Free Don't Sing at the Table by Adriana Trigiani

business by offering the best quality for the best price, not to overprice and lose the deal altogether. Short-term greed was never a viable long-term solution in business. The point of going into business was to remain there for many years. This commitment to stability was good for everyone: from the career operator to the summer hire who might go off to college in the fall, with actual experience working a trade under her belt.
    Even though my grandmother rose from operator to owner, her own family and my grandfather’s family was populated with union operators who put in thirty years and upward on the machines, providing income for their families. Some were widowed, others provided a second income to their husbands’ paychecks. The women I knew growing up worked outside the home, and were proud to do so, year after year. It gave them a sense of accomplishment and sustenance. I never knew anything but working mothers, and was well aware that my mother had a career before she had seven children. It seemed that everyone worked, and that work made life better. It wasn’t just about the paycheck—though that was important. A job well done led to a sense of accomplishment and enduring purpose: to feed the family’s bottom line.
    Child care for working families was a constant part of the discussion, and a priority for my grandmother. Viola would take three years off when my father was born; six years later she took two years off when her twins were born, and only six months when her fourth baby was born, as this was the summer before they opened the Yolanda Manufacturing Company. Years later when she wrote down her story, she remembered these dates clearly. They had been negotiated and discussed within her family. Viola used all avenues of child care available to her—family members (my grandfather’s cousin Zizi Mary and others), neighbors, and even nuns.
    In 1988, after a slew of office jobs and second jobs to provide additional income, I got my first job writing for television comedies. I saw Viola’s factory model in effect in an entirely different venue. A television network, through the support of advertisers, provided programming, hiring writers, directors, producers, actors, stagehands, designers, their crews, down to craft services, the folks who make a wagon of snacks for the actors and crew as they rehearsed to make television shows. Beyond these hires, once the show was made, the ripple effect of jobs extended to the graphic designers, distributors, and local affiliates who were employed and lived off the central idea, that we are making shows here, to entertain and enlighten, but also to advertise products that the audience will buy as a result of viewing the show.
    Thousands of families lived off of the creation and distribution of our shows. Soon enough, by the mid-1990s, with cheaper programming (sounds familiar) on the boards and with a restless public clamoring for real-life antics instead of scripted shows, the model sank, and with it quality programming that had been the backbone of network and cable television for years. Some might argue that we deserved to fail—we got too big, or maybe the quality wavered in many instances.
    However, we do ourselves no favors when we destroy the ability to provide goods and services to a buyer by overpricing ourselves or undercutting our product with watered-down versions of what we create. And yes, some survive the seismic changes that come with destroying one model in order to create anew, but more often than not, we don’t. It is true that we wind up with less product, less shows, and less artisans employed in the long run. We certainly don’t survive stronger, with more jobs to offer. We all lose. When the jobs are gone, we have learned the hard way, they are gone.
    If Viola were young today, she would invent her own new business model and manufacture goods her own way, with a small workforce, providing a niche product to the