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.
On that last part, sounds like many "working" jobs today. I spent a couple years as a defense contractor overseas and I think 120% of us were living off benzos to sleep, alcohol to relax, and amphetamine to work for years at a time. 16x7 work weeks in Iraq on a three year contract with not much to do while "down" just isn't sustainable without drugs, same reason drug used for productive, not recreational, use is so rampant among doctors or drudgery jobs. When I was a teenager working Jiggy Lube we always had beer in the "pit" and was rare a employee that didn't reek of weed or have track marks.
The productivity thing is a problem everywhere and all classes, no one likes a showoff for exactly the reasons you said. It's an occupation, not a vocation, and it took me a long time to realize the difference including the resultant work culture that comes with it. You are paid to be there, not work, so quit trying so hard.
No you really aren't, you would be salaried or piece work if so and they wouldn't care if you did your work efficiently and went home. It's why they are so focused on timecards and docking people for being a minute late. Why do you think busy work exists?
I did a stint in data entry back in my youth, I had a sustained typing wpm of around 95, the job qualifications were 20. The job entailed inputting the previous days results. You were handed a box and went home when done but were paid by the hour. I generally went home after two hours, my coworkers generally got 1 to 2 hours of overtime a day, I got -6 hours of straight time. I complained to my boss, he said "work slower then, you aren't salaried".
Every job I've ever had since then has been a variant of that same thinking including as a Fed and likewise it's why such a huge RTO wave after we proved TW was more productive, because you are paid to be present, not work because who else would fetch supervisors figurative coffee?
So the people who hire you and sign your paychecks think they're paying you to produce something--to work--but in reality they're actually just paying you to put in time and probably produce a half or less of what you could if you were actually working?
100%, the only people naive about it are small businesses owners whom have never been employed by someone else. I've seen studies that at best you get 20% productivity out of a office worker and maybe 40% lower on down hence yeah, you paying them to camp out and waste utilities for four of the five days they are showing up to boost your ego and that's at best.
For twenty years my boss would have been lucky to get maybe an hour of work out of me a week and that's thirty minutes more than my coworkers but they are loath to pay people $2200/hr so we both just pretend I'm working while I sit outside in the smoke pit for the other 39 jawjacking with the other employees doing likewise.
Americans are addicted to work being defined as being physically present hence time tracking, forty hour work weeks, onsite work, etc.
Oops, I forgot. There was one job where I hardly worked. It was a summer job in the traffic sign shop of a suburban county. The county had had spectacular growth. The workers told stories of how many signs they had put up in the old days. But there was almost no more "new road" growth. However, nobody got fired so there were at least 15 permanent employees and work for maybe 4. Plus two summer employees who were political favors (one was me) and two who were there on an anti-poverty program.
It was not a good introduction to the world of government work.
I wasn't there so I won't dispute your experience. But mine has been very different--in both white collar and blue collar employment. Well more than half the time, I was working.
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.
265 years ago, Voltaire wrote in Candide, "Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need."
On purely technical and material grounds, and to a first approximation but increasingly so in our particular context, "need" could be considered a solved problem. This isn't so much the "aim" of entrepreneurs and technocrats as it is a natural consequence of technological and economic progress outpacing population growth for a long time.
Vice we solved by defining it out of existence.
I think Voltaire's "boredom" could be better translated into English as something like "the ennui of idleness". Most work is "boring" in the English sense of the word, but ennui is a different experience. And ennui is also solved by combination of the solutions to the other two evils, by allowing people to indulge in vice, and progress that has made indulgence in hyperstimulative vices easily affordable.
If, on the other hand, you still believe in vice and that people should be discouraged from indulging in them, then you are still stuck with two evils for which, "The only thing that works, is work."
"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."
That is a very individualistic way of looking at things. That plenty of young men are tempted into lives of indolence, sloth, and other vices is no surprise, but you wouldn't want to live in a community full of lots of guys doing that. Sure, politicians wouldn't want their kids to work in a factory, though lower class parents might. But who wants their kids to fatten on porn, games, and drugs in the basement? Nobody. Who wants to live in a town filling with those types? Nobody.
Sometimes it seems like Libertarians who, on the one hand, can talk intelligently all day about how coddling some domestic sector with protections or subsidies is bad for the the companies themselves and the stock of organizational capital because insufficiently motivated to do their best, but on the other hand, won't acknowledge the same point about how coddling men is just as bad for those men and the stock of human capital, social capital, cultural capital, etc. This is a tragic source of tension between conservative and libertarian arguments that are really just both sides of the same coin, and the consequence is a lot of talking past each other and unnecessary acrimony.
Just like with "bubbles" / "online echo chambers" / "epistemic closure" - there are many dimensions that contribute to "segregated experiences of social reality and thus conceptions of human nature," and like Charles Murray wrote, these have gotten worse over the past 60 years or so to the point of near-de-facto-apartheid, cementing castes, and with more sorting and atomism. Instead of blind men describing the elephant, we are blind men trying to describe the other, very different blind men. That's why there are titles like "How the Other Half Lives" and "Coming Apart".
It is increasingly difficult to communicate across these divides and have intellectually coherent conversations about them without having to excavate accumulated layers of perceptions and assumptions down to the bedrock, and no one has sufficient trust and patience to do that anymore.
My impression is that just like most young white-collar-job workers now have little familiarity with the reality of blue-collar-jobs (especially the way they were in the past), most "white-collar-economy-town" residents haven't spent thirty minutes in the past thirty years in the towns that somehow used to be good places to live despite local economies full of these terrible, awful jobs.
Likewise, people who are "front row kids", and "marshmallow test passers" often truly have a hard time grasping what it is like to be a human being with several standard deviations less intelligence, market value, diligence, discipline, self-control, conscientiousness, etc. My impression of Libertarians is that the prospect of paternalistic attitudes toward these less capable adults is so anathema (in part because of the threat of liberty-crushing slippery slope going down a mile from giving the principle an inch) that it generates a special kind of crimestop reflex that puts up blinders to the depths of degradation and degeneration possible when large numbers of men are not prepared and incentivized to engage in regular labor of whatever level of quality.
Living in a society means we are all trapped in the prison of our own collective human nature, consisting of all the wide distributions of all human qualities. One can reason all day about optimizing taxes, rules, and commerce subject to economic constraints, but it's all a pointless exercise if one doesn't also recognize that social policy needs to optimize subject to human nature, the most pressing constraint of all, and no one knows any better to do that than keeping most men regularly employed, and yes, in economically inefficient, terrible, dirty, and dangerous jobs if necessary.
We need to find or create more jobs for Low IQ folk. Of all races, I usually add, when repeating this.
This is also my criticism of any UBI, the dumb idea of rewarding laziness with a govt no strings check. And Arnold’s curiously naive idea that his proposed “not enough to live on” is remotely feasible, as compared to more work subsidies & jobs.
A young man, almost a kid to me, whom I quickly deduced was a 2nd generation immigrant*, moved in catty corner upstairs, rather oddly for this shabby "vintage" complex of mostly old or retired people, dead people in some cases, and a few young professionals who like the location at the edge of an "enclave", and the odd international grad students or similar.
I have thus come to have a window onto his two lives, or what I think of as his two "selves".
He leaves each AM at 6:30, already having donned his yellow vest, his somewhat bowed legs never dragging in their heavy work boots, but always with a quick resolute step. He almost always carries a bag which holds his prepared lunch or breakfast, one or the other. He gets in the company-issued truck which is too large to park anywhere except the street and swiftly drives off and returns around supper time. If I happen to be outside, I wave, and he waves nervously back. He really is a fish out of water here, and I think one of the other white-lady inhabitants has gotten after him about "leaving the dog outside in the heat on the balcony all day" (at first it kept escaping) or "grilling on the balcony" or not setting his trash in the right place, and I imagine we're all one to him.
I can't say what precise work he does for the "civil construction" firm but he comes home with clods of clay dirt falling off his shoes.
Something in his cheerful manner as he goes off to work suggests to me that he's a good employee, probably with supervision over others.
