U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley introduced a resolution two weeks ago in the U.S. House of Representatives proposing a guaranteed job for every American and a federal plan to create jobs for adult Americans seeking employment.
Pressley’s call to make a job a legal right would have put a wry smile on my late father’s face. He liked to say there are two types of people in the world: People who want to work and people who don’t want to work and who will go to great lengths to avoid work.
I can confidently say that I fell into the latter category as a boy. If I could have made a paying career out of daydreaming and reading books, I would have heartily embraced both passions.
As I got older, a lot of professions looked fun to me but none of them grabbed hold of me with a vengeance. I wanted to be a general one day, a pilot, musician, spy or Egyptologist the next. I have earned a living as a newsman for 36 years and most likely chose the profession because it allowed me to interview people working all kinds of different jobs without getting my hands dirty doing any of them.
I grew up cosseted and spoiled and never worked the jobs my teenage friends shouldered. I take that back — I filled in one night for one of my cousins washing dishes in a country club kitchen until my other cousins surrounded me by the sink and unanimously fired me.
Unable to immediately find a job on a newspaper after graduating Boston University, I ended up employed as a houseman at the old Ritz Carlton.
In the early 1980s, the Ritz was still a regal dowager among Boston hotels. The general manager lived in a penthouse and the place exuded an air of decorum and elegance that I fell in love with even as I sorted dirty sheets and delivered soap and matchbooks to guests’ rooms.
I learned how to work at the Ritz and my teachers were people from backgrounds completely different from mine. Two of my co-workers — a tall, hulking East Boston kid and a Joe Pesci look-alike from South Boston — walked around a corner one morning and caught me reading a magazine. Joe Pesci knocked the magazine out of my hand and the Eastie kid shoved a broom at me.
“It’s OK to screw off when you’re not working,” he said, “but always look like you’re ready to work.”
I learned journalism basics at college. But I learned how to show up for work, how to get along with people, how to keep my mouth shut — in short, how to hold a job — from the maids and housemen at the Ritz.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the working world will change as we emerge from the pandemic. I’m afraid the remote distancing and technological changes that were hyper-intensified by COVID-19 are going to ace some people out of the workforce. Employers are going to comb through organizational charts and retain the people who can juggle several jobs at once. One-Note Janes and Johnnies are going to go the way of the adding machine and rotary-dial phone.
Offices are going to disappear or be reshaped. Working at home will continue in many cases but employers are going to monitor workers in ways that make the old time card I punched when I started and ended my Ritz shifts appear quaint.
I don’t know if Pressley’s job plan makes sense or not. But I think she probably shares my viewpoint that a job not only puts food on your table; it also helps you hold your chin up high every day.
