Lust

Before the union, there was the shape-up, and I stood in it.

You gathered before dawn at the foot of the pier, a hundred men and more in a ragged half-circle, and the hiring boss came out and walked the line. He walked it the way a stockman walks a pen at the county fair—running his eye over the goods, thumbing a shoulder here, squeezing an arm there, picking out the firm young backs and waving off the gray heads and the worn-out. And every man in that half-circle arranged his face to be wanted. You stood a little straighter. You tried to look strong and willing and cheap, because to be looked over and passed by was to go home with nothing and to put nothing on the table that night.

And the boss, walking the line, felt nothing for any man in it. He was not cruel, particularly. He simply did not see men. He saw arms. He saw backs. He saw a quantity of lifting to be had at the lowest price, a day's tonnage in human form. He saw a use. The man inside the body—the one with the sick wife and the boy who wanted to be a ballplayer and the bad dreams and the small stubborn hopes—that man was not present to him at all, any more than the grain of a board is present to the man who only wants to know if it will hold a nail.

That is Lust. Not the heat of the blood that the preachers carry on about—that is the bedroom's affair and no business of mine. The deadly thing, the seventh and the last of our seven thieves, is the appetite to use a person as a thing: to look at a living human being and register only what can be taken from him, to want the use and never the man, and to throw away the husk the moment the use is spent. And what it steals, this thief, is the most basic possession a person owns—more basic than his wage, more basic than his time. It steals his standing as a someone. It looks at a person and turns him into a thing.

I have saved Lust for last, and I have done it on purpose, because it is the bottom of the well the other six are drawn from. Greed is the hand that grabs; Gluttony is the mouth that will not close; Lust is the eye that looks at a person and sees only a use. And here, laying down the seventh, I will tell you the thing I held back through all the others. Strip the fine coat off any one of these thieves and you find this same act underneath. Pride that looks down its nose, Greed that grabs, Wrath standing at the door with its club, Envy setting neighbor against neighbor, Sloth that cannot be troubled to see you, Gluttony burning the oranges—every last one of them begins the same way: by looking at a human being and seeing a thing to be used, moved, blamed, or discarded. Lust is simply that act with nothing else laid over it. It is the rock at the bottom. It is the sin the other six are dressed-up versions of.

The first lie of Lust is that a worker is a resource. Listen to the word they file you under—“human resources”—and hear what it is telling you. It puts the living man in the ledger on the same page as the coal and the timber and the kilowatts: an input, a supply, a thing to be procured as cheaply as possible and consumed in the making of something else. A person has a history and a claim on you. A resource has only a price.

The second lie is that a bargain struck under the threat of hunger is a free bargain. He agreed to the terms. He took the job. Nobody held a gun to his head. As though a choice between this wage and the gutter were a choice at all; as though a consent wrung out of a man by his children's empty stomachs were the same free thing as a consent given by a man who could walk away. It is the oldest sleight of hand in the whole confidence game—to make a thing done to a desperate person look like a thing chosen by a free one.

The third lie is the cruelest, because it asks you to be grateful: that to be used is to be wanted, and to be wanted is a kind of worth. Be flattered, it says. The market desires you. The boss chose you off the line. The customer can't take his eyes off you—isn't that something? It paints the leash as a compliment and tells the used to feel honored by the using.

And mark that the using and the discarding are not the system breaking down. They are the system running exactly as built. A person costs you something—care, patience, a future. A resource is merely spent. The whole machinery of treating men as things exists for one reason: a thing is cheaper than a person, and you may throw it away without a pang.

Let me be fair, because there is a thing that looks like Lust from across the room and is the very opposite of it. Desire is not the thief. The body is not the thief. Wanting, attraction, love, pleasure, the plain animal joy of being alive—these are human and good and the thief has no claim on a single one of them. A man glad of his own strong back, glad to be of use to his people, head over heels in love, hungry for all the good of the world—there is no thief anywhere in that. The men who walked the shape-up line would love for you to confuse the two, so that any talk of dignity sounds like a sermon against joy. It is not.

So here is the test, the same plain test I have handed you in every one of these essays. Lust is not measured by how much a man wants. It is measured by whether he still sees the person in the one he wants something from. A boss may want the day's work done and want it badly, and still see the whole human being who does it—and that boss is no thief. The thief is the one who looks and sees only the arms. The sin was never the wanting. It was the erasing of the someone who stood behind the want.

And here, as in every one of these essays, I leave the pulpit to its own business. The old books file Lust in the bedroom—a private heat, a thing confessed and absolved between two souls. Let the preachers have your private life, all of it; I do not care who you love or how, and it is no fit subject for a labor paper. What I care about is the boss who can make a woman choose between her dignity and her rent—and the economy we built that put that power in his hand. Lust's true crime was never anything that happens in a bedroom. Its crime is that we made several million people cheap enough to be used and thrown away, and then had the nerve to call it a labor market.

The barons of our time have built Lust a machine, and its cruelest gear is the one that turns hunger into consent. Consider the woman who waits your table. The law in much of this country lets her employer pay her two dollars and thirteen cents an hour—a wage frozen solid since 1991, with its roots all the way back in the years just after slavery, when freed men and women were told to live on the goodwill of the people they served. The rest of her living she must coax, smile by smile, out of the pocket of whoever happens to sit down at her table. So when a customer's hand wanders, or his talk turns ugly, she runs the arithmetic that every woman in that trade carries in her head: her rent against her pride. To object is to risk the tip, and the tip is the rent.

