Little more than a week earlier, as I
once again found myself out of work, I called the temp agency to see
if they had a new assignment that would fit my rather eccentric skill set. To my surprise, they had something they described as an
“auction helper.” Great! I had organized several auctions and
so I accepted the gig that started the very next morning.
Getting an assignment before the
holidays was huge and having a paycheck before Christmas was even
bigger.
So, the next morning, armed with no
other information than a job title, I showed up to the site in my
khakis, open-necked dress shirt, sweater and a notebook.
I should have known better.
The job site was a now-shuttered
manufacturing plant on the edge of town. According to the For Sale
sign, it was three-quarters of a million square feet. According to
some of the plant's former employees that I would later meet, the
plant used to make axles for military and civilian vehicles.
It had been a heavy industry that
employed generations of people over its sixty-seven year run. These
were the jobs that allowed people to build a life for themselves and
their families. These were the jobs our grandparents had and that
our parents and other political leaders believe are still out there.
These were forty-hour-two-weeks-vacation jobs that led people into
the middle class. And they made that journey by the sweat of their
brow and the skill of their hands.
Like the great medieval churches with
stone steps transformed into abstract shapes worthy of Henry Moore,
signs of the plant's heavy use were everywhere: painted steel
railings worn raw, doorknobs polished bright by hundreds and
thousands of hands, grease-stained lockers and everywhere the
evidence of time passing as dust, metal and new technologies
accumulated layers in a cake.
The plant had closed for the last time
about two months earlier. The company had moved out the machinery
and the people they wanted and now hired a contractor to sell off the
rest.
The day I started was the preview for
the auction. It was an opportunity for prospective buyers to look at
the items and decide what they were willing to spend.
It was also a chance for me to explore
the building and soak in its history.
That first day, I was assigned to work
security. It was my job to patrol a section of the plant and make
sure the customers weren't adding, or subtracting, items from any of
the defined lots.
It was pretty light duty for the most
part given that many of the lots were heavy machine tools that would
require forklifts to pry from the shop floor.
The lots were being sold as-is-where-is
which, in most cases meant contents included. In my area that meant
cabinets and shelving full of bits and tooling used in those heavy
machines.
And when I say “bits” you might be
tempted to think in terms of the cracked plastic drill index you
inherited from your father, or the bits that came with the router
your in-laws gave you for Christmas, but you would be mistaken. The
bits I am talking about were the size of a football and weighed about
as much as the average third-grader.
My bosses with the auction seemed
convinced these items would be in high demand and made certain I paid
close attention to them. So, for eleven hours, I walked my post in
the southeast quadrant and was interrupted only occasionally by
potential buyers.
I herd many more buyers than I
saw—sound now carried freely through the plant. It rushed to fill
the space left by the missing employees and the relocated machines.
Every once in a while, my pacing was
interrupted by a passing electric cart. Security, plant staff and my
bosses would each make passes to check up on me and make certain no
one was trying to steal the building.
At the beginning of the day, I was
overly optimistic. I thought I was an overweight guy in need of some
exercise so I will embrace this opportunity to walk and thus draw
down my reserve of spare calories. By the time I was working on my
second layer of blisters I began to actively consider what it would
take to highjack one of those cards. It was a big plant, how quickly
would they find the body, really?
My beat covered six distinct
“neighborhoods.” There was a testing area next to the loading
dock to verify that materials received were up to spec, the room for
tooling, a machine show, a sharpening area and two different areas
for machining parts.
The quality control area was set-off
from the plant as a sort of building-within-a-building. The
equipment in this area was all white and looked barely used. If it
were a jewelry store, you would know just by looking in the window
that you would never be able to afford anything inside.
The tooling room had a living history
museum quality to it in that it was full of all manner of unusual
things that you wanted to know how they were used.
The sharpening room was another
building-in-building, but instead of looking like a jewelry store, it
had a quality like those settings they make at Disneyworld that look
like you just missed whoever it was who worked there. The room
looked like a roadside garage from a time before the interstate
highway system.
The machine shop was tucked away in a
corner at the intersection of two firewalls. It was dark and well
away from the skylights that seemed to be in every other part of the
building. The drab cement walls and concrete floors were the same
oily black color and, if you strayed from the beaten path you could
hear the crunching sound of metal shavings under your foot.
