Alex Kudera’s award-winning novel, Fight for Your Long Day (Atticus Books), was drafted in a walk-in closet during a summer in Seoul, South Korea. Auggie’s Revenge (Beating Windward Press) is his second novel. His numerous short stories include “Frade Killed Ellen” (Dutch Kills Press), “Bombing from Above” (Heavy Feather Review), and “A Thanksgiving” (Eclectica Magazine).
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Friday, February 5, 2021
Sunday, June 7, 2020
a check that would never be repaid
"We eat hotdogs and sauerkraut for lunch. After lunch, my father calls the telephone company and explains to them that he cannot pay his debt. He gets angry over a misunderstanding and berates the customer-service rep. He owes ninety bucks for last month plus three hundred from the winter, but he yells at the lady because before they said he could pay the ninety to keep the line and now she’s telling him three ninety or nothing. But he holds neither sum so the point is moot, and bankruptcy leaves one bitter or quarrelsome. He hangs up and bitches about those corporate mothers. When you lose your phone, you lose call backs from prospective employers too. I listen and despair and resist the urge to write him a check that would never be repaid."
~~ from "My Father's Great Recession" by Alex Kudera
~~ from "My Father's Great Recession" by Alex Kudera
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Atlantic City
I stumbled upon a couple articles on Atlantic City's current casino "contraction," here and here, and it sounds like the beach town is losing 5,000 jobs in three days. Which doesn't sound good. I suppose you could say that as a country, where gambling is increasingly legal everywhere citizens are taxed, we may be reaching our saturation point for blackjack tables and slot machines.
But I remember back when Vegas was the only option in town, so to speak, and my childhood neighbors' first cousins went to work as card dealers when the Atlantic City casinos first opened. This was the late seventies, and they were going directly from high school because the casinos offered good union jobs and working as a dealer was an opportunity to earn a decent wage, what is now commonly referred to as a "living wage" and not at all guaranteed for current card and dice workers in riverboat America. I was a kid, not even a teenager, and going to work for a new casino sounded very impressive at the time.
When I think of A.C. casinos, I also think of my father, when he was flush in the mid '80s coming back from Los Angeles with a wallet full of twenty dollar bills to drop on the tables after we ate at a swank Italian place in one of those first casinos. This was all before GMO gas ruined Caesar dressing. So it was mildly amusing that ten years later he trained to work in the "cage," counting chips and making change, at a riverboat casino in Florida for just a buck or two more than minimum wage. As best I remember, his casino career was cut short when some slightly better job showed up soon after.
Update from February 2016: "Report: A.C. jobs, housing in downward spiral"
But I remember back when Vegas was the only option in town, so to speak, and my childhood neighbors' first cousins went to work as card dealers when the Atlantic City casinos first opened. This was the late seventies, and they were going directly from high school because the casinos offered good union jobs and working as a dealer was an opportunity to earn a decent wage, what is now commonly referred to as a "living wage" and not at all guaranteed for current card and dice workers in riverboat America. I was a kid, not even a teenager, and going to work for a new casino sounded very impressive at the time.
When I think of A.C. casinos, I also think of my father, when he was flush in the mid '80s coming back from Los Angeles with a wallet full of twenty dollar bills to drop on the tables after we ate at a swank Italian place in one of those first casinos. This was all before GMO gas ruined Caesar dressing. So it was mildly amusing that ten years later he trained to work in the "cage," counting chips and making change, at a riverboat casino in Florida for just a buck or two more than minimum wage. As best I remember, his casino career was cut short when some slightly better job showed up soon after.
Update from February 2016: "Report: A.C. jobs, housing in downward spiral"
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Monday, July 22, 2013
pay
Ending on Isaac Sweeney's career progress seemed a bit too beyond the pessimistic pale of this blog, so I thought I'd return to my usual doom and gloom with this alternet piece on privatizing to reduce wages among janitors and cafeteria workers at charter schools.
This common tactic, that leads to downward pressure on wages for all "nonessential personnel," was something I noticed even in the 1990s, and it has always bothered me. Maybe the new healthcare law solves this problem, but for now, for most of my adult life, I've lived in a country where we tolerate food workers without access to healthcare serving school children. You don't have to be a "skilled professional" in any field to see how an illness exacerbated by lack of timely medical treatment could be far more expensive to society once hundreds of kids also become sick.
