Down the Up Escalator

by Barbara Garson

  Meanwhile, it was time to meet Michael’s dad.

  Religious, Republican, and Right-On

  Michael’s dad, Chuck, is a stiff, sturdy, short man who wore a crisp checked shirt and crease-free jeans. He welcomed us into a three-bedroom, two-bath tract home where everything had its place and hadn’t been put there just for our visit.

  The only things lying around were a book on the television and an amplifier left out for Michael. Chuck had recently gotten a larger one to use with his guitar at church.

  I sensed that this man had no idea what I wanted with him. It was trusting of him to accommodate his son this way. So I began by assuring him that I don’t use real names and I try to be vague about places of employment. “I’ll probably just say that you work in the warehouse of a …”

  “Distribution center,” he corrected me for the sake of accuracy.

  “… in the distribution center of a big-box store that I’ll call Big Box.”

  “It’s where I got these socks,” my husband said.

  “My jeans, my socks, my underwear, come from there too,” said Mr. Kenny. “But it’s an Eddie Bauer shirt. I like nice things, and I don’t like to iron.”

  Once Frank and Michael had left, Mr. Kenny fell to talking about his son. “Michael is so smart; he could do so many things.” The father and son were equally wrapped up in each other. “I tell him if he just …”

  The phone rang. It was his grandchildren, and Mr. Kenny was soon smiling so broadly that I thought his cheeks must ache.

  “Hi, sweetheart. You miss Pawh-Pawh?… Okay, put ’em on …”

  While Chuck spoke about report cards with one of his older grandchildren—“That’s an improvement”—I looked around the living room. It was dominated by two large portraits over the fireplace—one of Michael and one of his stepsister, the mother of those grandchildren on the phone. In his early teens Michael had had bird-downy hair that one could hardly resist fluffing.

  By the time Mr. Kenny hung up, I was examining the book he was reading, Karl Rove’s Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.

  “Michael and I don’t share political opinions,” he said, “but we share how we love people.”

  I asked Mr. Kenny about his work history.

  “I’ve never been unemployed since I was twelve years old,” he answered. I knew from his son that Chuck had taken on a lot of financial responsibility when his father left the family. Mr. Kenny gave me a more neutral chronology that included military service (“during the Vietnam War but not in Vietnam”), full-time jobs during an early marriage (“Ellen and I have been married thirty-three years,” he was anxious to tell me about his second wife), a corporate downsizing, a brief return to work for a family business (“owned by a Jewish family that I’d left on good terms”), and finally: “Twenty-four years ago yesterday, I went to work for Big Box, and I’ve been there ever since. I had opportunities to go other places. It’s sort of ironic, because I’m working a strange shift right now. But the reason I never left Big Box is because I was always able to be on days there, which left me the evenings and the weekends for my family and one of my hobbies, which is refereeing soccer.

  “With the shift I’m on right now,” Mr. Kenny said, “I can’t referee soccer on the weekends if I want to spend any time with my family.”

  “Michael says that you worked all these years for this company and now they’d like a cheaper payroll—that’s Michael’s interpretation—so they put you on a shift they hoped you’d quit.”

  “Trying to bring younger people in, forcing the older people out; it’s a constant battle. Fortunately, I’ve been able to survive. I don’t put stock in my own abilities to maintain that employment. I truly believe it’s through the grace of God and the strength and perseverance He gives me to say the right things to the right people.

  “I had to tell a vice president once that I’m trying to do my work as if I was doing it for my Creator. If that makes you happy, I’m happy. If it doesn’t, I’ll just go over somewhere else.”

  “And yet you’ve stayed?”

  “I’ve stayed. I’ve worked under eight facility vice presidents. They average about three years apiece.”

  Chuck’s son-in-law and stepdaughter raise two thousand acres of feed corn and soybeans on a farm that’s been in the son-in-law’s family since the nineteenth century. The previous fall the couple had to be in Russia by Thanksgiving to meet the child they were adopting. (The very granddaughter, now two years old, whom Pawh-Pawh just spoke to on the phone.) “But we had a real wet fall, so they got a late start on harvest, and it was all hands on deck.”