In the apartment, he is revealed to be an emotional child (no judgment, he's pretty young). He screams and yells, sometimes for a prolonged period, at an indeterminate woman or women who may or may not be resident there - the "closed" nature of these folks has not permitted me to learn relationships or names, and some people are hard for me to differentiate, looks wise. Maybe he has changed girlfriends. (They even keep the blinds closed, at all times, which makes me feel sorry for the dog, having nothing even to look at, but knowing that dogs are moving about in the courtyard below.) Still, it seems unlikely you would get so upset at a sister. Sometimes there have been children there but only temporarily, it seems. I stepped out in the foyer a couple times, the way you do with something new, uncertain whether the novel yelling and screaming was potentially "more" than it sounded. I soon concluded it was not. But from those first couple times when I did strain to listen for a physical fight, I gathered that he feels underappreciated, that he feels he is working the hardest, and something is disappointing or upsetting him based on that.
I'm now used to his occasional fits of yelling, which eventually peak in a kind of agonized, almost sobbing whine which is decidedly not very masculine or attractive, at least in my view.
I have nothing against this young man. But I really wonder - do people really think someone like him is happier, is more whole, without work? And that I would be happier living in close proximity to him, if he didn't go off proudly to work each day, but stayed home and yelled at his impotence in the domestic sphere?
*His relatives showed up not long after he moved in for a weekend-long gathering/party. He speaks English, as most young people do, but his older relatives spoke Spanish and had a rural look, the men following their fat wives about protectively. They took the younger generation of this extended group took over the pool for the weekend and had a fun time, I think. I noticed my neighbor didn't appear to own flip flops and went to the pool in tennis shoes and socks, a sign of someone who really does just work all the damn time. But he does have weekends off. He works for a big firm, not a shadow one.
This clan made a lot of noise coming and going over that weekend and I admit I was a little concerned that a lot of people were going to be living up there. But it was a one-off, and the dude has never gone to the pool since.
A lot of right-of-center economists extol the virtues of "cap and trade" approaches to allocate certain rights subject to some natural or other limitation, for example, the right to emit certain amounts of sulfur dioxide or the right to broadcast radio waves of a certain power and frequency from a particular place. Policy sets the overall goal, and "the market takes care of the rest", where agents are incentivized to discover how to get it done in the most efficient way.
Pressing on the minimal number of levers required to keep most young men gainfully employed and interested in early family formation is an alternative future labor policy to paying them all to, well, not so much "to play corkball" as "to play with themselves".
I am struggling to adopt this mindset, but cannot see how it will possibly ever pass muster to bake inefficiency into things so proles can have jobs. This is effects me personally as I am father to a son who is almost certainly destined to whatever fate has in store for such people. It's not an academic issue to me and I have no idea what I can do, if anything, to prepare him.
There is a relatively simple solution: "a union". A union gets above-market-rates of compensation for its members by monopolizing labor over a whole sector, restricting supply, and extracting surpluses from consumers and marginal laborers willing to work for less but kept out.
And your whole country can be a union, adjusting immigration and imports and regulations and tariffs to whatever minimal extent is required to keep marginal men participating in the labor force, (equivalent to selling contracts for make-work in the market to the lowest bidder), by subtly taxing their fellow countrymen and foreign competition, compensating for the inefficiencies involved by extracting surpluses from the consumers of their output and the foreign proles who would be willing to work cheaper, either in factories abroad, or domestically by moving here.
Wouldn't it be better to just replace this all with some kind of simple cash transfer scheme by redistributing from winners to losers? No. It's not better. The men need to be able to fool themselves (and everyone else whose esteem he needs) into thinking they justly earned every dime and weren't charity cases, and they have to spend their time actually doing something that looks and feels like a job. Does this actually work? Yes, just ask any old blue collar union man.
Is this good for growth? In Econ-101, the answer is clearly "nope". But in RealWorld-101, the question is, "Compared to what?" What exactly is the cost to the net present value of expected social welfare of throwing a third of our stock of potential human capital into a shredder. How much wealth will individuals and society waste on adapting to and dealing with the fallout? When everyone has to buy bars to install on their windows, that's a lot of wealth that gets trapped in the security necessary for a low-trust, low-order society that can't get allocated to anything of higher value. Just ask South Africa.
It's not unreasonable to propose that the optimal setting for the brake pressure on imports and immigrants to deal with these trade-offs is something other than zero.
Forgive me this, but I was raised -- had it drilled in my head, literally upon my father's knee -- that unions were an attempt to "fix the price of labor, enforced by threat of violence" and that it was antithetical to personal freedom and morally repugnant; never mind the arguments for economic efficiency, &c. Honestly, I had no problem with that formulation, as I thought that any human capable of "work" could earn a living wage in the US with enough pluck, imagination and hustle -- and the rise of the internet only served as further evidence that this was true (one need not even be able-bodied to create real value -- just able-minded with access to a computer and the "information superhighway"). It was really around the time of the Yellow Vest revolt in France that I started to glean the beginnings of a world where a creeping percentage of the labor force might actually truly have zero marginal productivity... not merely become unemployed, but unemploy-able. Yes, these concerns have been around for as long as the levelers and luddites, but I had an eerie feeling that, well, you know... maybe this time it *is* different. I have a child who in another era would have happily gone to the assembly line, I think, and never known differently that there was any other kind of life to which he would want to aspire. I cannot see how he will be able to hack it in a modern economy that requires social sophistication, abstract thinking, executive function... what will become of him? I would like the answer not to be "drugs and video games" which at the moment looks very much to me like the future... but turn the United States into a Japan where "window tribe" is the price of success? I recoil at the thought -- yes, even clutching my (decidedly worthless) Ivy League degree. Is this how the European aristocracy felt after the First World War?
Handle, you are the Malcolm X of conservatives. I don't always agree but I admire the way you push the boundaries, following ideas where they lead, without the "crimestop" of libertarians, progressives, liberals, or most conservatives.
'That plenty of young men are tempted into lives of indolence, sloth, and other vices is no surprise, but you wouldn't want to live in a community full of lots of guys doing that"
Why not? We seem to have no problem with lots of women doing it. The problem is people with mindsets like yours that demonize young men taking part in a long due equality. Believe it or not, men deserve a life of pleasure too, they aren't just there as piggy banks for women.
You notice how in all these comments nairy a one cares about our unemployed women sucking off the teet of their parents or boyfriend.
Demonize? Please, you need to work on your reading comprehension. It's the total opposite, more like the sympathy and pity of understanding. I'm not criticizing choices made among a perceived set of poor options and which are the normal and rational response to poor incentives. I am lamenting the current state of affairs with this framework of incentives, and I am proposing that a total allergy to using any policy levers whatsoever to nudge those incentives in the direction of better individual and social outcomes is callous and unreasonable, at best.
Ah yes saying you wouldn't want to live in a community around them or pitying their positive choices while judging them to a harsher standard than other simply because of their gender is being sympathetic lol. Likewise saying those are poor choices, etc.
Yet once again you've yet to condemn unemployed women living life's of leisure nor do.i imagine you would have the same vitriol or concern living in a town full of said women.
I am as guilty of romanticizing production work as much as anyone. Thinking about why this might be so, I come up with three primary reasons – family, my experience in both production and service jobs, and pay.
My father was a union steam fitter in a plant on Manchester Boulevard in St. Louis that produced chemical compounds for use in paints and other products initially for domestic use but then entirely for export to Japan. It wasn’t production, but it kept production lines operating and provided a comfortable existence. The plant was still operating last time I went by. My dad supplemented his income by buying a rental property and was able to get us a fairly nice suburban ranch house. One neighbor did production work at the Anheuser-Busch brewery, the other was a banker. Across the back fence lived a federal civil service senior executive.
Hard to imagine such a neighborhood today. But it wasn’t unusual. Everyone admired my two cousins in particular who had managed to get hired on to the Corvette assembly line. They made good money and had nice homes and lots of kids who all did well for themselves. But lots of other cousins did production work in plants down around Cape Girardeau. They all had nice lives even if the work itself was routine and repetitive. My brother ran away from home for a year while he was in high school and managed to support himself assembling hospital beds. He has a PhD now. I think that this is what I romanticize most about the production work of the past – ordinary people were able to own nice homes and raise families comfortably and were no better or worse than anyone else. And work was always associated with freedom and independence in my mind.
