WORK Magazine

the STRAND

WORK

THE STRAND MAGAZINE VOLUME 57 ISSUE 5

work /w rk/. e

Art by Ann Sheng I. To act, do, function, operate.

1. trans. a) To do, perform.

2. To be successful.

II. To labour, toil.

1. a) To exert oneself for a definite purpose.

2. a) To do one’s daily or ordinary business or work; to practise a profession; to pursue a regular occupation; to have a job, be employed. b) trans. To do (a job); to be employed in (a specific type of job or number of jobs).

3. a) To bring (a person or animal) into exhaustion, by hard or intense labour or exertion.

III. To make, create, produce.

1. a) To produce a material thing: to construct, manufacture, form.

I. Action, labour, activity: an instance of this.

1. a) An act, deed, or proceeding; something that is in the process of being, or has been done or performed. b) Acts or deeds collectively. c) A good or moral act or deed considered in relation to justification before God/divinity. d) A magazine.

TABLE OF CONTENTS 6

10

My first job

Horses at work

12

14

18

Education: A tale of two systems

Consumption

Una vida mejor

20

22

24

Fast food education

Institutional violence

Sex work

26

30

Reflections on the food service industry

Fiction: The restaurant

32 Every time the sun comes up

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from the editor The irony of making a magazine about work has not been lost on any of our editors. Over the last few weeks, we’ve toiled away in front of computer monitors to create the magazine you now hold in your hands. Schoolwork was briefly ignored (but never forgotten), and shifts at work were traded to make room for even more work in the form of this magazine.

When I first proposed the topic of “work” for The Strand’s winter magazine, I expected all submissions to come from hammer-and-sickle-wielding students ready to unite the proletariat and expose the inequalities of the labour market. Certainly, the perspective of the young worker is not particularly bright—a glance at page 22 or the criticism of the academic workplace on page 24 will begin to explore these topics. However, I was surprised by how personal and pensive the submissions turned out to be.

Everyone has a story that revolves around work, some more positive than others. Work is pervasive; it’s on our minds constantly. Our assignments, our responsibilities, the looming dread of entering the workforce—it never goes away. Yet we can still find the time to gather in fluorescent-lit rooms in the dead of night to fuss over fonts and commas for a small student paper that mostly only our parents read.

Everyone at The Strand is proud to present our winter magazine, Work. It’s filled with the first-hand accounts of job experience you’ll find on pages 6 and 26, the dangers of immigrant work on page 18, the presence of work in education on pages 12 and 14, and the healing properties of monotonous work on page 32.

We hope you’ll find that enjoying this magazine is a pleasant diversion from your own work. Happy reading.

Art Director & Design Paula Razuri

Magazine Editor Emily Pollock

Acquisitions Lead Amanda Aziz

Senior Copy Editor Rhianna Jackson-Kelso

Designers Amanda Aziz Vivian Che Grace Quinsey Emily Pollock Paula Razuri

Copy Editors Grace Bannerman Matthew Casaca Neil MacIsaac Holly McKenzie-Sutter Jacob McNair Sophie Poppe Richter Lily Wang

- Paula Razuri

Cover Art Sarah Crawley

Writers

Art & Photography

Our hardworking editors All contributors Whoever invented dumplings The Illuminati

Ben Atkins Amanda Aziz Geoff Baillie Victoria Beales Anthony Burton Beth Jarrell Neil MacIsaac Tiffany Ng Holly McKenzie-Sutter Emily Pollock Catriona Spaven-Donn

Victoria Chuen Sarah Crawley Warren Goodwin Seolim Hong Emily Pollock Paula Razuri Ann Sheng

The Strand Winter Magazine November 2014 editor@thestrand.ca

Contributors

Special thanks

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LETTUCE FARMING IN KAWAKAMI My first job as a Japanese farmhand BEN ATKINS Photos by Paula Razuri

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hen I turned 16, I got my first job pulling 12-hour shifts as a contract labourer on a Japanese commercial lettuce farm.

I had originally signed up to work for my godfather as a landscaper in Osaka, Japan. However, after a confusing turn of events I found myself employed as a manual labourer for a family of lettuce farmers. I am half Japanese. I have lived in Japan. I have Japanese relatives, and I speak the language badly. This was a completely alien experience.

Kawakami village is nestled deep in the foothills of the Japanese Alps, surrounded by heavily-forested, inaccessible valleys and Yakuza grow-ops. It is not a poor place—in fact, unlike the majority of the heavily-subsidized Japanese agricultural sector, Kawakami is a success story. It is the richest village in Japan. And, perhaps most surprising of all, young people aren’t abandoning the town in droves. The generational crisis and agricultural decline that has defined Japan’s rural communities for so long doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect in Kawakami. The young people there work in the fields each spring and summer and pull shifts as ski instructors during the winters.

Lettuce was first introduced to the village during the Korean War, when occupying American forces cultivated the crop to help feed frontline GIs. Sixty years later, and business is good.

The average household income in Kawakami is 25 million yen (240,000 Canadian dollars). Perhaps this is why it hasn’t yet been transformed into one of the ghost towns that dot Japan’s countryside.

My days went like this: I would rise at four in the morning, stow my futon, and stumble to the shower. It must be noted that this is very bizarre behaviour. In Japan, people don’t shower in the morning. At night, perhaps, but never in the morning. It’s genuinely such a rarity that my shower habits were the subject of much distress and confusion for my hosts. Was I sick? Did they strictly ration water

in the United States? At this point, I would be the sole occupant of the house, with the exception of the 90-year-old grandmother. She would either be padding around in the kitchen or making an offering to her dead husband’s shrine, bowing in prayer in front of his photo, him staring back at her, stern and poised in his Imperial Army uniform. I wonder what he would make of the state of Kawakami’s labour force.

Japan’s highly urbanized, prosperous society and lack of young people have led to what I believe is a severe crisis. Ten years ago, droves of 20-somethings would come up to villages like Kawakami to do part-time work (arubaito) and draw a decent paycheque. No longer. Strangers to Japan’s rapid post-war economic expansion and development, record numbers of Japanese youth are unemployed or are only employed in parttime work. If they do work, they don’t work in places like Kawakami. Otaku and hikikomori culture have resulted in many youth living with— and economically dependent on—their parents well into their 30s. My hosts were shocked to hear that I actually wanted to work on their lettuce farm.

As a result of all this, when I was working it was alongside Chinese, Iranians, Mongolians, and Filipinos, all of whom (by nature of Japan’s visa restrictions) were contracted on a limited part-time basis. The Filipinos formed an extremely tightly-knit community, as did the Chinese. Violence would sporadically break out between the two groups, and labour disputes had led to the murder of one of Kawakami’s farmers by two of his Chinese contract labourers the year before.

After my shower, I would shuffle down the road to the converted garage where my two co-workers, Alex and Yu, were staying for the summer. They shared a 50-by-25-foot room and kitchen. They did everything together. We’d stand around in the gathering dawn, drinking oversweet coffee and joking in broken English and Japanese. Alex didn’t speak Japanese, and Yu

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and I didn’t speak Tagalog, so conversation was always stilted and accompanied by enthusiastic gesticulation. We’d be taken to the fields at 4:30 AM in a rattling Mazda truck driven by the man of the house, a scowling chain-smoker of few words. We would cram into the bed of the pickup and speed into the foothills to the tinny sounds of enka (high-fructose Japanese country music).

At this point, I would like to emphasize that this is an industrial farm. It isn’t organic. It isn’t small-scale, and it definitely isn’t governed by sustainable principles. It’s a fucking farm. You don’t make 25 million yen a year from swearing off pesticides and taking the time to breathe in the majesty of your surroundings (and trust me, the hill country of Nagano Prefecture is breathtaking). In fact, I heard that many of Kawakami’s farmers would surreptitiously use chemical pesticides while selling their crops as organic.