  “And you helped in the fields?”

  “I learned to drive tractors, semis, grain trucks, taking them down to the river to …”

  “That smile again,” I said. “It’s almost like your grandchild’s smile.”

  “Yeah, and we got to be out there with the grandchildren. Worked long hours; got this camaraderie—my son-in-law, his brother, my best friend, Len, who was a vice president at a paint company who got downsized. Our church people would come out and drive trucks and … I get emotional,” Mr. Kenny apologized, “but friends, church farmers, all came to help. We finished four days before they had to go to Russia.”

  “Michael says you’re thinking of retiring and working on the farm?”

  “Yes, being a hired hand.”

  “That’s hard work.”

  “It’s hard work, but at least you get to work with people you truly, truly care about. I have good relations with my longtime co-workers at Big Box,” he hastened to say, “but they’re not my family.”

  In gross outline, retailers like Big Box import huge shipments of goods from Asia and disperse them in smaller lots from depots around the United States. In the area that Chuck manages, seven supervisors oversee about two hundred hourly associates who sort, mark, and ticket merchandise, then send it back out in the assortments of colors and sizes appropriate for each of their stores in the region.

  It occurred to me that most of this could be done on the Asian end without an intermediate stop at a distribution center in Indiana. Maybe it will be eventually. In the meantime, the company had just done an old-fashioned time-and-motion study—how many seconds to open the first flap of this or that carton, how many seconds to unclip a tag, fold a sleeve, and so on. This resulted in new quotas that had already been implemented in other Big Box distribution centers. “They’re already getting it done with less people at lower cost,” Chuck said. “So now the pressure is on us to get up there.”

  Along with new quotas the company had instituted a change from a five-day week to a ten-hour-a-day, four-day week.

  “Four tens means management’s got to be there 2:30 in the afternoon,” Chuck explained. “And we don’t get off till about 3:30 in the morning.”

  “That’s over twelve hours!” I said.

  “Right. Management does thirteen hours for the ten-hour shift. If the shift goes overtime, we’re there till five o’clock in the morning. And if they work on Friday, then it’s not a four-day week; it’s a five-day week. And you’ve already worked fifty-two hours. So it’s now sixty hours. So you’ve given them another half week’s work.” Managers don’t receive overtime pay.

  Americans work longer hours than people in any other industrial country. We average 20 percent more, for instance, than French or German workers. That amounts to an extra day a week. Not only have Americans been working longer hours since the mid-1970s, but American families have been sending more members out to work. Michael’s mother worked full-time as long as he could remember. Chuck says that in the families he knows at church, both spouses work “except if there’s a problem like unemployment or illness.”

  If families are working so many more hours than in the past, why do they borrow so much? I didn’t want to sound as if I were accusing the Kennys of extravagance or poor management. Nor did I want to put my own theories into his mouth. So I broached the subject of de
bt in as open-ended a manner as I could.

  “I notice your son doesn’t have a credit card. He almost won’t touch one.”

  “I think Michael has learned from our mistakes,” Mr. Kenny volunteered. “We, like all young families, used credit cards and got into debt.”

  “What kind of debt?” I asked. “What were you buying?”

  “Just normal expenses. We were saying, ‘Why should the two of us be working as hard as we are and not be able to afford a decent car or computers. Maybe we were keeping up with the Joneses. So you’d put it on your card. Then something would come up; you couldn’t make the full payment, so you’d carry it over.

  “There was a point in time when we had a lot of medical problems with our daughter and we had college debt with her: we were living paycheck to paycheck; it was getting to where I was having to wire money for a car payment so it wouldn’t be late.

  “At the time we weren’t tithing,” Mr. Kenny explained. “We were giving like 6 percent. And I remember one Sunday morning we were going to a church, and we were sort of having a heated discussion on the way. The kids weren’t with us. I don’t know what they were doing then, maybe just sleeping.

