Working For The Man Is Taxing
Tags: Social Justice, Work, Starttheconvo

Layoffs can be hard but they’re often my favorite part, more so if a triumph follows. I honestly can’t remember leaving a job where I’d wanted to stay longer. Maybe I’m lucky but jitters aside, I’ve always been happy to leave. Jobs are a mostly source of constant frustration, fewer than half of Americans would say they are satisfied with their work. We’re either unhappy, disengaged, over skilled or just underemployed.

Working towards retirement seems like an imagined passageway — lasting maybe a few years or a lifetime, towards a vacation — permanent or not. Sounds like Catholic sentiment, work hard now and be find rewards in another life. The middle of three boys, I’ve probably produced and reproduced the least. But I do travel a lot and keep a few passion projects. Personally, I never saw the point in staying on a career course if you didn’t like the trajectory or didn’t respect your boss.

Though I wasn’t always a designer. Life is good now but sometimes I wonder if I’ve really advanced all that much since high school. Charging $65/hr in the late 90s to build websites gave me a distorted sense of money. Nearly every job since then has paid less per hour, often far less. Not that my teenage rates weren’t worth it. My first client, a pharmaceutical company only just took their decade old site offline and replaced it with a barebones landing page.

Maybe I wasn’t ready to work in technology or just didn’t have the design credentials that I ended up as a debt collection agent around my mid 20s. My Mom worked on the same team, and for Marlene, the immigrant dream meant being a well qualified lecturer from India but disqualified from teaching in Canada. So she ended up working in a large national banking center where the street names reflected the trade. Some twenty or so floors of Immigrants which gradually shifted to “old stock” Canadians the higher up you went in the building, until at last you reached the top floor.

But the ceiling for Brown women must not be very high in Canadian corporate culture, seen in the wage gap between them and White native borns. They’re often over-skilled but discounted. Some say that things have slowly been improving, since we’ve normalized the visible minority discount somewhere between a 10–20% wage gap. As an Indian American living in the Bay Area, I have a mere 9% marginalized tax rate, a kind of systemic tax levied on women, visible minorities and women minorities. That’s in addition to the 9.3% marginal tax rate of California. 21st century equality…

Either way, I’ve never cared much for working in a call center, living in the ‘burbs or being discounted. On my 25th birthday, I gave the bank a weeks notice and followed my girlfriend to Michigan. “Y’all can all go fuck yourself!” That’s kinda what I imagined a future in America as.

So I just left. I quit Canada cold. I learned to stop saying sorry all the time. And about a year after I left, that succubus Stephen Harper became Prime Minister and he’s been there since.

My Canadian socialism gradually turned Californian libertarian — part mystic, part hedonist — but I knew early on, looking at upper management in Canada, that I was better off in new company.

Thanks Obama.