Someone Is Stealing Your Life

*&* Michael Ventura

Michael Ventura is a U.S. newspaper columnist and novelist who has held a variety of jobs. The
following article, "Someone Is Stealing Your Life," originally appeared in the newspaper L.A.
Weekly in 1990 and was reprinted the following year in Utne Reader - a monthly magazine that
includes articles with alternative and often socially critical points of view. This selection generated
considerable controversy among the editorial staff of Utne Reader, some finding it "misleading and
shortsighted" and others "a moving and accurate description of most Americans' experience in the
workplace."

Most American adults wake around 6 or 7 in the morning. Get to work at 8 or 9. Knock off
around 5. Home again, 6-ish. Fifty weeks a year. For about 45 years.
Most are glad to have the work, but don't really choose it. They may dream, they may
study and even train for work they intensely want; but sooner ordater, for most, that doesn't
pan out. Then they take what they can and make do. Most have families to support, so they
need their jobs more than their jobs admit to needing them. They're employees. And, as
employees, most have no say whatsoever about much of anything on the job. The purpose
and standards of the product or service, the short- and long-term goals of the company, are
considered quite literally "none of their business" - though these issues drastically influence
every aspect of their lives. No matter that they've given years to the day-to-day survival of
the business; employees (even when they're called "managers") mostly take orders. Or else.
It seems an odd way to structure a free society: Most people have little or no authority over
what they do five days a week for 45 years. Doesn't sound much like "life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness."1 Sounds like a nation of drones.
It used to be that one's compensation for being an American drone was the freedom to
live in one's own little house, in one's own quirky way, in a clean and safe community in
which your children had the chance to be happier, richer drones than you. But working stiffs
can't afford houses now, fewer communities are clean, none

life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: Natural rights guaranteed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776).
working stiffs: Ordinary, hardworking people.

CORE READING 2 Someone Is Stealing Your Life

are safe, and your kids' prospects are worse. (This condition may be because for five days a
week, for 45 years, you had no say - while other people have been making decisions that
haven't been good for you.) I'm not sure whose happiness we've been pursuing lately, but
one thing is clear: It's not the happiness of those who've done our society's work.
On the other hand - or so they say - you're free, and if you don't like your job you can
pursue happiness by starting a business of your very own, by becoming an "independent"
entrepreneur. But you're only as independent as your credit rating. And to compete in the
business community, you'll find yourself having to treat others - your employees - as much
like slaves as you can get away with. Pay them as little as they'll tolerate and give them no
say in anything, because that's what's most efficient and profitable. Money is the absolute
standard. Freedom, and the dignity and well-being of one's fellow creatures, simply don't
figure in the basic formula.
This may seem a fairly harsh way to state the rules America now lives by. But if I sound
radical, it's not from doing a lot of reading in some cozy university, then dashing off to
dispense opinion as a prima donna of the alternative press. I learned about drones by droning.
From ages 18 to 29 (minus a few distracted months at college when I was 24) I worked the
sort of jobs that I expected to have all
my life: typesetter for two years, tape
transcriber4 for three, proofreader (a
grossly incompetent one) for a few weeks,
messenger for a few months, and secretary
(yes, secretary) for a year and a half. Then
I stopped working steadily and the jobs got
funkier: hospital orderly, vacuum-cleaner
salesman, Jack-in-the-Box counterperson,3
waiter, nail hammerer, cement mixer, toilet
scrubber, driver.
It was during the years of office work
that I caught on: I got two weeks' paid
vacation per year. A year has 52 weeks.
Even a comparatively unskilled,
uneducated worker like me, who couldn't
(still can't) do fractions or long division -
even I had enough math to figure that two
goes into 52 . . . how many times/ Twenty-
six. Meaning it would take me 26 years on
the job to accumulate one year for myself.
And I could only have that in 26 pieces, so
it wouldn't even feel like a
' prima donna of the alternative press: Prominent
journalist in the nontraditional news media. (The term
prima donna, the principal female singer in an opera
company, can also refer to a temperamental, conceited
person.)
4 tape transcriber: Someone who types copies of material recorded on cassette tape.
5
Jack-in-the-Box counterperson: Employee taking food orders at the Jack-in-the-Box fast food restaurant.

