Here, from America’s Newspaper of Record, is a story that touches my heart.
Blue-collar work, whether it’s planting shrubs, pounding nails, tuning engines or laying bricks, can be just as rewarding as carrying a briefcase. In fact, it can be a whole lot more rewarding, if you’re not the sedentary type, or if the alternative is a corporate purgatory of cubicles brimming with spreadsheets and quiet desperation.
Boston landscaper Joe Lamacchia (When did “gardener” beome “landscaper”? What was wrong with “gardener”? It’s an honest old English word — the OED has a citation from AD 1300 … Never mind …) loves his blue-collar work and wants to proselytize.
“We don’t all want to sit in cubicles, pushing paper, working in middle-management jobs, traveling around the country for business meetings,” he writes. “I want more people to think about the alternatives and realize that you can be proud about going into a trade. A blue-collar career can be a choice that you feel good about as opposed to a fallback option.”
Joe has a website to spread the message, and now he also has a book out: Blue Collar and Proud of It.
We’re on our way to 400 million people in this country by 2050. That’s a lot of apartments, houses, roads, bridges, etc., etc. Meanwhile, the infrastructure of the country’s falling apart at the seams. The secretary of transportation, Ray LaHood, was on the radio a couple months ago and said, “America’s become one big pothole.”
There’s a lot of work … It’s an exciting time. I tell people, if you’re 35 and you’re in the cubicle, don’t wait 10 years, because right now is the time.
This is of course heretical. Current orthodoxy dictates that every American has four years of college (and the corresponding quarter-million-dollar millstone of student loans) as his birthright, followed by that paper-shuffling bogus job in cube #479. For blue-collar jobs, we import people. If God had intended us to skip college and go work with our hands, why did He create Mexico?
Following on from similar books by authors preaching the blue-collar gospel — Charles Murray, Matt Crawford — this gets us a little closer to bursting the preposterous, middle-class-bankrupting, nation-wrecking education bubble (43,300 hits on Google for “education bubble”).
[Post reporter] You like to cite a 2004 study in the UK, where blue-collar workers were found to be the happiest of all employees. What do you think is behind that?
[Joe] It’s a nice life! If you’re a skilled craftsman, you can pick up your tools and go work anywhere you want. We’re not living out of a suitcase, we’re not out at the airport. We’re home in the evening for our kid’s Little League game, for our daughter’s play. These are great jobs.
I think about this a lot; partly on behalf of my bright, personable, and healthy, but deeply un-academic son, who I think, barring some dramatic character change during his high-school career (just started), would likely be happier and more useful to society in a trade than in a cube. Also on behalf of myself, though. With luck I have twenty years of working life ahead of me. I have no inclination to retire, being ungregarious and having no taste for golf, bridge, Florida, or watching TV. Writing doesn’t pay worth a damn. I have re-wired my house, and believe I’d make a capable and happy electrician. Have I left it too late to start? How long are the apprenticeships? Any readers in the electrical trade care to offer advice? Or give me a pass into the union?
Though I have little experience doing so, there’s something highly rewarding about working on something with one’s own hands and seeing the finished product.
Awhile back, I helped lay tiles with my dad for a weekend. We spent hours completing the task. At the end, we were drenched in sweat, dirty as hell, covered and in a bunch of crap, but those tiles sure did look good.
Of course, I get similar excitement finishing a difficult intellectual task, especially involving some mathematical insight.
We don’t all want to sit in cubicles
WTF? ’tis lovely!
Boston landscaper Joe Lamacchia (When did “gardener” beome “landscaper”? What was wrong with “gardener”? It’s an honest old English word — the OED has a citation from AD 1300
In common American usage a “gardener” is either someone working in their own garden, or someone paid to tend somebody else’s garden regularly. Also your “garden” is not the same thing as your “yard”, so the kid you pay to mow the grass is the “mower” and not the “gardener”.
A “landscaper” is someone who plants new plants and works on old plants on all your property, and not just the “garden”, and does this on a one-time, piecework, basis. The approximate synonym would be “nurseryman” not “gardener”.