From an early age I had enjoyed finding jobs and working doing all sorts of things over the years until I hit 15 and got my first legal summer job selling snow cones at the St. Louis Zoo. I made less than minimum wage at the time because I was a student so I seem to remember pulling down something like 97 cents an hour but that is likely off. I had my learners permit and had bought a car with my savings so I could date. I fell in love with one of my black coworkers from the city and we had a fine time going to drive in movies and amusement arcades. But then fall came. During the school year I had part time jobs, the longest of which was selling Red Wing shoes at night at a shop. I think I made $1.25 an hour. Back then a person could open a shop and support a family. Not sure that happens much anymore. At any rate my first legal work experience was in the service industry and nothing about that work does much to stir romanticism. Later I would have a couple summers working as a fry cook in a chicken joint and stints operating a plastic injection mold and riveting saw horse brackets. The production work was more boring and repetitive but the conditions were better than the hot greasy service work environment and it paid more. During graduate school I would drive a school bus in the morning and then do temp agency office work in the afternoons working around classes. I would have to say I enjoyed driving busses much more than doing office chores (mostly distributing printouts, mail room stuff, checklists) and it paid better too.
On further reflection, perhaps another darker and more political explanation for such romanticism, is an early teenage infatuation with anarchists. Every so often I would mail off a buck or two to Dover Press and receive in return a book by the likes of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Proudhon, or Emma Goldman. Even went to visit the Mother Jones gravesite in Mount Olive. One wonders how much we remain at the mercy of our misguided teenage influences later in life.
A great lesson is, as a stranger, ask for a cigarette or some small favor, so as to fit in quickly and in a slightly inferior position as a debtor.
My experience of accepting somebody buying drinks is that I don’t like being in debt, or feeling I am.
Today in America, those good hearted hard working folk can find menial jobs, like at McDonald’s, and after a year or so bounce upward to a better job. Read an estimate that 10% of Americans worked at McDonald’s at some point, but I thought it was plus any fast food, so me too.
Far more than in the 60s or before, most unemployed have bad to terrible work habits, lifestyle issues.
A lot of manufacturing jobs today are skilled or semi-skilled in specialized tasks and equipment. They do pay ok and you can make a median wage for an individual, median for a household would be a bit harder. I was a line leader on a flexographic printing press for 3 years. Less than one percent of the presses in the world are like the press I was running. I was doing this job in Indiana, incidentally the only other place I know of in America I could have also done this same job is in St. Louis. So if you are working on a specialized piece of equipment in one place in America you aren't just a somewhere, you are an extreme somewhere because to leave is to start over again nearer the bottom. I can't imagine a project manager would have this problem moving between any city in America, pay changes would be more reflective of changes in local conditions and not because of the work skills as much. This is part of the truth of the sentiment Arnold expressed the other day that if you are a person who wants to work with things services are the way to go. Plumbing, Roofing, Electrical, Landscaping, etc. are needed everywhere. You can be a somewhere anywhere, and possibly make the money required to buy a home and support a family. Also, as far as rote tasks and repetitive work warehouses can be quite a bit worse, in my personal work experience, than manufacturing. Picking and packing products was worse than both my previous jobs in providing services to heavy manufacturers and working on the production floor in manufacturing.
I worked in two different factories at my former employer, a large aerospace manufacturer. The work involved a lot of machining, forming, welding, coating, and other processes to produce extremely expensive parts for jet engines. The workers were well paid and unionized, but the work wasn't a lot of fun for anyone. It did support a lot of families, but so do restaurant jobs or truck driving jobs.
I think the romance of manufacturing is based on a popular image of well-paid workers with secure jobs making the best products in the world. Service jobs are equally valid, but the economy has to be built, ultimately, on manufacturing and agriculture, which provide the physical products people use. This doesn't mean that most jobs need to be in manufacturing or agriculture - increased productivity improvements in both areas have allowed us to enjoy a lot more products while needing fewer workers.
"The article has a “list of employees” that lists only a few in each year."
It's a small point, but it looks like that is a list of union members, compiled in late 1996 or early 1997 - it lists a "plant sen." date for each one. Also, there at lots of gaps in the "Employee No." sequence. Employee number 20193 must have been hired on 9/16 or 9/17 of 1996, but had already left the company (or maybe just left the union) by the time the list was prepared.
In college I had a job installing navigation equipment on ships aand boats. It was a great job paying 20 per hour in 1985 through 1989.
As an engineer I worked on the F/A-18 program at McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis. More intensely in machine shop, composites, sheet metal, and final assembly. I was very involved in first application of Six Sigma. Learned personally from Motorolas Bill Smith. Also worked on C17, F15, X37, MD11, etc. Built first bunker buster bomb. We developed a lot of manufacturing technology now in Tesla.
Worked at a lumberyard where my Dad was the Operations Manager. Painted buildings; unloaded railroad cars with lumber, paint, etc.; drove trucks and delivered materials to customers and our remote sites; made trusses with a team of three.
Later worked for the county. Nothing like picking up dead deer, loading them in a dump truck, and delivering them to a local dump - except, perhaps, cutting grass along the roadside with a scythe when the handle would be wet and hitting an electrified fence.
Eventually taught at a college, but never forgot that background and the friends I made there.
When I was 17 years old before starting college at Cornell University for engineering, I worked the summer on a construction site. That work was life-changing in the way you described in your article. Today I live in Florida and run a large real estate investment firm. Most of the construction workers here are immigrants. Few of my industry peers, and probably none of the politicians understand the plight of the construction worker.
Living in a boomtown, in a neighborhood in which our ugly early 80s houses were slowly being rejiggered but more often replaced by almost-as-ugly but larger 2010s houses, I had a firsthand view of residential construction work as performed by small businesses.
I generally saw Hispanic guys who had a great camaraderie with one another; indeed often seemed to be joking and having a good time, working to the bathetic ranchera music that was a sign they were fresh from Mexico.
This cheerful atmosphere was not always the case, though. I remember one outfit that built several houses in the neighborhood, that went about their business morosely. The only differences I could discern were: no music; and there was a much smaller crew, doing the same work a larger crew down the street was doing, only more slowly. It may have come down to what your boss was like. The employer was a Castilian Mexican lady, who had a lot of money to invest in our crap houses, and replace them with sort of debased versions of high Mexican mod design, rather oversized for the lot. Still, it made the neighborhood more interesting to have different vintages of house instead of just our one unusually unfortunate vintage.
In both cases there was no such thing as an eight- or nine-hour day, and there was no such thing as the weekend, although I think they generally had Sunday off.
This situation had the advantage that no Anglo or black worker could have broken into the utterly closed society of these crews. In fact, should you chance to become the transient employer of such a crew, you will discover that it is equally the case that your outsider status makes it impossible to communicate with them, and going through the 2nd gen immigrant guy who is their connection, is not much help either.
"Cheap labor" - who knows, what is cheap, what is not cheap - we have no options down here - can end up costing you; it has me.
Of course, had Americans tried they would have come in, perhaps, with the disadvantage of being "soft", having worked in jobs that unlike these shadow economy ones, were governed by US labor norms. They might not have ever worked a sixty- or seventy-hour week, for instance, unless it involved overtime, which of course this did not. They might have had home responsibilities, which of course these men, living in trailers together outside of or on the fringes of town, did not.
This situation seems perfect because it pretty much guarantees that no politicians will ever understand the "plight of the construction worker".
As for AK's piece:
You are welcome to say that picking cotton would be better than sitting around playing cards or riding horses ...
I had a warehouse summer job a couple of years during college and a factory job in Germany for a summer, during a year studying abroad.
The biggest thing I remember is my incompetence compared to the people who worked there all the time, and knowing that everyone else knew how bad I was too. Of course I’d get better over the summer, but my memories of blue collar work are of being worse at it than everyone else and feeling like a loser. It gave me much more appreciation for the skill required, and the first hand knowledge that they were often extremely boring jobs too.
