April 10, 2009
"I hate those sons of bitches! May they all burn in hell!"
Everyone looked up as Rose stalked into the room, throwing her clear plastic work purse on the couch and throwing herself down beside it.
Finally, Jack approached her cautiously. "What’s wrong, Rose? What happened?"
Rose just pulled everything from the purse and tossed it on the coffee table, throwing the piece of plastic aside. "Good riddance," she mumbled, glaring at the hated object.
In the two months since Jack had lost his job, he and Rose had both looked diligently for work. Rose had continued to sing, but it just wasn’t enough to support the family on, and the little Jack made tutoring at the university helped only a little. Jack himself had tried to use his art to supplement their income, but he wasn’t well-known, and, while he had managed to sell some pieces locally and on the Internet, it just wasn’t enough to keep food in their stomachs and a roof over their heads. Steady work had to be found.
In desperation, Jack had reduced the number of classes he took when the new quarter started and applied for fee waivers. He wished that he could quit tutoring, as his boss was extremely difficult to get along with, making what would otherwise have been a pleasant job a nightmare, but even the little he brought in from that job was needed.
Rose wasn’t a student, which reduced their costs, but also precluded her from looking for a work study job like Jack had. It was just as well, since work study paid poorly and was never more than part-time, but the full-time job that she managed to find shortly after arriving in Perris was worse than Jack’s. Within two weeks of moving in with Mari, Rose found herself hired by Mari’s old nemesis, Starcrest of California, a place that, like Sunpeak, was known for its substandard wages, poor working conditions, mistreatment of employees, and labor violations.
It came as no surprise to anyone, especially not Mari, when Rose quickly became disenchanted with her job. Her position as a full-time data entry operator was dull and physically taxing, with working time often lasting eleven hours. From the start, she had been distrustful of her new employer, but after having to work eleven hours when she had been promised that it would only be eight, she had become more than distrustful—the company had become another of her crusades, one which Mari knew she wouldn’t win. Starcrest was a bad place, and nothing ever seemed to change—except for getting worse.
Mari had warned her, but it hadn’t deterred Rose in the slightest. No cause was too far gone for her to apply herself to, and her goal quickly became to unionize Starcrest. She discussed the idea with her co-workers, asked Mari for advice—which always turned out to be advice to stop what she was doing—and worked on her cause in her spare time. Mari told her over and over that it wasn’t a good idea—it would only get her in trouble—but once Rose got an idea in her head, it was virtually impossible to make her let go of it.
Which had led to the trouble at hand.
"What did you do?" Mari asked. "Quit?"
"No. They fired me."
"They fired you? What did you do? They hardly ever fired anyone when I was there. It was too hard to replace people."
"In this economy, workers are a dime a dozen. They’ll have no trouble replacing me.” She sighed. “I tried to unionize the place. They say that they don’t want unions because they’ll disrupt communication between employees and upper management."
"What communication?" Jack and Mari asked in unison, then laughed.
"My point exactly. There is none. And all the time, the workers have to deal with low wages, substandard working conditions, and equipment that was old when I was born—and I’m not exactly a kid."
"No way!" Mari stared at her. "Are they still using those 1975 computers?"
"Yes. And their management style is even more obsolete—it’s early twentieth century sweatshop. Not that that management style has ever really been out of fashion."
"So, you finally found a battle you couldn’t win." Mari pushed Rose’s belongings into a pile on the table.
"I don’t know that I’ve ever won a battle. What good has my campaigning done, anyway?"
"Plenty of good," Mari assured her. "You keep things in the public view, so they don’t forget about it."
"They’ll be quick enough to forget at Starcrest."
"That’s because hardly anyone stays at Starcrest for long. You lasted a month, which was about standard when I was there."
"Things haven’t changed. I guess it is kind of hard to organize when no one stays put."
"I just wonder how that company keeps going. Their mailings are trash, they’ve barely figured out the Internet, and they treat their customers as badly as they do their employees."
