By Sandor Slomovits

One morning earlier this year, I went to buy tires at a local store I’ve patronized for over four decades. The man behind the counter and I recognized each other, he’s worked there for many of those years. After we said our hellos, I told him what I needed and he said, “I’ve got the tires, but only one guy to put them on the cars. I’m full up today and for the rest of the week.” (This was on a Tuesday morning.) “Come back next Monday,” he said.

I’ve been driving for 55 years, and my work as a touring musician has meant that I’ve driven a great many miles. I’ve worn down and replaced a lot of tires. No one has ever before said they couldn’t sell me tires for almost a week.

I’ve encountered similar worker shortages lately at my pharmacy, in grocery stores, and in other settings. I’m not the only one. The media has been full of stories about labor shortages in many parts of the economy, about the large percentage of health care workers, teachers, and childcare providers who are contemplating retiring, and about baby boomers who are retiring earlier than they’d planned to before the pandemic hit. People—young, older, skilled, unskilled, blue collar workers with low paying jobs, and white collar workers with large salaries have all quit at unprecedented rates in the past year. And the Great Resignation and the Great Retirement of 2021 appear to still be going strong in early 2022. It seems that the pandemic has once again taught America to sing “Take This Job and Shove It!” like we did when country music star Johnny Paycheck’s version of the David Allan Coe song was in heavy radio rotation in 1977. Our current collective response to the pandemic is in stark contrast to the Rosie the Riveter phenomenon of WWII, when a great many women who had not previously worked outside the home stepped into the labor force to take the place of the men fighting overseas.

All this has had me remembering and reflecting on some of my earliest work-related memories.

My first job was as a clerk in the hardware section of a Caldor department store in upstate New York in the summer of 1966, just after my junior year of high school. (That I didn’t have a job before then is a testament to my parents’ over-protectiveness, and to our relatively comfortable financial status.) A few days after I started, I was stocking shelves when a man asked me about the location of some item. I didn’t know where it was and told him I’d go and find out. As I turned to leave, he said to his wife, not bothering to lower his voice, “Ez egy hulye. Nem tudd semmitt.” Which is Hungarian for, “This one is stupid. He doesn’t know anything.” I turned around and said, “Eloszor is, nem vagyok hulye. Masodszor, todok beszelni Magyarul.” Which is Hungarian for, “First of all, I am not stupid. Second, I do know how to speak Hungarian.”

When I’d been hired a few days earlier, it had been emphasized to me that the customer is always right. Nobody said anything about some customers acting like they had the right to behave badly, but as it turned out, a disheartening number did.

My next job, after college, was parking cars. (Why I decided on that line of work after graduating with a BA in History from a pretty good university is a tale for another time.) I didn’t mind most aspects of my job but hated the attitude of a significant number of my customers. Most of them were white collar professionals: lawyers, doctors, university professors, and businessmen. Not many ever said hello or good-bye. Few felt obliged to say thank you or please, even when they asked for, and received, special favors. They regularly felt free to rudely express their frustrations at not being served as quickly as they wanted, even when they saw that others were ahead of them and that I was hustling. I interpreted their thoughtlessness and carelessness as their way of conveying their self-perceived superiority, and my less-than status. My bosses were no better; besides paying only minimum wage—which then, as now, was not a living wage—they were rarely respectful or accommodating. They knew they could easily replace me if I quit.

I became keenly sensitized to this lack of common courtesy, the absence of these basic signs of respect, and began to see it also directed at other people who worked at jobs on the low end of the economy. I noticed it everywhere. I saw that waiters, gas station attendants, janitors, and others all got similar treatment from some of the people they served. The experiences left a powerful and lasting impression on me.

After parking cars for about two years, while I was beginning to learn my craft as a folk musician, I worked as a janitor for a couple of weeks. (Another long story—how I got that job, and how and why I was promoted.) Years later, when I began playing music in elementary schools, my brief stint as a janitor gave me extra insight and appreciation for the work that school custodians do--how critical they seemed to be to the smooth working of every school.

Learn more online at enlightenedsoulcenter.com

After about three years of parking cars, working as a janitor, and at a few other similar employment experiments, I was able to quit those jobs and begin focusing all my energies into playing music and everything that went along with trying to make a life in the arts. Over the many years since then I have frequently been aware just how fortunate I have been. “Must be nice to have a job where people applaud when you do it,” a friend once told me, her tone making it clear that that was not her daily experience of work, even though she had what looked to me like a pretty good and reasonably paying job. “I’d give my right arm to be able to do what you’re doing,” is another line I’ve heard many times over the years. I’ve always listened sympathetically. It’s not been hard to sense how much frustration and pain is driving that otherwise nonsensical sentence.

Perhaps the great resignation did not start recently. Perhaps there has long been a great resignation going on, when many, many people have been resigned to work at jobs they hated because they didn’t feel they had other options. So, when the pandemic forced people to be away from their work for the first time or, if they were deemed essential workers and were compelled to work despite the dangers of their job conditions, they saw their employment in a new light and, in the words of another song, a sea chantey, they decided, “The times were hard and the wages low, leave her Johnny, leave her…” It’s no coincidence that Nomadland was the picture of the year in 2021.

There are many, many complex reasons driving this Big Quit, and TV pundits, talk show hosts, business owners, social scientists, and political leaders have credited or blamed all of them: lingering illness caused by Covid, lack of childcare, shuttered schools, desire for flexible hours and better working conditions (things many employers are reluctant to grant), sexual and racial harassment, unemployment benefits, the government stimulus checks, pandemic savings, the reexamination of priorities, the deterioration of Americans’ can-do-will-do fiber…the list goes on.

Certainly, the recent uptick in loutish, abusive behavior by customers on airlines, in restaurants, and in other difficult work environments has not helped and has possibly amplified the lately-loud chorus of, “I ain’t workin’ here no more.”

It’s way above my pay grade to understand, explain, or fix any of this. I don’t know how our society could provide meaningful work and decent wages to all our people. I don’t know if and how we could eliminate all distasteful, unpleasant, or dangerous jobs. (Though improving working conditions to the degree possible and paying more generously would be a good start.) I am not offering a single, comprehensive, one size fits all solution, nor do I expect, or even think it necessary, for all workers in every job to be greeted daily with “Fanfare for the Common Man.”

However, I do have a modest proposal. We could start—all of us—by treating better the people who serve us daily. While John Keats was probably right when he wrote, “Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced,” meaning that we may never really understand what it’s like to work as a barista, bus driver, or garbage collector, surely we should be able to understand what it feels like to be treated disdainfully—and its opposite.

Or to put it the way the sages of many traditions have long said in variations of the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do onto you.”