Another characteristic of the work is its unsteady nature...sometimes I show up at five in the morning and wait in the labor pool until eight a.m., which is when any calls for day labor usually stop coming in.  I come back home unemployed for the day, having spent three hours watching the local morning television's endless loops of alternately perky or solemn talking heads' semi-news: the birth of triplets, Tipper and Al looking for new digs in Nashville, the usual house fire, the run-of-the-mill child abuse case, the current traffic pileups on the three Interstates which trisect the city, tomorrow's forecast coupled with today's actual weather, which invariably is different from what was promised yesterday.   We day laborers, despite any other insensitivities we may have, are intensely aware of the weather because those of us lucky enough to be employed for the day are quite often out in it.

Since my sojourns into the Labor Ready office began I have done a number of jobs.  Once, I was strongly cautioned that if anyone were to ask I was to say that I worked for Top Of The Line, a Nashville catering firm, but NOT Labor Ready. I was sent to help prepare food for a gathering of disc jockeys and radio execs at the Nashville Convention Center.  The point of this, as I immediately figured out, was to avoid any problems with the Health Department, since none of the Labor Ready crew had been screened for communicable diseases like, oh, say, Hepatitis C.   I put my nurse's education to the side and comforted myself with the thought that, except for politicians, I couldn't think of any more-deserving potential victims than the people responsible for spoon feeding the pap cranked out here in Nashburg to the Proctor&Gamble demographic spread across the continent.

But the gig was tough.  Handling literally a ton of barbecued turkey and pork, digging packets of Sysco mashed potatoes out of boiling water and slitting them open and dumping them into steam table pans is not only hard but painful work, and I was so sick of the sight of food that, though I was drained of energy by the end of the ten-hour day, I couldn't bring myself to eat.

"HI, BABY..."
Not all of the jobs have been unpleasant.  I worked for a week on what was basically a landscaping job thirty miles outside of town in Lebanon, raking and shoveling dirt, and then smoothing it, seeding it with new grass seed, and finally covering the seed with straw to hold the moisture in until the little guys could germinate and sink their roots into the topsoil.  It was hard, sweaty work, but not without its compensations:  One day I was raking and shoveling and a black chick in a new shiny red GM kinda ride came up the street, slowed down, and cooed out sweetly and seductively to me, "Hi, Baby".  "Hi Sugar," I responded and with a flash of teeth and a wave of a braceleted hand, nails painted to match the car, she floored it and was gone.  I don't think she was attracted to me because of my tremendous upper-body physique.  Maybe she dug my rake.  The point, though, is that it did indeed make my day: all afternoon long I was saying "Hi, Baby" to myself and chuckling.  But, mostly, the jobs are demanding, demeaning or downright dangerous.

Out West End Avenue on Highway 100 there is a construction site where dozens of McMansions are being built: an executive ghetto consisting of brick edifices whose outside dimensions belie the lack of usable living space within. These cheeseballs are being built by a company called CenTex, whose headquarters are in Central Texas, thus the name.  I have been a carpenter on some actual million-dollar houses in Florida, and the differences are immediately obvious.  Probably the mortgages for these McMansions have an option for "Fries with That?".  The entire project is being built by imported Mexican labor: formers, framers, roofers, sheetrockers and bricklayers, with the electricity and plumbing farmed out to Tennessee guys because of their familiarity with the local codes. But when this job is over the Mexes will move on to the next CenTex project in a different state, where they will once again stamp out the same 12 designs for cheap brick boxes at a quarter million a pop.  Over and over and over.

Another of the CenTex jobs that is farmed out locally, and here's where Labor Ready comes in, is that between each stage of construction the houses must be cleaned, so that the sheetrockers are not walking on the nails and cutoff ends left by the framers, for example, and the electricians and plumbers are not trying to finish their jobs in the sheetrock waste after the rockers have moved on to the next house. The guy who has the cleanup contract calls Labor Ready for help.  Nobody at Labor Ready likes working for this guy, at least after the first time, and it takes true desperation
to make you want to repeat the experience.  The guys okay, maybe, but the jobs he's given and passes down to the laborers are, as I say, quite often dangerous and always unpleasant.  The last time I worked for him, I was in the pouring rain on my knees in the mud installing tires on the construction office trailers so that they could be moved from the site where they were to another, and a new McMansion could be started.

Lately I have moved up in the pecking order at Labor Ready, which means the jobs I get lately are at least inside if still grinding.  So that I have come to be employed on an on-demand basis in various factories and warehouses in a fifty-mile radius around the city.  Which is why I'm in Portland Tennessee at seven a.m. this morning.   I have ridden up in a beater station wagon, but there is also a Labor Ready bus, which, being driven by a Muslim guy, has come to be known as "the Talivan."  Despite the brutish nature of our work, day laborers are not without a sense of humor.