From 5 to 8 AM, the lettuce would be harvested and packaged. The lettuce itself grew in rows of tamped, furrowed earth covered in plastic sheeting. The cutting of the fully-grown heads would have been going on since at least one in the morning, and when we reached the field targeted for harvesting, it would still be dark. Really dark.

There would be strobe lights strung around the edge of the farm, and everyone would be hard at work with their sickles, slicing the lettuce heads from their roots and tossing them into crates.

There was mud everywhere. To help us navigate the morass, wooden planks were laid between the plastic humps. I had to water the pesticides off the lettuce heads and sweep discarded leaves off the furrows. I would load dozens of boxes onto trucks bound for supermarkets and a chain of Italian restaurants. Once this process was completed, I would haul the packed boxes off the trucks onto forklifts at the village loading dock. During this stage, there was always a lot of swearing.

Breakfast, announced by tinny music blared from solar-powered loudspeakers dotting the valley, was always cup ramen. By now, the sun would have crested the hills, instantly turning what had been a very cold morning into a very, very hot morning.

From 8 to 11:30, we would come back to replant the field that we had just picked. This was truly gruelling. Carrying trays of lettuce shoots, I would slowly follow a man with a small flamethrower down each row of the plot. He would use this device to essentially blast holes in the plastic sheeting. Each hole would then be planted with a tiny shoot. Each row held roughly 40 heads, and there were at least 14 rows to a field. I planted all of them. Bending to plant row upon row of empty furrows in silence with the sun beating down on my neck was backbreaking. This being Japan, at some point each morning we would have to stop and listen to the community loudspeakers blaring out motivational music and the instructions for group calisthenics.

Then, lunch at home. This would always be a huge meal, eaten quickly to the sounds of highschool baseball on the TV, which my host attentively observed, wreathed in cigarette smoke. I would sleep from 12 to 2 PM. From 2 to 3, I would fertilize previously replanted furrows, walking down the line with a repurposed Coke bottle full of fertilizing pellets next to a man with a backpack sprayer full of DuPont pesticide. Finally, from 3 to 5, I would hoe unopened fields, breaking them up and digging furrows for future use.

Dinner was hearty and early. After that, reading and bed by 8.

My experience, while intense and gruelling, was my own. I was a well-off 16-year-old from Washington, D.C. I had no remittances to send home. I didn’t have a family to take care of. I have the luxury to expound on my “formative” and “life-changing” experience in a masturbatory magazine article. I’m not trying to portray my motives for work as similar to those of the people I worked with. During my employment, I tried very hard to impose some sort of deeper meaning on the experience that I had subjected myself to. This was hindered by how completely opposite Kawakami was to the built-up and modern Japan that I identified with.

There were intangible similarities between my coworkers and me, however. We all worked, surrounded by this completely foreign version of Japan. My coworkers, Alex and Yu, could have grown up anywhere in the world. In reality, one was a part-time cashier, the son of a mechanic, who loved hip-hop and who constantly swore in English. The other was a farmer sending his earnings home to his family in Manila. For those weeks, however, they were no different from me.

Everything that I saw in Kawakami was so foreign and so different from what one would imagine Japan to be. From the gangs of Filipinos and Chinese that fought constantly in the supermarket parking lot to the full-body tattooed Yakuza marijuana grower who was missing a finger, the list could go on forever.

Now I work in an office. I use Excel and accounting software to calculate bill payments and projected revenue. I live in Canada, a country that I’m relatively new to, part of an immediate family that’s spread across four cities, three countries, and two continents. Looking back on my summer in Kawakami, I cannot say what I learned from my experience. When I was working those fields there was something close to a personal epiphany. The discovery of some lost “Japanese” half of myself that, if I had perhaps worked just a few more weeks, I could have achieved. I could have used my experience in Kawakami and pointed to it—“this is the moment, my first job, when I discovered some unrealized aspect of myself, when I achieved full self-actualization as a result of my formative work experience.” I haven’t visited Japan in three years. There’s a sense of unrealized opportunity in the aftermath of all of this. But it does make for a pretty good story.

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“

We all worked, surrounded by this completely foreign version of Japan. My coworkers, Alex and Yu, could have grown up anywhere in the world.

In reality, one was a part-time cashier, the son of a mechanic, who loved hip-hop and constantly swore in English. The other was a farmer sending his earnings home to his family in Manila.

For those weeks, however, they were no different from me.

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HORSES AT WORK The refuge of therapeutic riding BETH JARRELL Illustration by Lynn Hong

A

s he’s done a thousand times over, Taz the thoroughbred horse walks calmly up to the rider’s mounting block, flanked by three of Pride Stables’ very best volunteers. Taz doesn’t know it, but today is a big day for the barn and for his rider, Jackie. It’s the first day of fall therapeutic riding lessons for people with physical and cognitive disabilities.

Six riders and their parents gather eagerly by the gate to the indoor arena. They take turns peering in to get a glimpse of the horses. One by one, the riders file in and line up to get on while their parents and caregivers watch like hawks from the sidelines.

For Sandy Richardson’s daughter Jackie, this might just be the best day of autumn.

“It’s not only about the physical benefits. It’s the idea of doing something and loving the animals, not to mention the responsibility,” Richardson says. “She comes here and has to help unsaddle, take the bridle off, and brush the horse…it gives her purpose.”

Horseback riding is a form of therapy for people with physical and cognitive disabilities.

Not only does it give the horses a job, but it can be very fulfilling for the riders. For people with partial or full spinal paralysis, the motions of a walk on horseback can mimic a human walk better than any other therapy.

“She loves being able to move on a horse,” Richardson says of Jackie. “From a therapeu-

tic standpoint, it has really helped improve the strength in her legs and core balancing muscles… outside the saddle it has had huge benefits.”

Kendra Flynn-Stronach, a certified instructor at WindReach Farms in Ashburn, Ontario, believes that the best thing about therapeutic riding is that everyone can benefit from it, not only people with spinal injuries.

“It’s not just for one specific group,” she says.

“Therapeutic riding can be used for people who have issues with both high and low tone in muscles, coordination, proprioception, and balance.

The benefits are truly limitless, and there are new studies that suggest it could be used for even more.”

When talking about therapeutic riding, it’s easy to talk about the physical benefits. What people don’t talk about, however, are the emotional benefits. In the last 20 years, dozens of such programs have cropped up across North America, from rehabilitation programs for addictions and mental health to “horse therapy” reintegration programs for juvenile offenders. For the kids and adults with physical and cognitive disabilities, being understood is a struggle they face in every aspect of their lives. Flynn-Stronach says that one of the biggest benefits to therapeutic riding is fitting in, something she feels is often lacking for children with disabilities.

“We have kids who have trouble connecting with other kids at school, but when they come

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here in a group lesson, they’re in a place where they’re finally understood,” she says.

Across the board, one of the themes talked about most in the therapeutic riding community is the behaviour of horses. Most instructors will agree that the most shocking thing about horseback therapy is the way a horse will change its behavior around people with disabilities.

“They totally know the difference between people with special needs and able-bodied riders,” she says. “They change their attitudes and their body language…you bring out a child with autism and that horse becomes the quietest, most patient animal. You look into their eyes and see the patience there, the wisdom…they know.”

Of course, part of this can be attributed to excellent training. At WindReach farms, Flynn-Stronach has a seven-step process to adapt a horse into the program, testing the limits of its patience. This includes exposing them to wheelchairs and other mobility devices, as well as practicing falling off to make the animals as

“bomb proof” as possible. These animals must be able to withstand a number of annoyances and scares that would send ordinary horses into fits of panic.

