I was called in my neck of the woods, a “factory rat”. Since graduating high school in 1974 I have worked in some sort of large manufacturing facility; most all of it for the auto industry. Some factory rats, like myself, started taking college courses right off the bat, not so that we could leave the factory for a more lucrative career, but so that we could promote ourselves within the factory hierarchy. We already had the job of our dreams, why would we leave to become a lawyer or a doctor? When I hired on at the plant, a beginning attorney made a paltry $35,000 a year. With overtime, I with a high school diploma could make the same money.
We had our own factory community, our own clubs; we even had our own credit union. Sometimes three generations of factory rats all worked together at times in the plant. Grandparents with high seniority, parents like my father who had worked his way up into engineering and then my generation would all come in at the same time of day. Mother wanted to know why I was wasting my time taking college night classes when I could have picked up an extra shift at time and one half pay in the evenings. Dad did costing for engineering projects and showed what I could make if I would stop taking weekends off and work 7 days straight.
Then there were the women who worked in the factory. It was the 70’s and I was a 20-year-old single man. Part of the plant was air conditioned, part of it not. In the air-conditioned part the women dressed to the nines. Their hair was perfect. They looked like fashion models. Those women would make my jaw drop. In the hot sweaty part of the factory, more natural looking women wore halter tops with no bras, short shorts and tube tops that would most likely slip down by accident when doing active working, or be pulled down to flash a passerby, like myself. The women in the sweaty part had that Janis Joplin hardness with availability that pervaded our part of the country in the 1970’s. We were all in our 20’s and full of hormones, fueled with drugs and alcohol. And we made more money than professionals that had studied for years. I worked next to a man with his Masters in Library Sciences from Purdue. We both fixed radio units that came off the line as rejects. Several education students came for the summer then stayed because the money was just too good to turn down, with little responsibility.
So now, we are retired, underemployed or out of work. The auto industry, as we knew it is decried for its lack of foresight. And the bearer of the brunt of this criticism is the factory worker himself or herself. In this time of finger pointing, the individuals that made the products, were encouraged by generations preceding them to carry on that mantle of American manufacturing, and stayed the course so to speak by not leaving our now dying communities to seek fortune elsewhere are castigated. We are called dinosaurs, lacking vision and perspective on America’s future. Politicians use us to point out the auto industries failures; we have become the $65 per hour grass cutters. I wish I had actually made $65 per hour, but that figure like others was pulled out of the air by the new breed of cannibalistic entrepreneur , most of whom were the architects of the old systems that we as factory workers profited and lived by.
I saw this coming, which is why I had half of my college finished by the time I retired. I knew that the old days were gone. I can read a balance sheet. I had many arguments with fellow employees who were convinced by their parents and grandparents that the factories would give them a job for life. I could have left the factories long ago. I didn’t. It was my decision in the end, and that is the bottom line.
But I remember vividly meeting my great aunt, the matriarch of the family who was at my wedding. She came up to me and hugged me, and she said these words that I will never forget. “I’m so glad you made something of yourself and got a good job at the factory.” In this country we talk a lot about getting back to our old values. In reality we need to bury some of our old values in the ground with the founding fathers and never look back.
No comments:
Post a Comment