Dishwasher at the Olympics

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I spent the opening weekend of the Olympics at work, just like many others in my industry and thousands of workers serving the athletes and guests, fueling the boats on the Seine, and cleaning up after tourists, athletes, celebrities, and politicians.

I’ve never had the opportunity to work at an event of a scale even remotely comparable to the Olympics, but I’ve worked at much smaller events and know that the reality behind the scenes — the reality of cooks, security guards, stewards, and cleaners — is entirely different from what the media portrays. It’s also vastly different from what the guests experience.

It’s a reality akin to “The Time Machine,” where the beautiful and wealthy Eloi smile, enjoying the pleasures of life under the spotlight, followed by cameras and adored by the masses, while the Morlocks, who work to make it all possible, live in darkness, in literal and metaphorical dungeons, such as blind kitchens where shifts sometimes last more than a dozen hours under artificial light.

The Olympic Games in Paris generated 150,000 jobs. Preparing the Olympic facilities consumed about 45 million work hours, more than half of which were carried out by skilled workers.

It’s unclear how many hours were spent on the “social cleansing” conducted in Paris before the Games when armed police removed 12,500 homeless…