For the first time ever, we have five different generations of workers all at once. As lifespan goes up and costs follow, more workers are delaying retirement as the newest crop, Gen Z, enters the workforce. This has presented new challenges when it comes to intergenerational collaboration and interpersonal relationships in the workplace.
This week, we’re shining a spotlight on workplace challenges in "Valley Spotlight: Multi-Generational Workforce."
Today, we look at an author who has worked just about every job you can think of in her not-that-long career.
Lydia Paar entered the workforce young. At age 14, to be exact. That might sound like child labor, but to her, it offered freedom and a way to make a little money. Her first job? As a Sandwich Artist at Subway. And it was on from there.
She documents it all in her new book “The Entrance is the Exit: Essays on Escape.” But she says what started out as a book about all of the weird jobs that she’s had turned into something deeper that explored class, labor and mobility.
Paar joined The Show to talk about how she felt about starting in the workforce at such a young age.
Full conversation
LYDIA PAAR: To me, it was a good thing in terms of learning about the working world kind of right away, getting into it early. So Subway, the Sandwich Artist, was the first job. And then from there went to Blockbuster, and then from there a place called Country Bill’s Steakhouse. And those were all in high school. I did have a job at the mall that I did not write about, because I only lasted a month.
And then it was trying to join the military to pay for college. I was planning to be an Army reservist. And then from there it’s been bartender, hostel worker — like front desk worker. I worked at training an AI bot for several years, which was one of the more recent jobs, and then teaching adjunct faculty. And so I was a landscaper, cook, prep cook. There’s been a lot.
LAUREN GILGER: There’s been a lot. It’s a list. It’s a list. Okay. So we have to talk about Subway a little bit more because this is the first chapter of the book. You title it “Escape Artist,” which sort of plays on the sandwich artist thing.
And I want to get to that idea of escape in a moment. But tell us first about the issues that come up right away. This book seems to be about dealing with class in the workforce right away because you’re 14, and you talk about friends from wealthier families coming, thinking it’s fun that you work there. What was that like?
PAAR: So I went to a Catholic high school. I was on scholarship, and my mom worked really hard to pay for it, being a recently divorced mom and living in our grandma's kind of attic area. So for me, it was like, “OK, this is maybe going to be my ticket out to something.”
I had a lot of friends from that Catholic school that didn't have to work. They didn’t have jobs, so they had a lot more free time. It was fun for them to come in and ask me for free sandwiches. It was fun. It was amusing. They would try to have jalapeño pepper eating contests.
And meanwhile, I’m kind of on the floor. I’m expected to be cleaning and helping customers and wiping things down and prepping stuff in the back. And so it was maybe a first moment of, “Oh, there are different things that different people have to do. Yeah, it’s not all the same.”
GILGER: So as you outlined there, you have worked jobs on all sides of the spectrum, but it sounds like there have been common themes throughout many of those experiences, whether you’re in the service industry — working at Subway or Blockbuster when you’re 14 or 15 — or whether you’re working in customer service or the job you mentioned about training an AI bot.
PAAR: Yeah. And granted, I have not obviously not worked all of the different kinds of jobs there are to work in the world. Most of them have been in some way sort of customer service based or customer service adjacent. But something I think about a lot lately is how people in these roles are treated, how you’re expected to be on and available and perfect, almost like a robot yourself for people who are expecting some kind of a service from you.
And I think that's a throughline from, you know, working at a very public facing job like Blockbuster or Subway or a restaurant, or training the bot where I was sort of veiled behind the artificial intelligence that was between me and the customers that were part of the training process.
And even as a teacher, there’s a certain level of expectation around the kind of service that you’re supposed to provide. And I think that what I’m hoping that people start to think about more is the humanness, humanness of the people who are doing these jobs.
GILGER: There’s almost a level of violence as a theme throughout this, too. Not abuse in like a child labor abuse kind of way, but the lack of humanity.
PAAR: Yeah, it’s unfortunate because I feel like I learned kind of early on in some of those very public facing customer service roles that a lot of people, a lot of my coworkers would resort to drug addiction or drinking. Not to say that any of that in and of itself is — I don’t have a moral judgment about that. But I think that a lot of behaviors were maybe sort of used as remedies for the stresses of the workplace. Finding some kind of escape.
This is something that Barbara Ehrenreich also talked about in “Nickel and Dimed” some years ago. She wrote that book over a decade ago.
GILGER: This book really reminded me of that. Yes.
PAAR: The role that you play at work and the way that work works, it really does start to impact your personal relationships, your self-esteem, your conception of yourself, your idea about your own mobility in the working world, how much you actually have the capacity to change your life. And some of that has to do with how much you’re getting paid. A lot of that has to do with how much you’re getting paid, too.
But I feel like when you’re in a role as a worker and you don’t have a lot of choice and you don’t have a lot of mobility, there is an inescapable city from certain kinds of violence, you know, whether it’s abusiveness from a customer or whether it’s coping mechanisms or whether it’s a loss of faith or hope in your own ability to make change. I do think that there are many different kinds of violence that are worth talking about with relationship to the kind of work you do and the kind of class that you find yourself in at any point in time.
GILGER: So right, that inescapability that you just mentioned there, I wanted to ask you about this because the subtitle of the book is “Essays on Escape.” And as we mentioned, the first chapter is called “An Escape Artist,” which is a reference to the Sandwich Artist job.
But what are you getting at there? Like, what are we escaping, or what are you escaping in these essays?
PAAR: That’s a really good question. I’m escaping a lot of things in the essays, and I think that part of it has to do with job stuff and financial stuff. So class economics, things like that. And part of part of that, which is connected, would be like bad relationships or friendships that aren’t quite maybe as positive as we think, or even ideologies, worldviews, ways of moving through the world, bad habits.
I think that the essay started out as a framework around jobs. Like that was the skeleton. That was kind of the artifice behind it. Like, “I could frame a lot of things around jobs that I’ve had.” And then it kind of went out to these other places where it was like, “What kinds of things am I trying to get to a better place with, on the whole?”
But I’m attempting to end with a hopeful message because I am an optimistic person. Like you do have the power, I think we do have the power to make ourselves better people, better collaborators, better Interactors, better to each other.
So there are better places to escape to, to form the realities that we actually want to live. But it ends up being kind of a prevailing question, overarching question like how malleable are our positions? How much personal work do we have to do in order to to be conscious of what we’re trying to get out of systems that we’re trying to get out of, and how do we have a different vision if we’re doing this completely by imagination, if what we know is the things that aren’t working, how do we imagine something that could work?
