Down the Up Escalator by Barbara Garson

during an early marriage (“Ellen and I have been married thirty-three years,” he was anxious to tell me about his second wife), a corporate downsizing, a brief return to work for a family business (“owned by a Jewish family that I’d left on good terms”), and finally: “Twenty-four years ago yesterday, I went to work for Big Box, and I’ve been there ever since. I had opportunities to go other places. It’s sort of ironic, because I’m working a strange shift right now. But the reason I never left Big Box is because I was always able to be on days there, which left me the evenings and the weekends for my family and one of my hobbies, which is refereeing soccer.
    “With the shift I’m on right now,” Mr. Kenny said, “I can’t referee soccer on the weekends if I want to spend any time with my family.”
    “Michael says that you worked all these years for this company and now they’d like a cheaper payroll—that’s Michael’s interpretation—so they put you on a shift they hoped you’d quit.”
    “Trying to bring younger people in, forcing the older people out; it’s a constant battle. Fortunately, I’ve been able to survive. I don’t put stock in my
own
abilities to maintain that employment. I trulybelieve it’s through the grace of God and the strength and perseverance He gives me to say the right things to the right people.
    “I had to tell a vice president once that I’m trying to do my work as if I was doing it for my Creator. If that makes you happy, I’m happy. If it doesn’t, I’ll just go over somewhere else.”
    “And yet you’ve stayed?”
    “I’ve stayed. I’ve worked under eight facility vice presidents. They average about three years apiece.”
    Chuck’s son-in-law and stepdaughter raise two thousand acres of feed corn and soybeans on a farm that’s been in the son-in-law’s family since the nineteenth century. The previous fall the couple had to be in Russia by Thanksgiving to meet the child they were adopting. (The very granddaughter, now two years old, whom Pawh-Pawh just spoke to on the phone.) “But we had a real wet fall, so they got a late start on harvest, and it was all hands on deck.”
    “And you helped in the fields?”
    “I learned to drive tractors, semis, grain trucks, taking them down to the river to …”
    “That smile again,” I said. “It’s almost like your grandchild’s smile.”
    “Yeah, and we got to be out there with the grandchildren. Worked long hours; got this camaraderie—my son-in-law, his brother, my best friend, Len, who was a vice president at a paint company who got downsized. Our church people would come out and drive trucks and … I get emotional,” Mr. Kenny apologized, “but friends, church farmers, all came to help. We finished four days before they had to go to Russia.”
    “Michael says you’re thinking of retiring and working on the farm?”
    “Yes, being a hired hand.”
    “That’s hard work.”
    “It’s hard work, but at least you get to work with people you truly, truly care about. I have good relations with my longtime co-workers at Big Box,” he hastened to say, “but they’re not my family.”
    In gross outline, retailers like Big Box import huge shipments of goods from Asia and disperse them in smaller lots from depots around the United States. In the area that Chuck manages, seven supervisors oversee about two hundred hourly associates who sort, mark, and ticket merchandise, then send it back out in the assortments of colors and sizes appropriate for each of their stores in the region.
    It occurred to me that most of this could be done on the Asian end without an intermediate stop at a distribution center in Indiana. Maybe it will be eventually. In the meantime, the company had just done an old-fashioned time-and-motion study—how many seconds to open the first flap of this or that carton, how many seconds to unclip a tag, fold a sleeve, and so on. This resulted in new quotas that had already been