Summary
Yes, a skinny fellow in his twenties replied. "I mean, I think I do, or I was about to." He shrugged and laughed. "I'm not sure." He explained that he'd been selected at a recruiting event to be a clerk at Ricky's, a shop purveying faux-'50s tchotchkes that's expanding into a chain. When he showed up for work, though, "somebody came two hours later and told us to go to this other store the next day." The next day, he cooled his heels at the locked door for a long while, then went home.
After him, I chatted with a hipster wielding a crayoned portrayal of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. He turned out also to be an almost-retail worker. Having procured a covt eted interview at the relatively high-paying Starbucks, he dropped the gold ring. "They asked me if I knew about their legendary customer service," he recounted. Of course hji knew about their legendary customer service, he'd enthused. Did he support their legendary customer service? Boy, did he ever! And what is their legendary customer service? "It was a trick question," he commented, with the deadpan delivery of a born barista, IMHO. But apparently the eager applicant had hesitated too long. Now he's keeping house while his roommate - a former Starbucks employee who says he was fired for organizing - pays the rent working for the union.The promoters of free agency cast the economic and psychological perils of this savage new world as; benisons in disguise. "Free agents understand and accept that the: relationship between themselves and theft employers shifted from "til death do us part' to 'What have you done for me lately?'" wrote the career consultant authors of Free Agen ts. "This realization provides free agents with a new psychological freedom ... By being dependent on themselves alone, they are able to develop a new kind of security."See the full content of this document
Extract
Discouraged Workers
Got work?
To mingle with folks who don't, I stopped by a peanut-butter- and -jell "breadline" in New York's Union Square the other evening. The event was organized by the Retail Action Project, a joint effort of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and the venerable community group Good Old Lower East Side. RAP's goal is not just to better conditions and organize workers but to build alliances between the employed and the jobless, the laborer and the...See the full content of this document
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