A Writing Group · San Francisco
Writing by and for working people since 2005
Prose & Poetry
Margaret Cooley (1954–) is a cultural worker who writes nonfiction and poetry. Her writing often focuses on her working-class Irish American heritage and the oppression of peoples worldwide.
A founding member of the LaborFest Writers Group, her creative pursuits are tied to her activism. She has contributed numerous songs, essays, and poetry to LaborFest, the Crossroads Irish American Festival, the Living Wage Coalition, the San Francisco City College Labor Studies Program, local labor union events, and picket lines.
She is working on a memoir of her Irish family emigrating in the mid-19th century to work in the coal mines of southwestern Pennsylvania.
She lives, writes, performs, and sings in San Francisco, California.
I want our government to pass an emergency relief act to employ people. It's been done before. In 1935 Congress passed an emergency relief act and funded the Works Project Administration — the WPA. The goal was to employ the unemployed until the economy recovered. My Grandma Marg from Pennsylvania said some called the WPA "We Poke Along." She noticed in Appalachia that men worked on the roads in groups of three, taking turns digging — one dug while the other two leaned on their shovels. It wasn't laziness. These were hard working men. They adopted the strategy of taking turns so that workers could keep their jobs for as long as possible.
The WPA hired musicologists John and Alan Lomax to collect folklore, and songwriter Woody Guthrie to write songs. Alan Lomax recorded more than 17,000 sound recordings during his lifetime. One of my favorite people he recorded was Sarah Ogan Gunning — born about the same time as my grandma, raised in coal camp towns, the daughter of a coal miner and union organizer. Her song was called I Hate the Capitalist System. Imagine the government funding a project that recorded a song like that.
So like Sarah Ogan, one of the ways to fight is to tell our stories. We can sing it, write it, or tell it. We have to do it because if we don't, nobody will. Telling our stories is a revolutionary act.
LaborFest Reading, 2012 · © Margaret Cooley 2012
Four hours working non-stop on the cash register without a bathroom break. Not the best situation for my fifty-five-year-old urinary tract. It's two-thirty in the afternoon. I have not had lunch. My blood sugar is dropping.
Today is the first day of the company's one-day sale that actually lasts two days. Every cash register has twenty or more customers in line. The company slogan for this holiday season is Believe. It's written in large red letters across every holiday shopping bag. I think about the slogan Believe while I fill bags with merchandise. What is it we workers are supposed to believe?
A temporary fill-in manager comes by my register. I call out to her, "Amy, I've been working over four hours without a break. I would love to go to lunch." "We go five hours without a break here," she retorts as she storms off.
At night the job follows me into my dreams. I am preparing Christmas dinner, a goose. I chop the head off the goose and begin skinning it. I look down and see the heart is still beating. Next I am back on the job working after my heart transplant — a goose heart. My manager says, "If something happens before the end of the holiday season, we cannot guarantee you will ever get your own heart back."
I wake up in a sweat but my mind is clear. I know what to do. I call Amy. I have just two words for her. "I quit."
LaborFest Reading, 2009 · © Margaret Cooley 2009
During the Great Depression, like most men in his hometown of Carroltown, Pennsylvania, my grandpa was a coal miner. The rest of the community had to scrounge for whatever work they could find. Scrounged work was a legitimate type of employment and working class people were proud to do it. It was listed often in the 1930 U.S. census records. The work was called "odd jobs."
Odd jobs are not strange jobs, unusual jobs, peculiar jobs or eccentric jobs. An odd job is the job that is left over — the job that remains after all the other jobs are taken. It's a job that needs doing that cannot be outsourced, but that many people do not want. Odd jobs I've had include picking apples, driving a blind piano tuner, working 18 hours on election day, working the 4 a.m. shift in a department store at Christmas time, cleaning up a building site, painting an apartment when a tenant moves out, and providing home care for an incontinent elder.
My most recent odd job was as an enumerator for the 2010 U.S. census in San Francisco. Our first assignment was "targeted non-sheltered outdoor locations" — places where people experiencing homelessness live, like alleys, under bridges, and in parks. Data collection had to occur between 2 a.m. and sunrise. Our assignment was Golden Gate Park.
We arrived at 1:30 a.m. Our crew leader gave us each a flashlight and reflective vest and divided us into teams. We fanned out into the bushes in slow steady rain, the ground well saturated. In one encampment a man proudly exclaimed, "And we are card-carrying registered voters in San Francisco too!" When the sun rose we headed home — another job well done.
LaborFest Reading, 2010 · © Margaret Cooley 2010