Man's Work

I could swear I read somewhere when I was young that the average railway brakeman in the 19th Century had a one in seven chance of dying in bed.  This is surely wrong.  But does sound like the brakeman's job was no day at the beach:

Coupling and braking had been a technical and safety problem for the railroads since their very invention. The coupling between cars involved a crude link-and-pin device that required brakeman to stand between the cars, guide the link into a socket, drop the pin in place, and, if necessary, hammer it down. Not easy, not safe. In the dark, with a slippery oil lantern in one hand, it was even more perilous. It was said that if a man was looking for work as a brakeman and claimed to be experienced, he was asked to show his hands—missing digits were the key to confirmation he had previously worked in the job....Braking, too, was primitive in the extreme. Locomotives had no mechanisms to slow them down apart from putting them in reverse, which good drivers did only in emergency. Instead, once the driver got the signal to slow down, a brakeman had to clamber along the roof of the train from the rear and apply the brakes fitted on each car. Normally, there would also be a brakeman at the front who would work his way toward the back of the train. There was no end of potential for accidents with this arrangement, nOt least the risk to the brakemen themselves. As a former brakeman described the process, it “took nerve, coordination, timing and a perfect sense of balance, to go over the top of a freight car—winter or summer ...  rain, snow, sleet, ice all over the roofs and on brake wheels and handholds.”

 Christian Wolmar, The Great Railroad Revolution 166-67 (2012).   Wolmar makes a few more general points about railway labor in the golden age of railroad construction--say, 1863 to 93.  He shows that the owners were avid for  manpower to chop trees, blast away rock faces, spread gravel and lay track.  Most of these were awful jobs--fit only for Irish or Chinese (sarcasm).  But nobody in those days worried about the end of work. 

Footnote to the Workapocalypse

Thinking about all that talk re the non-future of jobs: I spend more time than is good for  me at a motel next to  campus, 90 miles from home.  I was reflecting the other day on the folks who make it happen.  In particular, the handyman/gardener/factotum.  He's a Latino, maybe 50, substantial, not portly.  Neatly dressed (neater than I sometimes, I suspect).  Thing is, he seems to be a happy man, and I suspect I might know why: fact is, he's got a pretty good job.   He gets to do different stuff in different seasons and on different days. He hoses down the parking lots. He moves around some of the heavy-duty trash (he has kind of a private trash yard out back by the fence). He manages those lovely gardens and flower boxes that change from season to season.  And he has one--no, maybe two--of those closets full of stuff that a handyman might need.

Of course I haven't any idea what he might earn and I suspect it is not as much as an investment banker (nor a law professor).  But if they know what is good for them (I think maybe they do), then they are paying him a bit more than the market rate.  Fact is, he is what someone on Downton Abbey would surely call "a treasure." You just can't get that kind very often.

But more than that, he comes close to being his own boss.   I suppose somebody tells him what to do sometimes, but I don't recall that I've ever seen it.  My take is that as long as he gets the job done--and it looks like he does--then nobody much cares how he goes about it. No, turn it around, then his bosses have the good sense to stay out of his way.   Interesting work at decent pay with no hassles from the boss--wouldn't we all want just that?

I suppose I can compare him to the gardeners on campus.  Back when I came first here, the gardeners seemed to work as "employees" or maybe even "labor"--with lots of managers, telling them what to do.  At some point a few years back, that seemed to change.  My impression is that now, each gardener has his own turf.  It's his (or her--several women) responsibility to keep it spiffy,. his (or her) decision to figure out how.  Maybe that, maybe something else--but whatever, it seems to work.  The place looks on the whole pretty nice and I don't recall ever seeing anybody just learning on a rake.

I think you may see some of that attitude evening among the janitors.  I get the impression that maybe they, too, are on a "results" model: all is well as long as the place does not smell like pee (okay, there's more to it than that, but I couldn't help myself).  I ran into one here on a Sunday. By way of small talk, I said, "don't they ever give you a day off?"  She said something like "well, I like to do my big projects on weekends when people are out of the way."  Wow.  On her free time?  Overtime?  Comp time?   Or just pride of craft.  Granted she has to clean up shit, but it is not a shit job in the David Graeber sense.

[Fn.:  Readers are invited to compare all those happy service employees to my favorite Simpsons character, Groundskeeper Willie,  Wiki describes him as "incompetent," along with "feral" and "quick to anger."   I'm not so sure.  My guess is that he might be better at his job than people realize, although he does seem to feel the need to keep the rest of the world at bay.]

Should She be Fired?

i.e., this one?

Or this one?

