A Working Stiff's Manifesto by Iain Levison

you’ve quit your last thirty jobs, if you’re homeless, an alcoholic, whatever. Get on the plane to Dutch Harbor and show ’em what you got, and if you don’t, you’re a dead man. Apparently, it does matter to them if you’ve smoked pot recently, or at least they pretend it does, because I am given an address where I can pee into a cup.
    Drug testing is hilarious stuff, the last stand in America’s mad love-hate relationship with drugs. I’d definitely prefer a pilot or a surgeon who wasn’t high on something, but testing them every six months won’t catch them anyway, or it might reveal that they’ve smoked something six weeks ago while on vacation. I’m sure the high has worn off by the time they sit in the cockpit or pull on the surgery gloves, which means that the testing itself is basically irrelevant.
    What drug testing accomplishes is to strike fear into the hearts of bank tellers, meat packers, assembly line workers, desk clerks, football players, and fish processors. It’s a great eliminator. The words “WE DRUG TEST” tend to keep out the riffraff, people who know they’d fail. My advice to those people is, try it anyway; they probably just dump your pee down the toilet and tell you whether you passed or failed, based on whether they liked you or not. I’ve smoked a joint on my way to a drug test and passed, and I’ve been clean for months and failed.
    I take a bus over to the “clinic,” a shack with a surgical table and a toilet. These people are sparing no expense in the war on drugs. They’re hiring people who walk through the door without reading their applications. How demanding can this screening process be? Alaska work is like law school. They’ll let anyone in, then weed you out later.
    As we are milling around in the lobby, waiting for the bus to take us back to the city center, one girl anxiously asks the receptionist when we’ll find out the results. That’s always an act of genius. Why doesn’t she just say, “Look, when do I find out if those Golden Seal tablets really work?” The receptionist tells her they won’t let us on the plane at the airport if we’ve failed. Our pee has already been flushed, I’m sure of it.
    Myself, I’ve spent so much time with Jim lately, who is drug-free because his company tests randomly, that I’m clean either way. More importantly, I’ve been polite to everyone. I know I’ll pass.
    I head back out to Highway 5 to tell Jim I just signed on with a fish-processing company and am flying to Alaska tomorrow morning.
    â€œYou didn’t have to do that,” he says, his eyes aglow with relief at seeing the last of me. He can check out of the motel now, throw all his stuff back into his sleeper and live in a parking lot. His future just got a lot brighter. Every day without work doesn’t need to send him into a panic anymore.
    â€œI appreciate your helping me out,” he says.
    â€œLikewise.”
    We shake hands, wish each other luck. I head down to the Seattle Youth Hostel with about twenty dollars left in my pocket. The homeless shadow me as I go out and spend half of it on beer.
    Five hours later I am at the airport.

O N THE S LIME L INE
    Rayford Seafoods in Dutch Harbor runs its whole operation out of a disused World War II LST that sits in chilly Iliulink Bay. The LST, which used to carry men into battle, has been converted into a crab-processing boat. Crab fishermen bring their freshly caught crab up to the boat and they are pumped on board, still alive. Here, the processors, of whom I am one, grab them and pull their legs off or blast their guts out with a water hose. Then they are boxed and frozen and sold to the Japanese.
    Every crab caught in these waters is going straight to Japan because Americans won’t pay high prices for fresh crab. Japanese buyers wander around while we are working, grabbing our arms to