Job Satisfaction

Stanley Aronowitz, the Green Party’s choice for Governor of New York in the first years of this decade, once informed my class at Bard that we should not – could not, in fact – live our lives through our jobs. He told us that the day’s labors hadn’t always crept so deeply into home lives as they did now. As a nation, he said, we’d forgotten that we work so that we can come home and be with our families, practice our hobbies and pursue our dreams. In short, we work to live, and not vice versa. In the anti-establishment atmosphere of our tiny (emphasis on) liberal arts college, his words resonated strongly.

On reflection, though, I’m less moved. Should we not derive satisfaction from our work? If we are to enjoy our jobs, if they are to enrich us spiritually as well as monetarily, how can we draw Aronowitz’s line between labor and love? Have we devoted ourselves too fully to our jobs when we arrive late for dinner? When we skip a lunch hour? When we go out more often than not with our friends from work? When we talk shop rather than sports or politics with our colleagues? Is there any opportunity that shouldn’t trump an office obligation?

Or should we look to merge our jobs seamlessly with our lives, each twined around and through the other until we find ourselves asleep every so often on the keyboard at the office? Do we live to succeed?

If so, how can we find time for love? How much can we really be there for our children when we’ve committed ourselves to what is, after all, a righteous and necessary cause that would fall without us? (Is it possible to commit oneself body and soul to a job without convincing oneself that it is a righteous and necessary cause?)

It’s also worth considering whether occupants of different places in the economy might give different answers to these questions of commitment, value and priority. Are there jobs that, by their natures, must be abandoned without compunction when the proverbial whistle blows? Examples include most service jobs – plumber, janitor, bus driver, physical therapist, scribe. There’s a strong argument to be made that the “elite” levels of American culture are composed of jobs that don’t permit such detachment – vocations that cannot be left at work. Perhaps those of us who yearn for labors of love rather than labors of lucre that enable lives of love are tacitly admitting our place in the overworked aristocracy. (Was there ever such a glib phrase as “working Americans”, used largely to refer to the blue-collar middle-class?)

Should that divide exist?

Too, is there not a divide between what we want from our jobs at age 25 and what we’ll want when we hit 60 or 75? Shall we dive in now and live our labors to the exclusion of all else, planning to come up for air in our fertile years to make a family and then, gradually, to relinquish our yoke to the coming generation in favor of creature comforts and membership in our communities? Or would those years dedicated so heavily to vocational work have too high an opportunity cost in neighbors, friends and lovers, in books and in art?

If we decide, as many of us have, to go all-in during the sunniest days of our lives with an eye toward reining in our horses when the evening comes, can we really understand the sacrifice we’re making?

Finally -- and with a tip of the hat to Zac, who kindly reminds me that not all things in life are black and white – is this dichotomy an oversimplification? Surely there is middle ground between a menial job to bring home the bacon and a back-breaker of a job to satisfy even the most sweat-thirsty brow. I don’t doubt that I sold janitorial jobs short by describing them as mindless nine-to-fives, and in fact, I’ve spent some time with mops myself and have taken much pride in a floor well-scrubbed. But the question remains: How much of ourselves shall we invest in our occupation, and how much shall we lay in reserve for after the whistle blows?

Thoughts?

Oh, Mexico

The crashing surf provides mood music for the the hermit crabs scuttling passive-aggressively under banana leaves here at Mar de Jade, some hour’s drive south of Puerto Vallarta on the coast of Mexico. I share this space – campus is far too prosaic a word for this place, and estate smacks too strongly of cruel capitalism – with students and guests from around the United States.

The owner/proprietor/guru/storyteller-in-chief is an MD, MPH from los Estados Unidos who came to this area some decades ago to help build a public health infrastructure for the locals, who were (and still are) sorely in need. The zen retreat at which I stay doubles as housing for volunteers at the clinic that she still runs every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, providing free consults from doctors who donate their time. I went with them and found that I wasn’t entirely underfoot: taking blood pressure remains instinctive after my summers at Hopkins, and tough as the language barrier may be, a ready smile still puts most patients at ease while the doctor collects a history.

Still, I was struck by the differences between the “Mar de Jade Clinica Campesina” and the clinics I’ve frequented myself over the years. Few Americans would voluntarily tread into a doctor’s office with an open-air waiting room covered only by a trellis and vines, replete with flies and a noisy children’s program on the other side of the courtyard – certainly it’s not what we imagine as we debate the future of healthcare in this election. White lab coats are a distant myth to us as we usher the next patient into our semi-private exam rooms. The most high-tech tools available in the exam rooms are tiny flashlights for measuring pupil dilation, with reflex hammers a close second. One patient presented with an epidermal infection that we would have lanced but for lack of a scalpel. Women crowd the line outside the room containing the newly installed sonogram, and our OB/GYN, on loan from a Kaiser Permanente hospital in California, rushes madly through the patients in an effort to make sure no one goes home unseen.

