Summer for hourly workers isn’t the lazy vacation people think it is
Last week I ran into my cousin Lila at the gas station right after I got off my shift at the local hardware store. I was still wearing my work vest stained with grass and paint thinner, my socks were soaked through from walking through a customer’s sprinkler to load their mulch into the truck, and my vanilla soft serve was already dripping down my wrist. She’s a high school English teacher, salaried, gets the whole summer off, and she grinned and said “Ugh, I bet you love having all this free time to enjoy the sun, right?”
I just stood there blinking, ice cream dripping on my flip flop, because I couldn’t remember the last time I had a whole free weekday in summer. I don’t think she meant anything by it, it’s just one of those unspoken assumptions people have – if you’re hourly, you don’t have a “real job” so you must have all this unstructured free time to lounge around. But that’s not how it works, not for most of us I know.
Mostly what we do is pick up extra shifts. Summer is busy where I work. Everyone’s ripping out old patios, hosting backyard graduations and weddings, buying new grills and 50-pound bags of mulch and enough bug spray to kill a whole hive of hornets. The manager puts up a whiteboard for extra shifts at the start of June, and by the end of the first day every opening and closing slot is covered in scrawled names. Overtime is time and a half, and even an extra 10 hours a week adds up enough to cover that unexpected car repair or put a little away for rent next month. Last month I picked up a 6am opening shift right after closing at 9pm the night before. I was so tired when I got done that I left my keys under the checkout counter, and had to sit on my porch step for two hours in 85 degree humidity waiting for my roommate to get home from her lifeguard shift. I got a heat rash on my neck that lasted a week. Was it worth it? Yeah, kind of. The overtime covered the new tires I needed. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t miserable.
Not everyone can pick up extra shifts, though. That’s the thing, it’s not all the same experience. My coworker Mia has two little kids, and their after-school program closes completely for summer. Full-time daycare hiked their rates $300 a month for the summer, so if Mia picked up extra shifts, all that extra overtime would just go straight to the daycare provider. So she cut back to three shifts a week, all weekends, when her mom can watch the kids for free. I see her on Tuesdays when she comes in to pick up her check, and she talks about how she does all her grocery shopping at 9am on Wednesdays when the store’s almost empty, how she patches her kids’ bike tires and bakes lemon bars with too much butter when they’re at the park with grandma, how she gets a 20 minute nap on the couch before she has to pick them up. She brings those lumpy, too-buttery lemon bars in for the front end crew, and they’re the best thing we get all week. She says it’s the most unrushed time she’s gotten to spend with the kids in years, even if they’re tight on gas money that month. I don’t know, it’s not perfect, but it’s hers.
The thing that no one outside hourly work talks about is that most entry-level hourly jobs don’t give paid vacation. If you want time off, you don’t get paid for it. So you have to save up for weeks just to take a couple days off. My roommate and I saved for three months to take four days off to go camping at the state park two hours away. We forgot the can opener for our baked beans, so we had to pry them open with a beat up pocket knife that cut my thumb. Our cooler broke halfway through the first day, so all our beer got warm, and it rained the second night so our tent leaked. But it was still the best four days I’ve had all year, because I didn’t have to answer the question “do you have this specific lawnmower part in stock?” even one time.
Last week I had a rare full day off, it was 80 degrees, sunny, the kind of postcard-perfect day everyone posts about from the beach. I just sat on my couch in my sweatpants and watched three episodes of that terrible 90 Day Fiancé rerun. My feet were so sore from lifting 120 bags of concrete the three days before that I could barely stand to make toast, let alone walk across hot sand to get to the water. People would probably think that’s a waste of a beautiful summer day, but I was tired. It wasn’t a waste, it was just what I needed.
We also get stuck training all the high school kids that come in for summer jobs, right? No extra pay for that, just extra work on top of your regular duties. I spent two weeks training a 16 year old who kept asking me to get him free tickets to the county fair because I work with the manager who’s on the fair board. I kept telling him I don’t even get a discount on the mulch I sell, why would I get you free tickets? He kept asking anyway. It was awkward, I just smiled and nodded and showed him where the lawn fertilizer was for the tenth time.
Today after my shift I sat on the curb outside the gas station for 10 minutes with a cold root beer, because my car’s AC is broken and I didn’t want to get in it yet while it’s still 90 degrees. A guy who works construction hourly down the street stopped and sat with me, we didn’t even talk much, just watched the kids ride their bikes up and down the street. It was that golden hour light that makes everything look pretty, even the cracked curb and the faded gas station price sign. That’s the nice part, I think, that no one talks about. When you’re hourly, your schedule’s not locked into 9 to 5 five days a week. Sometimes you get to stop and sit on a curb on a Wednesday afternoon and no one’s emailing you, no one’s expecting you to be anywhere. It’s not the big fancy two-week European vacation salaried people post about, but it’s something.
I got Lila’s text yesterday, inviting me to her end-of-summer barbecue next month. I told her I’d come if I don’t have a shift. I probably will have a shift, actually. We’re doing a big end-of-summer sale on grills, so they need all hands on deck. I’ll stop by after, covered in sawdust, bring a bag of chips I got on sale at the grocery store. It won’t be the perfect summer you see on Instagram. It’ll just be summer, the way it is for people like me. (Word count: 1182)
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