“It’s like they know they have a job to do, and they’ll do whatever it takes to get it done,” says Bonnie DeWitt, owner and instructor at Sandhills Stable. “Horses are animals that want to please their rider. The thing we tend to forget is that this is a 1,200-pound animal. If they really wanted to take control, they would.”

“They connect with these kids. I’m always in awe of how horses can connect with people,” Richardson says. “They seem to tolerate whatever these kids give them, regardless.”

Meanwhile, back at Pride Stables, the lesson has concluded. Jackie dismounts and gives Taz a kiss goodbye. Already excitedly chatting about next week’s lesson, she spares Taz one last glance before heading for the door. The refuge that Pride Stables provides may only last a few hours, but its effects can last a lifetime.

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EDUCATION: A tale of two systems

GEOFF BAILLIE Illustration by Seolim Hong

D

ebate over Canada’s education system is usually divided into two camps: those who believe that we’re too lenient on students, and those who believe that we’re too tough on them. The former argues that the stakes of success and failure need to be instilled in students if they are expected to keep their heads above water in a competitive job market. The latter pushes towards reducing the relative importance of grades and instead emphasizes personal growth in order to avoid damaging students’ confidence levels.

The underlying principle of the “self-esteem movement,” an approach to elementary school education that has been advocated in North America for 20 years, is that students should be praised by teachers and parents as often as possible. The movement holds that confidence is a requisite for the acquisition of learning skills and that without it, students won’t be able to act on their full potential. Critics of the movement have argued that excessive praise can cause students to become overly self-assured and risk aversive.

Students might not feel the need to put their intelligence to the test because they believe that they’re already as smart as they need to be. Students who have grown accustomed to high praise might be too anxious to try their hand at any challenge where their absolute success is not a guarantee.

When this debate carries over to post-secondary education, critics tend to expound the personal and economic advantages of attending a challenging university versus an easy one. The University of Toronto’s notoriously tough grading system gives fodder for

op-ed columns arguing that tougher grades beget a harder working class of graduates, or that low GPAs make it impossible to get hired after graduation. These arguments will often compare our grading system to those of universities in the US, the UK, and France, considering whether the successful qualities of these countries’ education systems could be emulated in Canadian schools.

My personal outlook on the Canadian school system is informed by my being a participant in it.

Given that my education has taken place only within this country, my frame of reference for international comparison is limited. In the interest of expanding my knowledge of the topic, I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine who was educated in Communist Romania. We talked about how the education system that she grew up with compares to contemporary Canadian schooling.

The education system of Communist Romania is representative of a political and cultural landscape that is entirely foreign to that of modern Canada. But this lack of political and cultural commonality allows for a comparison that speaks instead to the principles of education at a fundamental level. The betterment of education systems requires finding a balance between challenging students and encouraging them, and Communist Romania’s education system exemplifies a stern emphasis on the former.

The school system described to me was one of institutionalized competition and strict penalties for failure. What she perceived to be the most notable dif-

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ference between the two systems is that in Communist Romania, students’ grades were publicly known. The teacher would stand at the front of the classroom and read aloud the test scores of each student. Academic success was highly sought after, and students who performed poorly were made to feel deeply ashamed. The system was, in effect, the polar opposite of what practitioners of North America’s aforementioned “self-esteem movement” would consider to be a healthy learning environment. Students were less motivated by the pedagogical value of self-improvement than by the fear of failing in front of their classmates. The average Canadian student surely prefers to appear intelligent to their peers, but our system doesn’t institutionalize the belittling of those who fail to the degree that the education system in Communist Romania does. Canadian students are entitled to the privacy of their own grades, and if they do poorly, the system tends to facilitate second chances. The mentality here is that if students do poorly on one assignment, they can always improve their grade on the next.

This wasn’t the case in Communist Romania. If you failed a test, your opportunities to redeem your grade were limited. In Canada, we have this idea that even students who consistently do badly can pull up their socks and improve their grades at the last minute. The system in Communist Romania necessitated constant diligence for students to maintain their grades. When applying to specialized programs at the end of high school, students received a cumulative grade that factored in every course of every year since the beginning of their education.

This program specialization oriented students towards their careers from an early age. During high school, it became apparent to you or to your teachers where your area of expertise was, and you would specialize in a way that catered to your talents. My friend, for instance, was gifted in math and science, so in high school she was oriented towards a career in mechanical engineering and was guaranteed a job upon graduating. This obviously isn’t the case in Canada, where we have a surplus of unemployed university grads who can’t find ways of putting their degrees to use. The specificity with which students were educated in Romania was advantageous in that it ensured employment, but it necessitated that students make life decisions at an early age that were nearly impossible to backtrack. The Canadian system is more fluid, since we can study a variety of topics until we arrive at a point of interest. Our options are extensive.

After working in that field for a number of years, my friend, who preferred to remain anonymous for the purposes of this article, taught mechanical engineering at high schools and colleges in Romania. She and her family eventually immigrated, and her daughter was educated in the Canadian school system. Considering her well-rounded perspective on education, I asked her for a piece of advice to give Canadian students. Her answer: we should always persevere, even in the face of failure. Canadian students have opportunity and agency, and that should not be taken for granted.

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CONSUMPTION Cultural Capital As Work ANTHONY BURTON Photo by Victoria Chuen

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here’s a part of me that thinks that anybody born in the internet age might not even understand the point of museums. Why bother walking around for three hours to stare at something that you can’t even touch? The internet, in its accessibility, has become a museum of sorts.

With one glance at my Tumblr dashboard I can see a museum visit’s worth of paintings in a couple of minutes. If I follow the right people, I can rely on the taste of curated Tumblr accounts to feed me jpegs of art, like a right hand automatically shoveling Doritos into my mouth.

Obviously a Tumblr dashboard isn’t a perfect substitute for the experience of a museum—the internet is not a quiet environment facilitating the experience of art, but more like if all the paintings were in the same spot and moved and gifs of Ron Swanson were reacting to all of them.

Tumblr is certainly an easier and more accessible option than a museum, however. In scrolling down your dashboard, the consumption of art becomes passive, unlike the activity of actually putting your shoes on and going to a museum or an art gallery. The work is already done.

Consequently, it can be difficult to understand why anyone would go to the trouble of seeking out media on their own when so much of it is easily accessible online. However, many people on Tumblr put enormous amounts of time and effort into maintaining their blogs, many of which boast large numbers of online followers.

These often don’t actually feature any original work by the blog owner, but consist mainly of reblogged content. Even the average, casual Tumblr user usually spends a significant amount of their time on the site re-blogging content to a much smaller group of followers.

So what’s the point of all this? Museums and art galleries have monetary incentives to display art to others, as do the creators of said art.

What incentive do Tumblr users have to devote so much time to showing work that is not their own to strangers online? This is where the concept of conspicuous consumption begins to enter into our sphere of thought.

The phenomenon of conspicuous consumption came about when the Industrial Revolution gave rise to a class defined by sociologist Thorstein Veblen as the “nouveau riche.” Prestige became linked to the accumulation of wealth, as the shaky premise of meritocracy bestowed virtue upon those who succeeded in the capitalistic system. The instant gratification of hedonic desires supplants, or at least accompanies, the utility of a purchase. This conspicuous consumption was performative—these quality goods signified wealth, and capitalism’s conflation of wealth and merit made these goods badges of merit. Of course, every performance requires an audience: so as long as this consumption was visible to others, the feeling of superiority was delivered on a silver platter.

Accumulating economic capital isn’t as democratic an exercise as many would like us to believe. However, the internet age’s increased democratization of access to knowledge facilitates a different kind of accumulation of capital—that of cultural capital. Pierre Bourdieu was the first to suggest that accumulated cultural knowledge conferred status and power in the same way that accumulated economic capital did in the early stages of the Second Industrial Revolution. Instead of conflating the finite resource of economic capital with merit, the possession of knowledge that encompasses formal education, intellect, and taste confers “merited” virtue onto an individual. I can consume a painting by viewing it, but traditionally, to consume it conspicuously, I would have to purchase it and display it in my home—in other words, I would need to find a way to visibly display my consumption of it.