Our patients are unfazed by the five to six gringos facing them in each examination room. We are frequently introduced by the English-speaking volunteer doctors as “mis collegas” – their colleagues – and are allowed to watch, certainly to speak during, most of the more prosaic procedures.

I am struck by the unwieldiness of the translation process. Though our doctors are conversant in Spanish, the histories are taken slowly for reasons both cultural and linguistic, as the doctors tiptoe their way through unfamiliar medical foliage in asking and then are faced with speedy yet meandering responses from the patients. I’ve been impressed everywhere in Mexico with the locals’ unapologetic belief in the importance of a good story, and the case interviews are no exception: sometimes we hear about a family member’s death for ten minutes before we finish the examination and call in the next patient. Having just read “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”, though, and faced with a paucity of medical resources, it occurs to me that an authoritative tone and an attentive ear are the most consistent medications we have available to dispense. I hope they help.

Whether they do or not, the clinic does have more modern techniques available. The lab tech comes in a couple of times each week to collect blood samples for analysis, and we can refer patients for ECGs or X-rays. These are all expensive, though, and even $50 US is an unreasonable sum to expect from the far from well-to-do patients who line the walls of the waiting room. The familiar battery of multi-syllabic medicines is available here as in the US, though the attenuated supply is hard to believe.

Lunch is hamburgers, known to all of us, in our newfound wry Mexican style, as “the American food.” We munch away and mainline lukewarm fruit punch as we debate the merits of allowing our interpreters to converse with the patients themselves and then relate the gist of the exchange back to the doctor. It’s not HHS-recommended procedure and there’s always the chance that we’re missing important nuances, but it seems to get the job done and it certainly puts the patients at ease, so no one feels too strongly about changing the process.

The line dwindles and our shoulders slump as the day draws to a close. We hop back in the truck to return to Mar de Jade and compare notes: doctors from the US and Canada, medical students from the South, post-bac students from the West Coast, and a PA and assorted others, including yours truly, the representative Baltimoron.

Au Revoir, NOLA

Looking back over my three weeks in New Orleans, I'm surprised (but pleased) to find that Jazz Fest was the least of my pleasures and privileges there. Certainly seeing Billy Joel and the Roots in the same venue was spectacular, but how could it compare with helping to turn this....


...into this...?



Or with the times that I learned to drywall:


...and what a subfloor looks like:



...and how and why to end it all:



I learned the difference between drywall drills and impact drivers, between legitimate contractors and exploitative frauds, between compassionate government and laissez-faire excusism, between disposable cities (myth) and indispensable cultural centers (reality),
between theoretical idealism and you-provide-the-materials-we'll-provide-the-labor world-changing effort. I learned about the ubiquity of good people and new friends, and the truth of Margaret Mead's most famous admonishment. I learned that jazz lives most fully in the streets.

And for all that a nice suit and a cubicle to work from lend forward momentum to movements, I learned that there's nothing like grueling work on the front lines to ease your soul and make measurable change in the world. Viva volunteerism.

So I'm back now, reflective and sun-tanned, and I cannot recommend too strongly that you volunteer yourself with lowernine.org. To my friends in the foundations of the rebuilding effort: thank you, and best of luck. I'll see you again soon.

The Little Things

Unimpressed With The Press

John McCain was in the Lower Ninth Ward yesterday. This is a small area, so it's not surprising that he spoke two blocks from where I was working. In light of the context and of the education opportunity for the Boston, MA high schoolers volunteering with us that day, a cadre of us split off from the rebuilding groups to get a taste of the Presidential race.

Senator McCain stepped out from the Straight Talk Express to shake hands, take pictures, and thank several National Guardsmen (amen, Senator!) before taking the world's most abbreviated tour of the Lower Ninth. It comprised about three blocks of Lamanche Street, and culminated in a press conference outside St. David's Church:



He traveled a mere three blocks, with perhaps five doors opened to him (two of them Christian centers, the rest local residences). All of these buildings were in condition similar to this one:


...which is striking, since there are houses in the Lower Ninth (blocks away from his route) that look like this:


And yet today's papers attribute special significance to Senator McCain's description of the Bush administration's failures in Katrina, since he "stood in the Lower Ninth Ward" while declaiming them. Senator McCain spent at most an hour and a half in the Lower Ninth, and neither he nor his aides saw anything representative of the conditions there. There's a lesson here about the all-too-human tendency to mistake background for context and appearance for substance.

