Workin’ for the man

There used to be a guy we regularly saw at coffee in the morning. He was sort of late middle age, often in grimy clothes with dirty hands and nails and was slightly stooped and walked with seeming discomfort. We didn’t know who he was but we christened him ‘Working Guy’. What we meant by that was with his scruffy demeanor and bearing he was definitely not a bum, he was a guy who worked hard for his crust.

Working Guy was typical of a lot of men we used to see on the BC coast: poorly schooled, a bit profane, a bit racist, a bit vulgar, and hellishly hard working in the forests, in the mills, in the factories, in the mines and on the fishing boats. There was a lot of room for those guys in the old days. “Only have 8th grade, buddy? Well, we don’t give a shit because we want you to knock down them trees and haul them out to the boomin’ ground, we ain’t gonna ask you to be no Shakespeare.”

It was a pretty nice life being unskilled and unticketed labor in the old days. You got good union pay; a certain amount of job security; and you got the good things in life. You were able to live like the middle class with a couple of cars, a pickup truck, maybe an ATV and a boat Hell, you could even take the missus and kids to Hawaii once in a while, just like rich folks with educations.

Your archetype was repeated all over North America. You worked on the Great Lakes steamers and in the auto industry. You went into the mines in Nevada or the Yukon. Sure, you took risks. Sometime a mine tunnel would cave in or a tree would fall on a guy, but the pay made the risk worthwhile.

I always had a soft-spot for working guys. My university summer job was in a plywood mill. I spent all my shifts with working guys. I liked them. I wanted to be accepted enough that I was seen as one of them, not some snotty-nosed college kid. In that I had to swear a lot, and teach myself not to wince when somebody would make an overtly racist or homophobic comment or joke. I had to talk dirty about ‘broads’ because that is what working guys would do. I had to be lewd about the plant’s very pretty secretary, when I actually harbored a secret crush on her and wanted to take her to a fine restaurant and wine and dine her. But it was good, all in all. Not such a shabby life.

What fascinated me with a lot of these guys (though assuredly not all) was that for them there seemed to be no tomorrow. Money was there to be spent, and spend it they did on hot cars, fancy vacations, booze, women, gambling, and so forth. They seemed to save nothing. “Saturday night and I jes’ got paid — fool about my money, no time to save?”

They lived in an eternal present, with rarely a thought of tomorrow. Rarely a consideration that the wolf skulking around the door had very sharp teeth.

A few years ago the wolf arrived. Jobs went away. Mills and logging operations ceased to do what they had done since time immemorial. No longer did that 8th grade education get you anywhere at all when the car plant shut down, or the bottom dropped out of the copper market. Yeah, you could have gotten a trade; become a journeyman of some sort, but, damn it, that ‘Vette was more alluring than spending 5 years learning to be an electrician.

So, as industries collapsed, city-slicker university educated government wonks and weenies said: “No worries, working guys. We’ll retrain you. You can go into, oh, the tourism industry, or become computer techs of some sort. You just have to upgrade your skills.”

And so, in back-to-work facilities, hulking ex-loggers try to get their sausage-like and calloused fingers to function on a dorky little keyboard rather than using those hands to fire up a Stihl chainsaw. Those same guys had to learn to be polite, keep the cussing down, and maybe even take a shave and change the shirt once in a while.

Yes, are such humiliating regimes that may or may not result in employment of some sort, or a guy can always become a greeter at Wal-Mart and earn, maybe, a good 10th of what he earned in the bush.

The destruction of the old-fashioned male trades goes well back before our current recessionary time, it has just become punctuated more dramatically by the economic downturn.

The result is the growth of a huge underclass of males who were once primary economic movers. Whose fault is this? Well, some of it is theirs because they exercised no sense of planning for the future. And some of it is just plain bad luck and a refusal to see that we have moved into a post-industrial era and the likelihood of us going back is remote. Even in such industries as petrochemical, which are still doing OK, the demand is for tradespersons with all the training they need under their belts. Working stiffs need not apply because they are rapidly becoming dinosaurs.

When I was a kid I liked going to the garage when my dad needed some work done on his car. The men in the garage were low-tech grease- monkeys. And they cussed and were filthy and had girly calendars on the walls and had no idea what a dying breed they were.

We don’t see service stations much any more. They have gone the way of the guys that worked therein. Now the person who fixes your car must be a highly-skilled technician who is prepared to upgrade his skills on an ongoing basis.

And you never see a girly calendar on the walls any more.