What a vain man. He probably thinks this column is about him. (It is.)
For I was brought up in a certain way, Mr. Flaherty. There are plenty of bad jobs, although in truth the only bad job is the one you have at the moment because every other job in the world looks like heaven on a stick.
Twitter is now awash in photographic proof of bad jobs, people waist-deep in an elephant, hopefully doing something medical. Elephants have no shame. The awfulness of jobs doesn’t show up in photos. You need art. You need Edvard Munch painting your scream, Jeff Wall installing your pain, or the Mike Judge movie Office Space.
I was a secretary at OK Parking, I was a cleaner at a car dealership, I was many summer interns (paid). You do what you have to do to make a living, right up to the place your dignity will not allow you to go.
I have gone past that place. But I never slept with anyone to get hired. This, it seems, is my limit. Everyone has one.
The essayist David Sedaris’s limit was that he would not lean out a window and call a pigeon “Cheeky.” Roger Morris and two others quit working for Henry Kissinger over the secret bombing of Cambodia. But surely all his staff quit en masse. Not at all.
When I refused to have sex with my boss, I left the building and applied for EI, which in those generous days I got. After a month or two, EI called me in to discuss, I assume, my efforts to find work.
And the EI office was in the building I had just left in avoidance of boss-sex. And I couldn’t do it, Mr. Flaherty, I could not. Sleeping with a thick-necked thug wasn’t my limit. Going back to that building to ask for EI was. I felt dizzy with rage.
So I quit EI.
This makes me Smug Jim’s dream worker. If only all working stiffs were so snooty about their dignity, he must think.
Employment Minister Diane Finley says unemployed teachers won’t be forced to pick fruit. But why not? Show us the regulations that will replace the ones that banned this. She won’t yet.
The Harper government’s omnibus budget bill, a sack full of rats and monkeys, will pass — that’s the magic of majority governments — but only one rumour has been confirmed, that repeat users of EI, a phrase that makes them sound like junkies, can’t refuse lower-paying work. That would mean, presumably, the 15 per cent lower wages paid to temporary foreign workers.
In Flahertyville, we shall all drive cabs and referee hockey games. I’m fine with this. I am a terrible driver and cannot skate, but it’s other drivers, other teams who will suffer, not me. Red light means drive. Icing means you lose your goalie, and the ref can confiscate the puck, right?
So keen is Flaherty to not pay EI that he may well mandate such catastrophic hiring.
Any job’s better than waiting on tables, a job requiring such stamina and mental skill that I, with no memory for faces, placement or indeed food — raisin toast for everyone! — will empty “eateries,” as restaurants are now amusing called.
Work induces cynicism. Flaherty appears to be aiming at regional unemployment. How cowardly not to say this aloud. Much Canadian work is seasonal. Why not pour money into building new industries instead of sending Atlantic region workers to Fort McMurray?
I oppose these new rules. They are destructive, cruel, short-term and destructive to family life. Are we all single and eager to move to a lousy job that demands no skills that might help build a plausible economic future?
No. But I was brought up in a certain way, Mr. Flaherty. I was taught self-respect. I was taught that other people were allowed to have it too.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Heather Mallick
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