The Struggles of Work

I’ve had a lot of different jobs in my life. In recent years, it’s been all white collar, but in my twenties and thirties it was mostly blue collar. One of the things I wanted to communicate in The Mahoneys of West Seattle are the work struggles that people have in both white-collar and blue-collar jobs.

In the case of Matthew Mahoney and Anne Boushay, they have a form of insurance that most families don’t have. Anne’s mother Joan is comfortable enough financially to get the Mahoneys out of any money problem. At least as long as Anne is willing to accept the help. And Anne’s father has left her a cabin in Anchorage, which could always be sold or mortgaged to bail them out.

The Perennial White-Collar Woe

Still, the struggles that Matthew and Anne experience in their respective work lives are realistic. And they reflect conditions that are current in America today. Anne is a professional engineer who does a good job at work. But she’s still been laid off three times before the age of forty. I personally know people who have experienced exactly that. Some of them are incredibly talented at what they do and, if managers, at how well they lead and inspire their teams.

In Boston, I was installing new roofs on houses and shopping malls. In Seattle, I was writing fashion copy at Nordstrom.

Reorganizations and layoffs are the American way. Some people are let go because of performance issues. That’s to be expected. But with others, the reasons can be more political. For instance, a new VP wants to hire their own team to guarantee loyalty rather than trust existing workers.

Having worked as a marketing copywriter at three large companies in the Seattle area from 1998 to 2014, I survived seven or eight reorgs. I witnessed an additional one in 2016 as a contractor. I watched several staff coworkers leave for a meeting from which they never returned. (As I edit this, I’m thinking about the Titanic references in The Mahoneys of West Seattle. After a layoff, those of us who weren’t let go would typically gather in a bar after work. It was like being in a life boat with all the associated survivor’s guilt.)

Layoffs can come with a high personal price. When Anne is let go in chapter seven of the novel, the only way available to keep the family from drowning in debt is for her to take contract work up on the North Slope. That step leads to her being sexual assaulted and also being absent from family life when one of her children suffers a terrible accident.

The Blue-Collar World

Matthew’s life is fraught with different struggles of work. In one scene, his whole roofing crew is shorted five hours on their pay checks for no good reason. Before I moved to Seattle in 1990, I worked a number of jobs in Massachusetts, including residential roofing.

On one occasion when I was new to a roofing crew, the boss had me running to get coffee and donuts for everyone during morning break. After several weeks of doing this every day, I asked the boss if maybe somebody else could do it that morning. He had somebody else do it. And when I looked at my next check I was shorted half a day’s pay, or four hours, despite having worked a full eight hours.

I lived in Gloucester, MA, for a while and worked for a roofing company there.

I went straight to the owner (his brother was the crew boss) and knocked on the front door of his nice big house while he was having dinner. He pointed me around to the back deck, where he explained that I was shorted the hours because I wasn’t being a team player. I was living from paycheck to paycheck at that point and had no recourse. As soon as I could, I quit and joined a new roofing crew.

Vanishing Health Insurance

At another place I worked, a company that assembled construction equipment, I performed various tasks. They included painting, sandblasting and transporting the heavy equipment to sites in New Jersey, where I helped to install it. A short time after leaving the company, a friend of mine who still worked there as an engineer, told me a shocking story. He discovered, by accident, that the owner, who employed around fifteen people including two of his sons, had canceled employee health insurance policies without informing anyone. The move, which sooner or later had to blow up in the owner’s face, was made to save money.

If my friend or his wife had had a medical emergency, they would’ve been on the hook financially for everything. The owner of the company had not canceled his own insurance policy, nor those of his two sons. Just the hired help, who earned their health care benefits every day with their labor. In my novel, I have a similar situation occur with Rieger Roofing. Diego has his insurance canceled, something he wasn’t aware of until his son needed urgent medical treatment.

The Struggle for Basic Needs

Near the beginning of chapter seventeen, I wrote a paragraph that points to the sense of uncertainty many working class people live with at least some of the time—will I be able to pay for gas tomorrow, groceries next week, and rent and daycare next month? To be clear, in this quote my use of the phrase “special excitement” is sarcastic:

“The roofing job in Lynnwood that day was pretty straightforward. The crew would have considered it a boring day if it had still been working with Rieger Roofing, but the job had that special excitement that work had when you weren’t sure if you’d still be employed the next day or the next week.”

Photo Credits

Roofing photo by Central Bay Roofing

“Nordstrom” by GoToVan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“Fisherman’s Memorial” by Adavyd, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons