America Thursday Afternoon

I get days off. I'm working, a situation that, at least for now, requires days off, though that custom is vanishing, like trick-or-treating or premarital virginity.

But I'm working, and given a day off during the week, I'll eat breakfast at a diner where pancakes, bacon and coffee costs $7, and then I'll go to one of those discount stores where, unlike better stores, the customers and the people running the registers are of the same social class.

It's a good place to pick up a $9.99 "dress" shirt for work, and the $9.99 isn't the sale price, either. It's $9.99 every day.

Unable to find a shirt, I left the store pretty quickly last Thursday afternoon, and standing by the cement pylons in front of the store's entrance, I met a friend. He was smoking a cigarette.

He works in the store. Shipping and receiving. Part time.

"How many hours you getting'?" I asked him. This is a polite question in 2013 America, where the word "working" does not always indicate 40 hours or overtime or any kind of benefits.

"Two, three days a week," he said. "I'm flexible, so they give me what they can.

"I'm on my break," he said.

The guy's probably 50, five years younger than I am, and I've known him for 15 years, and he's worked as much of those 15 years as he could.

When I first met him, he worked in a factory. Shipping and receiving. No union. Maybe $3 an hour over the minimum, some kind of benefits but no pension.

He got out of high school in the city where he was born, and he got a factory job, like all his friends did, but he was starting at the end of manufacturing in his small, gray Massachusetts city.

When I first met him, there were some weeks when the guy who owned the factory where he worked asked his 20 or so employees to wait "a coupla days" before cashing their paychecks. Shortly after that, a paycheck bounced, but his boss wrote him another one, and in "a coupla days" it was good to cash. The factory closed.

So he worked in a convenience store for a while, selling cigarettes and beer. Five bucks an hour, cash, "under the table," as they say. Right now, in the city where I live, if I were looking for work, I could probably find an under-the-table job quicker than I could find legitimate work.

"I went down south for a while," he told me. "Florida. Everything's minimum wage down there."

"Nothing here, either," he said. "But at least I got friends."

He's too old to join the Army and too young to die of old age, and so he's stuck at least until his Social Security starts coming and he can get into one of those old folks high rises where they take 30 percent of your check for rent, and you can spend the rest on booze and limos.

That guy, or one of the other guys I know who are just like him, is the backdrop for everything I hear any politician say.

If the politician says there will be jobs, I know the jobs have to be here in a couple months. If the politician says "gun control," I think about the difference between slow death and fast death. If the politician says "infrastructure," I think about people who don't have cars.

We were all supposed to work harder, to stop being "pampered" by unions and OSHA and 40-hour week laws, and we were all supposed to be "happy just to have a job."

And we did, and we are.

And we're stinkin' poor.

Because it didn't work.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

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