I, myself, have been a cabinetmaker, among other things. The only real drawback is the company you may have to work with, rough men with chronically blue vocabulary who are often resentful and suspicious of anyone with any sign of being “intellectual”. Otherwise, it was great if you could stand the noise, the dust, and the labor.
The satisfaction of a blue collar job is in knowing when you are finished. (I exclude assembly line work.) I’ve owned a business, worked in management and in a cubicle and the job I would take up again (if I could physically do it) would be waitressing.
Surely it is hard physical labor, but there is nothing from the job you can take home with you other than the paycheck and tips. It is a lot of fun meeting new people every 20 or 30 minutes. And it’s a lot of fun getting to know the “regulars” and figuring out who wants you to talk to them and who just wants their coffee in silence.
I can imagine a landscaper, gardener, mower… whatever moniker they choose to go by… would feel a similar satisfaction upon making a ragged lawn a manicured lawn.
There are certainly those who “keep score” in a different way and I don’t begrudge them whatever satisfaction they earn, but I wish our society did not place an excess premium on mental over physical work.
I did an honest half hour of work today, get about 90k a year. There are plenty of scams to be had here in cube-land. Can’t say that it’s personally fulfilling though.
Blame it on Samuel Gompers. Didn’t he say something to the effect that the promise of America for the working man was that he would no longer have to work with his hands?
As a lifelong resident of the Detroit area, I must say the concept of a blue collar work ethic is something I’ve only heard of, never seen. My social/economic historical theory in a nutshell: Unions ruined the blue collar work ethic in the rust belt. Between the 1930s and 1970s, two or three generation of non-college men came to believe that a good-paying, secure job was their entitlement, irrespective of whatever indolence, incompetence, or insolence they displayed on the job. They believed a boat, a snowmobile, and a cottage up north were their birthright. Upward mobility winnowed out the best of these men, who used their pay to educate their sons and daughters into the office class. That left the automotive and other factories staffed by the worst men, whose slipshod ways ruined American competetiveness, eventually killing the manufacturing geese that laid the golden eggs. The working class men I have known are surly, licentious jerks who perceive themselves wrongfully cheated out of the good life their fathers and grandfathers enjoyed.
I don’t disagree with anything Bradlaugh has written. I only regret that geography makes such a difference in our outlooks.
I ignored the advice Half Sigma often gives and nixed the unpaid white collar internships in favor of blue collar work until after I had a master’s degree. I’m glad that I tried it but now that I’ve done both I much prefer white collar work. 12 hours on a factory floor leaves me so physically drained that I waste my entire weekend sleeping and vegetating in front of the TV. As OneSTDV says, there’s satisfaction in both physical and mental labor, but I caution against idealizing either of them since your employer prioritizes its goals above your own personal challenge and satisfaction, and will often demand mind-numbing, repetitive, and pointless tasks towards that end that you would never undertake on your own.
@Jane S
There’s a HUGE difference in attitude, ethic,and world view between a union worker and a blue-collar person who sets up his or her own business.
While I agree with the sentiment, the fact is that higher education correllates with higher income. And while money can’t buy happiness, it can buy off a lot of misery.
A capable plumber, electrician, or carpenter can make a very good income, certainly comparable to your average cubicle dweller. The plumber who used to come fix things on my folks’ farm vacationed in Florida for a few months every year. I don’t think many of his clients could afford to do that.
Granted, they won’t make as much as a brain surgeon, but the whole point is that there are a lot of people who are perfectly capable of being a plumber but could never be a brain surgeon no matter how much higher education you throw at them. If they go off to university on Mom and Dad’s say-so, and then get steered into some sort of middle management-destined program when law/medicine/engineering gets too hard, they probably would have been better off at a tech school or apprentice program in the first place.
I had to stop reading. QUARTER MILLION IN LOANS FOR A 4-YEAR DEGREE?!?!