The machines in this area were all
painted a kind of blue-green that you might only see in the gyms of
older schools and municipal swimming pools. These were
unquestionably durable tools made from massive shapes formed in
molten cast iron. Sheet metal—the mayonnaise of our modern age—was
used sparingly to house switches and enclose massive copper fuses.
But more than anything else, more than
the massive scale, functional design or uniform color, what you
noticed about this equipment were the wheels, knobs and levers used
to control them. You noticed them because they were shiny and they
were shiny because of the decades of polishing they received at the
hands of their operators.
Perhaps I should explain, for those of
you who haven't been to a science museum, that axle are more complex
than just a piece of pipe and some bearings. In order for cars to
turn properly, the wheels on either side of the vehicle have to turn
at different rates. When you turn left, your back right tires have
to travel a lot farther than the left. They are powered from a
single engine turning at a constant rate, but the wheels,
periodically have to travel at different speeds. To be able to do
this and also rotate both tires at the same speed when traveling in a
straight line requires gears, lots of gears and cutting those gears
was the job of much of the plant's equipment.
Imagine for a moment all the steps that
might be involved in making a gear from a piece of solid steel. And,
while you're thinking about that, remember that where there is one
gear there is at least one other and the teeth on your gear have to
mesh perfectly with the teeth on that other gear that's being made by
somebody else.
To even begin to get that right means
that regardless of what happened before it got to you, the piece of
steel, the “blank” has to be the exact size and shape of the one
you made ten minutes, ten weeks or even ten years ago. And I mean it
has to MATCH, or it gets expensive very quickly.
Now imagine making that gear by hand
without a computer or a 3D printer or any of a thousand other modern
crutches. All you have to work with is your hands, a drawing and a
few measuring tools.
To do that work and do it well is a
skill and one that is not learned from a book or by watching a video:
it is the product—like most other things of value—of
experience.
These machines in this dark corner of
an idled plant showed their experience and seemed ready, at a
moment's notice to go again, ready to get back to work. They were
like the pets you see at the animal shelter: scarred but hopeful.
Right next door was the machining area
with more modern equipment. These machines were much less
interesting, much less poetic. No longer needed were the hands of
experience, they were replaced by the anonymity of ones and zeroes
and the inevitability of computers. No longer was uniformity a goal
to be measured against, but it was an expectation and anything less
was an aberration, a reject, a discard.
Very little cast iron in this room;
lots of mayonnaise.
The other thing I noticed about the
equipment in this room is that there was nothing shiny. You can
still see the evidence of human operators as in the machine shop, but
instead of well-worn controls polished bright by frequent use, you
see oily fingerprints on the screens and keyboards.
Not for nothing, but this was also the
only one of the rooms where oil was collecting on the floor, having
leaked from one or more of the machines like the slime trail left by
a slug as it squirms across your porch.
The end point of my circuit was the
heat-treating area where pieces and parts were delivered into the maw
of a garage-sized furnace designed to harden the steel and strengthen
the finished product.
The furnace was a gruesome assemblage
of ovens, piping, valves and gauges It put me in mind of the massive
coal-fired blast furnaces that gave birth to the industrial age, and
of other ovens that gave birth to a less innocent, more destructive
age.
Birth and death.
Past and future.
Round and round I went protecting the
past, presiding over its dissection and lamenting the loss of another
tradition.
Lap after lap.
Less you should think me some kind of
hypocrite, I will freely admit that progress is great, that
technology is cool, but, for every iPhone and Tesla, there is a
displaced worker left wondering what happened to the bargain made
with their employer.
The employees sold their time in
exchange for a promise that they would e secure in their retirement.
They worked with the chemicals, they risked their health so that they
could look forward to a brighter day free from worry. But, when the
going got tough, the employers got going and with them went the
employee pensions and their access to healthcare.
This is not a new story. It is one
that has probably been repeated more than once since I began this
sentence. But it's one thing to read a headline about a plant
closure and quite another to look at the silent machines and tables
full of tools that are out of work.
I don't mean to draw equivalence, but
there is no denying a solemnity comparable to the piles of shoes that
no longer have feet to protect, or footsteps to follow.
On the day of the auction, I met a
number of former employees who were taking one last turn through the
plant that had been a center for so much of their lives.
One woman wanted to have her picture
taken in front of a giant machine because, as she said, her kids
would never believe that she had run it.
There is a program I like to watch on
the Science Channel called “How It's Made.” The producers sent
their camera crews to factories and workshops all over the world and
document the fabrication of everything from electric violins to
headlight reflectors. It's a terrific program to watch and zone out
to: lots of motion, very little dialogue, not much to think about.