The job in Germany where I also barely spoke and understood German at the time gave me a lot of empathy for immigrants who haven’t yet learned great English. Everyone definitely assumed I was just plain dumb, and I had never experienced that before.
It was not fun work any of those summers but it sure was a great learning experience.
I think you are being disingenuous when you criticize politicians (presumably including Trump and Vance) who lament the deindustrialization of America as being motivated solely by romantic notions of the joy of factory work and/or the goal of buying votes from blue-collar workers. You have extolled the virtues of the shift to what you call 'the white-collar economy' multiple times on your blog/Substack (talk about romanticizing a particular class of jobs -- I earned most of my living from the white-collar economy, albeit admittedly in the federal government, and to a large extent it was a stupefying bore), but as best I can recall, I've never seen you address the fundamental critique of the Trump-Vance (and Elbridge Colby et. al.) position on the deindustrialization/reindustrialization question, namely, the inconsistency between outsourcing manufacturing to adversaries like CPU-run China, on the one hand, and the heavy reliance on military power to enforce the so-called 'rules-based international order,' on the other hand. Like it or not, the exercise of military power depends on the capacity to manufacture things -- munitions, missiles, launching platforms, tanks, drones, what have you -- and I know that the Pentagon has acknowledged in multiple reports that the US defense industrial complex is heavily dependent on Chinese supply chains. It would be one thing if you categorically rejected the idea that the US should act as the 'world policeman,' but as I recall, you once lamented the failure of the United States to stop CPU-run China from taking over Hong Kong. If you think China taking over Hong Kong was a bad thing, why would you trust China to be a major supplier of critical manufacturing goods (versus non-critical goods like women's underwear) to the United States?
This is one of the lessons of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Early in the conflict, the MSM put out a stream of articles to the effect that Putin was running out of missiles. When that prediction proved to be inaccurate, the narrative shifted to a stream of articles about how Russia is outproducing all of NATO combined with regard to artillery shells and other munitions and military equipment. And yeah, I know, there are also reports that the Russian defense industrial complex depends on other countries -- China for critical inputs, Iran for drones, North Korea for some artillery shells, and Western technology more generally, which somehow manages to evade the sanctions. So what? My point here is the waging war depends on having a sizeable defense industrial sector. In Russia's case, much of its defense industrial complex was undoubtedly built up under the Soviet system, and it is probably grossly inefficient (having seen the insides of some Soviet industrial dinosaurs, I can testify to that). The goal of economic efficiency is probably fine for most non-critical consumer goods, but for the purpose of exercising military power, it may be overrated.
As with everything in life, policy decisions about free trade, efficiency, deindustrialization/reindustrialization, and the ability to exercise military power involve trade-offs. Having a white-collar economy and shifting all those nasty manufacturing jobs to Asia may sound good on paper (and to repeat myself, much of it is boring in practice), but it isn't going to win you any wars, nor will it prevent them from happening.
PS, as long as we our touting our blue-collar work experience, I spent the summer after my freshman year at college working on the production line of a cannery, putting the apricots (2 apiece) in cans of a major brand of fruit salad. The cannery employed men to maintain the equipment, but women worked on the production line. Initially I put in minimal effort, but when I noticed the young Hispanic woman next to me on the line (and who was the last person on the apricot line before the cans moved on to the next type of fruit) was rushing to fill the cans I had missed, I stepped on the gas and left her with little to do. The lesson I learned is that if I made a competitive game out of filling as many cans as possible, the time went much faster and it was much less boring. In contrast, I can't count the amount of time I spent bored out of my mind in front of my computer screen in my white-collar jobs.
Full agreement with your core point -- outsourcing most mfg jobs outside of America makes it tougher to win any war, and more likely that there will be war. Or two. (As now). Or more, depending on how shooting conflicts are counted.
Trump was very very right in 2016 to want more US production in USA.
The universe doesn't care that your production job was or is boring and hazardous.
The coming collapse in demographics and global trade is going to mean that if we want stuff we're going to need to make it ourselves (H/T Peter Zeihan). We can either get ahead of the train coming down the tracks by doing things to enhance our manufacturing capability or we can keep on thinking that we live in Lake Woebegone where everybody has the above average IQ for a white-collar job and we can ship all the scut work somewhere else.
I see this as the big divide between the two parties. This is not a matter of us deciding on maintaining the Global Order. It is going to fall apart for a whole host of reasons. Republicans are at least willing to look at the opportunities that might be present in the situation. Democrats simply want to keep up the fiction that it's not going happen.
You are far from alone. My favorite story along these lines involves my friend Jim Sheffield. While Jim was a student at Georgia Tech, he worked summers as a plumber's helper. There is doubtfully no job that is dirtier or more disgusting. Still, Jim said that job, more than anything, incented him to do well and finish at Georgia Tech.
I believe that your friend and colleague, Don Boudreaux has also had and publicly shared similar experiences. Ditto for Thomas Sowell. I suspect that many people who have successful white collar professions share similar histories.
I like to say that the reason I went to school was so that I wouldn't have to work hard at manual labor. I do not believe that I am unique. Nevertheless, I enjoyed your story and connected with it. My dad used to say that such experiences are "character building" and so they are.
I worked in an oil refinery one summer. Many great experiences and memories, but one that stands out is this joke I learned: What is the difference between blue collar and white collar? If you are white collar, you wash your hands *after* you use the bathroom.
I don't hear politicians and pundits pining for more agricultural jobs. Was it John Kenneth Galbraith, who grew up on a farm in the early 20th century, who wrote that nothing he ever did afterwards seemed like work? American farmers are fantastically productive and enable the rest of us to enjoy lots of other goods because we spend so little of our income on groceries. Manufacturing has also become far more productive. It is logical for manufacturing employment to decline, even without foreign competition.
Two points that other commenters have not mentioned: (1) In the heyday of manufacturing jobs in the United States, the population was about half what it is now (hence unbuilt land was more abundant), zoning was less strict, and the average house was considerably smaller. So, the Levittown house then was more affordable to the assembly line worker than the suburban New York house of today. (2) Mass immigration of the kind the U.S. government allows pushes down wages for low-skilled workers. Raising their wages disproportionately requires either limiting the supply of low-skilled labor or somehow increasing demand for it relative to higher-skilled labor.
And by the way, I worked one summer in a furniture factory and two summers in a machine shop, neither with air conditioning on the floor. (The bosses' offices had it.)
Arnold, my best friend growing up was Martin Hahn whose father owned Soundolier. I've even been to the factory. In '83 he sold the business; after his non-compete agreement expired he founded a new company whose 1st contract was installing a new public address system in Mecca, the prime contractor of whom was Muhammad bin Ladin.
Not that much to add; I worked @ the National Vendors factory on Natural Bridge Ave in North St Louis in the summers between university [Vanderbilt]. The summers were brutal. These taught me about hard work & 12 hour shifts!
Richard Hahn was a cultured man: classical music, art [in their house] & travel. I learned a lot from him in terms of curiosity about the world: in the '80's I moved to Sydney & in the '90's worked all over SE Asia (management consulting in retail banking)
Love your Substack & read it daily; esp. your views on & experience in Fannie & Freddie & the US banking system (I was a General Manager in 1 of the Big 4 banks here in Australia)
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.
On that last part, sounds like many "working" jobs today. I spent a couple years as a defense contractor overseas and I think 120% of us were living off benzos to sleep, alcohol to relax, and amphetamine to work for years at a time. 16x7 work weeks in Iraq on a three year contract with not much to do while "down" just isn't sustainable without drugs, same reason drug used for productive, not recreational, use is so rampant among doctors or drudgery jobs. When I was a teenager working Jiggy Lube we always had beer in the "pit" and was rare a employee that didn't reek of weed or have track marks.
The productivity thing is a problem everywhere and all classes, no one likes a showoff for exactly the reasons you said. It's an occupation, not a vocation, and it took me a long time to realize the difference including the resultant work culture that comes with it. You are paid to be there, not work, so quit trying so hard.