Now, however, I can view a painting on the internet and get the facsimile of the experience of viewing it in a museum, but I can also re-blog this painting to people in my network.

This re-blogging is not necessary to my act of consumption, but rather to display my cultural knowledge. The social aspect of these websites facilitates the performative aspect of my consumption; essentially, all interaction on these websites

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is performative—the equivalent of having a loud conversation around someone you’re trying to impress. The target of an updated cover photo or a re-blogged painting is not a specific person, but the general ether of social opinion.

The internet has made the consumption of media an easily accessible affair, and it has also allowed a person to display this consumption to all eyes of their social sphere. The profit of one’s cultural capital is the same false merit that economic capital bestowed. The instant gratification brought on by these social networks’ simple approval buttons (“liking” on Facebook, “favouriting” on Tumblr, etc.) further incentivizes this conspicuousness. The ease with which the internet has facilitated the accumulation of cultural capital has transformed knowledge from self-improvement to self-affirmation.

Production has historically been the measure of merit in capitalist societies, with effort as its supposed foundation and merit and virtue as the supposed foundations of effort. Consumption is the opposite of production. It allows us to indulge our desires instead of working against them, and lets us consider ourselves instead of others. The internet’s facilitation of comparative consumption has made our self-consideration competitive, however. It has us exhausting our efforts in the digital space at our computers, competitively sharing our knowledge with everyone we know in an attempted display of merit. Our own selves, not our efforts, are pitted against each other in a quest for a different kind of superiority. No longer is our conversation, or the art we consume, an end in itself, solely for the benefit of the self.

Rather, it has become a means to an end that pits the self against others.

Art is something that facilitates human connection; it is about the world that already exists.

When it becomes just another marker of superiority, however, it also becomes another thing separating us from each other. It seems we’ve forgotten to do the work of tying our shoes and spending time in the physical space of a museum for the betterment of just ourselves.

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HOW FAR WILL YOU GO FOR WORK? CATRIONA SPAVEN-DONN Artwork by Sarah Crawley

“

Una vida mejor.” That is the response given by most migrants heading north towards the US when asked why they are making the journey. “A better life.” However, what are the risks involved in searching out this better life?

What will it consist of if it is eventually obtained?

In recent months, media coverage surrounding the migration of Central Americans towards “El Norte” has significantly increased. After the White House released figures showing that 52,000 unaccompanied minors had tried to cross the US-Mexico border illegally between October 2013 and June 2014, President Obama labelled the situation a “humanitarian crisis.” He then unveiled a plan that sought almost $4 billion in Congressional funding to allow for repatriation efforts, increased border security, and detention facilities for Central Americans attempting to enter the US. The UN promptly responded by encouraging the US and Mexico to consider children arriving from Central American nations, such as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, to be refugees fleeing life-threatening situations in their home countries.

Repatriation, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has said, puts children back into the hands of criminal gangs who often control whole towns and cities. Many flee after being unable to pay “taxes” to these gangs, which results in death threats and sustained violence against individuals and their family members. Others owe thousands of dollars to “coyotes,” smugglers who lie about the ease of crossing the border. Coyotes tell

potential migrants that they must find a job and send remittances home as soon as they can in order to pay back debts to the coyotes, who are often employed by local drug cartels.

Of course, many don’t reach the Rio Grande and the border with Texas. According to the New York Times, 38,000 Central Americans were deported by Mexican authorities in the first eight months of this year. This is the result of raids and checkpoints, as well as efforts to stop the flow of migrants who travel via the infamous network of trains running from Chiapas in the south of Mexico over 2,000 miles north to the US border. This network is known as “The Beast.” In his eponymous book, author Óscar Martínez describes it as “the snake, the machine, the monster” that is soaked in the blood of thousands of migrants who have tried to board its moving boxcars, or clung to bars of iron above the rails. Despite the risks, thousands of people use it as a way of getting closer to “El Norte.” These trains, laden with human cargo, “look like refugee camps,” writes Martínez.

In a certain sense, that is precisely what they are. Or at least, they become the transportation for people who are increasingly being referred to as refugees. The UNHCR’s call for Central Americans in the US to be considered thusly has sparked a debate about the identity of the refugee.

Traditionally, a refugee is someone who is persecuted for their race, religion, or ethnicity and has to flee their home for fear of a wider political conflict. Now, governments are having to confront the fact that people traditionally considered to be migrants are in fact also fleeing conflict and persecution from gangs and drug-related violence. The Honduran president called for the US to recognize that there was a war raging in his country, and that migrants were being displaced due to this violence. The Guardian published an article at the height of increased concern for Central American child migrants back in July entitled “Flee or die.” This is the reality. As migrant José Antonio Alvarado says, “No matter how difficult it gets, the way north, it is always more difficult back home.”

The significance of this recent wave of migration from Central American nations means that a more nuanced approach must be adopted when discussing migrant work. While Mexican immigrants in the US have an established community of approximately 11.6 million people, the statistics and demographics of Mexicans heading north are changing. The conversation must therefore change with it. Migrants arriving in the US are no longer made up of Mexican labourers who leave rural areas due to poverty and lack of opportunities. Instead, families and minors are travelling from what are effectively war zones.

These people seeking asylum risk everything for the small chance that they can reach a country

where it is safe to live, work, and raise a family.

However, in countries which receive many asylum applications or in which the borders become sites of a “humanitarian crisis,” hostility toward newcomers is often rife. In the US, stereotypes and institutionalised racism towards Mexicans and the Latino community as a whole are widely acknowledged. The Pew Hispanic research centre has published statistics that indicate that in 2010 over 60% of Americans believed that discrimination was a major problem preventing Latinos from succeeding in America.

Only 54% of people had said the same three years earlier. So, either discrimination is worsening, or awareness about the frequency and gravity of its occurrences is on the rise.

A short New York Times documentary entitled Occupy Bakery investigates the poor working conditions that Latino migrants often have to endure. Mahoma López, a worker in the Hot & Crusty bakery in Manhattan, was at the forefront of a prominent strike that resulted in increased wages, sick leave, and the creation of a workers’ union for its employees. Before that, López explains, employers would fire you if you called in sick. If you asked to at least be paid minimum wage, they would threaten to call immigration.

Exploitation of illegal workers is a dark underside to cities like New York, famous for their glitz and glamour. “Immigrants make this city run,” López states. And yet, despite the reliance on foreign workers, there is still discrimination and racism toward them. The “vida mejor” that many are searching for is riddled with hardship, both during the journey northwards and once inside the US—if they even succeed in making it across the border.

In this globalized world, the movement of humans is inevitable, and it will continue to grow. In the face of this unprecedented mobility, governments are constantly looking to protect and strengthen their borders. However, it is clear from the hundreds of people attempting to cross into the US from Mexico every day that strengthening borders is not necessarily the answer.

Activist groups like No One Is Illegal call for an end to all deportations and detentions. They also reject the distinctions made between “economic migrants” and “refugees.” Surely, they encourage us to ask, everybody has the right to work in a place that is free from violence? Border controls and repatriation efforts do not allow people this basic right, despite its great importance.

And it is important, because, in the end, despite the horrors of the journey or the discrimination faced at the final destination, the opportunity to work is something that people are prepared to go very far for and to risk very much to achieve.

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FAST-FOOD EDUCATION How Teachers and Students Get Screwed Over by the University EMILY POLLOCK Art by Emily Pollock Which job is more likely to result in a stable and well-paying career: working at a fast-food restaurant, or working at a university?

