In order to be believed, one must speak from experience. Even then, beliefs are in the eye of the beholders. When I moved to Massachusetts I worked for my uncle laying down carpet and tile. Meanwhile I was looking for a job elsewhere. Not to spite my uncle, but to realize my own dreams. One application I filled out was at Home Depot. If you don’t know, Home Depot is a home improvement warehouse.
Shortly after that, my uncle and I did some work for an electrician friend of his. I expressed that I had a little experience, and he expressed that he may be needing a helper soon. He indeed called me a week or so later. Home Depot called me the day after that. I went to Home Depot and told the manager that I had already found a good job, but I didn’t want to blow Home Depot off. We agreed that I would work part time for Home Depot. Hopefully you can stay with me here.
First of all, they needed to drug test me. I smoke pot. I’m not a “pothead” but I do enjoy the feelings we get from smoking marijuana. In the week leading up to my interview for Home Depot, I didn’t smoke a lot of pot because I just moved to a new land, and had no way to find the black market in this area. But they say that pot takes about a month to be cleansed from your system. I drank a lot of water, drank some pickle juice, and even ate cucumbers soaked in vinegar. Either that helped me cleanse my urine, or Home Depot didn’t actually test me. Maybe my attitude in the interview led them to believe it was a waste of money to test my urine. So maybe instead they paid a smaller fee to schedule an appointment. If I show up, I must not be worried about the test. Or I know that I took the necessary precautions to give clean urine. Either way, they aren’t going to catch me. Moving along…
I went to orientation for my new part time job. They expressed their “new” system of employment. They called it the “inverted triangle” where the workers were at the top of the importance, and the managers were there for support. They offered the security of knowing that the managers are less important than the workers. A noble business…too bad it didn’t mean anything. While I worked, the managers were still the bosses. They still controlled our workplace experience. They still controlled how much money we made, and what kind of benefits we were afforded. Case in point…
For Easter Sunday they offered all employees willing to work an extra days pay. Instead of just the normal overtime they paid on Sundays, they offered double time…sort of. At first they said that you would get extra holiday pay. Then I found out that full time employees would get an extra eight hours of vacation pay, and part time employees would get an extra four hours. My shift was always six hours. So that meant that I would only get four hours of extra pay even though I sacrificed six hours of my Easter Sunday. Most of the other part timers felt screwed. That’s where I had to speak up. I voiced my opinion and eventually was called into the managers office. His only defense was something about me parking my car in the wrong place. And even in that defense, he couldn't remember what color my car was. That Easter all workers got exactly as many hours of free pay as they worked on that Sunday. The management played it off as a misunderstanding…but they weren’t too happy about one of their workers speaking up about the injustice.
So as you can see, the inverted triangle was only a concept…not a practice. As long as they could convince the workers that “what will be, will be” they could continue to pretend they had that concept in place.
Since then somebody told me/asked me about Home Depot being a cult. In theory they were trying to create a different kind of workplace…but it was labeled as a cult to make people suspicious about that inverted triangle. How do you balance that? In reality it is the workers that have made this world…yet it is the managers that make so much money…the managers job is no harder than yours, just different. Until we demand the profiteers to contribute what we the workers contribute, we will be mired in a huge slump of ineffectiveness. There are many ideas out there…find them out, and use your own reasoning to understand them. Only then will you be able to make your own decisions. Do I want you to blindly follow me? No. Do I want you to think? Yes.
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