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Diaries of exploitation n°1 : To work is a horrible thing

Sunday 7 June 2015

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To work is a horrible thing. All those who wreck their spines bending over sewing machines, who stultify their brains sitting at computers, who sweat in call centers, who ruin their bodies carrying boxes whose contents they aren’t even aware of, who break down crying in the lavatory to at last wipe from their face that horrid smile they must show the customer, and all the others who weaken themselves by repetitively going through gestures which provide them with nothing but a little money which will go straight from their boss’ bank account to their landlord’s, all of them can at least agree that. Work is a concoction of sadness, boredom, pain, frustration, confinement and false pretences. It’s an act that goes against our bodies, our self-fulfilment, our subsistence, and, contrary to commonplace belief, our survival. So, indeed, work is a horrible thing. Perhaps some managers, bosses, artists, scientists or others will contradict my assertion, but in truth, who but the happily enslaved would take such objections into account in their daily lives?

For years now, I’ve worked a little under fifteen hours a week. I don’t work because I believe one should, I work because for now it’s a compromise that I’ve found in order to deal with the blackmail of money. To be precise, I’m a waiter at a restaurant in a rich neighbourhood in the centre of Paris, with a customer base made up of bourgeois-bohemians of all sorts (except perhaps poor ones), from the fan of organic products to the nouveau riche eagerly showing off wads of banknotes. Each day at work involves going through the same old motions, greeting hundreds of people with tight smiles and insincere, vapid dialogues in which we’re considered means rather than ends. To the customers, we’re just a way of obtaining food, intermediaries (among so many others) between their wallet and the restaurant owner’s bank. Of course, in the long run, it’s difficult to play along and accept that we’re nothing, that we’re servants (eagerly waiting) to be summoned with a whistle or a snap of the fingers, to whom one issues orders and commands in the guise of questions because one isn’t too comfortable with the idea of having slaves when directly confronted with it. When the customer asks for bread, he doesn’t ask for it, he demands it, and we must comply at once. Just imagine a waiter replying "no, I don’t feel like serving you" or "no, nothing about you inspires me to do you any favours".

But what is a customer? Truth be told, I don’t know. I cannot define this new class, this so absurd yet so integrated state of being. The customer is someone who, in exchange for a certain amount of money (or whatever other exchange value), has the right, backed up by the law, to obtain a given service. The customer must obtain this service, without any strings attached or negotiation. There is an assumption, even more deeply rooted in us than any other superstitious belief, that when the customer has payed, or is going to pay, he must get his due. For instance, a customer orders a pie, and as it happens, there’s only one left. Just when I’m about to serve it, the pie slips from my hands (which are worn out from an exhausting day spent doing the same thing over and over) and ends up on the floor. I apologise, as customary, and get down on all fours to clean up while he rants at me about how much of a hurry he’s in and how important (nay, primordial) what he has to do is. I present him with the menu again so that he can choose a different dish, but oh no, he wants that pie. I explain to him once more that it was the last one, but he won’t be swayed, he wants a pie and this is a restaurant which serves pies, he must have his pie, that’s just the way it is. The customer commands and requires, it’s his right to have a pie, the social contract guarantees it, the law enforces it. As for the boss, he rattles on that "the customer is king", in fact it’s become a motto, the motto of a life, a motto harbouring that constant of authority: when there is a king, he must be served, so if the customer is king, the customer must be served.

In this exploitation game, the long-timers and the most disillusioned among us often comment that even if the customer saw us bleeding from every pore in our bodies, crying, suffering, collapsing, even then, it still wouldn’t make a difference: they ordered food, so they must get food. It’s their right, it’s our duty. De facto, the first thing waiters must learn to do is to shut up, to swallow their pride, to forgo any shred of dignity they might have left, and to repress the urge of becoming violent and aggressive.

All this shit, just to keep a job that we can’t bear? The paradox is gigantic, it is that of domination. In fact, we don’t stay in line to keep our jobs, but to keep our wages, however meagre they may be; and even that is just the hundredth layer of compromise, buried well under the one by which we accepts that we need money in order to survive under the omnipresent capitalist domination.

These few lines don’t claim to be important. They’ll be published according to the author’s urge to write them, rather than with any regularity. They’re just the lines of an individual, frustrated to the bone, who spends his time refraining from violence, who would dream of hurling plates at all these shit-heads, but still has something (a wage, at least) to lose. It’s because one must hang on to one’s wage that one hangs on to one’s job, and keeping that job hinges on very few things. Chucking dishes at the kingly customers’ vile dribbling gobs is not of those things.

But who knows? One day, perhaps…

Non serviam.