Solidarity
“We need you all to communicate better and ask for help when you need it, okay?”
“Yes,” we all murmured, nodding and smiling. We were being given a little lecture or pep talk, I couldn’t tell which, at the end of another shift in which we’d failed to finish everything on time. I couldn’t even be annoyed because their message was so laughably baseless. It had been a night with higher par counts for every type of pastry. I’d repeatedly asked for help with the 700 doughnuts I was responsible for, but hadn’t gotten any until 7am for the simple reason that everyone was too busy.
The most redeeming aspect of my job is my relationship with the other night cooks. I’ve honestly never seen better communication among a team. We’re checking in all night, we notify each other immediately when we have a couple minutes free, and have no problems telling each other directly what kind of help would be most effective. We talk through any change in process that could improve efficiency, or ask why something is done a certain way if it doesn’t appear logical. We get out of each other’s way, figuratively and often literally in such a small space, and lend a hand, quite literally. Often we don’t need to say anything for someone else to know what needs to be done, and do it.
As we huddled together in the basement calmly accepting our scolding, I felt our solidarity in my bones. Solidarity is something I’ve thought about more and more over the years, but it was always a little fuzzier in the tech world. So many startups aim for a casualness that dissolves professional boundaries, which can still be cruel when power is ultimately asserted. One of my most traumatic experiences in tech was being fired by the startup founders who were my close friends.
You could say that I’m friends with my coworkers at the bakery, but that doesn’t adequately describe our relationship. Friends perform certain functions for each other, like offering sympathy and absorbing emotional baggage. We don’t bring that baggage to work. The fundamental pact of our relationship is to not make the shift any harder for each other than it already is. That sounds simplistic but is quite powerful and necessary. It allows us to operate under immense stress without turning against each other. We depend on each other too much to make it if we let our frustration get in the way of working together.
I hope the solidarity that I’ve discovered at the bakery can be extracted from the suffering that fuels it. All food work is hard, but the many small aggravating or insulting decisions made by my workplace create a clear Them against which an Us arises in sharp definition. My loyalty is fierce, but it extends to my colleagues and not to management. In a more egalitarian situation, how would it look different? There are beautiful aspects of this work that I’m coming to appreciate, and I try to conjure an image of how it could all flow together. The solidarity of the workers creating an atmosphere that feels good for them and for customers, and that further extends out into the world.