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Sirota's new book The Uprising hits home

by: Sue

Wed Jun 11, 2008 at 07:19:39 AM EDT

Dilberts of the World, Unite!

This article by David Sirota in The Nation hit home for me. It's a clip adapted from his new book, The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington.

(Photo from 2006 election, with Lamont supporters (L-R) Matt Stoller, Tim Tagaris, and David Sirota and lifted, totally without permission, from CTBob - thanks, Bob!)

Sue :: Sirota's new book The Uprising hits home

Right out of college (University of Hartford) my son was hired by Shawmut in Boston to be an IT guy. He was provided a laptop, and his job was to fix their employee's computers. He was assured he was on a probationary period that would last nine months. Insurance, including dental, would then kick in. There was a middleman - a recruiting company who was actually sending him a paycheck.

What a great job! They had paintball parties, beer meets on Fridays, pot luck dinners, pool tables in the employee lounge. He was happy; I was thrilled.

Unfortunately, the months dragged on, with no sign of full-time employment. At five months, he was told that he would have to reapply for his job. Several IT people were let go when they got close to that magic nine month deadline. Eight months into his employ, he was given the boot.

So when I read this clip from Sirota's new book, the bells went off:

"Around the middle of 1997," Courtney tells me, "me and my office mate were talking about how we weren't getting real raises or cost-of-living increases, and I was like, This permatemp stuff is kinda bullshit. The contract agencies are ripping us off. I was like, God, I wonder if there's an organization to help us." So he started phoning state agencies and labor councils. "Everyone was totally fucking clueless," he says. "All anyone knew about the new economy was that people make millions. No one had any idea that here in Seattle a huge percentage of the employment is contracted out."

Consequently, Courtney and other 'permatemps' became politically active - they developed a list of other full time 'temps', but were crushed down by government and other unions. So they went their own way:

For the uprising, the episode was like a match being dropped into a pool of gasoline. Sold out by both political parties and ignored by organized labor, "we decided to get serious," Courtney tells me. From the flames of outrage, WashTech was born. The organization's mission is straightforward: to get high-tech workers to vote to form unions so they can collectively bargain for improved wages, benefits and job security.

The article describes the uphill attempts of unionizing a politically disparate group of workers. I am going to buy 2 copies of Sirota's new book. One for myself and one for my lil' Dilbert.

Sue, proud member of the NEA, CEA and BEA.

Tags: The Nation, David Sirota, CTBob, (All Tags)

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Sirota's new book The Uprising hits home | 1 comments

A few corrections and additions (0.00 / 0)

Actually, the truth is that I was put on a 6 month probation before they said they would hire me full time. In reality I was competing with 3 other people that were working through a temp agency like the article describes. That agency pays them directly and their medical benefits are through them as well. These three were working at the company for the last two years when they were hired full time by them. They weren't promoted in any sense, there was just suddenly three positions available and they were all given preferential treatment in a public hiring process.

I got the definite sense that the higher ups had a grudge against the head of IT, or they were just very short sighted, or something. They gave us nearly unlimited funds for computers and whatever toys we wanted, unlimited patience for constant down times and failures, but they were very shrewd in operating costs. We had twice the number of employees as the HR department but a quarter of the office space. There were rumors of us being moved into the basement. We were constantly overworked but my manager on multiple occasions told me how she had to "prove that we need more people" through this very complicated audit of every action we took, with this program Magic, that must reach a certain activity level before she was allowed to hire additional people. It was ridiculous because you could tell that it was an impossible milestone to reach. When you're overworked so much your ability to maintain a constant and accurate audit of every little thing you do just doesn't happen. It basically required that each person fix 40-50 issues a day and believe me there were that many. Which is why on most issues they gave us a day or two to fix them. But the ability to log and maintain the 40 issues in a 9 hour day was daunting. It basically meant that we had to be on our feet with instant solutions all day long.

And yes, it was 9 hours because they fucked us in a cover-the-phones loophole. 5 people covering the helpdesk, 2 people had to be manning the phones at all times and one person to handle people walking in, lunch is a 1 hour break. People get hungry at noon and if they haven't eaten by 2pm they're pretty pissed off. So you have two lunch shifts, 12-1 and 1-2, but only two people can leave in any shift. Leaving one person out of the loop. No one really wanted that so we pool our time together, buying lunch in a group and generally eating as fast as possible so that we could maintain coverage and keep our ticket count high. In many ways the job felt like sales.

So the long story short is that after 9-10 months it became clear there was going to be no hiring of me as a full time w/ benefits employee. I was to remain an intern indefinitely. What eventually came to a head was the law that was passed in Massachusetts that required everyone have health insurance and that all companies offer it. I qualified for company coverage under the new law and therefore had to be terminated.

by: Brent @ Wed Jun 11, 2008 at 23:04:09 PM UTC