“Employee of the century” Arthur Winston died today peacefully in his sleep, aged 100. He retired last month after seventy-two years of service with Los Angeles’s transit authority. I don’t know what part of this story stuns me most.
Writing about Universalist Christianity and improving how churches work
Part of me says congratulations for being loyal, but another part wishes he had complained…because how else can one better the working world? If we are stuck in a captialist society, part of being a worker in such is speaking out. against the capitalist working procedures that keep down those that strive to support their familiies. I challenge those that say Arthur Winston was a “model” worker by not complaining. Because striving for working rights is a constitutional right, and we should all strive for such.
So what if the Los Angeles transit authority was a good employer? Or, if unionized, was properly represented? And it has been my experience that complaining isn’t the only about employer-driven working conditions — say, how awful X is on the job — and complaining isn’t the only way to have fair working conditions.
I hope he just loved his work. When I think of him taking just one day off after the death of his wife, I prefer to believe it was more because he wanted to keep busy, he had people he looked forward to seeing every day on the job, and that he was the kind of man who got more satisfaction from a good day’s work than in quiet time alone, or in leisure.
There are those people in the world.
He reminds me of a dear elderly man at a church I served who answered phones in the church office on Fridays for years after his retirement. He got so deaf that he decided he ought to retire from that job, too, although he loved it. We gave him a little party. He went home that night, wound up in the hospital the next day, and was dead three days later. My heart still hearts to think about it. Bless his soul.
Bless both their souls.