1/9/2024 0 Comments Haven of rest gig harborThe vice presidents, middle managers, and marketers all need to be looking down the same steep road the writers are walking with their signs. With AI bursting on all of our screens, “opportunity goals” await all of the other visitors on Main Street. It has a carefully tailored opportunity that will pay off sometime tomorrow, if you meet all your “opportunity goals” and get 200 five-star ratings. The future doesn’t have a contract, insurance, or a nameplate on the door. It’s easier to pretend we don’t.Ĭonversely, corporate America has seen the future and it drives an Uber. We accept the limitations, the assumptions, and the pain that those jobs demand because we don’t see ourselves as artisans joining a project, but as laborers selected for today’s work and grateful for a ride to the jobsite. We often see our jobs as something we accept, not as something we chose. We get distracted by shiny things with sparkles and by squirrels.īut the concerns the writers have are concerns that are relevant to anyone who gets a paycheck instead of a dividend. Moreover, the audience for movies, shows, and everything else has slipped. I have fifteen shows I mean to watch, and haven’t. The concerns of the WGA strike feels fairly far off with a $5 drip coffee in one hand and a $7 Nutella Cruffin in the other. Teachers, cops, and firemen aren’t far behind. If writers can strike, so can baristas, cooks, waiters, and landscapers. For the rest on the sidewalk, the brief picket walk through the waiting-fora- table-crowd should remind them of the power of organized labor. For other visitors, the strikers may well have emerged from the Fox News Screen Crawl, complete with horns and inverted crucifixes. For some of our vistors, the strikers might as well have borrowed the “big two wheeler” from Young’s and come pedaling out of the Gilded Age with top hats and bustles. When Donick Cary and the other WGA writers walk their picket signs down Main Street, the seas part and wonder rides the waves. The mansions on Main Street, just like the ones on Monomoy, Brant Point, and Sconset, were only built by workers. In 1840, a picket line across Straight Wharf would have put everyone off their breakfasts. The last thing Starbuck, Coffin, and Macy would have wanted was an International Brotherhood of Whalers. It was never Cripple Creek, Lowell, or Matewan. Nantucket has never been a hot bed of worker’s rights. So, for most of the well-heeled visitors on Main Street, the only unionized workers they have ever met pulled them over on the Polpis Road. And guess where that 1% comes for lobster salad and blueberry lemonade? Today, less then 10% of all workers are unionized while, at the same time, the top 1% owns 35% of the net worth of the country. As the CEO wages have risen and the workers wages have slipped, unions have faded from America and from Nantucket. Since Ronald Reagan, the economy has been splitting between the “have-a- Yukons” and “the have-a-bikes.” Since 1978, the average wage of a CEO has increased 1480% while the average worker has seen their wages hold steady or fall. The billionaires remain and they expect quality service. The mowing millionaires have moved to Florida, North Carolina, or Mashpee. The billionaires found a cheaper way to get the lawns they want for the summer: they let their accountants find a contractor who will hire sub-contractors who will find people to “grind the gig work” and pluck the grass out of the brick driveways for cash. I remember seeing those millionaires bouncing their lawnmowers in the back of Ford Explorers, with the handles pushed out a precarious back window. Two hours later, the bricks were weed-free and ready for the gleaming summer rides-one a Mini Cooper, the other a silver Yukon.Īt one point in the recent past, Nantucket was where millionaires mowed the lawns of billionaires. In one brick driveway, four women bent over and pulled slight shoots of grass and weeds from between the bricks. Instead, squads of white-shirted workers descend on the “property” and prepare it for the weekend. This close to town, the property values have entered into the Platinum Circle, so most of the yards aren’t waiting for Chad to get off the Rhodes 19 at the yacht club and get on the Toro in the backyard. Somebody pruned them by hand, fertilized the dirt with the right acidic mix to get bridal white blooms, and gave them lots of water. This summer, these hydrangea have bloomed, as have the hedges. On a day that a billionaire would have designed for his pleasure, I walked up Pleasant Street and headed to town.
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