Shift
“Do you yearn?” Kramer asks George in an episode of Seinfeld. “Yearn?” George clarifies. “Do I yearn?” Kramer leans in closer. “I yearn. Often I...I sit...and yearn. Have you yearned?” George thinks for a moment. “Well, not recently. I crave. I crave all the time, constant craving...but I haven’t yearned.”
Wendi and I write poems on receipt paper to make the time pass during slow weeknight shifts. Hers is about answering robocalls from the delivery apps we use. Mine is about pouring sauces into ramekins. We read them to each other in our best poet voices.
Wendi is my boss, though she cringes when I call her that. “I’m middle management,” she corrects with a laugh. We make fun of annoying regulars when they leave, we google customers we think are hot. People often come in and ask for her; other times they’re surprised to see her.
“You still work here?” they’ll ask incredulously.
“Yep!” she answers with faux cheer. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She told me once that she feels her purpose is to be a neighborhood character, to make people happy. She gets caught up in telling a customer a long story about her old friend’s neighbor who murdered his landlord. She juices some extra ginger in the back and makes all the cooks take a shot of it. She howls with laughter when they all start coughing: “Wendi, it burns!”
Wendi tells me that when she quit drinking eight years ago, she began going to thrift stores every day. She filled her closet with clothes; they spilled onto the floor. She made a list for me recently of all her favorite shops. I visit them sometimes while killing time before work.
In Dorothy Allison’s short story “Mama,” the narrator’s mother warns her against the perils of wanting. To be seen wanting something is an embarrassment. It is a concession of power: creating room for denial, disappointment, devastation. She encourages her daughter to “starve the wanting part” of her.
To rid ourselves of wanting is a zen pursuit, deprival for the sake of discipline. For the character Mama, though, and working people like her, the pursuit is also one of survival, protection, pragmatism.
I started my current serving job in Los Angeles the summer after I finished graduate school. When I first met Wendi, she told me she wasn’t that ambitious. I learned later that she had worked for many years as a screenwriter. She worries sometimes that her life has slipped past her in a way, that she hasn’t lived up to her “potential.” I try to assure her it doesn’t matter, capitalism sucks, it’s all bullshit. But even if we both know it, I still understand that gnawing feeling. I also understand, as Mama does, the endlessness of wanting, the dissatisfaction inherent to any notion of ambition.
Mama is a diner waitress. I’m a writer some days and a waitress on others. Sometimes customers ask me if I’m an artist, assuming there’s something “else” I’m trying to “do.” Each time, this annoys me. What if this was all I did, or wanted? What would be wrong with that?
*
“How are you for money?” my mom asks when I call her.
“Fine,” I say.
She tells me about an old classmate she talked to at her high school reunion recently. “I think he has a few Emmys,” she says. “Probably big money. I told him about your writing. He said he’d be happy to talk with you. Send him an email. Maybe he can help you.”
“Help me with what?”
“Maybe he can give you a job.”
“A job doing what?”
“I don’t know. It can’t hurt to reach out.”
I’m not sure if she understands what I want for my life. Sometimes I don’t understand either. I end up sending her old classmate a few clips of my writing. He says he’d be happy to talk with me on the phone about his experience breaking into the industry. I never respond.
*
“After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” Mierle Laderman Ukeles asks in her 1969 Maintenance Art Manifesto. Ukeles wrote the manifesto in response to her central frustration with capitalism: the relentless insistence of “progress,” the valuation of results over process, the imperative to always be moving forward. She sought to name and uplift people like mothers and janitors, those concerned with the overlooked project of maintenance, whose work “[keeps] the wheels turning.”
From the Manifesto grew an oeuvre of performances Ukeles categorized as Maintenance Art. In one such performance, she took over the duties of a janitor in a museum. She cleaned the cases of mummies, then labeled each with a sticker that rendered them “Maintenance Art Works.” She became the (unpaid) Artist-in-Residence of the New York City Department of Sanitation. For her 1979 project, “Touch Sanitation,” Ukeles spent a year meeting each of the city’s 8,500 sanitation workers. She shook each of their hands and thanked them “for keeping New York City alive.”
On my way to work during the Covid-19 pandemic, I pass a billboard thanking the city’s essential workers. I think of all the people this category describes, often the most vulnerable among us. It isn’t clear who paid for this public message. I wonder how much it cost.
In Ukeles’ more recent piece, “I Make One Hour of Maintenance Art Per Day,” displayed at the Whitney Museum, she interviewed and photographed 300 maintenance workers in a skyscraper at 55 Water Street (the Whitney’s previous location). She spent five weeks in the building, asking the workers to classify what they were doing as work or as art.
