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 of Mary sitting at her 3x5 memo pad machine for 17 years, or George pouring a lifetime of liquor and labor through his body, both of them bruised by the one activity that had both defined and eaten up the best days of their lives.
But I also knew, with great relief and guilt, that I had privileges they didn't, privileges that gave me the choice to walk out the door in September and never have to suffer their proletarian fate unless I chose to do so. Consciousness of class began to dawn on me, and with it, the temptation to believe that where people were in life was exactly where they deserved to be, calculations worked out by a mathematical fate.
But luckily for me, the good graces of my fellow factory denizens never allowed this sense of privilege to turn aristocratic. While they may have worked like navvies all their lives, their minds hadn't been ground down completely to dust; they constantly impressed me with their insights and intelligence, and it wasn't too much of a fantasy to see that with different rolls of the dice we all could have changed places, belying the notion that our fates were bound to our class.
I remember one particular conversation with Frank, Kevin, Mary, and Louise that was as intense as any seminar I'd attended. We were on break. I don't remember now how it got started, but for some reason the subject of dying and what it all meant came up. Kevin opted volubly for heaven; Mary, Catholic that she was but less voluble, agreed. Louise had her doubts: she didn't like the picture of worms in the cold ground but couldn't wrap her mind around eternal bliss. Frank snapped out that "ya die and that's it and no one should get in a twist about it." So here we had, in a humid July day in a paper mill in Holyoke, Massachusetts, two Aquinians, an agnostic, and a materialist.
This was the moment Albert Camus arrived in Holyoke, a little known fact about his life. I started talking about "this guy named Camus" who had written a book about a guy in a Greek myth, Sisyphus. In less than three minutes I had to set up the entire philosophical skeleton of existentialism in a way that connected with what they'd been talking about: Kevin and Mary's desire for certainty, Louise's doubt and hesitancy, Frank's no-nonsense dismisiveness. The 15 minutes flew by, and we all drifted back to our immediate work, but for what it was worth to them, they had gotten a taste of what the "college boy" got a taste of all the time, and in a way it validated that they, too, had minds that could have done what the "college boy" did if the dice had gone another way. As Mary said once, in her ear-easy Cork accent, "My head hurts sometimes when I talk with you, but I like it." Still the class differences, still the different destinies, but also mutual respect and more than the lip synch of small talk.
I didn't come back a second summer, choosing instead to housesit in Cambridge and do research for a professor, work more appropriate, I suppose, for the "college boy." Holyoke continued its downward spiral, sacrificed to easy investment opportunities in Thailand or Malaysia; the factory stands idle now, and I have no census data on any of them. I did finish the 550,000 steno pads, though; no bells rung, no shower of special prizes, but when the last tableful made its way to the spiral binder, I knew the ten-hour days were over in more ways than one.