No, you ARE paid to work.
No you really aren't, you would be salaried or piece work if so and they wouldn't care if you did your work efficiently and went home. It's why they are so focused on timecards and docking people for being a minute late. Why do you think busy work exists?
I did a stint in data entry back in my youth, I had a sustained typing wpm of around 95, the job qualifications were 20. The job entailed inputting the previous days results. You were handed a box and went home when done but were paid by the hour. I generally went home after two hours, my coworkers generally got 1 to 2 hours of overtime a day, I got -6 hours of straight time. I complained to my boss, he said "work slower then, you aren't salaried".
Every job I've ever had since then has been a variant of that same thinking including as a Fed and likewise it's why such a huge RTO wave after we proved TW was more productive, because you are paid to be present, not work because who else would fetch supervisors figurative coffee?
So the people who hire you and sign your paychecks think they're paying you to produce something--to work--but in reality they're actually just paying you to put in time and probably produce a half or less of what you could if you were actually working?
100%, the only people naive about it are small businesses owners whom have never been employed by someone else. I've seen studies that at best you get 20% productivity out of a office worker and maybe 40% lower on down hence yeah, you paying them to camp out and waste utilities for four of the five days they are showing up to boost your ego and that's at best.
For twenty years my boss would have been lucky to get maybe an hour of work out of me a week and that's thirty minutes more than my coworkers but they are loath to pay people $2200/hr so we both just pretend I'm working while I sit outside in the smoke pit for the other 39 jawjacking with the other employees doing likewise.
Americans are addicted to work being defined as being physically present hence time tracking, forty hour work weeks, onsite work, etc.
Oops, I forgot. There was one job where I hardly worked. It was a summer job in the traffic sign shop of a suburban county. The county had had spectacular growth. The workers told stories of how many signs they had put up in the old days. But there was almost no more "new road" growth. However, nobody got fired so there were at least 15 permanent employees and work for maybe 4. Plus two summer employees who were political favors (one was me) and two who were there on an anti-poverty program.
It was not a good introduction to the world of government work.
I wasn't there so I won't dispute your experience. But mine has been very different--in both white collar and blue collar employment. Well more than half the time, I was working.
Sounds like the Ford plant in Lorain OH back in 1966
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.
265 years ago, Voltaire wrote in Candide, "Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need."
On purely technical and material grounds, and to a first approximation but increasingly so in our particular context, "need" could be considered a solved problem. This isn't so much the "aim" of entrepreneurs and technocrats as it is a natural consequence of technological and economic progress outpacing population growth for a long time.
Vice we solved by defining it out of existence.
I think Voltaire's "boredom" could be better translated into English as something like "the ennui of idleness". Most work is "boring" in the English sense of the word, but ennui is a different experience. And ennui is also solved by combination of the solutions to the other two evils, by allowing people to indulge in vice, and progress that has made indulgence in hyperstimulative vices easily affordable.
If, on the other hand, you still believe in vice and that people should be discouraged from indulging in them, then you are still stuck with two evils for which, "The only thing that works, is work."
"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."
That is a very individualistic way of looking at things. That plenty of young men are tempted into lives of indolence, sloth, and other vices is no surprise, but you wouldn't want to live in a community full of lots of guys doing that. Sure, politicians wouldn't want their kids to work in a factory, though lower class parents might. But who wants their kids to fatten on porn, games, and drugs in the basement? Nobody. Who wants to live in a town filling with those types? Nobody.
Sometimes it seems like Libertarians who, on the one hand, can talk intelligently all day about how coddling some domestic sector with protections or subsidies is bad for the the companies themselves and the stock of organizational capital because insufficiently motivated to do their best, but on the other hand, won't acknowledge the same point about how coddling men is just as bad for those men and the stock of human capital, social capital, cultural capital, etc. This is a tragic source of tension between conservative and libertarian arguments that are really just both sides of the same coin, and the consequence is a lot of talking past each other and unnecessary acrimony.
Just like with "bubbles" / "online echo chambers" / "epistemic closure" - there are many dimensions that contribute to "segregated experiences of social reality and thus conceptions of human nature," and like Charles Murray wrote, these have gotten worse over the past 60 years or so to the point of near-de-facto-apartheid, cementing castes, and with more sorting and atomism. Instead of blind men describing the elephant, we are blind men trying to describe the other, very different blind men. That's why there are titles like "How the Other Half Lives" and "Coming Apart".
It is increasingly difficult to communicate across these divides and have intellectually coherent conversations about them without having to excavate accumulated layers of perceptions and assumptions down to the bedrock, and no one has sufficient trust and patience to do that anymore.
My impression is that just like most young white-collar-job workers now have little familiarity with the reality of blue-collar-jobs (especially the way they were in the past), most "white-collar-economy-town" residents haven't spent thirty minutes in the past thirty years in the towns that somehow used to be good places to live despite local economies full of these terrible, awful jobs.
Likewise, people who are "front row kids", and "marshmallow test passers" often truly have a hard time grasping what it is like to be a human being with several standard deviations less intelligence, market value, diligence, discipline, self-control, conscientiousness, etc. My impression of Libertarians is that the prospect of paternalistic attitudes toward these less capable adults is so anathema (in part because of the threat of liberty-crushing slippery slope going down a mile from giving the principle an inch) that it generates a special kind of crimestop reflex that puts up blinders to the depths of degradation and degeneration possible when large numbers of men are not prepared and incentivized to engage in regular labor of whatever level of quality.
Living in a society means we are all trapped in the prison of our own collective human nature, consisting of all the wide distributions of all human qualities. One can reason all day about optimizing taxes, rules, and commerce subject to economic constraints, but it's all a pointless exercise if one doesn't also recognize that social policy needs to optimize subject to human nature, the most pressing constraint of all, and no one knows any better to do that than keeping most men regularly employed, and yes, in economically inefficient, terrible, dirty, and dangerous jobs if necessary.
We need to find or create more jobs for Low IQ folk. Of all races, I usually add, when repeating this.
This is also my criticism of any UBI, the dumb idea of rewarding laziness with a govt no strings check. And Arnold’s curiously naive idea that his proposed “not enough to live on” is remotely feasible, as compared to more work subsidies & jobs.
A young man, almost a kid to me, whom I quickly deduced was a 2nd generation immigrant*, moved in catty corner upstairs, rather oddly for this shabby "vintage" complex of mostly old or retired people, dead people in some cases, and a few young professionals who like the location at the edge of an "enclave", and the odd international grad students or similar.
I have thus come to have a window onto his two lives, or what I think of as his two "selves".
He leaves each AM at 6:30, already having donned his yellow vest, his somewhat bowed legs never dragging in their heavy work boots, but always with a quick resolute step. He almost always carries a bag which holds his prepared lunch or breakfast, one or the other. He gets in the company-issued truck which is too large to park anywhere except the street and swiftly drives off and returns around supper time. If I happen to be outside, I wave, and he waves nervously back. He really is a fish out of water here, and I think one of the other white-lady inhabitants has gotten after him about "leaving the dog outside in the heat on the balcony all day" (at first it kept escaping) or "grilling on the balcony" or not setting his trash in the right place, and I imagine we're all one to him.
I can't say what precise work he does for the "civil construction" firm but he comes home with clods of clay dirt falling off his shoes.
Something in his cheerful manner as he goes off to work suggests to me that he's a good employee, probably with supervision over others.
In the apartment, he is revealed to be an emotional child (no judgment, he's pretty young). He screams and yells, sometimes for a prolonged period, at an indeterminate woman or women who may or may not be resident there - the "closed" nature of these folks has not permitted me to learn relationships or names, and some people are hard for me to differentiate, looks wise. Maybe he has changed girlfriends. (They even keep the blinds closed, at all times, which makes me feel sorry for the dog, having nothing even to look at, but knowing that dogs are moving about in the courtyard below.) Still, it seems unlikely you would get so upset at a sister. Sometimes there have been children there but only temporarily, it seems. I stepped out in the foyer a couple times, the way you do with something new, uncertain whether the novel yelling and screaming was potentially "more" than it sounded. I soon concluded it was not. But from those first couple times when I did strain to listen for a physical fight, I gathered that he feels underappreciated, that he feels he is working the hardest, and something is disappointing or upsetting him based on that.