Trick question. While the university teacher has more prestige than the person who makes our burgers and fries (nice classism there), university jobs are less secure and less profitable than they used to be. The reason for this is that universities have been moving away from offering full-time tenured positions and moving towards temporary “contract” staff.

These teachers, who make up almost half of Canada’s undergraduate teaching staff, aren’t much better off than fast-food workers Contract staff have the same teaching burden as regular professors with none of the benefits of tenure.

They have almost no job security and often have to reapply to teach their classes every semester, even if they’ve been teaching them for years. They tend to be assigned to the most difficult classes—for example, the thousand-person first-year classes that tenured professors refuse to teach. And they’re paid a whole lot less. While the typical tenured professor earns $80,000 to $150,000 per year, a contract worker teaching the same number of courses will make around $28,000. For households with just one income-earner, that puts them below the poverty line.

These positions have different names in different countries—they’re called Contract Academic Staff (CAS) in Canada, adjuncts in the US, and fractionals in Britain—but their working conditions are almost uniformly poor.

Contract teachers are part of the emerging precariat (precarious + proletariat) class, with jobs characterised by insecurity and low wages. This class includes temp workers and interns, who have become a substitute for full-time workers in many fields. In Canada, temp workers are almost 14% of the workforce, and the number of temp jobs has multiplied five times as fast as the number of permanent jobs since 2009. Apparently, academia is no exception.

Despite the encroachment of university temps, the tenured professor is still a mainstay at most uni-

versities. However, this doesn’t mean that contract staff are likely to achieve tenure. Instead, it creates a two-tiered system with tenured staff at the top and contract staff at the bottom. What this breeds is fear and resentment: anxiety in the tenured staff that they will be replaced, and anger in the temporary staff that they’re doing the same kind of work with a much lower payoff.

So when the university underpays contract workers, who loses? Contract workers lose because of their low wages and poor job security. Tenured professors lose because the presence of much lower-paid contract workers undermines their status.

Even students lose when their universities employ contract staff. It’s hard for even the most dedicated of contract workers to keep in touch with students like tenured professors can, since they don’t have the same kind of office space or campus resources. Kimberly Ellis-Hale, a CAS at Laurier, shares her office space with 12 other teachers, and says, “I’ve had to meet with students in stairwells or coffee shops.” And it isn’t as if using contract staff lowers the price of tuition for students. As Ellis-Hale says, “We’re subsidizing the university’s mission by getting paid less.”

The biggest loser in this situation, however, might be the quality of education. Untenured professors who are afraid for their job security aren’t going to put forward radical ideas if it will get them in trouble, which is a cause for concern given the increasing corporate subsidization of university campuses. And if teachers don’t feel safe taking risks, students are getting fast-food education—learning as just another assembly-line product to be delivered as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Though fast-food workers are told they should go to school to get a “real job,” the graduate students who have done so aren’t much better off. Workers in university contract positions are low-paid, low-security, and low-status. Fast-food workers may be the public face of low-security McJobs, but university workers are quiet victims.

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WILL LECTURE FOR FOOD

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FROM TEXTBOOK PAGES TO INSTITUTIONAL PLACES The structural violence of unpaid work AMANDA AZIZ Art by Sarah Crawley

On November 3, Bank of Canada Governor, Stephen Poloz, gave a speech in the House of Commons that enraged rather than enlightened young adults in the workforce. Offering advice on how discouraged youth can tackle the dwindling economy by finding a job, Poloz stated, “Having something unpaid on your CV is very worth it because that’s the one thing you can do to counteract this scarring effect. Get some real-life experience even though you’re discouraged, even if it’s for free.” What Stephen Poloz doesn’t know, as a man sitting comfortably on top of his workforce hierarchy while being paid a generous salary, is that his classist advice is a promotion of structural violence that directly harms marginalized youth workers.

“Structural violence” is not just fancy jargon that inhabits textbook pages, but a socio-cultural problem that is currently affecting Canadian youth in institutional settings. Although it is not yet the mot du jour for young adults in today’s typical workplace, it is important for young adults to educate themselves about this phenomenon in order to understand how it operates within governmental, public, and private settings. In essence, structural violence occurs when an institution’s systematic abuse of power

creates obstacles that only people of certain classes can overcome, resulting in inequality.

Many young workers experience structural violence even before knowing that there is a term for the injustices they have faced. What makes tackling structural violence even more frustrating is that the term itself is broad. When we hear the word “violence,” we automatically think of the kind we hear most about—the physical kind. Our idea of violence is something visible, abrupt, and momentous. Yet structural violence is invisible, calculated, and spans across decades of bureaucratic policies that limit the opportunities for marginalized groups to be included in any setting.

Structural violence is systemic inequality created by institutional settings and cultural values that exclude and perpetuate the marginalization of people who identify as part of a minority.

The discourse over structural violence is very dense, but it is applicable to many social issues due to its intersectionality. People affected by structural violence are those who have experiences with racism, ableism, ageism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and so on. From micro-aggressions like buildings having only female and male bathrooms to job openings requiring new-

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comers to have at least five years of permanent residence in Canada, structural violence is everywhere. Stephen Poloz’s insensitive comment about “unpaid work” is another unfortunate example, as he disregards youth workers of lower economic classes.

Young adults, as entry-level workers, spend years paying their dues until they can find the financial stability they need to acquire the role they desire. The Bank of Canada recently estimated that 200,000 Canadian youth have expressed a desire to work. With high numbers of youth looking for paid positions, the competition for entry-level jobs tends to be tougher than it is for higher-level ones. Yet, more competition also attracts the most diverse crowd of applicants.

People of different economic classes, different professional connections, and different educational backgrounds apply for such jobs. The point of entry-level positions is to let beginners learn while working. Young adults who are interested in getting a job or who want to advance in their field look for the accessibility that the entry-level position can offer them.

“We have been creating jobs at a trend rate of less than 1%, well below what one would expect from an economy that is recovering,” said Poloz, elaborating on the current state of discouraged youth looking for advanced work. However, the suggestion that unpaid work will help with career advancement implies that the 1% of new jobs will likely be more accessible for workers who belong to the economical 1%, meaning those belonging to the upper-middle class and higher.

Canada is no stranger to the uproar over unpaid internships—in fact, interning for no pay is illegal. In the case of the Employment Standards Act of Ontario, however, a loophole allows unpaid internships to exist. Noted in Section (1) p.2.II of the act under the “Person receiving training” heading, if “the training is for the benefit of the individual,” then unpaid work can be a legal exception. To add more to the equation, many employers who used to offer unpaid internships are now calling them “voluntary training positions.”

Voluntary work is legal in Canada (though the ethics of not volunteering for the community but

for a work sector are questionable), and therefore this loophole helps to refurbish the unpaid internship, turning it into a “volunteer” position.

The unpaid internship may technically be gone in the Canadian work system, but the value of gaining experience through “volunteering” is still a desirable addition to a young person’s resume.

However, the consequences of valuing this type of position are devastating. Voluntary unpaid work, when it is labelled as a necessity for climbing the socio-economic hierarchy of each working field, unfortunately limits the diversity of applicants that are “eligible” to apply for entry-level jobs. Youth from lower classes literally cannot afford to take the risk of an unpaid internship, and they therefore lack the experience that their unpaid internship-experienced competitors have. This discussion even grossly excludes street-involved youth, most of whom do not have a claim to permanent residence. How can the idea of unpaid work lessen the “scarring effect” of an empty space on a resume if even securing shelter is an obstacle (forget living in their parents’ basements, as Poloz suggested in his speech)?

Supporting the concept of unpaid work will make it a social norm—or worse, a criterion that takes away the necessity of the entry-level jobs and lessens the opportunity for everyone to improve.

Understanding the economic diversity of youth workers is the first step of helping to eliminate class-based structural violence and systemic inequality from happening in the workplace.

