When I went to the Midwestern university hospital to apply for a job as a wheelchair pusher to support my ABD lifestyle habit and instead they offered me the directorship of that department as well as of the Volunteer Service, I thought that I was either just lucky or I that looked good in a suit. At the fried chicken and slab cake welcome reception held for me the following week by my fellow directors, I discovered that it was the suit. What made me look good in it was that I appeared to be a clean-cut conservative looking white guy wearing it. At the reception, I was taken aside by several people who expressed their concern that my predecessor (a Black woman) had been taking on too many volunteers of an undesirable socio-economic status. Specifically, she had been recruiting them not from the university neighborhood, but from the poor surrounding neighborhoods. This wasnt about race my concerned informants were quick to add. It was about the hospitals image with the suburbanites it wished to draw as customers.But they were telling me that there were too many Black volunteers. If I had been a braver, tougher, more righteous person, I should probably have resigned on the spot. But I had already packed up my apartment for the move to the local neighborhood. And to be brutally honest, one of the perks of the job was access to the famous university library that the hospital was attached to and I wanted to get my hands on it.Quickly groping for a rationalization, I decided that even if I did quit, they would only keep looking for someone pliable. On the other hand, if I stayed, maybe I could help change things. Not in a brave throw-myself-in-front-of-a-train way, but in the subtle, cunning, and vicious way that I had operated with graduate school politics. And after all, not everyone at the reception had taken me aside for a private chat. The fact that the racists did this told me that they were by no means the majority in the place. So I stayed on and decided to undermine their concerns instead.The hospital had a terrible reputation for race relations. Some years before their emergency room had actually turned away a famous civil rights leader who had been hit on the head by a rock by some savage during an open housing march. When I arrived at the hospital, it was feuding with the citys Black owned newspaper. One of the first directives I got (conveyed by word of mouth) was that I was not, under any circumstances, to advertise for volunteers in that paper.The Volunteer Service was rather small at the time and consisted of a core of senior citizens who processed and delivered the mail; some high school students called candy stripers for the color of the uniforms their grandmothers had worn when they were high school volunteers; some adults who volunteered in the childrens hospital; and some pre-med college students who were volunteering in the emergency room in order to gauge their true feelings about blood and gore. These groups seemed to me to be racially balanced and at first I was confused about what the problem was supposed to be for the racists. Did they want me to terminate every single Black person on my staff?But I soon discovered that there was another kind of volunteer that was causing their concerns.The director of the Volunteer Service was also the director of the wheelchair pushers (known as Patient Transportation). This department was chronically understaffed and sometimes patients would have to wait too long to be wheeled to their next appointments. My predecessor had been filling the gaps with volunteers. It wasnt a plot on her part to infiltrate poor Black people into the hospital. It was that poor Black people tended to be the only ones who would volunteer for what was a rather crappy physically demanding job. They volunteered because my predecessor had been selecting the best of them as regular replacement workers when openings appeared. (And why not? They were already proven and trained.) This is what had gotten her into trouble. As I read through the thick volunteer policy manual to see what might be bent and what might be broken, I discovered that there was a strict rule against people using the Volunteer Service as an entry point to hospital employment. There were a number of reasons for this. Many of the hospital departments were unionized and the union might submit a grievance if unpaid workers were found working alongside paid workers (although the wheel chair pushers were unionized and no one had ever complained before.) On a pure business basis, the Volunteer Services director would in effect be doing an end-run around the Human Resources department. It was likely that workers coming in through the Volunteer Service would be unskilled and would therefore by definition be a drain rather than an augmentation to the hospital labor pool. But finally, of course, experience had shown that the volunteer director was not considered quite qualified to perform the subtle socio-economic vetting of workers that some of the senior staff required.I could see that all of these rules could be bent by someone provided he maintained a very low profile. For it also quickly became clear to me that the surrounding communities needed a job training program. Bush the Senior was president and he was already beginning the dismantlement of the failed American welfare system that Clinton would finally kill several years later. There were already people bouncing off the doors looking for volunteer work that might lead to a job and being sent away for their troubles. The business issues looked to me to simply be typical business problems that could be solved. The racism piece was something I felt I had to undermine. So I decided to set up a secret job training program for Black people.Could it be done? On of the joys of working for a huge modern hospital is its general disorganization as a business. An academic hospital is even more disorganized, because it combines both the power structure of a hospital and the power structure of a university. The place was overrun with chiefs and really controlled management centralization was impossible. As for starting a program as such, new programs always need to be jump started. Even if I built the perfect stealth ship, I would still have to crack the bottle of champagne across the bow to launch it. I would have to change policies and the daily operations of the department significantly to accommodate the program. If I was going to get caught breaking the rules it would most likely be at the very beginning. But I thought I could count on a honeymoon period; a thirty day or so window where I could plead ignorance for any mistake I was caught making. I had to act quickly.In my first week on the job, as I interviewed people who wanted to volunteer in order to find work, it became evident that people trying to get off a lifetime of welfare were not only unskilled, they were worse than unskilled. Our whole culture of labor discipline under capitalism, which workers take for granted, was mostly foreign to the poor. In general, the poor didnt know how