In the summer of 1972 and the summer of 1973, I worked at Soundolier, Inc., a company that manufactured speakers used primarily in office buildings.1 The speakers were used to pipe in music, or Muzak. When I returned to college in the fall, I would joke with my fellow economics majors that not everything that the private sector produces has positive social benefit. I can still occasionally find myself in an old office building or restaurant, look up, and recognize a “sixty-eight dash-eight,” which was our most popular model.
I am writing this because very few people in my social class have ever experienced working in a factory. And in fact few people of any social class are going to have that experience: last time I looked, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was showing that only about 5 percent of the employed labor force was classified as “production workers” in manufacturing firms. We are a white-collar economy, and a lot of the politicos who wax romantic about manufacturing jobs would be horrified at the thought of one of their kids having one.
My two summers at Soundolier came after my freshman and sophomore years of college. They were the last blue-collar jobs I ever had.
I got the job because the owner of the company was a former neighbor, and his wife and my mother had stayed in touch. But I never saw him at the factory, and I don’t think any of my co-workers knew that this was my connection. They could tell that I came from a different background, but they did not hold it against me.
The factory was in a southern suburb of St. Louis, and most of my co-workers had southern accents. The union had only reluctantly admitted black members, and the blacks that did work there were on the second shift (meaning at night), so that I never interacted with them.
I worked in the shipping end of the factory, which had the most variety of tasks. One of them was “answering the oven.” Right before the speaker covers came to us, they were in the painting area. Blackie, the cigar-smoking union boss (he insisted that I join the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) led a team that spray-painted the metal speaker covers as well as the “cans” that were the speaker backings. Blackie’s team would place the painted parts on a rolling rack and push the rack into an oven about 10 feet high and 20 feet long, to dry. After they had baked long enough, a buzzer would go off, and one of us in the shipping area would use a hook to pull them out of the oven to cool off.
When the cans cooled, we had to apply finishing touches. We would have to install rivets to the lip of the can, so that a speaker cover could be screwed onto it. This was a boring, repetitive job, where you sat in front of a rivet gun, positioned the can, pressed a pedal to get the machine to put in a rivet, rotated the can to the next place for a rivet, and did that several more times until all the rivets were in place. Then you did the same thing to the next can, and the next, and the next…
The next finishing step was called “gooping and padding,” done most efficiently in a team of two. One guy would use a paintbrush to apply the “goop,” which was a tar-like substance, to the inside of a can, which was about 15 inches in diameter and about 3-1/2 inches deep. He would then toss the can across the table to the other guy, who would stick pads of jute onto the goop. Both the goop and the pads served to muffle the metallic cans, making the sound from the speakers tolerable.
I typically did padding, because more experienced workers were faster at gooping. One of my gooping partners was a guy named Jim, who preferred to be called “Indian.” On one of my first days, he told me what the goop was made of. “Th’ ahfice calls it human excrement but ah calls it shit.” I assumed he was kidding, and I laughed. I never did find out what was in that stuff.
Finally, we put the cans and the speaker covers in boxes, along with packs of screws that could be used at the receiving end to assemble the speakers. We would take the bill of lading from the woman at the window to the office and put it, along with the boxes, onto the loading dock.
At our lunch break, we would use the loading dock as a handball court. I was an enthusiastic player. St. Louis in the summer will have hundred-degree days, and the guys would sometimes tell me to ease up so as not to get heat stroke.
We had one huge contract that took us several weeks. It was for a big office building in Chicago. Maybe Standard Oil? I’m not sure. For padding, instead of jute they wanted fiberglass. After a couple of days of getting fibers stuck in my arms, I opted to wear gloves. Nowadays, I figure that if I get lung cancer that job will be where it came from.
My guess is that there were adverse health effects from most of the jobs there. Guys who were cutting metal were subject to getting splinters. The painters were breathing in fumes that were probably toxic in the volumes that they were inhaling. Those of us doing gooping and padding were inhaling tar fumes and handling dangerous fibers (jute is less irritating than fiberglass, but it is not something you want to work with every day for hours on end.)
You are welcome to say that working at Soundolier would be better than sitting around playing video games and living off your parents or the taxpayers. But when a politician who has never worked that kind of job goes into some rhapsody about how wonderful manufacturing jobs are and how awful it is that they have disappeared, I am not ready to sing in harmony.
On the Internet, I found this article about the history of Soundolier. It has many holes. I’m pretty sure that Norm’s last name was spelled Friedman. The article has a “list of employees” that lists only a few in each year. The list starts in 1969 and ends about twenty years later, and only totals 119 for the entire period. There were more than that working at the Crestwood factory in 1971 and 1972 alone. The names I remember—Mike Stuckey, Jim Eicholz, and Bob Smith—do not show up o the list. Nor do I. The article says more about the Festus plant than about the Crestwood plant, which is where I worked.
Graveyard shift at Oldsmobile, Lansing MI, down in "the pit" installing shock absorbers. The union guy wouldn't take the job, so it was given to the lowest of the low seniority, i.e., kids working nights while they went to school. We'd get spit on and stuff thrown at us because we were scabs, which is strange because they wouldn't let us join the union as it would dilute seniority.
Drag a pallet of shock absorbers across the shop floor, load them down into the pit by hand, climb down in, ram one into place, take the air gun that weighed a ton, place it, hit the trigger, and get hit with about 100 lbs of torque. If you didn't brace hard for the hit, it would lift you right off your feet. Repeat until the pallet was done, then run across the shop floor to grab another while enduring insults and getting spit at. Anyone caught working hard was verbally abused, as it made everyone else look like they weren't working hard. Every couple days someone would jam a wrench in the line to bring it all to a halt, which brought management running to figure out what went wrong, and everyone would then relax and laugh at the managers trying to get the wrench out of the line and get it up and moving again.
On breaks and at lunch, Quaaludes were surreptitiously distributed. Lunch was also when a few guys would sprint across the street to slam down a couple beers and shots. Anyone wondering why American cars were pieces of crap in the early 70's...the drugs and alcohol didn't help.
It pretty much removed what little respect I ever held for the UAW.
Manual labor jobs are hard. Repetitive, menial task jobs are hard. There are two redeeming aspect of these jobs:
(1) Some of them are necessary
(2) Some of these jobs are the best jobs some people will qualify to have
#2 is a factor that the ivory tower will never understand. I did several stints in manual labor jobs and I met a side of society that I would never have otherwise known. I learned that some people have no aspiration other than to have a check - and whether that check came from an employer or unemployment they did not care. Such people are unlikely to ever qualify for professional work.
The great question I wish our "experts" would debate is whether work is necessary and good for humans individually and collectively. The "Christian" ethic is a man must labor both to prove his character and give him something useful to do - idle hands are the devil's playground. My bias is that learning to work and becoming good at it matters a lot to a person's emotional health. At that same time, there are jobs and job environments that are destructive to a person.
This debate matters because the aim of the technocrats seems to be to create a society where no work is required. I am hugely appreciative for technology that makes living easier. But I do not think I could live without work. And we know this is true. Even the artist must work! No person of great accomplishment is lazy. A good life demands good work. At the same time, a good life probably doesn't require a person spend 60 hours a week on an assembly line.