Ukeles’ work hinges on the idea that you can be an artist if you call what you’re doing art. She harkens this authorial power to the “Duchampian freedom to rename something.”
Many reviews of her practice describe Ukeles’ art as offering working people some control over their lives, proving that their work is worthy of a museum, and should be valued as art. Though I deeply enjoy and appreciate Ukeles’ project, I find this framing troubling. Instead of “elevating” work to the level of appreciation we have for art, I wonder what would change if instead we valued work highly, for what it is.
*
In his book Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber notes the inverse relationship between the social and economic value of work in the U.S. The more social good a job seems to create, the less those workers are paid for their labor.
Growing up in Boston, I was obsessed with the movie Good Will Hunting, in which Will, an MIT janitor, is discovered to be a brilliant mathematician. At one of the film’s emotional peaks, Will’s best friend Chuckie confronts him about his choice to continue kicking around South Boston working low-paying jobs, rather than pursue a career that utilizes his gifts.
“You're sittin' on a winning lottery ticket, and you're too much of a pussy to cash it in,” Chuckie tells Will as they eat lunch while on break at a construction site. “I'd do fuckin’ anything to have what you got. So would any of these fuckin' guys. It'd be an insult to us if you're still here in 20 years. Hangin' around here is a fuckin' waste of your time.”
Whereas everyone in Will’s life attributes his hesitance to ascend into a cushy job in the private sector to cowardice, I find his commitment to his community to be admirable, or at least reasonable.
But I wonder: if Will’s choice to withhold his talents from corporate America is a form of protest, who does it benefit? Does his settling necessarily weaken the system he resents? Ultimately, his decision to stay or go affects only himself. His solidarity bears no material improvement on his friends’ standard of living, nor does it rupture the state’s sleek inner-workings.
The film’s final scene depicts Will driving across the country to California to win back his Stanford-bound girlfriend and presumably take a white-collar tech job in the Bay Area. But I wonder what happens after.
How should one handle the pressure to “cash in” on talents that others want? Do I “owe” something to my parents, who put me through school and took out crippling loans to do so? My mother, who put her own life and desires on pause?
“What happens to a dream deferred?” asked the one Langston Hughes poem that was taught in school. It was years before I learned of his communist work, his more radical desires:
The bees work.
Their work is taken from them.
We are like the bees—
But it won't last
Forever
Graeber notes that radicals after the Industrial Revolution agreed that there is something divine in work, “but that divine quality lay not in its effect on the soul and body--as laborers, they knew better than that--but that it was the source of wealth; everything that made rich and powerful people rich and powerful was in fact created by the efforts of the poor.”
*
Teen jocks come into my work wearing t-shirts that say things like, “No Days Off.” I serve them soup, and they ignore me when I check in to see how they’re doing.
I serve as a go-between for the customers and kitchen. Sometimes I’ll laugh with the cooks about the irritating requests of our mostly white, gentrifying clientele. Sometimes I worry about our fraught allyship. Despite my position in the working class, I am a white gentrifier too.
One of the cooks I work with has kept two full-time jobs for over ten years, since he immigrated to Los Angeles from Mexico City when he was twenty-one. His only day off is on Wednesday, when he goes to the supermarket, does laundry, works out. He says he usually sleeps four hours a night.
“How are you?” he asks me sometimes. “Tired?”
I feel guilty saying yes.
We are comrades, to a point. The back-of-house sweats through twelve hour days, some of them hiding Modelos in to-go cups to ease the time. At the end of my five hour shift, I count my tip money and go home, unburdened.
*
One afternoon last winter, I attended a screening of Salt of The Earth at the Autry Museum of the American West. The 1954 film chronicles a group of Mexican-American workers at a New Mexico zinc mine. They initiate a long and grueling strike to protest their unsafe working conditions and unfair wages. The film’s concerns are multi-issued; when the miners’ wives get involved in the strike, the politics of housework and the myths of male supremacy are drawn into focus.
“At Last,” read the movie poster, “An Honest Movie About Working People.”
Since the film’s release over sixty years ago, I can think of precious few other movies that fall into such a category. (“Work is rarely treated in films. It’s one of the peculiarities of the movies,” writes New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael.) The conditions of the protagonists’ struggles also haven’t improved much over the decades. If anything, exploitation of workers has only gotten worse since then, as corporations replaced local tycoons and algorithms demand inhuman efficiency.
Salt of the Earth was created by communists who had all been blacklisted by the Hollywood establishment. The production featured only five professional actors; the rest were locals.
During production, mobs of vigilantes descended on the set, knocking over cameras, assaulting members of the cast and crew. They blasted music over loudspeakers, shot bullets into the unoccupied car of one of the actors, and burned down the home of another. The lead actress, Rosaura Revueltas, was deported before filming was completed.