A frequent topic are the various forms of packaged foods. It can be
fascinating to see the choreography of complex machinery as the
product moves from ingredients to packaged piece with only nominal
human intervention. Where you do see human hands they are loading
the machines, or transferring product from one automated line to
another.
We demand lower prices and higher
efficiencies, which drives automation in and people out: this is the
bright future we have set for ourselves.
What good is a bright future if you
can't afford to live there?
During the week that I worked with the
auction company one question came up time and again from the high
bidders: what was going to happen to the building?
As far as I was able to determine,
there is no plan. For one thing, it's really not suited to much
other than the purpose for which it was built; and for another, who
would want three-quarters of a million square feet for anything
except maybe a warehouse space that would be packed by machine with
goods made by other machines.
So, there I was, day after the final
gavel fell, sweeping out the corners of this cathedral of work
listening to every shovel hit the trash can, every stroke of the
broom as it bounced off every wall. Many of the bidders have come
and gone with their spoils. What's left are the discarded gloves,
the partially emptied lockers and an uncertain future.
Perhaps I am more than a little
sensitive to uncertain futures and the promise of work.
It's been three years since I last had
a traditional full-time job and, with each passing day, I feel more
like Tiny Tim with his face pressed against the window of that toy
store.
Being unemployed, or even
underemployed, is a lot like that oily shop floor: it doesn't take
much to put you on your back.
When I was working full-time, it was
easy to be cynical about the ideas of hard work and merit. These
were held up as the keys to advancement, to leveling-up even as
Mary-Catherine, who started after you got an office with a window and
you got written up for coming in late that one time. I always
thought there would be other turns, another hand when the cards would
come my way.
Standing on the snowy side of that
window, things look a lot different. Work is more like a privilege:
something you got to do instead of had to do.
I noticed that in the assignments I
have had since being a temp worker, I have resisted stopping work,
having to take breaks, or even lunch. Perhaps it was for fear of not
measuring up in some way, but, most likely, it was because I had a
very clear sense of how ephemeral a job can be.
I get that times have changed and that
global competition requires a nimble economy and an even more nimble
workforce, but work is a contract where each side benefits.
For the last generation, the benefits
have been something other than mutual and much less than equitable.
Somehow, it has become acceptable to move away from thinking of labor
as a partner in corporate success to being now seen as a millstone
around the company's neck
I wouldn't have a job without this
shift in mindset, but I also know that I don't have much of a future.
Like the items up for auction, I am
wearing my own identification tag, hoping that someone will see the
value, bid on me and put me back to work.
Dark thought indeed for a holiday
season, but not entirely out of keeping with the season.
Even as the snow stubbornly, miserly,
refuses to fall, darkness crowds in, if only to provide stark
contrast for the inflatable Homer Simpsons and the cartoon Minions.
Stark contrasts are what this time of
year is all about: barren trees festooned with colorful lights, fist
fights among adults over toys that will bring the most joy,
celebratory feasts in the midst of so much poverty and hunger.
These are among the many threads that
continue to bind us to Dickens Christmas story of so long ago.
Progress was also rampant in mid-nineteenth century Britain enriching
many good men of business while sending many more to the prisons and
the workhouses. Scrooge is the poster child for this modern times
and he, quite literally, has to be scared into changing his outlook,
to start making mankind his business.
It surprised me to find, as I made my
laps around this soon-to-be-abandoned cathedral, that it was not
Scrooge that I was thinking about, but Old Mr. Fezziwig, his first
employer.
Fezziwig's business also closed, but
not because he chose to move it to a place where labor was cheaper,
but because he didn't. By today's metrics that would make Fezziwig a
loser, a bad business man. And perhaps he was, if dollars and cents
are the only yardstick. They were clearly not his yardstick. He
honored his responsibility to the people and the families who worked
for him.
As I passed the giant ovens I couldn't
help but wonder what it would take to scare our modern-day scrooges
into a new perspective and different priorities.
I should have perhaps added pages ago
that I really do like the holidays but, as they seem to keep coming
around faster and faster each year, it seems important to look
beyond the Chia pets and the larger flat-screen and remember that not
everyone gets a turn, or rolls double-sixes. Like the machines, the
tools and their displaced operators, everyone deserves a second
chance.
Happy Christmas.
