by Michael Bettencourt

Created on: April 17, 2008

THE WORK ETHIC, AN ETHIC OF WORK

When I was growing up in Holyoke, MA, in the early 1970s, a person could still find factory work, jobs that paid a decent wage and promised to stay in town. And for me, a callow college freshman coming home for the summer, that was just fine; the capitalists could spawn whatever schemes they wanted to as long as I could earn enough money to go back in the fall.

So I showed up for work one morning in a paper factory, courtesy of a high school chum whose father managed the operation. I would just get through this, I told myself, put my head down and bull through the obligation. I never expected that the experience would actually give me something other than money to take back to school.

The company didn't make paper, it cut it, into endless species of notebooks and pads and ruled graph paper and fine stationery. Every morning at 6 AM a tired, sometimes hung-over group of us would file into the airless womb of a 19th-century crenelated mass of brick; by 6:10 the building vibrated with the hammer of knives and cutters and dolleys moving across furrowed wooden floors.

I started, as befits a college boy among the working class, at the bottom, hunting down garbage and hauling eight foot-high columns of cut paper to the knife men, who would knock them down into 82x11s or 6x9s or whatever size the invoice demanded. I got to meet George, the chief technician of the cut-paper phase, a rheumy soul who drank perilous amounts of liquor during the day to keep his hands steady. I met Frank, the man at the knife who chunked the cut-paper down to size and who reminded me of a ferret or some other slim, twitchy mammal. I met Ludmilla, a Polish survivor of World War II, and Josie, who was deaf, and Marie, who worked with Josie, and Mary, whose specialty included 3x5 memo pads. I occasionally worked with two prim, bow-tied gentlemen named William and Richard, who handled the requests special stationery.

Before long Mr. Huntley, the shop foreman, decided to upgrade me to running one of the knives. The company had taken a government contract for 550,000 6"x9" grey-cardboard-covered steno pads, and my job, for eight hours (eventually ten hours) a day, five days a week was to cut steno pads and send them out for spiral binding.

As I cut, I thought - about class, about privilege, about fatigue. For three months I would have to maintain the kind of mulish, inglorious stamina my fellow workers had to maintain year-round. With admiration laced by pity, I thought

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