Down the Up Escalator by Barbara Garson Page B

me to “enjoy.” “
Very
comfortable.”
    “We had the old one for twenty years,” Mr. Kenny said, defending his purchase. “I could pay this off right now, but I’d have to go into my retirement savings. So I thought I’d just wait to give them the money since I can do it at no cost.”
    I could imagine how Michael derided the new couch bought on credit even though at no interest.
    “One thing my faith has taught me,” Mr. Kenny declared, “you cannot be a slave to two masters. Only one. With debt you’re at the mercy of your employer. If they say ‘You will do this,’ you can’t say ‘No I won’t: I’ll just leave,’ because you have bills to pay. And if you have bills, you’re subject to the terms that job puts on you. Employers know that.
    “But Michael has no debt. Who’s he responsible to? He can pack up and go. If the Lord tells him to go to Nineveh like he told Jonah, he can go. When you’re in debt, you can’t do that.”
    What a thought! One’s own son might be called to preach to Nineveh. Michael’s unshorn locks may even be a sign of his readiness, for they make it difficult for him to be tied to an encumbering steady job. But what did this say about Chuck himself? Does he believe that the debt he’d incurred by dutifully taking care of so many people over his lifetime disqualified him from responding to God’s call? It must be terrible for him to feel that way.
    I asked Mr. Kenny if the long unreimbursed hours were because of the recession. “Does the company thank you for helping them through their downturn?”
    “Big Box is doing extremely well financially,” he asserted. “And they also own Medium Box [a more upscale chain]. We’re just short-staffed.”
    Big Box and its parent company were indeed profitable. During 2010, the year I spoke to Chuck, they returned considerable money to shareholders through stock buybacks. The remaining shareholders enjoyed an increased rate of return on their capital while employing several thousand fewer workers. It may be a smaller company, but productivity—the value of output per paid hour—was up, and investors took a greater share of that in profit.
    America’s successful firms have traditionally increased labor productivity by giving their employees the most advanced equipment in the world to work with. Some automation may have been going on at Big Box. But at the distribution center, Chuck Kenny increased the company’s productivity by the low-tech means of donating free days of work and by enduring the tension that comes from feeling understaffed.
    I recently heard about a Walmart-owned warehouse in Elwood, Illinois, that’s pioneered the practice of paying the loading crews on piecework. If they have to wait for a container, they can take home less than the minimum $7.50 an hour. Someone showed me the pay stub of a man who worked 12.5 hours for $57.81. This primitive form of increasing labor productivity actually militates against efficient scheduling and investment in new machinery. It’s a third-world way of squeezing out profits.
    Chuck Kenny is not a complainer. He was unhappy about the way he was being treated at Big Box. He’s also regretful about his own career choices, and at his age these regrets are naturally on his mind. But he only talked to me about them because I asked. I didn’t have to ask, however, to hear about God, the farm, or his grandchildren.
    “I never realized being a grandparent was going to be like this,” he said, welling up. “My grandchildren think I’m
it
. ‘Pawh-Pawh.’ The twins said that even before they said ‘Mimi.’ I’ve always been the one that was down on the floor with them. I’m the one that takes the boys out on the farm, into the woods, down to the creek. Adventures. And Isabella wants to do whatever the boys do.”
    The Kennys’ church has a congregation of about a hundred. They’d been meeting in a school gymnasium till the housing bust gave them the chance to get