What Stephen Poloz needs to know is that not every youth has the luxury of working for free, because not every youth comes from a financially secure background. Encouraging the idea that “unpaid work” should become a competitive quality marginalizes youth of lower economic statuses and prevents them from working their way up the ladder in their chosen field. In order for economic inclusivity in the workplace to exist, youth need the ability and accessibility to “pay their dues,” and that comes with gaining experience that is paid. After all, if people deserve credit where credit is due, then youth workers deserve payment for paying their dues.

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SEX WORK: Just because it’s voluntary, doesn’t mean it’s not misogynistic TIFFANY NG Illustrations by Emily Pollock

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hen it comes to the difference between prostitution and sex trafficking, a misconception exists. People tend to believe that prostitutes, unlike trafficked sex slaves, engage in their work entirely on their own terms and enjoy acceptable working conditions. People also often assume that prostitutes aren’t subject to violence or abuse. In this way, prostitution is widely believed to be less misogynistic nature in comparison to sex trafficking, largely due to the element of choice.

This assumption could not be further from the truth, however. The misogynistic nature of prostitution is largely understated, and my belief is that it is even more misogynistic than a lot of people might guess. My conclusion was catalysed by world-renowned journalist, Lydia Cacho, and her most recent publication, Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of Sex Trafficking. Cacho’s thesis is that misogyny is inherent in all sex work. Regardless of a sex worker voluntarily engaging in their work, a sex worker is a victim of structural violence.

We can immediately identify how a trafficked sex slave is a victim of structural violence, but there’s often difficulty in coming to the same conclusion about a prostitute. This difficulty stems from the misconception that prostitutes must have largely positive experiences because they choose to be there.

It’s difficult to imagine a worker willingly working a job where they face violence and abuse. But, excuse our naiveté, we don’t have to imagine such a scenar-

io, because it’s a reality for many: “They told me in Paraguay that I would be an exotic dancer in a top nightclub in Madrid and that, if there were clients, I could choose them myself. They brought me to Navarra and I had to endure sex with [30] men per day. It was terrible; my vulva was swollen. One guy bit my nipple and hurt me. Another guy wanted to suffocate me with his penis in my mouth and take photographs with his cell phone. Another one forced me to have anal sex and when I was crying he said it was because I liked it…I thought being a prostitute in Spain would be better. They told me that here the clients would show me respect, but it wasn’t true. It’s the same as in my country: they pay to humiliate you.”

“A…sociologist insisted that if the teenage girls in the Vietnamese villages I visited were coming and going from the brothels unaccompanied, they must be voluntary prostitutes. However, after eating and staying with them over the course of a couple days in their communities, I witnessed the levels of domestic and sexual violence they suffered and the punishment they received from their parents if they did not bring home money [from the clients]… These girls are [not only] being exploited… but are also [being] enslaved by the cultural values of violence against women: they are victims of structural violence.”

These are first-hand stories Cacho compiled for Slavery Inc. Cacho, in supporting her thesis, shows the structural violence and abuse that prostitutes

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face. In showing how structural violence against women can be a reality for all sex workers, Cacho is able to conclude the inseparability of misogyny and sex work. Her supporting evidence extends outside her book, as I discovered when I brought the content of Slavery Inc into some of my personal conversations. Some of my friends’ responses were along the lines of, “It’s unfortunate that prostitutes face abuse too, but this is what they signed up for—did they really think their clients would treat them with respect?”

These comments were extremely troubling for me. People were attributing the blame to the sex worker and not to the client. Instead of sympathizing with the sex worker, some—unknowingly—excused the abusive behaviour of the client by commenting in this way. This is a clear example of victim blaming.

Further, the general automatic response to consider the sex worker to be at fault for their choice of profession, rather than to see the sex worker as a victim

of structural discrimination, speaks for itself. “What you just said was an example of structural violence and discrimination against prostitutes,” I said. “What is that?” was the response I more than often than not received.

Cacho is right: prostitution, just like sex trafficking, is inherently misogynistic. But it’s not just because prostitutes face abuse and violence; it is because of the way prostitutes are perceived. People perceive them to be fault for their own misfortunes rather than as victims of structural discrimination and violence. This is because of a general inability for people to identify structural violence and discrimination against prostitutes, or even against women in general. And I can’t help but believe that this is due to the normalization of discrimination and violence against women. I can’t help but believe that misogyny is not only understated in prostitution, but in society at large.

In Vancouver, 90% of street-based sex workers are assaulted while doing business

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COMPLICATING the SIMPLE THINGS

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Reflections on the food service industry HOLLY MCKENZIE-SUTTER Photos by Warren Goodwin, Paula Razuri

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recently left my food service job at a popular chain, and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I remain confused by that fact and confused by how a seemingly unimportant place could make me experience the spectrum of feeling that it did. But it’s undeniably true.

We all know that the service industry can be hell on earth, but this community was special. It didn’t feel like going to work; it felt like going to hang out with friends for eight hours in a day.

This was why I stuck around for so long when things started to change.

In late August, there was a shift in the management team and a new manager was transferred in as the second-in-command. For our purposes here I’ll refer to him as “D.” On my first shift working with D., he commented to the assembled group of male crewmembers that I should set my career goals higher and become a stripper. Later that week, he ended a shift by telling everyone they were free to go, except for me because he and I were going to “go get naked in the fridge together.” One night he came to the bar with a group of my coworkers and I after a late shift, and his aggressive sexual “joking” went even further on the scale of things-you-don’tsay-to-your-crew, which for reasons of propriety I won’t restate here.

I had never felt the physical manifestations of stress to that extent before. I had trouble sleeping and eating. I found it impossible to focus on school with the mental discomfort that was constantly weighing on me. The things that always cheered me up weren’t working anymore. I told a select few of my friends about what was going on, and their rightfully concerned reactions only made me feel worse.

I decided to report D. to the corporate liaison for our store. I was told he would be “talked to.” On future shifts with the two managers I still trusted, I felt like I had a safe space to talk about what was happening. I heard about their individual problems with him—that he made constant “jokes” about being able to fire whoever he wanted, that he would lay the blame on them for not

picking up his slack, and so on. Talking to other people who felt the same way reassured me that my reactions were justified. We tried to brainstorm ways in which we could fix things because, as horrible as things were getting, we still cared about the place.

Even though talking through our problems was comforting, the emotional battery of seeing other people I cared about so constantly upset was worse than my own individual problems at work. The feeling of mutual powerlessness was completely draining. I found myself unable to concentrate on anything, and I didn’t feel like myself.

A few weeks after I reported D., I was pulled aside by my boss and asked what my remaining issues were. I told him that I didn’t think my complaints had been responded to appropriately, and I received a surprisingly accusatory response: “Do you think that maybe he didn’t understand how he was coming across to you?”

I was then told that I had made a mistake by not talking to D. directly about my problems with him, and that being intimidated by him wasn’t an excuse. I was told that talking to the other managers about my feelings of discomfort was unprofessional and akin to petty gossip. I was forced to have a meeting with my boss and with D. to sort out our “issues.” Framed as a formal apology, this was essentially a threat against “misinterpreting” and “gossiping” about comments I perceived to be aggressive. I was told that I needed to work on my communication skills to ensure that the “hassle” of writing up a formal reprimand would never happen again.

What was so disappointing about this was that I had trusted my boss to do right by me. As much as the original incidents with D. had hurt me, this betrayal felt worse because it came with the realization that my voice had no value to him.

That night I headed home from the store with a coworker who knew most of the details of what was going on. We stopped at the subway entrance and I apologized for being so mopey, saying, “I know that people have it way worse off; I’m

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sorry for complaining about something that isn’t such a big deal.”

He jumped a little bit and gestured in the direction of the store sign. “Are you talking about what’s happening in there? What’s happening in there is a big deal. I just wish I knew how to fix it.” From a couple of blocks away, the store looked very small.

