It's been 10 days since my last student mini-job, but that one (to borrow from the vernacular) was a doozy: a half hour commute both ways, but then 6.5 hours of dishwashing at a canteen in former Eastern Berlin.
The equipment was fascinating. I keep on yearning for my family to adopt a rule that I read about in books and hear about in real life: that the person who's cooking doesn't need to wash the dishes later. But it's been well over a decade. The rule in our household is still that the person who's cooking is making a shocking mess that needs to be cleaned up as soon as possible. One of my former colleagues, frankly surveying our romantic prospects / lack thereof, once commented that he and I are still waiting for 'our Mr. Darcy's. In my case, I hope that Mr. Darcy will wash half the dishes while I do the other half. ... In the meantime, 1. a dishwashing machine that takes about 10 to 20 minutes to rinse the pottery, glassware, cutlery, etc. once you slide in the tray, 2. a piece of steel wool that takes care of almost anything that sticks to stainless steel basins, lids, utensils and pots, 3. industrial-strength dishwashing liquid, and 4. a powerful spray attachment at the tap, come pretty close.
I liked the colleagues, and not just because they gave me a free café au lait and a bottle of water. I barely glimpsed the customers since the only opportunities arose while I was ferrying back and forth the caddies full of dirty lunch trays and glancing at the counter where customers were ordering their food. But I was horrified by an indirect communication: one of the customers left a wasp, which they had apparently cut in two, on their plate for me to dispose of.
But I emerged from the job with sore muscles (in my lower arm, obviously; but also at my thumb, inner thighs, lower back, ... the list goes on) and fiery new socialist convictions. The radicalized political views are not just based on this job, but also the others.
For one thing, I don't think that people should have to work or spend their lunch breaks in windowless rooms.
For another, is cashier work and dishwashing work, really 'honest' work? Or is it just grubbing that is underpaid by an employer who needs to wring out every last cent of profit, in a market where the company is just not making enough money have large margins, and sometimes made unduly difficult by customers who are badly raised? For example, it was no trouble at all to wash coffee cups, cake plates, and cutlery. But scraping off a whole bunch of food that the customer didn't feel like eating after all, or prying crumpled paper napkins out of congealed sauce, felt like nannying or parenting un-endearing 5-foot- and 6-foot-something babies — rather than providing a reasonable service to a paying adult. As I complained to family afterward, only half joking: I'm not their mother! if they don't want to bother to use table manners, they can clean up their own darn mess!
Thirdly, I increasingly doubt the 'American Dream' narrative about low-paying jobs. Maybe I'm just a pampered princess who is not used to scrubbing encrusted cheese from metal bins. But from my point of view, it would be a far better use of refugees' and economic migrants' time and effort to find something fitting for their specific interests and skills, at times and in places that are practical (not '5 a.m., when few trains are running' and 'across town'). It does not make sense to give them needlessly labour-intensive, dead-end jobs and then ask them to spin soap suds into gold. It's like the household revolution in countries like the UK after World War I: when the mistresses of households began to have to do housework instead of domestic servants (who were hired away by factories or shops), they finally realized that maybe they wanted to cook easier, less complex food and have machines to tackle the majority of the hard work. Hard labour always feels more indispensable when the burden falls on another, and I really don't think that enlightenment, valuable life training, and spiritual contentment come from scraping uneaten ketchup into a garbage bin.
Fourth, I think that the current grocery store system is wildly unsustainable. It's not just cashier work at the register that instills a whole different perspective on how much labour goes into creating a small package of food (sometimes empty calories) that is purchased in a few seconds and perhaps eaten in the same amount of time. It's also stocking shelves. At least the grocery stores here in Berlin tend to order an extensive gamut of eclectic groceries in sets of up to 20 packages. Picture the process of raising the ingredients (farmers, fuel suppliers, fertilizer suppliers, etc.), transporting the ingredients, blending the food, transporting the blended food via train or airplane or truck, dividing the food into the desired portions using materials that also need to be sourced from long supply chains (paper, plastic, etc.), then sorting them out into a grocery store's order. All kinds of work that needs to be done in the middle of the night, over long distances, for very low wages and low profit margins, etc. Then, I as the cashier have to open the package (which can be as complex as Ikea furniture assembly) and familiarize myself with the shop's layout to figure out where that package goes. Then I have to move aside the older packages so that the newer ones go in the back. While keeping an eye on the till to see if anyone needs me to ring up their purchases. All so that someone can e.g. buy a tiny tub of yoghurt that will be eaten up in a few seconds. ... Thinking about all of this has made me more of a zealot about cooking food from scratch using bulk ingredients — locally sourced, if possible.
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