There's also a lesson about the sensationalist and bloodthirsty bent of the press corps. Senator McCain was reported to have taken "direct aim at the Bush administration",

"tick[ing] off a long list of mistakes by the current administration, saying there were 'unqualified people in charge, there was a total misreading of the dimensions of the disaster, there was a failure of communications.'" [Ibid.]

I heard the question that elicited this response, and I have no doubt that Senator McCain carefully chose his words to leave the President nothing more than vaguely responsible for the Katrina and Rita disasters. The reporter asked, "In what ways did President Bush fail in dealing with Katrina?" That part's true enough. The above McCain quote selected by the Times was preceded by something like, "Well, I think we all know that mistakes were made, and we've talked about them in depth. There were..."

In other words, Senator McCain answered a completely different question than the one that was asked: to wit, "What mistakes were made in dealing with Katrina?" Note the passive tense. Note also that all but the first of the examples the Senator cited were at least as applicable at the local level as they were at the White House. In fact, the Senator gave the example of non-interoperable radios used by relief personnel, an example which in no way reflects the President's judgment or action.

The logical follow-up question would have been: "Senator McCain, we're aware that those mistakes were made. In what ways did the President contribute to them?" But it was not to be.

Instead, the press corps somehow heard a screaming indictment in the Senator's delicate treatment of the President. I was there, though, and I see no dissonance between the tenor of McCain's softshoe yesterday and his decision to campaign with the President. I was, however, disappointed by the face-to-face docility and consequent misinterpretation offered by the press.

In fairness, though, what can you expect from a press corps that covered the Senator's stroll down Lamanche while corralled into media-friendly feeding troughs?


Lest you should think, as I did until I asked one of the Guardsmen present, that this was a nefarious plot to restrict journalists to taking only those pictures arranged by the campaign, know this: the reporters requested those flatbeds.

I hope that this indolence isn't typical of all campaign reporting. To my knowledge, no reporters cased the neighborhood to observe the condition of houses off the anointed path. No reporters interviewed community leaders ahead of time to find, for example, that the City had fought against reopening the local school, and that children (and therefore neighborhood residents) had been allowed to return only after months of effort by the community associations. No reporters had sufficiently examined records or newspaper reports to be able to ask Senator McCain his understanding of Presidential responsibilities, both legal and persuasive, in a situation such as that following Katrina, and, as above, specifically how the President did or didn't acquit himself of those perceived responsibilities.

In short, the press dropped all of the balls on this one. Senator McCain at least gets credit for visiting the Lower Ninth Ward, however briefly; for leveling criticism, however inchoate, at the White House for its myriad Katrina failings; for speaking directly to the Guardsmen present; and, perhaps most of all, for shaking hands with and then publicly thanking the stellar high schoolers I was working with:


And yes, that's Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal next to Mr. and Mrs. McCain. They travel together, you know.

Vultures of the Lower Ninth

In the fine tradition of the reading material at my old dentist's office, see if you can spot what's wrong with the following picture:


If you said, "The foundation columns for that house are unsteady piles of cinderblocks or poorly mortared bricks, all unattached to the house itself", you'd be both out of breath and quite correct.

If you said, "That 6x6 is neither attached to nor supported by anything on the near side", you'd be correct as well.

But if, based on the abundant evidence, you concluded that this New Orleans homeowner was defrauded by the contractors who skipped town with her money after doing only perfunctory work, you'd win the grand prize.

The standard deal in the Lower Ninth (as, I believe, in other places) is that the contractor negotiates with the homeowner a price for an agreed-upon list of projects. After that, the homeowner pays the contractor 40% of the total price for the first 40% of work. When that's complete, another 40% is paid, and then a final 20% payment is exchanged when the work is complete.

Of course, these deals are largely arrived at on a handshake basis. Worse, homeowners rarely know how to verify the bona fides of a contractor, and the government's done a phenomenally poor job of regulating the contracting market. As a result, the standard eventuality for work 'round these parts is that the homeowner pays 40% for the first set of work, lays out the second 40% and then finds that a) the contractor has skipped town without a forwarding address, and b) what work was done was of such poor quality as to require near-complete reconstruction.

Witness, then, the "beams to nowhere" (original phrase -- citations, please!) and disintegrating pillars above. Elsewhere in Miss Sheila's house, the uneven floors, sparse and improper screws and nails, cracked drywall and crooked doorways are salt in the still-fresh wounds left by Katrina. Mentioning contractors in any gathering of Katrina survivors is a surefire recipe for rolled eyes and strained, knowing smiles.

The work we do here isn't top-quality by any stretch of the imagination, but it is conscientious and it is honest and it is accountable, and damn if those floors aren't level when we're done with them.

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