“Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.”
-Mark Twain
Today marked the symbolic dagger in the heart of my former employer and the embrace of a new one after an oh-so-short month of unemployment. It’s a bittersweet feeling for reasons I will explain.
At this point I’m beginning to feel like a half-willing participant in a Barbara Ehrenreich-like journalism project. Ehrenreich, wrote Nickel and Dimed, a book where she took on various low-income jobs, as a maid, Wal-Mart clerk, and waitress to get a first-hand look at what it was like to be a member of the desperate working class.
For me, in my five short months in Los Angeles, I have become the quasi white-collared version of this kind of experiment. I’ve been a poorly paid part-time Ebay lister, a near-invisible temp/office whore at a huge bank and hotel, an unfortunate victim of a mini-Enron like corporate scandal at my “dream job,” and as of today, a low-rung software tester at one of the biggest video game companies in the world.
None of which have which inspired me to say much positive about the nature of the modern white-collar job.
Today, I was informed of an article in the Boston Globe spelling out the likely death knell of Media Data Corporation.
http://business.bostonherald.com/businessNews/view.bg?articleid=146072
The paragraph of interest in the article is this:
“The case comes just a few weeks after that of Wakefield hedge fund manager Frank Russo.
The Securities & Exchange Commission is suing him for allegedly siphoning millions from his clients to a personal stake in a California software company, Veritasiti.
The SEC yesterday froze that company’s assets in its bid to rescue Russo’s investors. He had up to 160.
Secretary of State Galvin now says the amount taken may be as high as $25 milliion. “At the end, he was running a true Ponzi scheme,” Galvin said.”
In other words, it’s now impossible for our company (referred to it’s old name Veritasiti in the article) to make a company saving deal with the SEC freezing it’s assets. It’s now next to a zero percent chance that I or any of the 50 plus employees will receive the thousands of dollars that is owed to each of us.
Some of the 160 investors that ended up unknowingly losing their money in the company are trying to goad the SEC into taking control of MDC and running it with the purpose of getting money back for the investors, but that’s a joke. I can’t imagine them making any more than 1 cent on the dollar, if that.
Meanwhile, the rumor mill continues to flow about insanity that occurred at MDC over the course of the last couple of years. Talk about sexual harassment, wrongful hirings, and shady practices. The most interesting one to me is that apparently at one point, they were seriously considering outsourcing my entire department to Fiji for cheap labor. I tried to picture the islanders of Fiji sitting in a dark room combing though the DVD of “Booty Call” for sex, violence, and profanity content, but the thought is just too ridiculous.
Unable to secure a writing job (it’s a wee bit competitive in this town) and desperate for cash, I recently accepted a job at the aforementioned software publisher (which I shall not name here because I’m learning the hard way about what to post and not post on a public blog).
On the surface, the job is great. I could obviously do worse than playing video games all day, for one. Secondly, there is almost a non-existant dress code (the HR girl that took us around was wearing one of those saucy neon green low cut tops, one of the managers sports a bright green liberty spiked Mohawk, and I’ve seen a ton of people with metal/rap T-shirts). I was beginning to think I’d be a business-casual thug for life.
And then there is there is the glorious break room, a virtual “fantasy land” of pool tables, foozeball tables, arcade games and a fountain for free soda.
But behind the seductively non-comformist, New Economy mohawked cool of the corporation lies temporary work, relatively low wages, a huge amount of overtime, zero paid health benefits, and a “at will” contract that means they can fire you for pissing in the wrong toilet without saying a word. Sure, the corporate world would tell us that it works both ways and that it should be “empowering” to be a “flexible, mobile” worker, but that’s just BS.
The bottom line is that after 3 to 6 months of working on a specific project, my employer may drop me if I don’t live up to their productivity standards, or simply if there’s not a project available.
Ah, the wonders of capitalism and the free-market. Anyone need a slightly cynical/browbeaten writer for anything?