Afterthought, speaking as a long-experienced and bona fide old person, I treat it as a matter of profound indifference that the chirrupy little blonde is scared of old people.  Of course she is scared of old people. She is a young person.  It's her job to be scared of old people.  Did not the saintly Lisa Simpson say she didn't want to sit next to grandpa because he smelled funny?  Yeh, sure, the blonde has to bite her tongue and be nice to to old people  anyway and you know what, sweetie?  I'm not all that crazy about young people when they are, e.g., acting like idiots.  But we learn to suck it up and rub along anyway, don't we?

I'd say the boss in the cute-blonde case is being a jerk, but she probably learned an important life lesson.  The other guy is  a prime candidate for the may-he-rot-in-hell file.  But at least the lady gets to keep her pension.

Back in the Ill-Behoover Administration

The estimable Michael Quinion puzzles over "behoove/behove" as in "it ill behoves":

It’s one of those few expressions in modern English that is almost always impersonal. You or I, or even they, do not generally behove. The empty agent it is usually in charge of the verb. Behove can also appear with negative sense, for which a common marker word in the UK is ill. Ill behoves implies acting inappropriately or improperly, as in this editorial pronouncement from a Sunday newspaper:

In an age of genuine austerity, it ill behoves those who have enough cash to eat as they wish to stand in judgment on those who do not.
The Observer, 10 Feb. 2013.

Americans use ["behove"] only rarely, but make up for it by using behoove more often and with a wider range of modifying words such as would, might and certainly.

I think I can help re the American instance.  Back in the 50s, all the clever people (= myself and my friends) owned an LP record called "I Can Hear it Now," in which Edward R. Murrow curated snippets of radio broadcasts of famous events.  Clever people could recite chunks of it, including this from John L. Lewis:

Labor, like Israel, has many sorrows. Its women weep for their fallen and they lament for the future of the children of the race. It ill behooves one who has supped at labor's table and who has been sheltered in labor's house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.

Amazing how flat ir sounds without his orotund Welsh sonorities.  Best I can do is a snippet of some testimony before the Senate, from back  in the days when private-sector unionism was stilll a public issue:

Meanwhile, I'm still looking for a good finish to the limerick about the girl from Vancouver who thought it would never behoover.  "Louvre" seems indicated, although I am not quite sure how.

Wal-mart: Live by the Market, Die by the Market

Walter Russell Mead thinks he has discovered why the stores are empty at Wal-Mart.  It's that pesky minimum wage.  If Wal-Mart didn't have to compete with (for) workers earning the minimum, they wouldn't have so much trouble finding help.

Well yes, and they could make more money if they could just kidnap bystanders and empty their wallets.  But we have this atavistic notion that even corporate behemoths should obey the law, at least some of the time.

Anyway, I think Walter may be looking for the problem in the wrong place.  Seems to me the real fly in the ointment is CostCo and all the other guys who find that they cannot get good help unless they pay above the minimum wage.   Peter Drucker taught us (or wanted to teach us) that it is important to treat the employees as an asset rather than a liability.  Hire capable people and train them to do a job, rather than teaching them how to apply for food stamps.  Wal-Mart might think this sounds like insanity; but for guidance, they might want to ask the former owners of Border's and Circuit City what happens when you try to staff the floor with zombies.

Meantime, I assume we can expect Walter to demand that Congress impose price controls on CostCo to keep them from promoting uppitiness among the underclass.

Stuff

I've been reading a fair amount of midcentury history lately--the depression, war, postwar, that sort of thing--and what I can't get over is the amazing amount of stuff we used to make in those days.  First cars, and highways to run them on.   In the depression dams, and public buildings. In my youth I knew an old guy who remembered his time on the Hoover Dam the way others would remember their time at Guadalcanal.  I had a law clerk once who said that when the next great earthquake arrived he wanted to be inside the LA federal courthouse because he figured anything built by the on cost-plus could withstand anything.

And then the war: rifles of course, and uniforms, but that was barely the beginning: whole buzzing storms of fighter planes, flotillas of carriers to deliver them, hordes of high-flying bombers to glower over them all.  And not  just built them: built them knowing they would be destroyed, shot out of the sky, sent off to the bottom of the briney deep, we well knowing that we would and could and did build them all again.  We seemed to have no end of metal to bash into things, or oil with which to feed them.

And then after the wars the cars.  And the superhighways.  And the washing machines: I got an early break in the newspaper biz when a somewhat less than sober young engineer catalogued for me the defects in the 1962 GEs.

All of which implies the labor: the armies of workers marching through the door in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. And the strikes: another thing we tend to forget were how violent or disruptive were the near numberless labor-management conflicts of those days.   It was mostly a guy thing, something you did with you buds (inadequate word: Aussie "mates" is much more to the point) before you went off  hunting together.