The film was denounced by the United States House of Representatives for its communist sympathies, and all but 12 theaters in the country refused to screen it. The screening we attended was introduced by a professor from the University of California, Irvine. Her talk touched on representation and feminism, but strangely omitted any mention of labor.
*
“A nation starting out in quest of a great goal,” Richard Nixon proclaimed in his 1971 Labor Day Speech, “like a young worker starting out upon his career, does not always get what it wants; rather, a nation gets what it deserves.”
Driving back from Las Vegas in the middle of the night, I stop at a Dairy Queen off an exit called Ghost Town Road. I order a small fry and a peanut butter blizzard. Two women are working. They are talking about high school. One of them used to take AP science classes. She laughs. “That didn’t get me far.” I wonder if they are satisfied with their lives, or work. How their lives are tied to their work. If someone has to work at the Dairy Queen on Ghost Town Road in the middle of the night. If it might as well be them. If it might as well be me.
If I’m unsatisfied with my work, does that mean I think I “deserve” more? (And, conversely, that others don’t?) Richard Nixon and I would certainly disagree on our young nation’s “great goal,” as well as what it deserves.
A segment of Nixon’s Labor Day speech is used as the epigraph for Studs Terkel’s 1970 oral history, Working, in which Terkel interviews over 100 workers across various industries “about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.” I check it out from the library at Wendi’s recommendation.
When I’m at work, I look forward to having time off, and when I have time off, I don’t know what to do with myself. What would Sisyphus do all day if he didn’t have to push that rock?
“Do we really want to be free?” Byung-Chil Han asks in his book Psychopolitics. “Before God, we are all debtors: guilty. But debt--guilt--destroys freedom. Today, politicians appeal to high debt rates to explain that their freedom to act is massively restricted. Free from debt-- that is, wholly free -- we would truly have to act. Perhaps we run up debts perpetually so we won’t need to do so -- that is, so we won’t need to be free, or responsible... Could it be that Capital is a new God, making us guilty and debt-ridden again?”
I understand this paralysis, exacerbated by our current quarantine. The sinking suspicion that faced with unlimited free time, I wouldn’t find anything interesting to do. I look for ways to distract myself from the vertigo of freedom. I try to cook complicated recipes. I re-organize my apartment. I pick up extra shifts. I online shop. I write cover letters for new jobs that I’m sure will offer me the meaning that is missing. Work, then, is no longer a means to an end, but an end itself.
“You speak of my working life?” says a factory employee interviewed in Working. “I like what I’m doing. I’ve never been laid off in thirty-six years. I look forward to going to work. I’d be lost if I wasn’t working. (Pause.) But I’d like the experience. After so many years—I would just like the experience of not having to go to work. I look forward to retirement in another three, four years. I don’t know what it would really turn out to be...”
My grandfather retired after decades of working as a grocer. He grew bored before deciding to go back for several more years.
*
If, per Ukeles’s thesis, you become an artist when you call what you are doing art, can its inverse also be true? Do you become a worker if you call what you’re doing work?
In a 2016 interview for The Creative Independent, painter Cynthia Daignault describes her practice:
I usually set impossible goals for myself. I’m always behind. The ‘boss’ is always pissed at me...To be honest, just like the Amazon worker, I can be pretty miserable while I’m in the middle of a shift. I work 80-hour weeks. I get incredibly lonely. I physically break down from the receptive stress on my shoulder and neck. And yet in the end, I look at what I did and I’m often stunned...It’s funny, becoming an artist, I always thought I was choosing a life outside of corporate America. Yet, here I am telling you that I’m basically an Amazon Fulfillment Center employee. Well that’s how the sausage is made.
Of course art requires a tremendous amount of labor, and Daignault’s point is well taken. I winced, though, at her specific comparison to an Amazon warehouse employee, who is totally alienated from their own labor. As if they could possibly be stunned by what they’ve “created.” As if their “boss” is hypothetical. As if the conditions are at all comparable. Basically an Amazon employee. I can hear the bitterness in her voice, the cruel irony that the liberatory path she’s chosen has turned, to her mind, into the job associated with the most shame. Amazon Fulfillment Center employees make $15/hr, with very little protections. I wonder how much Daignault’s paintings sell for.
Her interview calls to mind a line of questioning from a steelworker in Working: “Let’s say Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. It took him a long time to do this, this beautiful work of art. But what if he had to create this Sistine Chapel a thousand times a year? Don’t you think that would even dull Michelangelo’s mind? Or if da Vinci had to draw his anatomical charts thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, eighty, ninety, a hundred times a day? Don’t you think that would even bore da Vinci?”
