I um going back to work tomorrow. ugh. tell yourself, self, sometimes
when ya work y’appreciate the time yer not working more. it is true.
i get embarrassingly giddy about getting off of work and turning my axe
toward something fascinating more to my local neuron-sparking
inspirations than that abstract trade of time for the power to buy
doohicky. but work ain’t good for ya, not really.

i didn’t invent this longing, hope or idea–i heard it from various
anarchists, primitivists, anti-work ideologues–let’s work at
something we less inspired by (like building new houses, farming,
paperwork, gathering garbage, digging, plumbing, teaching or studying,
mechanical repairs) but for no more than four hours per day. And then
work at things we are more inspired by (gardening, songcrafting,
building that shelf, learning that language, quilting, tinkering with
the stereo, computer, or vehicle, teaching, farming, studying history) for
another couple hours. It’s not a new idea, it’s as obvious as a dream.
Yesterday i never thought of doing that, it inspires me today, it’s
drudgery tomorrow… still might need doing. Organize the economy like that.

and of course the answer from the studio oddy-ants comes back
always, bah! utopian! the poor will always be with us! or somepin stick
like that. i won’t debunk that here, except to point out that there is
no evidence to support a conviction that any society would crumble if
you and i and everyone else only worked four hours per day, and still
were paid the same. It’s of course this last morsel that will stick in
some throats like a pine cone.

Get paid the same?! the economy would crumble! that’s balderdash, and
was the same argument used by opponents of the eight hour work day
earlier last century.  Hopefully you are already familiar with how we
came by that. It’s a great story, replete with anarchists, company
thugs, police violence, a hanging, and victory for the people. You can
find out more about it from the wonderful wikipedia, for example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_Riot

Studies are showing that workers who work less hours are more
productive, which is of course intuitive, since a happily inspired
person is on who focuses better, makes fewer mistakes, works harder.
The IWW has been arguing for the 4 hour day for a while.

http://www.iww.org/projects/4-Hours

Now i’ve heard of studies of productivity showing that the average
humyn bean at work only does about four hours of real work anyway! I
don’t have a citation, but think anecdotally about how much time at
yer job, if you have the misfortune of being currently employed, you ackcherally
do shpit. Alotta time be spent the a gum-flapping with co-workers,
puttering with shtuff, staring off into space…bosses hate that sort
of thing. I had a boss recently so uptight about productivity on the
job site, i thought to get some assurance that he wasn’t only going to
pay me by the moment, for those moments when i held the hammer in my
hand! whew! As it turned out, assurance from this man would have been
worthless…

My boss was general contractor Chris Pickering from Gainesville
Restoration, a remodeling company he owns that does fire damage, flood
damage repairs. I am glad i no longer work for that contractor. After
working like a dog for him for several months, doing demolition,
framing, painting, etc., he had the ethics to cheat me on my last
paycheck, paying me $80 less than i was owed. He has cheated others as
well, but i can only tell my own story.

How it happened still gets me a little steamy. He called me into his
office at the ass end of a friday afternoon, when i had stopped in to
pick up my paycheck, saying he would no longer pay me $12 an hour. What
does that mean, i said. He began a story about how i didn’t know how
to read a speed square or some like palaver, and so on. His reasons,
logic, and approach set off little itchy red flags like fire-crackers
all over that dismal sheetrock industrial park office.

Well, how much are we talking about, i asked. He said well, what do you
think you are worth? So i told him. There was a long silence, where i
could tell he was trying to decide if it would look more manly to
laugh, or yell. It seemed to me he often reacted to things based on how
they would make him look.  He ended by back-tracking, when i was
intransigent, offering to drop my pay by a dollar. This struck me as
the oddest part of the whole interaction. He would be saving all of $40
on a 40 hour work week (we usually worked less)! It looked more like he
just wanted to see would i go along with it. Or maybe he had guessed
what my reaction would be, as you’ll see.

I said no, i could easily get $12 elsewhere, and that i’d call him
about my last paycheck, as there is often a week’s lag time with
construction contractors who are using leasing companies for payroll.
That whole rig is a topic for another time. Well, i thought about it
all weekend long, and decided that i couldn’t be sure whether it was
pride or self-worth that made me resistant to accepting a pay cut. 
Also, i hate looking for work, more than i hate working. So i decided
to eat crow, and work for $11.

He called me Sunday night, and made some idle conversation. Now, for
some reason, i am sometimes reticent to be direct with authority
figures, like bosses, teachers, cops, judges. Part of my hesitation is
likely learned self-protection, but the lame part of it is just wanting
to avoid the awkwardness of the other person being uncomfortable. So
instead of asking, why did you call me, i told him i had reconsidered,
and so on. And he said, i don’t have anything for you. I lost it a
little and asked him what the hell he was calling me for, and what did
he expect me to do. And the phone went dead! So i called immediately
and left a message saying, i guess we got disconnected, call me back,
here’s my number.

He called me back three hours later. By that time, i had decided it
wasn’t just pride, he was actually jerking me around, and that looking
for work was less painful than feeling like a dog tied to the bumper of
his RV hurtling down the interstate…I didn’t talk to him that night,
or the next day. After calling a couple of friends, within a couple
hours i had several leads on a new job, at the pay i wanted. I began
work Monday morning: i decided that not acting until i felt certain of
my motivations had opened up doors for me.

Now all i needed from Mr. Pickering was my pay check. The next Friday i
called asking when it was okay to pick it up. He put me off a couple
times, saying it wasn’t there but then said come at 4 pm and it would
be, and that he probably wouldn’t be there when i came to get it. He
said that part about not being there more than once. The little red
flags started dancing again, but i told them to get lost, he’s just a
busy man. I called him at 3:30 pm because i was in the neighborhood,
and he sounded flustered, saying yeah i’m here now, and so is your
paycheck but i’ll leave it for you under the mat, cause i have to go
somewhere…

By the time i got there, all the little red flags were making it hard
for me to see the road. The lights were out to his office in the North
Industrial Park, the door was locked. But his truck was there. Weird.
I  checked under the mat, there was my check, and he paid me for all
the hours, but wait, the hourly wage was $10! Chris Pickering basically
stole $2 per hour; he paid me $10 an hour for the week i
had already worked when we had the conversation about my pay.
I had worked that week, and for months before that, for $12 per hour. i
have pay-stubs to prove it, though like most times when a worker gets
ripped off, there’s nobody to show. Florida is a so-called ‘right to
work state,’ which means right to exploit the workers, since in effect
unions don’t offer much protection to most of us. The history of how
that happened will be the subject of another icy’ah blog,
someday…

I called Chris Pickering of Gainesville Restoration immediately at both
the office and his cell and left messages saying what he had done was
illegal, and if it was a mistake that i would appreciate a call back to
fix it. My guts said he was hiding in the office with the lights out.
In any case, he never called me back. I called him again the next week
and he flat out refused to pay me, even refused to give a reason. May
Gainesville Restoration suffer a nightmarishly slow, agonizing failure
ending in financial bankruptcy to equal his moral one.

As a final plea for consideration of short time , here is  an article
on how overwork is killing us…

http://money.guardian.co.uk/work/story/0,1456,1552801,00.html

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