I'm now used to his occasional fits of yelling, which eventually peak in a kind of agonized, almost sobbing whine which is decidedly not very masculine or attractive, at least in my view.
I have nothing against this young man. But I really wonder - do people really think someone like him is happier, is more whole, without work? And that I would be happier living in close proximity to him, if he didn't go off proudly to work each day, but stayed home and yelled at his impotence in the domestic sphere?
*His relatives showed up not long after he moved in for a weekend-long gathering/party. He speaks English, as most young people do, but his older relatives spoke Spanish and had a rural look, the men following their fat wives about protectively. They took the younger generation of this extended group took over the pool for the weekend and had a fun time, I think. I noticed my neighbor didn't appear to own flip flops and went to the pool in tennis shoes and socks, a sign of someone who really does just work all the damn time. But he does have weekends off. He works for a big firm, not a shadow one.
This clan made a lot of noise coming and going over that weekend and I admit I was a little concerned that a lot of people were going to be living up there. But it was a one-off, and the dude has never gone to the pool since.
A lot of right-of-center economists extol the virtues of "cap and trade" approaches to allocate certain rights subject to some natural or other limitation, for example, the right to emit certain amounts of sulfur dioxide or the right to broadcast radio waves of a certain power and frequency from a particular place. Policy sets the overall goal, and "the market takes care of the rest", where agents are incentivized to discover how to get it done in the most efficient way.
Pressing on the minimal number of levers required to keep most young men gainfully employed and interested in early family formation is an alternative future labor policy to paying them all to, well, not so much "to play corkball" as "to play with themselves".
I am struggling to adopt this mindset, but cannot see how it will possibly ever pass muster to bake inefficiency into things so proles can have jobs. This is effects me personally as I am father to a son who is almost certainly destined to whatever fate has in store for such people. It's not an academic issue to me and I have no idea what I can do, if anything, to prepare him.
There is a relatively simple solution: "a union". A union gets above-market-rates of compensation for its members by monopolizing labor over a whole sector, restricting supply, and extracting surpluses from consumers and marginal laborers willing to work for less but kept out.
And your whole country can be a union, adjusting immigration and imports and regulations and tariffs to whatever minimal extent is required to keep marginal men participating in the labor force, (equivalent to selling contracts for make-work in the market to the lowest bidder), by subtly taxing their fellow countrymen and foreign competition, compensating for the inefficiencies involved by extracting surpluses from the consumers of their output and the foreign proles who would be willing to work cheaper, either in factories abroad, or domestically by moving here.
Wouldn't it be better to just replace this all with some kind of simple cash transfer scheme by redistributing from winners to losers? No. It's not better. The men need to be able to fool themselves (and everyone else whose esteem he needs) into thinking they justly earned every dime and weren't charity cases, and they have to spend their time actually doing something that looks and feels like a job. Does this actually work? Yes, just ask any old blue collar union man.
Is this good for growth? In Econ-101, the answer is clearly "nope". But in RealWorld-101, the question is, "Compared to what?" What exactly is the cost to the net present value of expected social welfare of throwing a third of our stock of potential human capital into a shredder. How much wealth will individuals and society waste on adapting to and dealing with the fallout? When everyone has to buy bars to install on their windows, that's a lot of wealth that gets trapped in the security necessary for a low-trust, low-order society that can't get allocated to anything of higher value. Just ask South Africa.
It's not unreasonable to propose that the optimal setting for the brake pressure on imports and immigrants to deal with these trade-offs is something other than zero.
Forgive me this, but I was raised -- had it drilled in my head, literally upon my father's knee -- that unions were an attempt to "fix the price of labor, enforced by threat of violence" and that it was antithetical to personal freedom and morally repugnant; never mind the arguments for economic efficiency, &c. Honestly, I had no problem with that formulation, as I thought that any human capable of "work" could earn a living wage in the US with enough pluck, imagination and hustle -- and the rise of the internet only served as further evidence that this was true (one need not even be able-bodied to create real value -- just able-minded with access to a computer and the "information superhighway"). It was really around the time of the Yellow Vest revolt in France that I started to glean the beginnings of a world where a creeping percentage of the labor force might actually truly have zero marginal productivity... not merely become unemployed, but unemploy-able. Yes, these concerns have been around for as long as the levelers and luddites, but I had an eerie feeling that, well, you know... maybe this time it *is* different. I have a child who in another era would have happily gone to the assembly line, I think, and never known differently that there was any other kind of life to which he would want to aspire. I cannot see how he will be able to hack it in a modern economy that requires social sophistication, abstract thinking, executive function... what will become of him? I would like the answer not to be "drugs and video games" which at the moment looks very much to me like the future... but turn the United States into a Japan where "window tribe" is the price of success? I recoil at the thought -- yes, even clutching my (decidedly worthless) Ivy League degree. Is this how the European aristocracy felt after the First World War?
Your son needs to be building stuff, with his hands. Maybe with you, maybe even sometimes when he doesn't want to.
Maybe even if you don't want to or know how to. (Learn together?? Nahh...)
Find a builder, or plumber or electrician, who is willing to take on your son as an apprentice.
Another path is the police force -- every city needs good cops. Tho it's not so easy, either.
Handle, you are the Malcolm X of conservatives. I don't always agree but I admire the way you push the boundaries, following ideas where they lead, without the "crimestop" of libertarians, progressives, liberals, or most conservatives.
'That plenty of young men are tempted into lives of indolence, sloth, and other vices is no surprise, but you wouldn't want to live in a community full of lots of guys doing that"
Why not? We seem to have no problem with lots of women doing it. The problem is people with mindsets like yours that demonize young men taking part in a long due equality. Believe it or not, men deserve a life of pleasure too, they aren't just there as piggy banks for women.
You notice how in all these comments nairy a one cares about our unemployed women sucking off the teet of their parents or boyfriend.
Demonize? Please, you need to work on your reading comprehension. It's the total opposite, more like the sympathy and pity of understanding. I'm not criticizing choices made among a perceived set of poor options and which are the normal and rational response to poor incentives. I am lamenting the current state of affairs with this framework of incentives, and I am proposing that a total allergy to using any policy levers whatsoever to nudge those incentives in the direction of better individual and social outcomes is callous and unreasonable, at best.
Ah yes saying you wouldn't want to live in a community around them or pitying their positive choices while judging them to a harsher standard than other simply because of their gender is being sympathetic lol. Likewise saying those are poor choices, etc.
Yet once again you've yet to condemn unemployed women living life's of leisure nor do.i imagine you would have the same vitriol or concern living in a town full of said women.
Excellent story. Thanks for sharing.
I am as guilty of romanticizing production work as much as anyone. Thinking about why this might be so, I come up with three primary reasons – family, my experience in both production and service jobs, and pay.
My father was a union steam fitter in a plant on Manchester Boulevard in St. Louis that produced chemical compounds for use in paints and other products initially for domestic use but then entirely for export to Japan. It wasn’t production, but it kept production lines operating and provided a comfortable existence. The plant was still operating last time I went by. My dad supplemented his income by buying a rental property and was able to get us a fairly nice suburban ranch house. One neighbor did production work at the Anheuser-Busch brewery, the other was a banker. Across the back fence lived a federal civil service senior executive.
Hard to imagine such a neighborhood today. But it wasn’t unusual. Everyone admired my two cousins in particular who had managed to get hired on to the Corvette assembly line. They made good money and had nice homes and lots of kids who all did well for themselves. But lots of other cousins did production work in plants down around Cape Girardeau. They all had nice lives even if the work itself was routine and repetitive. My brother ran away from home for a year while he was in high school and managed to support himself assembling hospital beds. He has a PhD now. I think that this is what I romanticize most about the production work of the past – ordinary people were able to own nice homes and raise families comfortably and were no better or worse than anyone else. And work was always associated with freedom and independence in my mind.
