What most people viscerally understand as
the worst is
the worst they’ve experienced, and even if you intellectually understand that worse things exist, it’s easy to assume you relate to other people’s ‘worst’ far more than you do. My username isn’t based on a hobby— I am a classically-trained chef experienced in and intimately familiar with food service operations and labor from the retail concessions level to Michelin Star fine dining. Working fast food jobs can be tough, greasy, hot, and sometimes dangerous work, but it’s physically, mentally, and emotionally the easiest work in food preparation— almost no other job has been workshopped, designed, redesigned, re-outfitted, optimized and re-optimized for human interaction — and it doesn’t even pay the worst. Especially as a casual teen employee, it doesn’t hold a candle to working as an a la carte line cook, let alone in heavy manufacturing, or nearly any other blue collar work as an adult with adult responsibilities and needs. Even in the food industry — The cog-in-the-machine aspect of being a fast food worker doesn’t hold a candle to being a fine dining dishwasher, which pays less and is far more physically demanding, dangerous, monotonous, micromanaged, etc etc etc. Fast food work is more cog-in-the-machine-like than being a fine dining prep cook, but being a fine dining prep cook is much more physically demanding, stressful and skill-intensive.
Lots of soul-crushing cog-in-the-machine work pays well because that’s the only way they can get anyone to work for them at all. Like working on the UPS truck loading line at the distribution point near where I grew up: the supervisors would walk around on catwalks above the docks with whistles and stop watches putting you on blast if they timed you loading fewer than X packages in a minute. Those jobs paid far better than other entry-level jobs in the area and made the chance of getting into the jobs people actually wanted— the delivery driver jobs— much easier. Those jobs were famously miserable, grueling, and dehumanizing and the people in charge couldn’t care less. They just kept inching up the pay until they could be filled because that’s the way business works. They didn’t think they had a problem with persistently understaffing the docs so it had to be run like a labor camp— they had recruitment and retention problems, which are a lot cheaper. And even delivery driver jobs these days are crap. People like trash truck drivers and corporate-employed Amazon delivery drivers interviewed often say they’re penalized for such minuscule lapses in productivity that they’re forced to piss in bottles because there’s no time for them to stop, even along their route. They’re not shooting for bonuses either— they’re just trying to not get fired. Does that sound like they’re happy? Do you think the bosses that created and enforce these requirements care if they’re miserable?
I know one guy that got life-altering injuries as a tech school welding student. He was repairing a metal ladder above large underground storage tanks that the plant manager said had been emptied, triple-rinsed and dried. Well, he lied. They were full of miscellaneous waste chemicals. The sparks from the tig welder somehow ignited the gases in the tanks and he was blown through the roof of the plant and briefly woke up in the parking lot before waking up months later in the hospital wearing the silicone compression gloves save neck wrap he’d have to wear through his twenties to keep his skin grafts from falling off. In court, the plant manager said emptying and cleaning the tanks whenever people were going to be doing welding was just too expensive. He wasn’t fired. The medical expenses and facility damage were handled by insurance. Do you think he cared how miserable that boy’s life became? How about the private detectives their insurance company paid follow my friend around just in case they could snap a picture of us bowling or something they could use to prove non-compliance and deny his claims? Plant is still going strong today! They have had a few more explosions since, regrettably.
Do think those types of stories are rare? Do you think you understand what working in a place like that is like based on your fast food experience?
Of course business executives are making logical decisions based on the economics— that’s the entire fucking point. They’re doing that because that’s the way the system works. They didn’t create the system, it’s not their fault that the system works like that, but that doesn’t change that it is the way it is, or the effect it has on workers.
> You say “few executives care if their workers are miserable” and that is the dumbest, most misinformed, wrong take on earth. Even if the answer is only one of pure self-interest in profit, having all of your workers hate their lives and the company itself is beyond stupid, and is not the plan.
Got me! Always good to throw together a quick insult to make yourself feel better about not being able to put together a counterpoint, right? Saying I’m accusing executives of sitting in the c suite twisting their mustaches plotting ways to intentionally make their employees miserable is the “dumbest, most misinformed wrong” interpretation of what I said. Would you feel better had I said “few executives think twice about favoring all but the most trivial bits of profit over workers not being miserable?” Do you think manufacturing without union protections or worker safety laws would be better than in Victorian era mills or early 20th century mines? Why? Because executives care about their employees happiness beyond what it takes to keep them from quitting? If so, why isn’t that the case in China? If worker protections didn’t exist and the job market allowed it, do you really think that basic worker comfort and safety wouldn’t be traded for shareholder profits in a heartbeat? If you think that, you’re going to need some solid empirical evidence because that’s not the way humanity has operated historically.
The only places in our country that support anything but high-skill speciality manufacturing are the places where people don’t have a choice. Look up a dozen run-of-the-mill production plants on Glassdoor and skip the reviews obviously made by HR— and then tell me that the people running those places are prioritizing worker happiness. The difficulty of profitably running a manufacturing business in the United States doesn’t change the fact that workers often bear the brunt of the efficiency measures implemented to make it possible.
The author of this nice well-meaning article made some totally valid observations about reasons people don’t actively choose manufacturing jobs in this country when they have a choice — what’s not realistic is thinking we can make it all better just by changing the way we look at it.