*
Does someone have to work the late shift at the Dairy Queen in the middle of the night?
Is this the case for automation?
In a recent essay published in The New Inquiry, “Work Sucks,” Kassandra Vee wonders about methods of activism surrounding work. She writes: “Why not build a politics around material reality—that we hate our jobs, that our productivity is destroying the planet—instead of around some magical idealistic notion about the dignity of our labors?” Graeber notes similar efforts of the 1960s counterculture, in their slogan: “Let the machines do all the work!”
I wonder, then, if I’ve gotten it wrong. Is believing in the dignity of the worker in fact a method of prolonging capitalism?
Graeber traces the belief in work’s inherent nobility to theologic roots. In the stories of the Garden of Eden and Myth of Prometheus, work was meant to discipline man for defying the divine Creator. At the same time, work served as “a modest instantiation of the divine power itself.” Work, therefore, is at once a curse and a blessing, punishment and redemption.
Graeber’s research notes another interesting paradox: “that 1) most people’s sense of dignity and self-worth is caught up in working for a living, and 2) most people hate their jobs.”
“Workers, in other words,” he concludes, “gain feelings of dignity and self-worth because they hate their jobs.”
These questions and confusions build and knot in my brain. Waiting in line for White Castle at midnight, a man nearby vomits explosively all over the table and floor. His friend drags him out, leaving the mess behind for the employees to deal with. “Are you allowed to take tips?” I ask the cashier. She holds out her hand. I only have a ten dollar bill, so I hand it to her, and she pockets it. I wonder about the line between empathy and pity and feel guilty for perhaps having crossed it.
*
At the cafe where I used to work, I’d close early if it was slow. The fluorescent lights cast their sickly glower over the white walls and concrete floors, and I’d play the same song over the speakers each night. Catch a boat to England, baby, maybe to Spain. I’d fill the yellow mop bucket with hot water and pretend I was a character in a movie, the young protagonist working a dead end job, thinking longingly towards the future. Don’t characters in movies ever pretend to be characters in movies? Wherever I have gone, wherever I’ve been and gone. I listened to the song again and again, mop sloshing against concrete. It reminded me of the zen board my dad kept at his desk to doodle on when bored or lost in thought. The grey slate darkened, glistening, then dried.
“Movies set up these glamorized occupations,” Kael writes. “When people find they are waitresses, they feel degraded. No kid says I want to be a waiter, I want to run a cleaning establishment. There is a tendency in movies to degrade people if they don’t have white collar professions. So people form a low self-image of themselves, because their lives can never match the way Americans live--on screen.”
I actually like being a waitress. For the most part, I enjoy talking with customers, and my coworkers and I laugh together constantly. It’s easily my favorite job I’ve ever had.
One of Elon Musk’s five tips to increase productivity: “Don’t be afraid to contradict yourself.”
*
On a busy Sunday night, a customer scolds me for not being more attentive to him as he waited for his order. When I apologize and remind him that we’re in the midst of a pandemic, he counters: “This is still a restaurant, you’re still at work, and I’m still the customer.”
During quarantine, my dad tells me that he feels purposeless outside of work. He realizes he’s let it become the center of his life. I have, it seems, the opposite problem. During an interview for a second job at a pizza place not long ago, the manager asked me about my five year plan, and I couldn’t help but laugh. I’ve spent weeks on this essay now and can’t decide if it’s work or art.
Ukeles’ project is concerned, at its core, with modes of survival, yet the question of maintenance is a tricky one. To maintain also means to preserve.
“Caring for others, especially over the long term, requires maintaining a world that’s relatively predictable as the grounds on which caring can take place,” Graeber writes. “And that, in turn, means that love for others...regularly requires the maintenance of institutional structures one might otherwise despise.”
Ukeles sees maintenance as an emphasis on care and detail in the face of the empty and exploitive progress of capitalism. Graeber warns that focus on maintenance can prevent the imagining of new and needed worlds.
“Who you gonna sock?” asks the steelworker in Working. “You can’t sock General Motors, you can’t sock anybody in Washington. You can’t sock a system.”
Thinking about my relationship to ambition as an individual feels increasingly like the wrong question. I wonder what my and our work will look like in the future, if there is a way to channel our collective labor into care for each other, as we imagine and realize new possibilities of meaningful lives outside of capital.
My most recent receipt poem is named for a button on the POS system, “Other Tender.” I read Wendi the last stanza:
A splash on my hand that I lick quick
Pour lift pour
The ebb and flow of replete and replenish--
More lids, ripped bag, loose fits
Prone to spill
Some extra napkins, just in case
Sara Selevitch
Sara Selevitch is a writer and waitress living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Eater, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Tele- Art Mag, and the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.