Ghosts of Tom Joad (16 page)

Still, me and Jodie got along well even just as friends, and we both were hoping to get ahead some now that we had steady part-time work at Bullseye. We thought of ways we could help each other. One day her kids were sick and she didn't want to leave them home alone, so she brought them in to work. She told them to stay in the toy aisle all day looking at things, pretending like they could buy them, and me and Jodie took
turns quietly checking on them until quitting time. Some cough-soothing syrup went missing that day too between my picking and Pharmacy's filling. That day of all days Jodie got asked again to work through her break, so I had to feed them sick kids Ho-Ho's and red pop for lunch, which probably made them feel better than me overall.

Our biggest attempt at trying to help each other was after Jodie transferred to sporting goods and one day told me how customers were always asking her for Ace bandages and white tape and stuff. That all was kept over in Pharmacy. Bullseye told us our guests were the most important product, and had Rule Number 3 that if a guest asked for something somewhere else in the store you couldn't just say, “Sure, over in Aisle Seven,” but you had to walk them there as a courtesy and wait to see if they found what they were looking for or needed additional guest service interaction. Jodie said the problem was so many people kept asking for athletic tape that she was walking a lot and her team manager, Ephraim, was on her ass for not being at her station near the bowling items. She told Ephraim about the athletic tape taking her away, but he said something about her needing to learn to work smarter not harder, which did not seem to help, because the athletic tape was still not where customers were asking for it. Having to actually talk to the customers, we came to understand, was the weak link in the chain of efficiently transferring money from them to Bullseye.

“So Earl,” Jodie said, sharing a Twinkie on break, “I know how we can get ahead here. We can do this thing called innovation Ephraim told us about at the last team-building meeting. He said we have to be ahead of our customers' needs to
succeed in this market. So, here's my plan. You pick me some athletic bandages and tape, just a few at first, and put them in my tub instead of Pharmacy. I'll have the new things set up all nice near my station, and when Ephraim comes by I'll show them off. We'll get promoted maybe. For sure win that ‘Catch Us Doing Our Best' prize.”

I think it was only because firing two valued teammates at the same time would've made Steve and Ephraim look bad, or because they couldn't figure out a way to blame it on one another, that we didn't get thrown out that day. Ephraim was a cooler Team Leader, explaining to Jodie about unit stock control, location sales metrics, and how important it was that each Bullseye store maintain its unique identical layout. Steve just told me never to do anything that wasn't on the pick sheet again, or he'd call security and have me walked out. He also secretly tagged me as “IE” on my performance review, ineligible for rehire it meant, which I only found out later after I was laid off and trying to use Bullseye as a reference for Taco Bell. Jodie got reassigned to the children's section, which everyone hated because it was where the most shoplifting took place and she was worried about having to see one of her mom friends doing it. Her first task was to put out only one shoe of a pair on display, keep the other one in the back until someone paid, to discourage people from stealing 'cause they couldn't get the set. After customers just started stealing any old right shoe to go with any left shoe on the rack, Jodie had to redo it so there were only left shoes on display.

I got put on busing tables at the Food Courtyard. Because the waitresses were supposed to share tips with us bus boys, the
Bullseye family was not legally required to pay minimum wage, so I got three bucks less an hour than before. That most sales in the Courtyard were like four dollars for coffee and a sandwich, and the average tip thirty cents, and only about half the waitresses would share half the time anyway, it wasn't the best. Throw some peanuts and watch the monkey dance. Sometimes though I was quicker and could slide the change off the table into my bus tray along with the dishes and cheat those bitches back. Most of the customers were daytime moms desperate for some little bit of adult human contact. You'd think there'd be a million stories in a place like this, but there's only one. Even the food was gonna depress you; big colorful posters of perfect rounded burgers and stuffed sandwiches made by artists, and then we serve you a warmed over flat thing.

One day I recognized one of the customers.

“Earl, is that you? I haven't seen you since when, high school?”

“Yeah, hi, how you been?”

