Boo passes on as news to him and possibly others that people working Thanksgiving do so because employers make them and not because they want to.
And in both shock and dismay that "workers count for nothing in today's corporate world."
And yesterday?
Dreiser's hero in An American Tragedy at 16 gets a job as a bellhop at a prestigious luxury hotel.
His work week comprises four days of 6 hours on and 6 off and three 6-hour days.
A sixty-six hour week with such poor pay the hotel allows their bellboys, elevator operators, and housekeeping staff to eat in the kitchen, and most of their income is tips.
No holidays, no paid time off, no insurance.
Dreiser has no idea how exhausting a schedule of six on and six off is and gives his characters busy and eventful social lives in off hours.
But I have been on guard duty and I know, and it leaves you constantly too tired to want to waste your chances on anything but sleep, and you never get enough of it.
My late maternal grandmother, born before 1890, worked fourteen hours, six days a week, as a young girl, all of it straight time, with no insurance, no job security, and no paid time off.
Exhausted children, beaten into it, and brutalized adolescents in those years, staggering with fatigue, falling asleep on their feet, worked horrific hours at dangerous machines in unsafe factories for employers with no responsibility for injuries, permanent disabilities, or death.
I suspect Boo's grandmothers did nothing of the kind.
Some labor historians have vouched for the truth of claims of the slavocracy that slavery appeared downright paternalistic, compared to the treatment of free labor in the North.
Maybe it did, sometimes, after the importation of slaves from Africa was stopped.
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