re doing canvassing. By gum, it’s effecting real change!
But I was never more than a far-removed extension of the organization. I can understand why such an outfit wouldn’t immediately integrate every new employee into its decision-making process, but even after more than a year I felt like a total outsider. The covid lockdown only made it more pronounced. I would never hear about decisions until they were already handed down. Eventually my supervisor just told me to follow the organization’s social media accounts for updates. So essentially I was about as plugged into my own organization as a random member of the public.
After my experience being burned and ignored by liberal corporate media in January 2020 and beyond, I was getting disenchanted with progressives in general. Still I figured I was doing something useful phonebanking from home to get citizens behind halting evictions, doing the census, making sure emergency covid funds were being dispersed, etc. All the while, the organization kept dropping hints that covid was doing a number on their finances, even though there are technically two arms of the non-profit that can receive donations.
The day after the election we were informed of layoffs. The organization wouldn’t tell me exactly how many were let go besides me. Based on asking around, it seems like only hourly employees were cut loose. The salaried folks remain, to little surprise.
Whatever actual good I did with the non-profit, no one who helped cancel me or wrote me off for unproven allegations cares. They’ll never rethink whether destroying me could have possibly been wrong. The organization itself never thought of me as anything other than disposable. The progressive non-profit was as careless with me as the Ben Shapiro-loving owner of the moving company.
AND NOW:
I accepted another in-person canvassing job with a different organization that operates in DC, to begin December 21. I guess I should be thankful to get anything at all, even a job that will have me outside full-time during a pandemic, knocking on doors that residents undoutbedly will not want to answer. This one works on donation quotas to partnering organizations, so there’s even less of a pretense this is anything but a puffed-up sales job. I’m sure it’s a scam. Everything is a scam. I already hate it.