“Great. Just home from the city for a few days to see the folks, you know. Had to pick up a few things and figured I'd grab a bite. You wanna sit down?”

“I work here.”

“Oh, well, yeah, cool, so this is what you do?”

“I'll just get someone to take your order.”

At one point to fix the economy we were gonna have legalized gambling and build a casino in Reeve, but it turned out anybody who'd want to gamble around here didn't have enough money to gamble it away. Then for a while the big hope was for a German car factory to locate in our part of Ohio. It was in all
the news. At one point cars were pretty much made in Detroit, all around that Greenfield Village museum we took the field trip to in high school. Somehow we got from there to here, where cars are made by foreign companies and Detroit looks like Dresden after WWII and Dresden looks like Detroit before WWII. Still, if our state could give the Germans enough of our tax money as an incentive, and enough work visas for their most skilled workers and managers to come over from Germany, they'd build cars to sell us here in Ohio and we'd have some more jobs that the Germans didn't get, which was a lot like stealing tips. I noticed some foreigners in nice clothes come in to the food court now and then, along with our politicians who were offering those incentives. I'd listen in on them while I was wiping things up, hoping to get the inside track on when those jobs would come.

“Mr. Mayor, we thank you for your hospitality. Our friend here from your governor's office has taken us around to so many of your rustic small towns. I must say, Ohio is quite beautiful.”

“We do like it here Manfred—may I call you that? But of course in addition to being so pretty a countryside, we have a lot of hard-working Americans anxious to get started.”

“And that, if I may be blunt Mr. Mayor, is our concern. The tax breaks are generous, and your promise of a better highway to allow us to ship parts from Munich via the Columbus airport is important. What worries us, frankly, are the workers. Our motorcars are complex machines, and our quality is our brand. Can your people meet our standards, at our price?”

“These are good people, Manfred. Salt of the earth.”

“Mr. Mayor, allow me to tell you a true story. Apple had redesigned their iPhone's display literally at the last minute. New screens began arriving at the assembly plant in China near midnight the day before the units were to ship. A foreman roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, gave them each a hard biscuit and a cup of tea and sent them into the factory for work. Within thirty minutes of being woken, they started a twelve-hour shift fitting displays without a break to meet Apple's deadline. Can your workers do that? Do they have those kinds of skills? Perhaps, of course, we would serve coffee instead of tea here. A little joke, yes?”

“Um, well, Manfred, I just don't know. I mean, we have laws here, about people being able to sleep and how long they can work.”

“In my China factories I do not even by law have to allow workers breaks for water or sanitation. We do find limited meals are necessary for productivity. Those are the skills I need. Can your people provide them?”

“Manfred, really, those aren't skills, getting out of bed to work in the middle of the night, twelve-hour shifts. You can't bully your workers. Can you? What you're talking is more like, well, I don't know, more like you need farm animals than people.”

“Ha yes, Mr. Mayor. I understand your joke in English. We indeed have such a saying in German as well. You are funny, but in North Carolina they are offering us the incentive of using prison labor if we locate the plant there, only a few of your pennies an hour. I do think it would cost more to feed farm animals. That is my joke to you. But yes, yes, of course I
understand. I have opened factories for our company all over the world, and I have heard the same thing in Shenzhen and in Chennai. In the end, there I have found workers at our price point, in our needed quantity, with the skills we require, despite these so-called ‘laws.' It is flexibility those places offer me. Of course, your people do speak good English, and that is a plus for us. But can you guarantee me that they'll work to our standards? Can you assure me for example that there will not be a union here to disrupt our labor price calculations?”

“Well, on the quality, sure, they'll do it, of course. And now, you know I can't control the thing about the union here—”

“Mr. Mayor, again, we are in your country and I am happy to follow your custom of direct speech. My company needs a North American facility, but our margins are tight. I can drop this plant across the border in Mexico as easily as I can drop it here. You will please think about that. Meantime, allow me to think over what you have said, maybe take a closer look at your labor pool, ‘size them up,' I think you say in English, no?”

