The Drawer

114 the minnesota review Tom Wayman The Drawer On each job, there's a drawer in the superintendent's desk or filing cabinets of the office manager or at the foreman's station which contains amid pencil stubs faded memos and directives blank time cards snapshots of people who no longer work here a pad of permission slips to take your tools out of the plant for the weekend our right to determine how each shift will feel: die way the task will be divided who works where me sort of coordination needed, if any die quality of the finished product the effect our employment and that which we produce has on people's lives and more and more— everything mat should be ours because our daily existence goes into this job and hence we as free adults have the right to manage our work together. To alter it, improve it abolish it. What else could democracy mean? For while this absent part of us is held somewhere at the jobsite, what can't they do to us off work? wayman 115 When kings and queens reigned they claimed divine, and hence natural, law justified their privileges. Now the owners argue they risk their money in this enterprise and thus they are entitled to establish the procedures by which to control us here: as if our contribution —our thought and actions and selves each day — is worth less than dollars. But though what we lack is jumbled inside a drawer in the dark with other objects considered peripheral to the job no one finds justice by obtaining the key to the compartment for herself or himself or with the blessing of the company. That which we are missing is locked up in the people we work with and only through them can we secure at last what belongs to us inside that drawer. ...