Although Philly.com posted this video on how absurd it is to use an 80-hour work week to teach employees how to budget money, they were also kind enough to post the good news on wages by using the distorting mean instead of median, so with a straight-faced headline they let us know that the "average American worker" earns $1,000 bucks a week. A good clarifying comment notes that we only have 100 million full-time workers (in a population over 300 million), and the median pay among them is in fact $763. I "googled" to follow that back to its source, the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Somewhere along the surf, I also stumbled upon the fact that within the private sector, one in four makes less than ten dollars an hour, and many more of us live desperately, terrified we could sink back under that modest level (400 bucks for a 40-hour work week before any taxes, housing, food, transportation, or healthcare costs are taken out).
If this is America in recovery. . .
This common tactic, that leads to downward pressure on wages for all "nonessential personnel," was something I noticed even in the 1990s, and it has always bothered me. Maybe the new healthcare law solves this problem, but for now, for most of my adult life, I've lived in a country where we tolerate food workers without access to healthcare serving school children. You don't have to be a "skilled professional" in any field to see how an illness exacerbated by lack of timely medical treatment could be far more expensive to society once hundreds of kids also become sick.
Although Philly.com posted this video on how absurd it is to use an 80-hour work week to teach employees how to budget money, they were also kind enough to post the good news on wages by using the distorting mean instead of median, so with a straight-faced headline they let us know that the "average American worker" earns $1,000 bucks a week. A good clarifying comment notes that we only have 100 million full-time workers (in a population over 300 million), and the median pay among them is in fact $763. I "googled" to follow that back to its source, the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Somewhere along the surf, I also stumbled upon the fact that within the private sector, one in four makes less than ten dollars an hour, and many more of us live desperately, terrified we could sink back under that modest level (400 bucks for a 40-hour work week before any taxes, housing, food, transportation, or healthcare costs are taken out).
If this is America in recovery. . .
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
the poetics of pensions
Dow 14,000 or not, according to plenty of sources, we're in a persistent recession for black Americans, older workers, and more or less, the rest of the country.
With an impending sequester and the promise of a million or more job cuts, things could get even worse before they get better, or possibly, they won't ever get better for most human beings on the planet. So to recap, that'd be worse and then worse again. . . maybe a meandering, a lull between worses upon occasion, but we'll see.
Somehow it all reminded me of this Kevin Varrone poem* posted on the homepage of the Pennsylvania Book Center. I'll be sure to hit him up for some cash if I ever run into him in Philly.
With an impending sequester and the promise of a million or more job cuts, things could get even worse before they get better, or possibly, they won't ever get better for most human beings on the planet. So to recap, that'd be worse and then worse again. . . maybe a meandering, a lull between worses upon occasion, but we'll see.
Somehow it all reminded me of this Kevin Varrone poem* posted on the homepage of the Pennsylvania Book Center. I'll be sure to hit him up for some cash if I ever run into him in Philly.
*The Kevin Varrone poem has disappeared with the Pennsylvania Book Center, so I found a replacement poem by Varrone.
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Steve Almond for POTUS
While one Wesleyan writer carts her son off to college, another brings the heavy metal back to the Oval Office. As usual, Steve Almond is passionate and funny, if in a somber way, but as for the former, I found her NYTimes Op-Ed to be interesting writing but also couldn't help contrast how her life experiences with her partner have differed so greatly from the women filmed in this CNN video on food insecurity and hunger. It seems as if Americans are still voting for lifestyle issues and between competing "moralities" and yet the issues of economic injustice remain, at least to me, so much more significant. Of course, the two sets of issues should not be forced to compete with each other.
And in other news, hundreds of thousands of jobs were reportedly added to the economy and the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared higher today, so to an extent, I'm drawn to doubt all this downer talk of downturns and economic despair. My students though, at least the ones who expressed a view, are under the impression it is extremely difficult to get a career-type position, and almost all the jobs we see advertised are the ones college students don't want.
So we did the whole "except for nursing and engineering" thing and then moved on to the stories.
And in other news, hundreds of thousands of jobs were reportedly added to the economy and the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared higher today, so to an extent, I'm drawn to doubt all this downer talk of downturns and economic despair. My students though, at least the ones who expressed a view, are under the impression it is extremely difficult to get a career-type position, and almost all the jobs we see advertised are the ones college students don't want.
So we did the whole "except for nursing and engineering" thing and then moved on to the stories.
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