I had heard about this and it wasn't just in China. In Mississippi, Nissan claims never to have laid anyone off at their car plant. That's because more than a quarter of their workers are employed by temp agencies and laid off at will, but by the temp agency, not Nissan, still with its clean hands. The workers say in eight years they have never seen a temp promoted to regular. FastEx Ground classifies thousands of drivers as independent contractors, so they get no benefits. Those drivers have to pay for their own gas, and rent their trucks. Still having to buy from the company store.

I did get one thing outta the Germans. For a while one of them had his wife staying with him in town, sort of checking us out I guess to see if their German kids could grow up here. She hired me under the table to do some yard work, cleaning gutters and painting a bit, saying even their rented place wasn't right for her, as she had come from Europe. Whatever, I made a few bucks, she gave me coffee and we actually got to know each other a little while I was working. One day she invited me inside to move some stuff and, you know it, like in them videos, we ended up in bed. She never called me back, but she slipped me a sweet fifty that day, mumbling how it wasn't much in real Euros anyway, so there's your American worker, job done right.

Back at Bullseye things didn't go as smoothly. It wasn't anything I did, but they hired some kid to bus tables and I got sent back to my old job, though I always wondered if any of the waitresses secretly caught me stealing their nickels and dimes off the tables. One of them could have seen me at the bowling alley buying beer with handfuls of change maybe. Anyway, the second time around the picking and stocking job didn't last too long. Steve the Team Leader explained one day that Bullseye had innovated a new warehousing system that centralized item distribution in such a way that goods came to our store already sorted into tubs. Instead of me breaking down a big box of razors or toothpaste into tubs for Pharmacy and tubs for Grocery, it was done centrally somewhere else by someone else. The people who used to just have to pick up their filled tubs from me were redefined so that they now went into the big truck directly and lifted out their pre-filled tubs. They could skip their own bar code reading part, and so Steve laid off three of those
people for efficiency, too. Steve did thank me very nicely for my contributions to the Bullseye family and took my blue vest. At first I was so mad I wanted to burn down the building and bayonet the survivors, but Steve said he hoped I would leave without a fuss. I did. I guess in the end I had precious little fuss left in me.

B
EING UNEMPLOYED AGAIN
meant lots of time on my hands. When it was too hot or too cold outside and I had a few bucks in my jeans, I liked to spend time in the new coffee shop at the strip mall here in Reeve. I'd buy a cup, drink some, then load it up with sugar and milk. Drink some more, slowly, reload with sugar and milk, and keep doing it until it was just milk or I got caught. The owners were Koreans and would take the milk container in right after the morning rush, but when one of the few local staff was at the counter (those Korean families were only so big and could only cover so many hours no matter how greedy they was, plus I think they liked the idea of us havin' to work for them), I could do that milk thing all afternoon.

The other thing I liked about the coffee shop was the Korean girls that would come in for bubble tea, the kind that requires that big-ass straw. I tried one of those straws on my coffee once, but it made me drink too fast. Not a working man's straw. The girls were all young and pretty, maybe a little too much makeup at nine in the morning sometimes, but everybody had to make a living. I tried to chat a few of them up, but they either didn't speak English or didn't see the point in talking with a guy who obviously had no play money. Most of them worked at that club
without windows, and most of the customers going in and out were Koreans too, dropping money as if they were allergic to it. I doubt too many of Reeve's other citizens could afford an import.

I did have some hope for this one woman who seemed to linger a bit longer than most of them. She might have been a little older, hard to tell age exactly with Orientals, but she'd sit outside and smoke while her friends would grab their tea and head right back to work. I wasn't sure what was the right way to approach her, but after some clumsy eye contact and some spilled coffee trying to bump into her accidentally twice at the door, we did get to talking. Spoke good English although without ever satisfying the letters R and L, which I kinda got used to. At first it was mostly hello and good morning, but once she realized I wasn't angling for anything, we'd talk while she smoked and got to know one another.