I don't mean to go overboard on the nostalgia here.  It was pretty awful, the way we ripped through the planet and through each other.  It was also a way of life, the only one we knew.  One may speculate on the etenet to which it was hard-wired.  But we've still got a (dying) generation who cannot imagine it any other way.  And their children and grandchildren who have not yet invented one. 

Demand-led Employment Growth in the Mills

My friend Marie (name change) and I were chatting about our youth around (but not in) the millyards, textile and otherwise, of Manchester NH in the 40s or thereabouts.  Marie threw in one great story I had not heard before:

Why there were so many three decker homes on both sides of the [Merrimac] River, owned by Amoskeag Corporation?  These homes were purchased at a very reasonable price if   the owner met the agreement to bring down two  more families from Canada to work in the mills....

 Makes sense to me--demand-led employment growth in the textile industry.  I do remember that the mill population in our day was (or so I thought)_ heavily French Canadian: they used to say that the Friday night traffic on the road back towards Trois Riviers (Quebec) was so thick you could hardly move.  

I told Marie about my own grandmother who was left a widow with seven kids.  I never her knew her; she died the year I was born, perhaps of exhaustion. Of her seven children, the oldest three had to quit school and go to  work early.  Of the seven, all who survived through adulthood (two died early) went on to useful and productive lives.   "At least my children never worked in the mills" their mother is said to have said.  Not that mill work was beneath their dignity--just that it was grinding, implacable and unremunerative.  Marie, resisting the impulse to deliver a bitch slap, responds with a story about  Roland (name change), her husband of 50-plus years:

Roland worked in the mills right after high school in order to pay for his schooling, and help support his parents, as his mom had a brain tumor, and couldn't work at Leavitt's dept store, and had a little sister.  He'd go to school at NH School of Accounting located up over a fruit store on Hanover St. (eight in his graduating class)  owned my Mr & Mrs. Shapiro.     Well anyhow he'd attend class from 8  - 1 PM...then head to a beef company to work on their accounting books.  At 3 PM he'd leave for the dye mill  until 11PM..that job was easy, so he could study.  He just had to keep an eye on the pressure gauge or some machine.  Then at home of course  at 11 PM he had to call me right away every night--then fold laundry and off to bed.

"So he quickly learned," says Marie, "mill work wasn't for him"  Copy that, but it sounds to me like that Marie got a keeper.

For optional reading:  Marie recommends Hareven and Langenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City.

There's a wonderful summary of the early history of labor in the mills, in Atack and Pasell, A New Economic View of American History (a favorite; why doesn't somebody do a new edition?)--at 175-190.  I just now notice that they include a reference (at 182) to my old college roommate. Robert B. Zevn--this guy.  Yo, Bob!

More Schmatta

Following up on that last post: exactly what is the relationship between the rag trade and the pajama game?

Hitchens on Central Africa

If you want a little perspective after you've reviewed your 401k statement, take a look this stuff from Peter Hitchens, reporting from Zambia (link):

These poor, hopeless, angry people exist by grubbing for scraps of cobalt and copper ore in the filth and dust of abandoned copper mines in Congo, sinking perilous 80ft shafts by hand, washing their finds in cholera-infected streams full of human filth, then pushing enormous two-hundredweight loads uphill on ancient bicycles to the nearby town of Likasi where middlemen buy them to sell on, mainly to Chinese businessmen hungry for these vital metals.

To see them, as they plod miserably past, is to be reminded of pictures of unemployed miners in Thirties Britain, stumbling home in the drizzle with sacks of coal scraps gleaned from spoil heaps.

Except that here the unsparing heat makes the labour five times as hard, and the conditions of work and life are worse by far than any known in England since the 18th Century.

Many perish as their primitive mines collapse on them, or are horribly injured without hope of medical treatment. Many are little more than children. On a good day they may earn $3, which just supports a meagre existence in diseased, malarial slums.

We had been earlier to this awful pit, which looked like a penal colony in an ancient slave empire.

Defeated, bowed figures toiled endlessly in dozens of hand-dug pits. Their faces, when visible, were blank and without hope.

We had been turned away by a fat, corrupt policeman who pretended our papers weren't in order, but who was really taking instructions from a dead-eyed, one-eared gangmaster who sat next to him.

By the time we returned with more official permits, the gangmasters had readied the ambush.

The diggers feared - and their evil, sinister bosses had worked hard on that fear - that if people like me publicised their filthy way of life, then the mine might be closed and the $3 a day might be taken away.

Hitchens calls this a new "slave empire" and he blames it on "the Chinese,"but I'm not sure this hits the point. On his own account, it appears that these miserable people are doing the best they can with the resources available to them.