currently reading: Temp by Louis Hyman
books bought
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
Crudo by Olivia Laing
Collected Stories by Diane Williams
books received
What's in a Name by Ana Luisa Amaral, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (out 2/28)
Screen Test: Stories and Other Writing by Kate Zambreno (e-galley, out 6/18)
books finished
The Word Pretty by Elisa Gabbert
Hey you,
A few months ago I felt a little tickle at the back of my throat and thought maybe I was coming down with something. I wanted to plan out my week so I thought, probably I'll work tomorrow and the next day and then take that third day off. Which sucked because, you know, I needed money. So I thought I'd take a look and see if I was entitled to sick pay—I couldn't remember how many employees a business needed before they crossed that threshold where the sick time employees earned was paid. (It's 11 people, fair enough—can't imagine a scenario in which someone who works with only nine other people would get sick and also still need money!)
At the bottom of that page on the mass.gov website was a link to related information and some of that related information pertained to blue laws. I clicked that link because I didn't know they had blue laws here—I thought Bergen County in New Jersey, where I grew up, was the last place to really enforce them. (Everything is closed on Sundays except like, the grocery store and the pharmacy. It's really inconvenient.) But no, Massachusetts has blue laws too. Retail stores can still open on Sundays, but (and I'm quoting the mass.gov site here): Retailers that employ more than 7 people, including the owner, are required to compensate employees who work on Sundays, except for bona fide executive, administrative, and professional employees, at a rate of pay not less than 1 and a half times their regular rate.
Well, we'd never been paid that. There's a lot of drama and personal turmoil I could write about but the long and short of it is: we were legally entitled to a certain wage and we weren't receiving it, which of course is against the law.
I sent an email to the owners and they said OK, we'll look into this, and I didn't hear anything from them for a little while. At the same time, the attorney general's office said, basically, this is too small for us, little buddies, good luck on your own out there!
So I wrote another email and the owners said OK, we're not 100% sure the law applies to us, we're not going to pay a lawyer to find out ("lawyers are expensive!"), we'll just change it so from now on, people who work Sundays get time and a half. And... that was it.
InTemp: How American Business, American Work, and the American Dream Became Temporary, Louis Hyman quotes a former temp named Christopher Winks: "Showing up to work, he felt, was like being 'somebody who surrenders to a blackmail scheme... despite his attempts to reassure himself that he is doing the right thing under the circumstances... humiliation lurks at the bottom of his stomach.'" It felt quite like that, after I found out we weren't being paid in compliance with the law. I mean, that's why I'm writing this. It's not about a public shaming* or a callout—it's the shame that I'm tired of. It fucking eats at you, dude. It's the particular humiliation, specifically, that we received when one of my coworkers finally worked up the courage to explicitly ask about back pay; the owners of the store said not only did they not have a way to reconstruct previous schedules but also they "discovered" they'd been paying for our breaks the whole time (which was true, and appreciated!), ergo they'd been "overpaying" as well as underpaying, so no way to know who earned what, really, sorry.
Understand the terror I felt when I saw this: we have very few "benefits" at the bookstore; one of these benefits is a 15- or 30-minute paid break (depending on how long one's shift is). Did I just get those taken away from my coworkers, who hadn't done a thing to deserve it? When they said "overpaying," did that mean they were going to try to get the money back from us? Did we somehow owe them money, and were they going to come after us, and were they going to come after me specifically, and was I going to get to keep my job?
I want to be very clear about this: of course I'm angry writing about this now, angry that I was taken advantage of, angry at a system with so little enforcement that seems designed to intimidate employees at every step of the process. I'm angry that when I went looking for help the answer wasn't "go demand the money that they literally, and I can't stress this enough, they literally owe you, the money you already worked for and already earned"; the answer is "play it cool, don't gang up on them, be patient, don't go in upset." Don't react proportionately to your situation, in other words. (I'm not angry that people gave me the former as advice; it was almost certainly correct, under the circumstances. I'm mad at the circumstances.) I'm losing the point, a little. The point is that even though I'm mad while writing this it's not, like, an act of vengeance. I just want anyone else in a similar situation to know that they're not alone in it. I want to stop feeling alone in it! I felt a terrible loneliness in the middle of it, and still do: it seemed impossible to talk about it openly without getting fired, and even now it still feels like I am admitting to something shameful: that I was fooled, maybe, or that my value is less than everyone else's, everyone who gets paid the legal amount that they're entitled to. Was I such an obvious fucking sucker that they felt like they could get away with it? By accepting, however inadvertently, a sub-minimum wage, wasn't I making the world slightly shittier for all the potential booksellers out there?
I'm not writing this because I'm angry; I'm writing this because I felt some solidarity with my coworkers but not as much of a sense of solidarity within the greater bookselling/publishing/book-loving community. What if, like, the American Booksellers Association had a hotline I could've reported this to and saved myself some agony? What if we had been unionized—would a bookseller union have allowed non-payment of wages to happen? What if there had been someone I could talk to about this when it was happening? What if there had been some sort of safety net (a severage package maybe—can you imagine?) so I didn't need to spend so much energy worrying about what would happen if I lost my job? There is so much we could do but don't; I am writing this so we think about it.
So where are we now? Everyone who works Sundays currently gets premium pay. I've received about a third of what I'm owed. I talked to a lawyer (who told me, incidentally, that the thing about breaks would be like if they were paying us $15 per hour, "discovered" Massachusetts's minimum wage is actually $11 per hour, and told us we were being overpaid so we were exempt from earning overtime). I got a new job, which is maybe obvious by now. I am going to be a sales assistant at a university press. You've probably heard of the university. I start in the new year. (I'm really terrified!)
Reading Temp, I'm struck by the similarities between me and my coworkers at the bookstore and the temporary workers Hyman writes about. And the more I read the more obvious it becomes that that's because we are temporary labor, insofar as temporary labor can be defined as work without security, a career path, benefits, or real control.
I am thinking now of what perhaps I could call a red flag, though I'm just beginning to think of it in those terms as I write this. Before I started working at the bookstore I read an interview with one of the owners, who was asked the hardest part of running a bookstore and who replied that the answer was saying goodbye to booksellers who move on to different jobs. But why do all of the booksellers move on? The answer to the interview question could've (should've) been, "The hardest part is not being able to provide my employees with health insurance," or "The hardest part is not being able to provide my employees with the wages I know that they deserve." Am I being picky? Maybe. I don't blame them for the circumstances; I just wish we were more honest about them. I wish that instead of getting a vaguely-worded weaselly reply when we asked about back pay we could've gotten at least, you know, an apology. Elayna Trucker has a great piece at LitHub about shopping local and some of the ethical implications of running a bookstore:
We find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being believers in social and economic justice while struggling to pay our employees a salary they can survive on. We urge our customers to Shop Local but make hardly enough to do so ourselves. It is an unintentional hypocrisy, one that has gone largely ignored and unaddressed.
So where does that leave us? Rather awkwardly clutching our money, it seems... All of this brings up the most awkward question of all: does a business that can't afford to pay its employees a living wage deserve to be in business?
I see questions like that and I reflexively think, I am so glad I am not the one who's tasked with coming up with an answer. I have no idea. I haven't the faintest idea at all.
And I'm not really sure what comes next, either. I'm going to keep up the books** newsletter, though. I remain hopeful that the next one will have more books in it.
Your friend,
Smalls
*Though it's not really a public shaming, is it? (Which would be well-earned and totally delicious?) While I haven't concealed the information—I'm sure you could find out if you wanted to—I'm not interested in naming the store.
**Touché, fine, the "books" newsletter