From an early age I had enjoyed finding jobs and working doing all sorts of things over the years until I hit 15 and got my first legal summer job selling snow cones at the St. Louis Zoo. I made less than minimum wage at the time because I was a student so I seem to remember pulling down something like 97 cents an hour but that is likely off. I had my learners permit and had bought a car with my savings so I could date. I fell in love with one of my black coworkers from the city and we had a fine time going to drive in movies and amusement arcades. But then fall came. During the school year I had part time jobs, the longest of which was selling Red Wing shoes at night at a shop. I think I made $1.25 an hour. Back then a person could open a shop and support a family. Not sure that happens much anymore. At any rate my first legal work experience was in the service industry and nothing about that work does much to stir romanticism. Later I would have a couple summers working as a fry cook in a chicken joint and stints operating a plastic injection mold and riveting saw horse brackets. The production work was more boring and repetitive but the conditions were better than the hot greasy service work environment and it paid more. During graduate school I would drive a school bus in the morning and then do temp agency office work in the afternoons working around classes. I would have to say I enjoyed driving busses much more than doing office chores (mostly distributing printouts, mail room stuff, checklists) and it paid better too.
So when I look at BLS employment figures for employment and compensation in the service sector (https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm and https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.t02.htm ) I can’t help but think that there a millions of people working low pay unpleasant service sector jobs that would be willing to move to higher paying production work. That might not be right. Nevertheless, I am happy that there are researchers exploring how opportunities might be opened for workers trapped in low pay service sector jobs to find economic security in better paying work. (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/01/helping-trapped-low-wage-workers-employers-struggling-to-fill-spots/ ). Robust reindustrialization may or may not be part of that, but the important thing is that obstacles to economic security be removed and people freed to seek better opportunities.
On further reflection, perhaps another darker and more political explanation for such romanticism, is an early teenage infatuation with anarchists. Every so often I would mail off a buck or two to Dover Press and receive in return a book by the likes of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Proudhon, or Emma Goldman. Even went to visit the Mother Jones gravesite in Mount Olive. One wonders how much we remain at the mercy of our misguided teenage influences later in life.
Of Mice and Men comes to mind, and Cannery Row.
A great lesson is, as a stranger, ask for a cigarette or some small favor, so as to fit in quickly and in a slightly inferior position as a debtor.
My experience of accepting somebody buying drinks is that I don’t like being in debt, or feeling I am.
Today in America, those good hearted hard working folk can find menial jobs, like at McDonald’s, and after a year or so bounce upward to a better job. Read an estimate that 10% of Americans worked at McDonald’s at some point, but I thought it was plus any fast food, so me too.
Far more than in the 60s or before, most unemployed have bad to terrible work habits, lifestyle issues.
A lot of manufacturing jobs today are skilled or semi-skilled in specialized tasks and equipment. They do pay ok and you can make a median wage for an individual, median for a household would be a bit harder. I was a line leader on a flexographic printing press for 3 years. Less than one percent of the presses in the world are like the press I was running. I was doing this job in Indiana, incidentally the only other place I know of in America I could have also done this same job is in St. Louis. So if you are working on a specialized piece of equipment in one place in America you aren't just a somewhere, you are an extreme somewhere because to leave is to start over again nearer the bottom. I can't imagine a project manager would have this problem moving between any city in America, pay changes would be more reflective of changes in local conditions and not because of the work skills as much. This is part of the truth of the sentiment Arnold expressed the other day that if you are a person who wants to work with things services are the way to go. Plumbing, Roofing, Electrical, Landscaping, etc. are needed everywhere. You can be a somewhere anywhere, and possibly make the money required to buy a home and support a family. Also, as far as rote tasks and repetitive work warehouses can be quite a bit worse, in my personal work experience, than manufacturing. Picking and packing products was worse than both my previous jobs in providing services to heavy manufacturers and working on the production floor in manufacturing.
I worked in two different factories at my former employer, a large aerospace manufacturer. The work involved a lot of machining, forming, welding, coating, and other processes to produce extremely expensive parts for jet engines. The workers were well paid and unionized, but the work wasn't a lot of fun for anyone. It did support a lot of families, but so do restaurant jobs or truck driving jobs.
I think the romance of manufacturing is based on a popular image of well-paid workers with secure jobs making the best products in the world. Service jobs are equally valid, but the economy has to be built, ultimately, on manufacturing and agriculture, which provide the physical products people use. This doesn't mean that most jobs need to be in manufacturing or agriculture - increased productivity improvements in both areas have allowed us to enjoy a lot more products while needing fewer workers.
"The article has a “list of employees” that lists only a few in each year."
It's a small point, but it looks like that is a list of union members, compiled in late 1996 or early 1997 - it lists a "plant sen." date for each one. Also, there at lots of gaps in the "Employee No." sequence. Employee number 20193 must have been hired on 9/16 or 9/17 of 1996, but had already left the company (or maybe just left the union) by the time the list was prepared.
In college I had a job installing navigation equipment on ships aand boats. It was a great job paying 20 per hour in 1985 through 1989.
As an engineer I worked on the F/A-18 program at McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis. More intensely in machine shop, composites, sheet metal, and final assembly. I was very involved in first application of Six Sigma. Learned personally from Motorolas Bill Smith. Also worked on C17, F15, X37, MD11, etc. Built first bunker buster bomb. We developed a lot of manufacturing technology now in Tesla.
It all taught me a great deal.
Worked at a lumberyard where my Dad was the Operations Manager. Painted buildings; unloaded railroad cars with lumber, paint, etc.; drove trucks and delivered materials to customers and our remote sites; made trusses with a team of three.
Later worked for the county. Nothing like picking up dead deer, loading them in a dump truck, and delivering them to a local dump - except, perhaps, cutting grass along the roadside with a scythe when the handle would be wet and hitting an electrified fence.
Eventually taught at a college, but never forgot that background and the friends I made there.
When I was 17 years old before starting college at Cornell University for engineering, I worked the summer on a construction site. That work was life-changing in the way you described in your article. Today I live in Florida and run a large real estate investment firm. Most of the construction workers here are immigrants. Few of my industry peers, and probably none of the politicians understand the plight of the construction worker.
Living in a boomtown, in a neighborhood in which our ugly early 80s houses were slowly being rejiggered but more often replaced by almost-as-ugly but larger 2010s houses, I had a firsthand view of residential construction work as performed by small businesses.
I generally saw Hispanic guys who had a great camaraderie with one another; indeed often seemed to be joking and having a good time, working to the bathetic ranchera music that was a sign they were fresh from Mexico.
This cheerful atmosphere was not always the case, though. I remember one outfit that built several houses in the neighborhood, that went about their business morosely. The only differences I could discern were: no music; and there was a much smaller crew, doing the same work a larger crew down the street was doing, only more slowly. It may have come down to what your boss was like. The employer was a Castilian Mexican lady, who had a lot of money to invest in our crap houses, and replace them with sort of debased versions of high Mexican mod design, rather oversized for the lot. Still, it made the neighborhood more interesting to have different vintages of house instead of just our one unusually unfortunate vintage.
In both cases there was no such thing as an eight- or nine-hour day, and there was no such thing as the weekend, although I think they generally had Sunday off.
This situation had the advantage that no Anglo or black worker could have broken into the utterly closed society of these crews. In fact, should you chance to become the transient employer of such a crew, you will discover that it is equally the case that your outsider status makes it impossible to communicate with them, and going through the 2nd gen immigrant guy who is their connection, is not much help either.
"Cheap labor" - who knows, what is cheap, what is not cheap - we have no options down here - can end up costing you; it has me.
Of course, had Americans tried they would have come in, perhaps, with the disadvantage of being "soft", having worked in jobs that unlike these shadow economy ones, were governed by US labor norms. They might not have ever worked a sixty- or seventy-hour week, for instance, unless it involved overtime, which of course this did not. They might have had home responsibilities, which of course these men, living in trailers together outside of or on the fringes of town, did not.