It seems odd to me, too, that I waited for months to commit to finding another job. I could have walked out and it wouldn’t have been unjustified. I know I could have found something else in a matter of days. But I didn’t want to give up on the people I liked there, and I resented being forced out of the place when many of my best friends were still there. I was scared to say goodbye and scared to admit that it was an unwinnable situation.

After I was reprimanded for gossiping, I was no longer being scheduled on shifts with managers that I trusted and felt comfortable with. That was the breaking point, and I started really looking for another job.

When I walked out of the successful interview a week later, I felt physically lighter than I had in months. But when I went to work that day and told my few trusted friends that I was planning on putting in my two weeks’ notice, it hit harder than I expected it to. I caught my two managers who had remained supportive in the back office. I didn’t think I would feel like crying, but I did, and apparently they did, too. Still, they waved away my apologies. “Don’t be sorry; I’m proud of you. I’m going to miss you, but I’m proud of you.”

In a way, having their blessings made me feel validated in an experience that I hadn’t yet been able to draw a positive conclusion from. The situation and its outcome were pretty bleak. But

feeling so supported by people in an environment where I also felt so antagonized made it seem a little bit better.

Leaving was messy. One coworker was so distraught that he threatened to take up smoking again if I left (I don’t think it was a joke). A few people told me they felt heavy-hearted to think about me leaving. I felt the same way. I didn’t think I would feel light and heavy at the same time over leaving a part-time service job, but I was caught off-guard by the intensity of feeling over it.

A few people were laying on the guilt a little bit thick, and someone backed it up by saying, “You realize we’re only saying this because we like you. If we didn’t care, then we wouldn’t care about you going.” It might seem strange that I dragged out my departure for so long, but I think the reason this seemingly black-and-white situation of textbook harassment became so convoluted was the fact that the rest of us cared so much about each other.

It seems like I’m treating the dissolution of the crew as a great tragedy, and I believe that it was. A genuinely supportive and loving workplace environment is a rare gem to come by, and when it falls apart because of one destructive person, it is a tragedy. These small places contain big histories and big communities. It’s possible to feel isolated and antagonized in the same place that makes you feel loved and supported. Simple things become complicated when people care about each other.

D. is still employed by the same company, retaining the same high-ranking position and rate of pay as he always was. It’s true that we didn’t win the battle, but after having formed such unconditionally supportive relationships with those people, I’m hesitant to describe it as a loss.

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What was so disappointing about this was that I had trusted my boss to do right by me... my voice had no value to him.

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THE RESTAURANT VICTORIA BEALES Art by Sarah Crawley

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lice’s father had told her that she didn’t need a summer job, but somehow $10.95 an hour gave her a feeling of independence like never before.

She wasn’t old enough to serve alcohol and wasn’t experienced enough to work in the kitchen, so every Thursday through Saturday, from 5 PM until midnight, Alice found herself slicing limes, running food, and washing glasses at Reilly Keogh’s Irish Pub downtown. She would only be staying until September. Then she would start eleventh grade and be sent back to private school on the other side of town, where she stayed five nights a week from September until June.

Nobody knew who Reilly Keogh was. For all Alice knew, he was an entirely invented character. Perhaps Reilly was simply the most authentic-sounding Irishman the owner could come up with when first establishing the pub. (The owner was a local who had inherited a very small fortune from a deceased relative and now made an impressive living off the three

pubs he had opened, which were sprinkled throughout the city.)

Aside from the word “Sláinte!” printed in gold lettering on the wall above the bar, there was very little about the place that seemed overtly Irish. One secluded corner of the restaurant featured an inexplicable plastic vine snaking its way up and around the back of a booth and into the rafters. Alice supposed this was meant to imitate the magical setting of some Celtic myth, but that was only a guess.

The servers wore green plaid pleated skirts and high black socks as their work uniform. Alice loved these skirts, but she was instructed to dress in black pants and a branded t-shirt that the pub provided.

This was the same attire as the bartenders, all short burly men, most also bald, who treated the staff like their own children and seemed jollier than any other men Alice had ever met.

The kitchen manager and cook, Marie, was a feisty lady from Quebec with beautiful dark eyelash-

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es and a quick tongue. She made fun of everyone except Alice, which probably meant she didn’t think Alice was tough enough to realize that these jabs were meant to be affectionate. Every time any of the kitchen staff spoke to Alice, she found herself blushing vigorously. She had never considered herself to be a meek creature before—at least not until that first time Marie called on her by saying, “Hey, qui-et girl!”

Most of the girls who worked at Reilly’s had been friends for years. They had gone to school together, gotten jobs together, and some were now even going back to school together. No one ever seemed to have a complaint to direct toward anyone else. This was not to say that no one ever complained at all; it was just that problems rarely seemed to stem from within the restaurant itself. More often than not, the problem was with the customer.

At Reilly’s, Alice soon learned, the customer was rarely right, and rarely tipped enough. During dinner hour patrons often brought loud children with them, asked for a gluten-free menu, and were not afraid to send their food back if it was too spicy or too bland for their liking. Alice would watch as a cheerful server scooped up menus from a table and winked at a screaming baby, holding the smile only until her back was turned. The smile would then turn into a scowl, and even a curse or two would be muttered under breath, often acknowledged with an empathetic nod by another server walking past. These nods were an act of solidarity. Even if two servers had little in common with one another, they could always align to complain about the customers.

There were a few regulars, of course, who were exempt from this rule—unmarried men who showed up promptly every week and knew all the staff by name, who didn’t need to place an order to be served their favourite dishes. Alice was frightfully embarrassed when, in her first week, a patron affectionately known as Buster stopped her with her hands full of empty plates to introduce himself by saying, “I see you’re new here!” His kindness left her feeling inexplicably uneasy and keenly aware that, as a mere summer worker, she was much less familiar with the goings-on and history of Reilly’s than Buster was.

At first, Alice stuck out from the rest of the staff.

Everyone noticed her as foreign, and even seemed to take personal offense to her being there until she introduced herself directly to them. But after everyone learned her name and the fact that she would only be around for a few months, Alice became all but invisible. This didn’t concern her. In fact, it afforded her a unique position: she knew the staff were not really her friends, so listening in on their conversations without contributing her own thoughts was not considered rude, but neither was she expected to join in politely.

One of the servers, Leah, was leaving soon, too.

She was going away to teach English in Tanzania, and would be leaving around the same time as Alice. Midway through August, Alice began to hear plenty of talk among the other girls about what kinds of going-away gifts they would be getting for Leah. Alice took no offence; she wouldn’t be offered any going-away presents, or even be invited to Leah’s party, but it was still

fun to listen to all of their secret planning. Leah, on her last shift, changed into a dress in the bathroom after she had clocked out and stayed for drinks until the end of the night. Alice, on her last shift, collected her share of tips, pulled a sweatshirt on to protect her from the chilly night air, and contentedly made her way to the parking lot in the back.

The cook was outside, smoking a cigarette. “Good night, qui-et girl,” she said in response to Alice’s silent wave. “We’ll see you next week then, eh?”

When Alice timidly confessed that she would not be returning, the reaction she received was entirely unexpected. She had not thought that the cook’s eyebrows would knit like that, nor that the corners of her mouth would turn down. The cook was hurt, Alice realized. “Well, we’ll miss you, Alice,” the cook said after a thoughtful pause, seemingly deciding to be sweet even after having been slighted. “We’ll see you next summer, then.” At the time Alice said yes, she would probably be back in June.

She didn’t end up returning. She was offered a job making photocopies and answering the phone in her mother’s office, which had air conditioning and left Alice with her weekends free. One night in August, Alice’s father suggested they go to Reilly’s for dinner “to see how all your friends are doing.”