  “My wife said, ‘I think we should be tithing.’ I said, ‘We can hardly make our payments now, and you want to increase our giving?’ She said, ‘Yes.’

  “Well, that Sunday when we wrote the check, she said, ‘What will it be for?’ I figured it out and wrote the check. And we have never been in need of money since then.”

  There was a long pause.

  “I’m not saying money hasn’t been tight. But we have not been living paycheck to paycheck since we decided to give God back a tenth of what he has given us.”

  “Do you remember what year that was?” I asked.

  “It must have been about fifteen years ago because I had heart trouble right after that. They gave me angioplasty.”

  “How long since you’ve been out of debt?” I asked.

  “Sometime in the last five years. Well, we still owe on our house, of course, and one vehicle and the new furniture you’re sitting on.” He gestured to the couch. “But that was interest-free,” he said, hastening to set the record straight.

  “It’s very comfortable,” I said. It must be the new couch Michael instructed me to “enjoy.” “Very comfortable.”

  “We had the old one for twenty years,” Mr. Kenny said, defending his purchase. “I could pay this off right now, but I’d have to go into my retirement savings. So I thought I’d just wait to give them the money since I can do it at no cost.”

  I could imagine how Michael derided the new couch bought on credit even though at no interest.

  “One thing my faith has taught me,” Mr. Kenny declared, “you cannot be a slave to two masters. Only one. With debt you’re at the mercy of your employer. If they say ‘You will do this,’ you can’t say ‘No I won’t: I’ll just leave,’ because you have bills to pay. And if you have bills, you’re subject to the terms that job puts on you. Employers know that.

  “But Michael has no debt. Who’s he responsible to? He can pack up and go. If the Lord tells him to go to Nineveh like he told Jonah, he can go. When you’re in debt, you can’t do that.”

  What a thought! One’s own son might be called to preach to Nineveh. Michael’s unshorn locks may even be a sign of his readiness, for they make it difficult for him to be tied to an encumbering steady job. But what did this say about Chuck himself? Does he believe that the debt he’d incurred by dutifully taking care of so many people over his lifetime disqualified him from responding to God’s call? It must be terrible for him to feel that way.

  I asked Mr. Kenny if the long unreimbursed hours were because of the recession. “Does the company thank you for helping them through their downturn?”

  “Big Box is doing extremely well financially,” he asserted. “And they also own Medium Box [a more upscale chain]. We’re just short-staffed.”

  Big Box and its parent company were indeed profitable. During 2010, the year I spoke to Chuck, they returned considerable money to shareholders through stock buybacks. The remaining shareholders enjoyed an increased rate of return on their capital while employing several thousand fewer workers. It may be a smaller company, but productivity—the value of output per paid hour—was up, and investors took a greater share of that in profit.

  America’s successful firms have traditionally increased labor productivity by giving their employees the most advanced equipment in the world to work with. Some automation may have been going on at Big Box. But at the distribution center, Chuck Kenny increased the company’s productivity by the low-tech means of donating free days of work and by enduring the tension that comes from feeling understaffed.

  I recently heard about a Walmart-owned warehouse in Elwood, Illinois, that’s pioneered the practice of paying the loading crews on piecework. If they have to wait for a container, they can take home less than the minimum $7.50 an hour. Someone showed me the pay stub of a man who worked 12.5 hours for $57.81. This primitive form of increasing labor productivity actually militates against efficient scheduling and investment in new machinery. It’s a third-world way of squeezing out profits.

  Chuck Kenny is not a complainer. He was unhappy about the way he was being treated at Big Box. He’s also regretful about his own career choices, and at his age these regrets are naturally on his mind. But he only talked to me about them because I asked. I didn’t have to ask, however, to hear about God, the farm, or his grandchildren.