CHAPTER FIVE Work

year. In other words, no time was truly mine. My boss merely allowed me an illusion of
freedom, a little space in which to catch my breath, in between the 50 weeks that I lived that
he owned. My employer uses 26 years of my life for every year I get to keep. And what do
I get in return for this enormous thing I am giving/ What do I get in return for my lifel
A paycheck that's as skimpy as they can get away with. If I'm lucky, some health 7
insurance. (If I'm really lucky, the employer's definition of "health" will include my teeth and my
eyes - maybe even my mind.) And, in a truly enlightened workplace, just enough pension or
"profit sharing" to keep me sweet but not enough to make life different. And that's it.
Compare that to what my employer gets: If the company is successful, he (it's 8 usually a
he) gets a standard of living beyond my wildest dreams, including what I would consider
fantastic protection for his family, and a world of access that I can only pitifully mimic by
changing channels on my TV. His standard of living wouldn't be possible without the labor of
people like me - but my employer doesn't think that's a very significant fact. He certainly doesn't
think that this fact entitles me to any say about the business. Not to mention a significant share
in ownership. Oh no. The business is his to do with as he pleases, and he owns my work. Period.
I don't mean that bosses don't work. Most work hard, and have the satisfaction 9 of knowing
that what they do is theirs. Great. The problem is: What I do is theirs too. Yet if my companion
workers and I didn't do what we do - then nobody would be anybody's. So how come what we
do is hardly ours? How come he can get rich while we're lucky to break even? How come he
can do anything he wants with the company without consulting us, yet we do the bulk of the
work and take the brunt of the consequences?
The only answer provided is that the employer came up with the money to start Ю the
enterprise in the first place; hence, he and his money people decide everything and get all the
benefits.
Excuse me, but that seems a little unbalanced. It doesn't take into account и that nothing
happens unless work is done. Shouldn't it follow that, work being so important, the doers of that
work deserve a more just formula for measuring who gets what? There's no doubt that the people
who risked or raised the money to form a company, or bail it out of trouble, deserve a fair return
on their investment - but is it fair that they get everything] It takes more than investment and
management to make a company live. It takes the labor, skill, and talent of the people who do
the company's work. Isn't that an investment? Doesn't it deserve a fair return, a voice, a share of
the power?
I know this sounds awfully simplistic, but no school ever taught me anything 12 about the
ways of economics and power (perhaps because they didn't want me to know), so I had to figure
it out slowly, based on what I saw around me every day. And I saw:
That it didn't matter how long I worked or what a good job I did. I could get 13 incremental
raises, perhaps even medical benefits and a few bonuses, but I would not be allowed power over
my own life - no power over the fundamental decisions

profit sharing: System in which employees receive part of the profits of a business enterprise.

CORE READING 2 Someone Is Stealing Your Life 253

my company makes, decisions on which my life depends. My future is in the hands of
people whose names I often don't know and whom I never meet. Their investment
is the only factor taken seriously. They feed on my work, on my life, but reserve for
themselves all power, prerogative, and profit.
Slowly, very slowly, I came to a conclusion that for me was fundamental: My 14
employers are stealing my life.
They. Are. Stealing. My. Life. 15
If the people who do the work don't own some part of the product and don't 16
have any power over what happens to their enterprise - they are being robbed. You are
being robbed. And don't think for a minute that those who are robbing you don't know
they are robbing you. They know how much they get from you and how little they give
back. They are thieves. They are stealing your life.
The assembly-line worker isn't responsible for the decimation of the American 17
auto industry,7 for instance. Those responsible are those who've been hurt least,
executives and stockholders who, according to the Los Angeles Times, make 50 to 500
times what the assembly-line worker makes, but who've done a miserable job of
managing. Yet it's the workers who suffer most. Layoffs, plant closings, and such are no
doubt necessary - like the bumper stickers say, shit happens8 - but it is not necessary that
workers have no power in the fundamental management decisions involved.
' decimation of the American auto industry: Drastic reduction in U.S. car production in the 1980s because of a
severe economic recession and intense competition from foreign car manufacturers.
° shit Itappens: Negative things naturally occur.

CHAPTER FIVE Work

 As a worker, I am not an "operating cost." I am how the job gets done. I am the job. I am the company. Without
me and my companion workers, there's nothing. I'm willing to take my lumps in a world in which little is certain, but
I deserve a say. Not just some cosmetic "input," but significant power in good times or bad. A place at the table where
decisions are made. Nothing less is fair. So nothing less is moral.
And if you, as owners or management or government, deny me this - then you are choosing not to be moral, and
you are committing a crime against me. Do you expect me not to struggle?
Do you expect us to be forever passive while you get rich by stealing our lives?