Whilst in seminary, I worked as a security guard for Pinkerton, assigned to the Hewlett-Packard plant in north San Diego county. Like the security guards, most (if not all) of H-P's non-salaried employees were in fact contract employess, including the line workers assembling printers. A regular feature of my job came whenever a line was shut down, the product run having been completed. The standard procedure was to wait until the last day, inform the workers about halfway through the shift, and also notify them their contract was up and they were now without work. Extra guards would be assigned to the line area to make sure nothing was stolen and no one indulged in a little spiteful vandalism. At the time, it seemed to me a policy which assumed it would offend and outrage those subjected to it might need some rethinking.
In a discussion of the Sabbath as occasion for enjoyment, Peter Leithart draws out some spiritual implications of these hiring policies:
The problem is that many larger corporations fail to give employees any sense of being part of a larger whole, and this is especially true when the employee’s employment is precarious. How is a worker supposed to experience the social satisfactions of labor when he’s never sure if he’ll be part of the team for the next project? It is like being in Egypt; it is like bricks without straw, labor without Sabbath.
No comments:
Post a Comment