It was midway through the morning when I started to hear them
groan, men who hadn’t counted on being tired before lunch. A group
of four was helping me and my wife move into our new place in
Michigan, and the sheer quantity — and weight — of our stuff was
beginning to tell. We had several large pieces, enough boxes for a
small village, and myriad IKEA components that are difficult to
carry. There was a time when I moved myself, with the assistance of
a family member or two, in a matter of hours. My wife, bless her,
has relegated those days to the ash heap of history.
The foreman and his assistant worked mainly from the moving
truck, unloading our things. My attention was soon focused on the
two movers doing most of the heavy lifting, bringing our stuff up
the driveway and inside. Both men were black, between the ages of
perhaps 25 and 32, though I’m not much good at guessing these
things. One guy was powerfully built, well over six feet and two
hundred pounds. He wore thick glasses that seemed to have been
pasted to his face but that became more crooked as the day wore on.
His partner was maybe 150 pounds, five foot something, and probably
the younger of the two. I guided them as they went back and forth
down one flight of stairs, bearing furniture, appliances, and boxes
of books I will never read.
“Man!” huffed the smaller guy at one point, gallantly trying to
carry two book boxes at once. “Someone sure likes to read a lot.”
Someone wants to read a lot, I told him, and he tried to laugh but
gasped for air instead.
The big guy asked where we had moved from, and was surprised to
hear New York City. “Really?” he asked, and weighed his words so as
not to give offense. “You left there…and came here?” He
seemed perplexed and his glasses did, too.
Throughout the day the two men worked in good humor, and we
shared several laughs together. They were solicitous of where we
wanted things placed, even as their steps grew weary and their
breathing frantic. Seeing that my wife and I had numbered the
boxes, and that I was checking them off on a clipboard, they
started calling out the numbers:
“57 and 81,” said the little guy, almost collapsing into a
corner with more book boxes.
“No number on this one,” huffed the big guy, carrying one of our
evil IKEA pieces. Something about this gesture of theirs touched
me, and I wanted to know more about where these men came from.
It turned out they were not employed with the moving company but
with a local temporary work agency; they were laborers, not
professional movers.
“They pay us between five-fifty and five ninety-seven,” said the
little guy, tossing an empty box and shaking his head. The big guy,
wrapping up some moving blankets, nodded when I asked if I had
heard correctly.
As we were settling up, the foreman told me that he paid the
agency $15 an hour for their services. When he was out of sight, I
gave the two men a tip that essentially doubled their hourly take
for the work, bringing them closer to $10 an hour.
THEY WERE SUCH DECENT SORTS they lingered in the mind long
afterwards. I remembered that throughout my life I had dealt with
men of their ilk, men without a lot of education or skills working
hard for a pittance. And when I was younger the inclination was to
grasp at traditional liberal solutions — higher taxes, hikes in
the minimum wage, jobs programs, and the like.
The old saying echoed in my mind: “If you aren’t liberal when
you’re young, you haven’t got a heart; if you aren’t conservative
when you’re older, you haven’t got a brain.” A liberal would want
to force the agency to pay above the minimum wage for work like
this, even if the work does not have a market value that justifies
that rate. If companies are only willing to pay $15 an hour for
help of this kind, how can the agency pay its employees much more
than minimum wage and still make a profit? Of course, the
possibility exists that the market will bear more than $15, and
that the agency could charge companies more, and pay its employees
more in turn.
If the agency is charging artificially low rates to spur more
business and corner the market, and these practices are found to be
unethical or illegal, there are remedies. If their practices are
merely harsh, but legal, employees have options — switch to
another firm, find a way to acquire new skills, or move elsewhere
where the climate is more favorable. None of these options is easy.
All are part of the real world of capitalism, about which the less
romanticism, the better (the less hysteria, too). Capitalism, as
someone once said, is really a liberal’s word for life. And we all
know how fair life is.
We’ve had 40 years and more of liberal social spending to try to
make it more so. We put our money where our hearts were, and to
hell with our heads. When we started, the illegitimacy rate in the
black community was about 20 percent. Now it’s 70 percent. The
poverty rate, for all that high-priced compassion, has barely
budged in the intervening time, and the quality of education in
urban communities remains wretched. With the exception of the civil
rights laws, precious little that was enacted during these decades
has done anything to help men like these two laborers to a better
life, let alone a higher wage.
Adapting the old song from Casablanca, it’s still the
same old story: a tale of value and money. If you can’t provide the
first, nothing will help you get the second. How the economy
ascribes value has very little to do with justice, but if one meets
those standards of value, he will generally be treated — and
compensated — justly. To expect more than this from any system of
economics is to expect that human needs and wants will match human
ideals and aspirations. They are different things.
I liked these men and wished them well, but wishing is a poor
substitute for truth. As I watched the moving van drive away, I
reminded myself of that…and reminded, and reminded. The truth
has its own rewards, but the heaviness in the heart remains.