  “I never realized being a grandparent was going to be like this,” he said, welling up. “My grandchildren think I’m it. ‘Pawh-Pawh.’ The twins said that even before they said ‘Mimi.’ I’ve always been the one that was down on the floor with them. I’m the one that takes the boys out on the farm, into the woods, down to the creek. Adventures. And Isabella wants to do whatever the boys do.”

  The Kennys’ church has a congregation of about a hundred. They’d been meeting in a school gymnasium till the housing bust gave them the chance to get property cheaply. Their new building was being renovated. But the same price decline that benefited the church put the kibosh on the Kennys’ personal plans.

  “We were going to build a house on the farm. They gave us three acres, we’d already settled on the plans, and we were just at the point to order materials. But it was 2007, and I just felt uneasy about the economy. We were talking about a long-term financial commitment, but the uncertainty about our jobs, our pensions …”

  “Couldn’t you sell this house to pay for building a house on the farm?” I suggested.

  That’s exactly what they’d intended, but Chuck Kenny said, “Right now our house is probably worth 40 percent less than it was ten years ago. A lot of people will buy a home and sell it at the right time and make a ton of money. Ellen and I have lived in two other houses before this, but we’ve never been able to do that. Well … that’s the way it goes.

  “We like this house,” he said to console himself. “We’ve mortgaged it a couple of times with the kids in school. But by now, I don’t mind telling you, it’s only $895 a month. It would be nice to be near the grandchildren. Nice, but who wants a large new mortgage at the age of sixty? I think we made the right decision not to take on new debt.”

  For a lot of our remaining time we talked about Michael—how to get the bright young man well settled. Chuck knew his son’s strengths and weaknesses, and he agonized over the right amount of help a parent should give—the right balance of carrot and stick.

  He’d put $5,000 down on Michael’s present car in order to get the monthly payments down to something Michael could afford. “You need a car to work.” At Big Box, Chuck had seen people dismissed as too unsteady because they drove unreliable cars or depended on rides from family members.

  “You want to help your children when they’re helping themselves. But when they’re not, you have to start pulling back. Maybe if I had started pulling back a little earlier, he would be a littl
e further ahead right now.”

  “We just can’t know,” I said.

  “No, you don’t know. I tell him, ‘Cut your hair and get a job.’ He drives me crazy and I push back. But he’s gonna live his life his way.”

  “What about Michael’s friends?” I asked. The Kennys had taken in a couple of their children’s schoolmates during rough patches in life like parents divorcing. “I heard Michael tell a friend back from Florida that you can’t just pound the pavement for a job these days. So where should they go?”

  “Take the fast-food industry,” Mr. Kenny replied. “You go to work in McDonald’s; you apply yourself; you can get into their management program. Big Box hired several fast-food managers as supervisors because they have experience where it’s fast paced, quick, and very regimented. Those skills are transferable. But first you have to be willing to put on the hairnet and do the work.”

  Here’s a man who knows the Evansville labor market. His idea of a career path for a kid like his son starts by putting on the hairnet at McDonald’s with the hope of transferring that discipline to a warehouse management job like the one he started with.

  With perseverance and luck or God’s help to say the right things, that young man might move up to the job Mr. Kenny himself holds now—a job where he keeps working longer hours for the same salary. Where, in other words, his hourly wage has been going down. But isn’t each generation of Americans supposed to move up in the world?

  His employers hadn’t repaid Chuck Kenny’s loyalty with their own, yet he didn’t have much respect, or at least much hope, for any friend of Michael’s who couldn’t bite the bullet and pursue the only employment opportunities that were really out there: fast food and Big Box.

  That doesn’t mean you don’t try to find something better for your own child. After all, “Michael is so bright.” And even if he weren’t, each parent’s job is to help his own particular children to beat the odds.

  We went round in circles about what Michael might do till Mr. Kenny took a phone call and returned restless or distressed. It was time for work, and he was headed for a long shift at a place where his staff was under pressure to meet new quotas and he was under personal pressure to leave. Who knew what additional pressure he learned about in that phone call? Chuck Kenny set off on a brilliant fall afternoon and wouldn’t get home until almost five in the morning.