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More updates about work! Which I'm still going to be slightly cagey about!
First, there's
this link from the UFCW 3000 website—and I must stress that, as of right now, what's written there is
old news: it's from Friday, but it brought about more anxiety and stress about what may happen with my job (and all of our jobs) from then until Tuesday this week, than I have felt since the early days of covid. There's so much more about the specificity of stress on potential contingency plans at the office and specifically with my job, but it's really in my best interests not to get into detail about it here, except to say that it was deeply dispiriting.
In my post yesterday, I initially linked to the overall feed of updates at UFCW Local 3000, but I just went back to edit it, so that it links to the exact post, as linked above. At the time I posted yesterday, that post from Friday night was still the most recent on their website—but, as of now, it's
this one, about the tenative agreement they finally reached, after months of contention, well after midnight Tuesday night. It includes a list of "Key Tentative Agreements" that, when taken together, seem kind of astounding to me, given what we've been told for months now that we can't afford.
And then there's the
Seattle Times article, which was posted at 12:59 p.m., and neither Gabby nor I knew about it until a friend of hers texted it to her during our afternoon meeting. Those people work fast—and I suspect they had a draft at the ready for just in case the worst-case scenario actually did happen.
Still, at the time, the article was much shorter, and short on specifics. Online newspaper articles often get updated with more information later in the day though, so when I checked it again this morning, the article had indeed been updated, as of 5:07 last night. It even added confirmation that two of the ten on the Bargaining Committee had voted against the tentative agreement, with at least one staff member who plans to vote no on the contract next week.
At this point, though, I am far less worried about it. Honestly, this over-focus on the 2 out of 10 on the Bargaining Committee who voted no, and the "several union members" who said they will vote to reject the contract next week, serves no purpose other than an attempt to stir up shit. As I already noted, they managed to get an extraordinary number of things in this tentative agreement, and I suspect people at the stores are just as eager to settle all this once and for all, and move on, as we in the office are.
I get that the point is that there remains discontent in all of this, but here's the harsh reality: there's never a scenario in situations like this where everyone gets everything they want. That's fantasyland shit (as is the suggestion that anyone in entry-level positions get paid $35 an hour, which I haven't seen myself but have heard was on some of their buttons, and is batshit crazy talk). Capitalism sucks ass, but it's still the system we're all being forced to work in.
And again, I remain astounding by the number of concessions they did manage to get. Whatever the long-term consequences of that may be, I say: good for them. It's a strategy that tends to work: shoot for the stars and you might get the moon.
I'm writing a lot more about a lot of this than I would have dared to even last week, and believe me, there is a
lot I am still leaving out. But, I figure I can say mostly whatever the hell I want now, about information that is publicly available.
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As for last night, I went straight to a movie after work, at Pacific Place. It was called
I.S.S. and, while hardly terrible, it was
utterly forgettable. I had fun writing that review, though, which honestly makes me sound like more of a hater on the movie than I really was. It's just, the more you think about that movie, blandly entertaining as it is, the more dumb you realize it is.
Shobhit worked through the evening, getting home a bit after 9:30. I watched a couple episdes of season two of
Sort Of on Max. I'm so happy Laney recommended it to me, as I had never heard of it and I really love it. Shobhit hasn't watched it but he had heard of it, as he watches the CBC channel on cable constantly and they've clearly been promoting the current (and last), third season of the show.
The one sort of jarring thing about it is that season 2 picks up right where season 1 left off, but the two kids in the cast are clearly a year older. I guess that's just the kind of thing you have to deal with, with kid actors though.
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I just had my biweekly Zoom lunch with Karen. Holy shit, did I have a lot to catch her up on—when we had our last lunch two weeks ago, I had no idea what was coming. I still need to send her those links so she can get some of the more specific information.
She was running behind and had to push our lunch back from noon to 12:30, which is why I'm posting this a bit later than usual.
Anyway, that stuff took a solid half of the hour or more, and then we talked a bit about her Tulalip house construction. She also told me her dad, who died last year, would have been 94 tomorrow. Naturally she's been thinking about him. I should have asked about her mother, come to think of it. I usually do when her dad's passing comes up in conversation.
It also made me think of my mom, of course, and how I also think of her every year on her birthday (June 2), and every year on the day she died (July 1). I have also recently done some
extra organizing of all my photo albums of family reunions over the years, and it reminded me that Uncle Paul and Aunt Raenae passed away only a year apart: Uncle Paul in 2022 and Aunt Raenae in 2023. In an incredibly short amount of time, Grandma and Grandpa McQuilkin's five children, all alive as recently as two years ago, dwindled down to three.
It just made me think about how, the older you get, the more you deal with death. It's definitely one of my least favorite things about aging. It's even worse than thinking about turning fifty in two years! Okay, two years and three months. You know what I mean.
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[posted 1:37 pm]