This situation seems perfect because it pretty much guarantees that no politicians will ever understand the "plight of the construction worker".
As for AK's piece:
You are welcome to say that picking cotton would be better than sitting around playing cards or riding horses ...
I had a warehouse summer job a couple of years during college and a factory job in Germany for a summer, during a year studying abroad.
The biggest thing I remember is my incompetence compared to the people who worked there all the time, and knowing that everyone else knew how bad I was too. Of course I’d get better over the summer, but my memories of blue collar work are of being worse at it than everyone else and feeling like a loser. It gave me much more appreciation for the skill required, and the first hand knowledge that they were often extremely boring jobs too.
The job in Germany where I also barely spoke and understood German at the time gave me a lot of empathy for immigrants who haven’t yet learned great English. Everyone definitely assumed I was just plain dumb, and I had never experienced that before.
It was not fun work any of those summers but it sure was a great learning experience.
I think you are being disingenuous when you criticize politicians (presumably including Trump and Vance) who lament the deindustrialization of America as being motivated solely by romantic notions of the joy of factory work and/or the goal of buying votes from blue-collar workers. You have extolled the virtues of the shift to what you call 'the white-collar economy' multiple times on your blog/Substack (talk about romanticizing a particular class of jobs -- I earned most of my living from the white-collar economy, albeit admittedly in the federal government, and to a large extent it was a stupefying bore), but as best I can recall, I've never seen you address the fundamental critique of the Trump-Vance (and Elbridge Colby et. al.) position on the deindustrialization/reindustrialization question, namely, the inconsistency between outsourcing manufacturing to adversaries like CPU-run China, on the one hand, and the heavy reliance on military power to enforce the so-called 'rules-based international order,' on the other hand. Like it or not, the exercise of military power depends on the capacity to manufacture things -- munitions, missiles, launching platforms, tanks, drones, what have you -- and I know that the Pentagon has acknowledged in multiple reports that the US defense industrial complex is heavily dependent on Chinese supply chains. It would be one thing if you categorically rejected the idea that the US should act as the 'world policeman,' but as I recall, you once lamented the failure of the United States to stop CPU-run China from taking over Hong Kong. If you think China taking over Hong Kong was a bad thing, why would you trust China to be a major supplier of critical manufacturing goods (versus non-critical goods like women's underwear) to the United States?
This is one of the lessons of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Early in the conflict, the MSM put out a stream of articles to the effect that Putin was running out of missiles. When that prediction proved to be inaccurate, the narrative shifted to a stream of articles about how Russia is outproducing all of NATO combined with regard to artillery shells and other munitions and military equipment. And yeah, I know, there are also reports that the Russian defense industrial complex depends on other countries -- China for critical inputs, Iran for drones, North Korea for some artillery shells, and Western technology more generally, which somehow manages to evade the sanctions. So what? My point here is the waging war depends on having a sizeable defense industrial sector. In Russia's case, much of its defense industrial complex was undoubtedly built up under the Soviet system, and it is probably grossly inefficient (having seen the insides of some Soviet industrial dinosaurs, I can testify to that). The goal of economic efficiency is probably fine for most non-critical consumer goods, but for the purpose of exercising military power, it may be overrated.
As with everything in life, policy decisions about free trade, efficiency, deindustrialization/reindustrialization, and the ability to exercise military power involve trade-offs. Having a white-collar economy and shifting all those nasty manufacturing jobs to Asia may sound good on paper (and to repeat myself, much of it is boring in practice), but it isn't going to win you any wars, nor will it prevent them from happening.
PS, as long as we our touting our blue-collar work experience, I spent the summer after my freshman year at college working on the production line of a cannery, putting the apricots (2 apiece) in cans of a major brand of fruit salad. The cannery employed men to maintain the equipment, but women worked on the production line. Initially I put in minimal effort, but when I noticed the young Hispanic woman next to me on the line (and who was the last person on the apricot line before the cans moved on to the next type of fruit) was rushing to fill the cans I had missed, I stepped on the gas and left her with little to do. The lesson I learned is that if I made a competitive game out of filling as many cans as possible, the time went much faster and it was much less boring. In contrast, I can't count the amount of time I spent bored out of my mind in front of my computer screen in my white-collar jobs.
Full agreement with your core point -- outsourcing most mfg jobs outside of America makes it tougher to win any war, and more likely that there will be war. Or two. (As now). Or more, depending on how shooting conflicts are counted.
Trump was very very right in 2016 to want more US production in USA.
The universe doesn't care that your production job was or is boring and hazardous.
The coming collapse in demographics and global trade is going to mean that if we want stuff we're going to need to make it ourselves (H/T Peter Zeihan). We can either get ahead of the train coming down the tracks by doing things to enhance our manufacturing capability or we can keep on thinking that we live in Lake Woebegone where everybody has the above average IQ for a white-collar job and we can ship all the scut work somewhere else.
I see this as the big divide between the two parties. This is not a matter of us deciding on maintaining the Global Order. It is going to fall apart for a whole host of reasons. Republicans are at least willing to look at the opportunities that might be present in the situation. Democrats simply want to keep up the fiction that it's not going happen.
You are far from alone. My favorite story along these lines involves my friend Jim Sheffield. While Jim was a student at Georgia Tech, he worked summers as a plumber's helper. There is doubtfully no job that is dirtier or more disgusting. Still, Jim said that job, more than anything, incented him to do well and finish at Georgia Tech.
I believe that your friend and colleague, Don Boudreaux has also had and publicly shared similar experiences. Ditto for Thomas Sowell. I suspect that many people who have successful white collar professions share similar histories.
I like to say that the reason I went to school was so that I wouldn't have to work hard at manual labor. I do not believe that I am unique. Nevertheless, I enjoyed your story and connected with it. My dad used to say that such experiences are "character building" and so they are.
I worked in an oil refinery one summer. Many great experiences and memories, but one that stands out is this joke I learned: What is the difference between blue collar and white collar? If you are white collar, you wash your hands *after* you use the bathroom.
I don't hear politicians and pundits pining for more agricultural jobs. Was it John Kenneth Galbraith, who grew up on a farm in the early 20th century, who wrote that nothing he ever did afterwards seemed like work? American farmers are fantastically productive and enable the rest of us to enjoy lots of other goods because we spend so little of our income on groceries. Manufacturing has also become far more productive. It is logical for manufacturing employment to decline, even without foreign competition.
Two points that other commenters have not mentioned: (1) In the heyday of manufacturing jobs in the United States, the population was about half what it is now (hence unbuilt land was more abundant), zoning was less strict, and the average house was considerably smaller. So, the Levittown house then was more affordable to the assembly line worker than the suburban New York house of today. (2) Mass immigration of the kind the U.S. government allows pushes down wages for low-skilled workers. Raising their wages disproportionately requires either limiting the supply of low-skilled labor or somehow increasing demand for it relative to higher-skilled labor.
And by the way, I worked one summer in a furniture factory and two summers in a machine shop, neither with air conditioning on the floor. (The bosses' offices had it.)
Arnold, my best friend growing up was Martin Hahn whose father owned Soundolier. I've even been to the factory. In '83 he sold the business; after his non-compete agreement expired he founded a new company whose 1st contract was installing a new public address system in Mecca, the prime contractor of whom was Muhammad bin Ladin.
Not that much to add; I worked @ the National Vendors factory on Natural Bridge Ave in North St Louis in the summers between university [Vanderbilt]. The summers were brutal. These taught me about hard work & 12 hour shifts!
Richard Hahn was a cultured man: classical music, art [in their house] & travel. I learned a lot from him in terms of curiosity about the world: in the '80's I moved to Sydney & in the '90's worked all over SE Asia (management consulting in retail banking)
Love your Substack & read it daily; esp. your views on & experience in Fannie & Freddie & the US banking system (I was a General Manager in 1 of the Big 4 banks here in Australia)
Thank you, Arnold!
https://jeffcomohistory.org/LisasHistoryArticles/Soundolier.htm
That's Richard Hahn's wood panelled Oldsmobile station wagon next to the red truck.
The family home was on South McNight Road, Richmond Heights.