Changing Mind's Project--Introducing Sam Carolan

For the Changing Minds project, my partner is Sam Carolan. We got together after class last Thursday and just talked—not really anything about unions and worker’s rights, but more just about ourselves and our backgrounds. Through this in-depth research about each other, I think we have both found some valuable data that can lead to explanations for WHY we have the beliefs we do about unions and labor politics.

First thing I found out about Sam is that he is a freshman. Sam is in my blog group so we sit in the same area at class and have had group discussions before and I had for some reason assumed that he was at least a sophomore, maybe even a junior. So it surprised me to find out that he was younger than I had thought. This leads to the assumption that Sam seems to be mature for his age, or maybe just acts older than his age, but both of these pieces of information can be used to explain his beliefs on labor politics. Sam is not exactly sure what he wants his major to be. Right now he is in CLA and is possibly interested in economics, journalism, poli-sci, or possibly education.

Next we talked about high school. Sam grew up in Stillwater—a cute little town (well I think it’s cute..) west of the cities on the St. Croix River. He attended the public high school in Stillwater and there were about 2300 students grades 9-12. His high school is obviously a fairly large high school, more than twice the size of the high school that I attended.

We talked about what Sam’s parents do for a living. We focused on this for a while, because through our discussion we learned that both of us believe that quite often children’s political beliefs stem from the beliefs of their parents—whether this is good or bad, I guess it depends on the situation, but since we both agree on that idea, it made sense to learn about Sam’s parents to best get to know who Sam is and why he is the way he is. Sam’s dad is the head of customer services for Slumberland. Sam says that he considers his dad fairly moderate on the political scale—maybe slightly left-leaning. He is not involved in a labor union. Sam’s mom has worked for the State of Minnesota for the Department of Health and Human Services for as long as Sam can remember. She used to run a daycare, but that was when Sam was very young. Working for the State, Sam’s mom is currently very frustrated with politicians in office. She is a liberal, so her frustration is understandable as the Republicans are currently in control, and the fact that nothing seems to get done in the legislature at all these days. Sam’s mom is involved in a union.

Now on to Sam’s personal work experience. Sam has had several jobs in the past. The first two didn’t last long, as they just didn’t really work out Sam says. Sam played tennis and football, so sports took up a lot of his time so he basically didn’t have enough time for school, sports AND a job. Sam also used to play baseball, and spent a lot of his time focusing on baseball. He was never really great, and often his dad would volunteer to coach his teams. But Sam never wanted this, because he didn’t want to have an unfair advantage because his dad was the coach. He wanted his success to come straight from his own hard work. Unfortunately, when high school rolled around, Sam realized that to be on the high school team, it was more about who you knew and what connections you had to the team instead of about your baseball skills, so Sam didn’t get to play. (That was a bit of a side note but it relates to Sam’s political beliefs discussed late on so I had to include it…but back to work experience now!) So this summer he had his first real job. He was a waiter at a restaurant in downtown Stillwater. He worked an average of 30 hrs a week and made minimum wage plus tips. He had 2 bosses—liked one of them, didn’t like the other one so much. One of his managers was always encouraging the wait staff to “upsell” (basically encourage people to upgrade their meals to extra options that cost more). The manager would tell the wait staff to do this so the waiters would make more money, but Sam realized that the manager was more interested in his OWN share of the profits, not the waiters’ tips. Sam told me about a time when he was scheduled to work from 12-10PM during the towns big summer festival. Sam ended up working for 15 hours with no break because it was so busy. The managers didn’t do anything about it, and both Sam and I thought that there are some laws about working for that long without breaks. For the most part, Sam thought this job experience was fine. He made a lot of money—but also spent a lot of it on fun stuff this summer. He doesn’t currently have a job on campus but is looking into work-study jobs for next semester.

We then went over the quiz we took in class together and I found a few interesting bits of useful data about Sam. Sam, like me, is currently annoyed with politics and politicians. People seem to be so strongly set in their views that they end up saying things that make them sound just plain dumb or ignorant. He showed me an argument that occurred on one of his friend’s Facebook pages on election Tuesday. The original wall post said “anyone who voted for a republican is dumb” and there were over 350 comments. Sam said he knew the kids who were commenting and a lot of them were smart kids but they just all sounded so stupid and looked like idiots. Also, when we talked about the question of whether you would honk and give a thumbs up to the strikers, Sam said he wouldn’t do that because he doesn’t want to be “that guy.” These two little pieces of info showed me that Sam may have his beliefs, but he isn’t one to be extremely vocal about them or aggressively push his beliefs onto others. I believe this is important in discovering why his labor politics beliefs are what they are.

This is all the data that I have gathered about Sam so far. I bet you could take a guess at what his political ideology is and a guess at the number he received for the quiz we took. Take a guess if you want right now. I think it would have been very interesting if when we did this project, we were randomly paired with a person and did not know their number or their political ideology and through our interviews we had to determine it. But here’s the facts about Sam…Sam considers himself socially liberal. He is not completely decided on the economics part of his political views because he hasn’t supported himself ever and doesn’t know what economic policies would be best for himself. He would like to believe that the everyone has a fair shot at being successful in life, but unfortunately it seems that it is more about WHO you know than WHAT you know—this ideology relates perfectly back to Sam’s baseball experience. Sam received a 5 on the quiz, and doesn’t really have a strong opinion on unions yet, but his opinions will develop more as we learn more about labor politics. His middle-of-the-road stand on labor unions fits perfectly with the data I collected about him. Sam is perfectly content sitting in the middle, not quick to jump to any conclusions or latch on to anyone idea. He isn’t strongly opinionated and is willing to learn to people’s views on different subjects. So far I have learned that Sam’s parents, work experience and even baseball have formed his political beliefs. As we talk further about labor politics, I am sure these same factors will be used to explain his specific beliefs on labor politics.