to dress. They were not used to waking up early and reporting to work precisely on time whether they felt like it or not. They were not used to the authority structure of even the most laid back department. They had trouble with the concept of failing and persevering. And they often had trouble separating appropriate work behavior from private behavior, when, for example, it came to drinking or smoking marijuana. They tended to have no work experience at all. They had no resumes. The very worst cases were illiterate. In short, they had to be taught how to learn about work.I envisioned the program as requiring people to work five four hour days on a rigid schedule. I co-opted a few of my student volunteers into the conspiracy. We would give these volunteers a crash course in deportment and general labor discipline expectations. We would teach the ones who were interested in clerical work basic filing and computer operations. All volunteers would be apprenticed in that they would be attached to a regular worker as an assistant as they learned how to act and work in the department.I learned from my wheelchair pushers which of the many departments seemed understaffed. I discretely approached their managers with my proposition and found about half a dozen takers (who knew exactly what I was doing).The best place to advertise my program (which I named JETS for Job Experience Through Service so there would be no ambiguity about what I was doing) was in the Black owned newspaper we were forbidden to do business with. I decided that to violate the recent directive and advertise in it anyway held little risk for me. My rank was such that I could sign purchase orders that would then be paid by A/P without question. And my main political opposition was not likely to read the newspaper in any case. So I took out a half page ad for a week. When the editors asked me if I wanted to include a logo, I sent them a sheet of the hospitals distinctive letterhead.There was one other thing that I had to do. The people who would volunteer for this program were really, really poor. I could not pay them anything. But I saw that the Volunteer Service had a policy of giving bus tokens (which the city used at the time) to the candy stripers and lunch cards (good at our cafeteria) to the senior citizens. I decided to offer both of these to the JETS volunteers. I obtained a large initial supply by hiding the three month supply of tokens and cards that I found when I started, and then telling my boss that I had found almost nothing. She allowed me to get another three month supply. I knew that I would run through my surplus pretty quickly giving out two tokens and a lunch card to each JETS volunteer every day. But I figured I would solve that supply problem later.About 60 people ended up calling about the ad in the next week. About 40 of them set up interview appointments. About 20 showed up for the interview. About 10 showed up for their first day of work. And about 5 stuck it out after the first week. I was both disappointed and relieved.I ran the ad another week with similar results and after that pure word of mouth drew in about half a dozen keepers a month. Half of those who stayed into the second week were hired within, on average, three months. Half left. The steady flow of volunteers soon made me have to face my bus token and lunch card problem. I needed a cash flow.The only cash operation that the Volunteer Service was involved in was the hospital newspaper delivery. It was managed by an outside guy who had the franchise. As luck would have it, he was suspected of lots of little petty thefts from patient rooms. By pressing it, I quickly found a reason to fire him. He was upset at being fired, but he was even more upset that I might make him pay back the couple of thousand dollars that the wholesale news vendor had fronted him. We had thought that when we settled each month with the vendor, we were paying for the current months papers. In fact, we were paying for the prior months papers. Our guy had been kiting, having managed to siphon off an entire months gross receipts. I reassured him that I would get the hospital to cover it. Then I told the story to my management, but doubled the amount that I said he had skimmed and asked the hospital to cover that. This put me a month ahead of my payments. I handed off the delivery of the papers to the senior citizens who did the mail (and they were delighted to do it) and therefore took over the paper route directly. Between the cushion I built and the profits from the paper delivery itself, I solved my cash flow problem and could afford the tokens and lunch cards I needed to keep the JETS program afloat.I ran the program for four years. At the end of it I got a new boss who in effect finally busted me. I ended up resigning. I was very burnt out anyway; I am no Dorothy Day. Over the four years I found jobs for about 120 people. Most were successes. But some of the failures were spectacular. I fired from the program a number of people for cocaine or crack abuse. Two of these people were subsequently murdered during drug deals. Some of my failures entered hospital folklore. There was the man who used to loudly hum the Death March when he brought the morgue stretcher to or from the inpatient wings, much to the dismay of the grieving families. There was the man that hit up the patients for tips. And there was the janitor who, when asked to pick up a piece of paper off the floor by a member of the Joint Commission that evaluates and accredits hospitals, dropped a small bottle of bourbon out of his shirt pocket, smashing it on the floor. It was one of the most interesting jobs I ever had.What did I learn about the poor when I inadvertently put myself on the front line of the war on poverty? There is a school of conservative thought that holds that the best way to get the poor to find jobs is to teach them to swim by throwing them in the deep end of the pool -- preferably with some sharks. I found that the poor were pretty much like everyone else in terms of character and weaknesses. What made them different was they tended not to have cultural training in the work ethic that the regular workers had. This was not a character issue as such.The poor were just as willing on the whole to work as hard as anyone else; otherwise why would they have come to me asking to work for free? But they didnt know, just as we dont really see that we organize our lives around work.We structure both our waking and sleeping moments to accommodate our jobs. This state of affairs eventually becomes natural to us (although if we are unemployed for a long time this can erode). The character part of the work ethic for the poor was always the endurance of that terrible up-front period where working had to become natural to them in the same way. Part of the work ethic for us is coping with failure and unfairness. We learn to stand up after we are slapped down.The poor that I knew didnt know how to do this the way that we do. So they almost always needed some kind of hand, even from a thief like me.