A LITTLE ORIENTATION ABOUT WAREHOUSES FOR YOU PATRICIANS
OUT THERE:
There are four basic warehouse machines: there is the forklift of which you probably have seen at least one, which is used to unload and load the trucks.  Then there are deep-reach machines, kind of a forklift, but capable of plucking pallets from shelves as high as thirty feet, so as to keep the floor space underneath the shelves stocked with products.  Then there are what are called in this factory anyway "runners", machines which can carry two pallets in tandem, upon which are stacked the items "picked" from the floor, and which are capable of speeds up to twenty miles an hour, which in a warehouse is very fast indeed. And then there is the humble pallet jack, a non-motorized heavy cart which carries one pallet, upon which products are stacked.  This is the only machine I am allowed to operate, so as to lessen the chance of my killing anybody other than myself.  Like the others, it works by inserting its forks into a pallet so that the pallet can be lifted, loaded and then "dropped", and a new, empty pallet can be picked up.  Warehouses are not quiet places; they are filled with the sounds of the horns of these machines as they reach the intersections at the end of every aisle, and with the stentorian requests and announcements from the management over the loudspeakers. My job, and that of those trusted to operate the runners, is to pick up a list of orders from the desk, then go through the aisles, stopping at the designated places and picking up the requested amounts of merchandise.  One list can consist of more than a hundred boxes, each of different dimensions, which must be stacked in such a way that they do not fall off the pallet, and it can take up to two hours and two miles of walking, adding to an ever-increasingly heavy load, until the pallet stands over six feet tall and weighs up to 1200 pounds and so gets very difficult to pull.

The runners are mostly operated by women, whom I have, predictably I know, come to refer to as "pallet babes'.  The pallet babes, mostly tattooed and pierced hillbilly girls, fly by on their runners, their hair billowing out behind them, leaning into the wind like mastheads of the vessels they steer at blinding speeds through the ocean of warehouse cacophony.  Well, despite the florid nature of that last sentence there, I have noticed, when I worked for a day at the Hewlett Packard repair center in Smyrna, Tennessee, and now here in the Kroger warehouse, that there is a factory and  warehouse culture among these women, who all are made up for these jobs which require no interaction with the public, and I have wondered with no results about it.  How much of it is traceable to their identifying with the rich people on "The Young and Restless", which is on the telly in the lunchroom when they have lunch?  Burly dudes, black, white and one Samoan, load my pallet with 6 swing sets weighing 200 pounds each, on E dock, and I begin my trek back to C3, where I am to drop it, leaning into my load like a mule.  Black pallet babe comes by on her runner, says, "Hey, old white dude, jest drop it there, an' I'll take it down for you."  "You'll take WHAT down for him?" says one of the black Burly Dudes, which opens a floodgate of laughter and catcalls from the palletbabe and the other Burly Dudes.

SOME THINGS I LEARNED FROM BEING A DAY LABORER...

I found out that some of these "temporary employees ' have been working in this one warehouse for over a year, for the same reason other companies hire temps: no messy benefits to pay, thus higher profits.  No insurance to pay, no retirement fund to pay into.  More money for the CEOs and the stockholders.  If a temp employee gets sick or even hurt on the job, he's on his own.  Income taxes are not much of a worry for these workers; most earn below the official poverty level, but they DO pay Social Security and FICA, they DO pay the eight percent sales tax Tennessee charges on everything they buy, plus the federal excise taxes on many of the same items.  And
those of them who don't own a car pay someone else five dollars a day for a ride to a job where they will earn less than fifty.  Their work leaves them too tired to do more than bitch among themselves, but being 'mere' day laborers doesn't mean they don't know they're getting fucked here.  They just don't know what to do about it...except keep getting up at four o'clock in the morning, keep going to bed at eight p.m., keep not having a life until they've been worked out and become what they are desperately trying to avoid being: burdens on society. I didn't go to the Labor Ready office this morning.  I've been able to write about this as an extraordinary experience because I knew it would not last much longer, that I'd be pulling stuff out of it that may turn up in a song somewhere.  And because tomorrow night I will be doing my little show for more money in an hour than I could make at Labor Ready in six days.  I have a tour coming up in Florida in May, and April's dates are filling in as well.  I have learned how blessed with good fortune I am.  There are vast numbers of citizens here in America who are not being treated fairly, and who are aware of it.  Flag-waving to the contrary, they are giving more to their country than they are getting back.  And they know it.  And now you do, too.
                         
                                                                                              Panama Red

Visit Panama Red's website

Editor's Note:  Panama Red is an independent music artist, story teller and songwriter based out of Nashville.  He has written songs with Kinky Friedman and others of note.  Panama Red's "Homegrown" CD is pure genius in my opinion.  He's just a misplaced Texan I do believe.

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