Nickel and Dimed: Chapter Three

Equally draining is the effort to look both perky and compliant at the same time, for half an hour or more at a stretch, because while you need to evince “initiative,” you don’t want to come across as someone who might initiate something like a union organizing drive.

The ad is for “customer service” work, a type of job I tend to avoid because it normally involves a résumé, which in turn would involve levels of prevarication I am not prepared to attempt.

When I call I am told to come in at three sharp and to be sure to “dress professional.” The latter injunction presents a challenge, since my wardrobe consists of T-shirts and only two pairs of pants other than blue jeans, but I have a jacket and decent shoes brought along for a stop in New York on the way to Minneapolis, and this, fortified with lipstick and knee-highs, makes for a pretty damn impressive getup, I think.

Lee-Ann, a worn-looking blonde in her forties, and I sit across a table from Walt, who lays out the main points in a jolly, offhand way: Be nice to the guests, even when they get irate because they can’t return things, and they’re always trying to return things.

Now we start taking turns going to the computers to begin our CBL, or Computer-Based Learning, and I become transfixed by the HIV-inspired module entitled “Bloodborne Pathogens,” on what to do in the event that pools of human blood should show up on the sales floor.

Even in the tightest labor market—and it doesn’t get any tighter than Minneapolis, where I would probably have been welcome to apply at any commercial establishment I entered—the person who has precious labor to sell can be made to feel one down, way down, like a supplicant with her hand stretched out.

There is a better room, her husband says when we return to the office, but—and here he fixes me with a narrow-eyed stare—I’d better not “trash” it. I attempt a reassuring chuckle, but the warning rankles for days: have I been fooling myself all these years, thinking I look like a mature and sober person when in fact anyone can see I’m a vandal?

Gray-faced and fiftyish, she must be the apotheosis of “servant leadership” or, in more secular terms, the vaunted “feminine” style of management. She says “please” and “thank you”; she doesn’t order, she asks.

“Because this is not in the right place. See the fabric — it’s different,” and she thrusts the errant item up toward my chest.

I'm not sure what kind of deference, if any, is due here: Is she my supervisor now?

“Apartment rents skyrocket,” the front-page headline declares; they’ve leaped 20.5 percent in Minneapolis in the first three months of 2000 alone, an unprecedented increase, according to local real estate experts.

Sometimes, I discover, my favorite subject, which is the abysmal rate of pay, seems to be a painful one.

Wal-Mart's appetite for human flesh is insatiable; we've even been urged to recruit any Kmart employees we may happen to know.

Emboldened by her vehemence, I risk the red-hot word again. “I know this goes against the whole Wal-Mart philosophy, but we could use a union here.”

I don't share the belief, held by many union staffers, that unionization would be a panacea. Sure, almost any old union would boost wages and straighten out some backbones here, but I know that even the most energetic and democratic unions bear careful watching by their members.