Someone new greeted them at the door. Although Alice had never seen the girl before, she was all too familiar with the uniform of a green shirt and black pants. “I guess that’s the new me,” she said to her parents once they had been seated in the booth with the vine.

Throughout dinner, she watched the new girl making her away around the restaurant. Buster stopped her once to tell her a joke, and Alice saw the new girl laugh in a way that suggested she either didn’t really understand or find it funny, but didn’t want to be rude. It could have been her imagination, but at one point Alice thought she saw the new girl blushing while leaving the kitchen with arms full of food.

The server, Carrey, remembered Alice, and although she didn’t make extra fuss over them, Alice’s father commented that they’d been given a staff discount when the final bill arrived. Alice put some of her own money on the table to add to the tip when they left.

Walking to the back of the building where her father’s car was parked, they passed the open kitchen doors. “Hey, qui-et girl!” Alice was pleased to see the cook. “Carrey said that you were here tonight. You should have come into the back to say hello.”

“I’m so sorry, Marie. I didn’t know I was allowed….” It was the truth. She hadn’t even considered going into the kitchen to say hello. But she was happy to see Marie now that they were standing here. “It’s such good timing that you’re out here, Marie. I’m really glad I got to see you. Also… my curry was delicious.”

In the car, Alice looked over her shoulder and watched Marie stamp out her cigarette, then wave before turning back inside. Alice’s cheeks felt cool. She craned her neck to see herself in the mirror, seeing no traces of a blush.

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EVERY TIME THE SUN COMES UP My summer spent in the past NEIL MACISAAC Pictures courtesy of The Beaton Institute

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n movies, there are few easier ways to convey that a character is unhappy or depressed than to show they are stuck in routine. Fight Club, The Matrix, and essentially every role Kevin James has ever taken, depict routine as something monotonous, soul-destroying, and begging to be escaped from; routine is for living-dead sheeple too stupid to comprehend their own misery.

I’m not particularly fond of such movies. I’ve always loved Groundhog Day. This summer I worked in Nova Scotia, on my hometown university’s archives. A friend working there had let me know that they received funding for a position to digitize their World War I materials in advance of its hundredth anniversary, and they needed to fill the position quickly. I interviewed and got the job, even after explaining I might have to miss some time since I was expecting to switch treatments for my Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disease. My first day of work was May 28, the day Maya Angelou died. Fittingly, she was often quoted as saying “Nothing works unless you do.”

My new employers were very accommodating.

Switching from the weekly treatment I had had for seven years to a totally new one required a round of steroids and regular trips to the hospital (which I had already been making, since being sick and depressed forced me to drop all my classes and move home in March). On June 1, my grandmother, my last remaining grandparent whom I had grown up a block away from, died after a month of serious illness. She was 90 years old.

Grief and funeral arrangements hardly contribute to physical or mental healing, but extended family and siblings made it easier. Growing up in a home with two parents, three older siblings, and many regular visits from cousins had fortunately made interaction with family more delightful than dreaded. During all this I was still going through tests (turns out I do not have tuberculosis, the test for which was completed en route to the funeral home) and the steroids exacerbated my already-ter-

rible sleep cycle. I fell asleep late, woke early, and rarely got more than five hours of sleep per night for weeks.

And then the funeral was over. Everyone was gone, leaving my parents and me. Added now to the aforementioned sickness, depression, sleep deprivation, and grief was a daunting chore: clean out Nana’s house and put it up for sale by the end of the summer. The house had been in the family since October 1923, a fact scrawled in faded orange chalk on a wall in the basement, previously been hidden by faux-wood paneling. The house contained possessions belonging to my great-grandparents who had lived through the Depression, my grandparents during the times of World War II, and my father, aunts, and uncle.

In particular, my grandmother kept an incredible amount of clothes she rarely wore, papers and photos she filed away years ago, and more wool and yarn than even the most industrious grandmother could convert into clothing or blankets in three lifetimes. It was a lot of work to clean out. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and one of my sisters would periodically visit to contribute, and in the end they got more of the job done than my parents and I did. It was easier to work for a week straight than to chip away hours at a time for months. When we were there we sorted out which belongings would be taken, and by whom, what would be sold or donated, and what would be thrown out.

Stripping a beloved house of both its dead weight and its last signs of life was emotional. My father, the engineer who could get spectacularly angry over minor inefficiencies but who also compassionately pushed his children to work towards their goals, had lost his mother and now had to empty out his childhood home. To push my father to complete this task was slightly terrifying. I had to encourage him, and remind him that the whole family needed us to work at this. It was impossible not to see it all as very bizarre: the role-reversal, the preparing of a family house for strangers, and the nights steroids

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kept me wide awake in bed but too drained to do anything but be alone.

All of my friends from university were in Toronto or off in various amazing locations and most didn’t know why (or in some cases that) I had left.

Just about all of my friends from home were also working far away, discovering themselves abroad, or something of the sort. Personally, I was finally completely outside of my normal routine. I did not feel empowered like Tyler Durden or Neo or Paul Blart. I felt quarantined.

But waking up every day to “Napoleon Says” by Phoenix blaring from my phone (I can recommend no more effective alarm) and sun in my eyes, I was glad to have a job to attend. I was glad to drive up and down the same hill, glad to pull into the same parking spot, glad to sit in the same terrible chair in the same small office, glad to pick away at the looming task of scanning as many photographs, letters, forms, diaries, and other archival materials pertaining to World War I as I could, before my work term expired in late August. I took the advice Joan Rivers offered Louis CK in her appearance on his show before her death: I didn’t quit the job. I never once thought I would.

It was, in a lot of ways, the definition of monotony. A typical day: I arrive in the morning and consult the list of materials to be scanned. I pick some items from the list and retrieve them from “the vault,” the large climate-controlled room where all the archived material is stored. I pull out photos taken by a soldier in France who died of an infected wound in 1919; or the casebooks of a doctor who helped soldiers apply for pensions in the 1920s and 30s; or the photographic record of the Cape Breton Highlanders that showed the faces, names, ranks, regimental numbers, and hometowns of every member of that battalion, now all departed. I take them back into the office and scan them one by one, page by page, piece by piece. I organize them all and make note of the metadata for the database before putting them back in the vault. Repeat.

Even to someone who loves history, it was generally dull work. You weren’t being asked to use any of the material or present it to anyone or offer any opinion. Just scan it and put it back. It was lunch in the same break room, it was the same struggle to stay awake in the afternoon, and it was the same balance between handling material with the care it deserved while scanning it and moving on as quickly as possible. It was also the same better-than-minimum wage paycheck. It was the same supportive and hilarious co-workers. It was the same gradual sense of understanding a time other than your own slightly better, which might make you a little better.

It was the same job I knew many of my peers would beg for. It was a chance to feel lucky and happy.

Of all the material that passed through my hands, nothing stuck with me more than a letter a soldier wrote to his mother saying that the shelling of his trench “sure gets on a fellows [sic] nerve.”

It stuck with me because of how quickly the horrifying had become routine and how insane that seemed. But I think making the terrible less sensational can make it more possible for us to actually fight it. This is not to discourage empathy but to promote it, as well as promote our capacity to change and improve.

Depression and grief are founded on lies we tell ourselves, most notably that there is nothing you can do. What was jarring enough to prove that lie false to me were my experiences of continuously being put in environments where people continually argued the other side—in a hospital, in a counselor’s office, and in an archive that tried (and tries) to keep us from forgetting. The blessing of work and routine is to prove there is a dialogue between the worse things and the better things, and to prove that it is renewed everywhere every day. That blessing is not distributed equally, which often makes it feel like the worse things are winning the argument. My hope is that when your alarm goes off, you know it goes off for you, calling you to work. And you can imagine Phil Connors, and yourself, happy.

WORK

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