"Strike Three"

Recently in Los Angeles, the crew of the entire local bus system and the hourly employees of a few major supermarket chains went on strike at the same time. As bad as this sounds, relatively few people in L.A. ride the bus; and a few supermarkets avoided the strike and capitalized on the ever-present demand for pre-packaged groceries and other things they don't sell at the Farmer's Market. So, while the strikes caused an increase in the already bad traffic and killed the possibility of my picking up seltzer water and Ben & Jerry's at Ralph's on my way home, life for most Angelenos did not screech to a grinding halt. These strikes did, however, make me realize the power that a group of people can wield if they merely stop working.

I stop working all the time. In fact, I'm not sure I ever really started. Nearly every day at my day job I refuse to work beyond the bare, acceptable minimum. There is a philosophical, political principle behind my actions-- or lack of actions. I think regular jobs suck and that requiring me to come in five days a week, eight hours a day is oppressive, cruel, and should be unusual. Unfortunately, in this country it's not.

The problem is, whereas "organized labor" gets enormous changes made through cooperation and the power of numbers, "unorganized labor"-- of which I am a charter member-- is unable to change its conditions at all. While embittered nine-to-five desk workers like myself are scattered throughout the city like white-collared sleeper cells-- fantasizing about blowing up our offices, and possibly ourselves along with them-- we are made harmless by a system designed to keep us separate. How can there be a movement of "workers" if we never even meet?

There is no great meeting place for frustrated, under-stimulated clerical and client service workers to meet and conspire. We have no union halls, no regular bars, not even a common lunch spot. Half of us fall for the trap of the nefarious "office fridge", put there to keep us in the office that eighth, non-paid lunch hour, and away from our counterparts out on the sunny streets and sidewalks. And at night or on weekends, when dispersed throughout the population, we mildly skilled, semi-technical keyboard drones have no distinguishing markings-- no embroidered work jacket, no holster, helmet or stethoscope, no calloused, sinewy hands-- with which to pick each other out of the crowd.

I don't favor a total and complete walkout from the workplace. That might be too radical and disruptive. Even I would feel a twinge of guilt over leaving so many pseudo-important marketing, advertising, financial, publishing, manufacturing and insurance companies down in the dirt, sucking wind. I shudder at the thought of these vice presidents and managers having to transcribe their own phone calls, order their own brass-coated staples and micro razor point pens, and run their own eight hundred page, two-sided copying jobs on a fifteen year old, non-collating Xerox machine.

What I favor is a partial work stoppage, an overall reduction in productivity. We would enrage and wear down our superiors using subtle psychological warfare and all out passive aggression. We would be known as "disorganized labor", and we would turn the world on its head... or at least give it a little poke in the ribs.

Imagine "Misspelling Day", when even the simplest short memo will look like it had been written by an autistic glue-huffer, and the boss will completely freak out over spellings like "offis", "compyooter" and "penne"-- that being a writing implement, not the pasta. The beauty is, spontaneous English language deficiency is a pitiable condition, not a fire-able offense.

When the enemy digs in and refuses to acquiesce to our demands for forty vacation days a year and pizza on Fridays, we bring out the heavy artillery-- "Deletion Week." This is a series of days when we lower-tier office workers have the worst computer luck know to man. One after another, increasingly important files are accidentally erased: letters, spreadsheets, calendars, passwords, software applications and the entire customer database. This scenario is almost too horrible and tragic to contemplate. Did I mention that all the backup files are deleted, too? When angry epithets and accusations of negligence fly, the deletions can be attributed to power surges, solar flares and Al-Qaeda's devious supermagnet.

The Union of Ambiguous Workers-- that would be our official title-- would also use more behavioral, less technical means of coercion. On "No Smile Day" every administrative assistant, salesperson, secretary and customer service representative would wear the scowl of a Mudvayne fan at a Jewel concert. On "Maybe Monday" all customer queries by phone, email or in person would be met with "I can definitely tell you that the answer is quite possibly yes... barring the situation in which it would be 'No.'" On "Cough Wednesday," every office would erupt in a violent, jarring explosion of phlegm-clearing hacking. If upper management isn't rendered totally unproductive from the annoying racket, they will soon flee from what they suspect must be whooping cough, walking pneumonia or Legionnaire's Disease.

At this stage, all of the above is just idle talk. I haven't actively organized anything yet. Organizing "disorganized labor" would take lots of diligence and hard work, and God knows my hypothetical union couldn't pay me nearly enough to justify all that effort. Don't think that my handing in this column late this month was part of my partial strike plan, either. It absolutely wasn't. I would have had it in on time, but, uh... the bus wasn't running AND I had to go fifteen miles out of my way to buy groceries!