Rivethead - Ben Hamper [42]
A miniature Auschwitz had been assembled far behind the clicking of the cashier's keys, far removed from the lazy shuffle of the fresh claimant's feet, off in back where you now only waited for the pellets to drop and the air to get red.
Oh, I guess it could have been worse. You could have been burned to death in a Pinto. You could have been snagged in a plane prop. You could have been fatally trampled at a Paul Anka concert. You could have had to go out and find a job.
That was the funny part. A job? Most of us already had jobs. We worked for the goddamn General Motors Corporation. We were shoprats stuck in a holding pattern. This was all temporary, a fluke of the trade. Soon enough those showrooms would start bustling. Phones would begin to ring and we'd all straggle back to our callings. It was just one of the quirky fates that went along with being just another cog in such a mammoth flywheel.
With this understood, it was such a joke when the folks over at the MESC announced that you were now expected to make the rounds looking for an alternative occupation. Instead of just pickin’ up your biweekly check, the claims people insisted that you must take along four sets of job applications to be filled out and returned upon your next visit. It was ignorant, but you had to play along in order to keep receiving your money.
This new requirement was a real grin. For instance, on the day before I was to go pick up my check at the MESC, I would reach for the yellow pages and randomly select some of the most bizarre places of business I could find. On a given week I may have “applied” for work at a taxidermy shop, a porno theater, a limousine service and a funeral home. They had a spot on the job form where you were required to write in the name of the individual you had spoken with. I'd call up the business and ask whoever answered the owner's name. I'd jot it down and hang up. The form also had a line asking “Outcome of Job Interview.” I put down phrases like “enormously unqualified,” “lacking sufficient training” and “a stalemate of mutual disgust.”
I assume the MESC never followed up on any of it. It was just another way for them to make you feel pressured. They had to know that any shoprat with half a brain wasn't likely to sacrifice his hefty unemployment benefits by accepting a job flippin’ burgers or scrubbin’ toilets. We may have been crazy, but we weren't fuckin’ dumb.
It was fairly ridiculous how much money we were being awarded for not going to work. Unemployment paid you $377 biweekly. Add to this the $80 a week courtesy of the GM-UAW Supplemental Unemployment Benefits and you were takin’ in a comfortable $268 a week, hardly anyone's definition of chump change when measured against the fact that you weren't required to do anything but survive the snail plod over at the MESC every other week.
It didn't end there. This being the tail end of the Jimmy Carter era, we were presented another bonus. It seemed Jim had a powerful soft spot in his lust-leechin’ heart for unemployed factory goomers. Before he was booted out of office, he shoved through some bill called the Trade Readjustment Act (TRA) and, yipes, it was feedtime all over again for the old hip pocket.
TRA was designed to provide financial assistance for autoworkers whose plants were closed due to the influx of foreign competition. I gladly took their money, though the pretense seemed rather misguided. I still maintain that blaming it all on the Japanese was a rather cowardly way of admitting “Aw, shit, who was the asshole in charge of mass-producing RHINOS when the public can only afford GERBILS.”
I remember the day I received my lump-sum TRA payment. I had never seen such mirth and hysteria inside the GM-UAW Benefits office. Men were actually smiling and talking to one another. They would go sprinting out the door plantin’ high fives and wavin’ their odd-colored checks above their heads. It was all so contrary to the usual dull isolation of the cattle clog.
When it was my turn, I stepped forward