It is no accident, then, that the restaurant trade is the single greatest source of the harassment complaints women bring before the government—at many times the rate of the working world at large—nor that women in the two-dollar states endure it at twice the rate of women in the states that pay a real wage, and are told to dress “sexier” three times as often besides. The harassment is not a flaw in the arrangement. The arrangement manufactures it. Pay a person too little to say no, and you have quietly sold the right to use her along with the right to employ her. And what is done in the open in the dining room is done in the dark wherever a worker can be made poor and frightened enough—the farmhand in the field who dares not report it, the housekeeper alone in a stranger's home, the immigrant told that a complaint means a one-way trip across the border. Power turns the workplace into a hunting ground precisely where it has first stripped the worker of the power to walk away.

And there is a third face to this thief, softer-looking and now nearly everywhere, and it works on every last one of us. The barons discovered that the most private engine a person owns—desire itself, the plain human wanting—could be hitched to a cart and made to pull a load of merchandise. So they took it. They built a whole trade on dressing a human being up as bait—most often a woman, cropped down to a surface, the person fairly trimmed out of the frame—to make you ache for a thing you did not know you wanted an hour before. And now the machine has grown a memory. The feed studies what your eye lingers on, learns the exact shape of your wanting, and sells it back to you by the hour. The most intimate thing about you, turned into inventory and resold at a markup.

It is Lust at one remove. Not a boss using a worker across a counter, but a system reaching into you and using your own desire against you—so smoothly, so pleasantly, that you take the leash for your own free hand. You sit there believing you are the customer. You are not the customer. You are the thing being sold.

So mark this, for it is the curse the user carries, and it has the same shape as in all the others. Lust may take any body it pleases and never once be known by a living soul. It may possess a thousand and be loved by none. For to use a person is, precisely, to refuse to meet them—and a man who spends his whole life refusing to meet anyone ends it exactly as alone as he made every person around him feel. He has had the use of a great many people and the true company of no one. He turned every someone he ever touched into a something, and a man who is surrounded by things is, in the only way that counts, entirely by himself.

Which tells you where the cure has stood all along—and it is the oldest word the labor movement ever spoke, and it happens to be the answer to all seven thieves at a single stroke. The word is dignity. It is the flat refusal to be a thing. It is one worker looking the whole grinding machine square in the eye and saying: I am not a resource. I am not an input. I am not a use to be spent and set out with the trash. I am a someone—and so is the man on the bench beside me, and so is the one across the picket line, and so is the one whose face I will never see who packed this box and picked this fruit and waited the far table. You will deal with us as persons, or you will not deal with us at all.

That is what a union card has always truly been. Not a wage demand—or not only one. A declaration of personhood. A small printed paper that says the man who carries it is not for sale by the pound.

Now hear the good news, because this last thief, like all the others, has been thrown down before. We abolished the shape-up. The men of 1934 walked off those docks and would not go back—through the gas and the clubs and the dead carried up from the Embarcadero—until the hiring boss's livestock pen was torn out and replaced with a hall where work was handed out fair and by turn. That was the whole of it, stripped to the bone: working men saying, out loud and together, we are not cattle to be looked over. We dragged the children out of the mills, where they had been wanted for the precise reason that they were small and cheap and could be used up without anybody hearing about it. Women organized and forced the law to say that a workplace is not a hunting ground, that what a boss may demand of a body has a fence around it after all. Every safety law and hour law and protection ever wrung out of this country was the identical act, performed again: working people insisting they were persons and not things—ends, and not means—and making the ledger write it down.

And as I set down this seventh and last of the thieves, hear the whole series at once, for it has only ever told one story. I have shown you seven thieves across these pages, and I have told you now that underneath the fine clothes they are all doing the one same thing. Which means the answer to all of them is also one thing. Against Pride and Greed and Wrath, against Envy and Gluttony and Sloth and this last one, Lust, the working people of this country have ever had but a single weapon—and it has not once failed them when they found the nerve to lift it. It is the stubborn, unkillable insistence that a human being is a human being: a someone, never a something, and owed the full standing of one. That is the whole of it. That is what every picket line and every hiring hall and every hard-bought law was ever for.

A Someone, Never a Something

So when the machine reaches for you—to file you away under resources, to buy your “no” with your own hunger, to crop you down to bait or sell your wanting back to you by the hour—do the one thing it cannot abide. Refuse to be a thing. Carry yourself like the someone you are, and then do the harder half: see the someone in the worker on the bench beside you, and in the stranger across the line, and in the unseen hand that packed your parcel and picked your supper. And then build the fence, the way we have built every fence that ever held—a real and living wage in place of the two-dollar insult; the law enforced in the dark places where the powerful do their hunting; the app-worker handed back his personhood instead of the word “contractor”; the union that turns a resource back into a man.

Because that is the answer to the seventh thief, and to all six that came before it. It was never complicated. They have only ever had the one trick—to look at a human being and see a thing—and we have only ever needed the one reply. Say it for yourself, and say it for one another, and say it together until the ledger has no choice left but to hear it. And don't you dare lose hope.

Notes On The Record