"Maybe I don’t need to damn them to hell. Maybe that’s where their success comes from."
Mari stared at her, then laughed appreciatively. "You sound like me. That’s what I always said to my parents."
"What did they say?"
"My dad said they were assholes, and my mom told me to be grateful I had a job."
"Were you grateful?"
"For about the first five minutes. Then I was ready to quit. I did quit, when I graduated high school and got a scholarship to Elias University. Who needs Starcrest when you have college?"
"I have seven college degrees, and I still got stuck there."
"True." Mari paused. "Are you sorry to leave?"
Rose shrugged. "Not really. My pride is a little bruised, and now I’ll have to find another job, but aside from that—I don’t care." She turned to Jack, changing the subject. "How was your day?"
"Better than yours—a little bit better, anyway. I went to work, and then went to class. Everything was fine until my boss first stood around praising someone, then abruptly turned on me and screamed that I couldn’t do anything right. If I didn’t need the money, I would be out of there so fast…"
"Have you tried looking for another job?" Rose wanted to know.
He nodded. "Yeah, but nothing has come up yet."
Lizzy came up to them and crawled onto the couch between them, opening her coloring book and ignoring the grown-ups’ conversation. College and jobs and unions meant nothing to the four-year-old, except that they concerned her parents.
Mari watched them for a moment, looking thoughtful. "Your boss reminds me of someone I knew in high school when I was a senior," she told Jack. "There was this library lady who acted just like your boss. Maybe they’re related."
"Maybe they’re the same person."
Mari wrinkled her nose. "If it is, poor you. She was a bitch."
"Mari, watch your language," Rose warned. The more time Lizzy spent around Mari, the more she imitated her—and that included Mari’s colorful way of expressing herself.
Jack pulled Lizzy into his lap, bouncing her absently on his knee. "What strikes me as strange is that the same people who scream furiously about people not having jobs are the same ones who refuse to hire them and give them a chance."
"I’ve noticed." Rose took Lizzy from him and set her in her lap, handing her the leftover remains of her vending machine snack. "And then, when we do have jobs, we’re always vulnerable to cuts and to downsizing, while the people who make the most fuss sit back and relax."
"I think I may just join you in your politicking," Jack told her, watching Lizzy savor the leftover potato chips. "It seems like whatever we do, we just can’t win."
"Well, if all else fails, just live for yourself and the people important to you, and tell the people with the power to go fu—" Mari stopped. "Sorry," she apologized. "But I just don’t see what else to do."
"You’ve turned into a real cynic, Mari."
Mari shrugged. "I know. It comes with the territory. You should see the crap…uh…stuff…that people try to get away with regarding the environment. And all too often, they win. What else can little people like us do?"
"Just try to live each day for itself, do what you can, and make it count," Jack responded. "That’s what I do. That’s what Rose does. And maybe things will change or maybe they won’t, but hiding from problems won’t make them go away, and sitting back and accepting everything that happens is a dangerous path to follow."
Rose looked up in astonishment, hearing him echo her words. "I think you’re more of a crusader than you realize," she told him, letting Lizzy climb out of her lap and go back to her coloring book. "You may not be as vocal as me, but I think that you care about things anyway, and if push came to shove, you’d be out there with me."
"Probably," Jack acknowledged, knowing that he could never let Rose face the world alone. Even though he rarely joined in her campaigns, at least not publicly, he did support her efforts to make the world a better place. He just had a different way of going about it.
"What I need to think about now, though, is where to find another job. I think I’ll tell prospective employers not to contact Starcrest—they’d have quite a story for them, accurate or not. I just hope it doesn’t take too long—the rent’s due in three weeks, and Lizzy needs new clothes for summer."
Lizzy glanced up as she heard her name spoken, but quickly returned to her coloring. Jack put a comforting arm around Rose’s shoulder.
"We’ll think of something, Rose, one way or another."