Um, no. Hyperbole like that causes readers to stop reading – especially when the folks who might read and agree with your article (like myself) are more likely to go to a state school than an ivy-league school (where they might indeed cost 250k). Personally, my 4-year degree cost around $20,000 at a decent state school. Maybe it’d be a bit higher now (it’s been a few years) but a quarter mil is an absurd figure to quote.
I can’t help but think that some problems here in the US are the result of loss of trade skills. Germany and Japan, for example, have extensive vocational training. Aside from turning out happier students, those students are better at their jobs. The average German plumber has something like a Masters’ degree in plumbing. And some of those plumbers go on to get degrees in engineering or whatnot; there’s no rule that says you can’t go back just because you picked a vocation early on.
As we watch our trade deficits grow and our quality of life flatten out, I can’t help but wonder, who is going to invent great products for export? The mechanic who has done the same job a thousand times and has that “ah-ha!” moment that will increase productivity and lower cost is every bit as innovative as a pharma researcher or a computer programmer.
I was looking at this Web site today:
http://www.asymmetricfasteners.com/
and thought, these are the kinds of products we need to be inventing and exporting by the bucketload. It seems like the US is falling behind in mechanical and electrical invention, and nobody seems to care.
I would guess that the AVERAGE public school cost right now — for a 4 year period — stands around $40k to $50k. However, for many private universities/colleges — and not just Ivy League schools — $40k represents just the yearly cost. For instance, George Washington University in DC costs that much. It makes one wonder just why anyone would would attend a place like that if they can get into a decent public local school.
That’s just tuition, btw. Total cost at GWU for an entire year is 53k:
http://www.campusgrotto.com/most-expensive-colleges-for-2008-2009.html
It’s just as hard to go DOWN in social class as it is to go UP, so you would never, ever, ever be accepted as an electrician. And as an earlier commenter pointed out, the people you would be working with on a regular basis would probably not share your mannerisms and values and it might be rather jarring, both to you AND to them. I think most of the reason we take the jobs we do and live in the places we do is to be among people who are basically similar to us. Sorry, you can’t just chuck it all and show up at an IBEW local with your toolbelt, our lives aren’t THAT free.
Or give me a pass into the union?
Some right-winger YOU are. Or are you just infiltrating the union in order to destroy it?
there are a lot of people who are perfectly capable of being a plumber but could never be a brain surgeon no matter how much higher education you throw at them
I’m just curious — how much evidence is there for this statement? It sounds intuitively appealing, and that makes me distrust it. (Or is it just that *higher* education would be useless because they have already been failed by their early education or nutrition or whatever?)
Surgeons, after all, work with their hands. It’s a highly respected and well-paid profession, but it ain’t rocket science. (And actually rocket science is mainly engineering. Quantum mechanics, maybe?) In fact, surgery used to be considered a blue-collar job, far inferior in prestige to physicians, who diagnosed and prescribed.
Some right-winger YOU are. Or are you just infiltrating the union in order to destroy it?
Unions don’t necessarily have to be left-wing anymore than corporation are necessarily right-wing. They can act as one of “small platoons” Burke described. In a lot of ways Samuel Gompers would be something of Buchananite these days.
And as an earlier commenter pointed out, the people you would be working with on a regular basis would probably not share your mannerisms and values and it might be rather jarring, both to you AND to them.
Maybe it’s the region I live in, but I really don’t see that kind of a gap. I interact all the time with welders, machinists and technicians. I also worked my way through school as a truck driver. Of course, I happen to share a lot interests with blue-collar workers, like fishing, still I suspect Joseph had a tougher time because his co-workers keyed on his own disdain for their interests.
Come on, John, this had ‘false modesty’ writ large. Reverse snobbey, anyone?
Late to the party but something I have strong feelings on. Certainly in Canada it is just as challenging to get a journeyman (1st class) trade status as a uni degree but people are not directed that way because teachers/counsellors are biased againsst it. A ticket takes years to complete and includes hours of experience, 6 week school programs and series of exams with limited repeats. After you get your ticket you can get 6 figures working for someone else and are more than qualified to run your own business. At interim levels you are making decent money and you can stop schooling at any level.