Scalese is in the concrete construction business. What we construct are mostly curbs and gutters. But before the new ones can be put in, the old ones have to be broken out. That’s where the breakout gang comes in. The gun runner breaks the old gutters into jagged, hundred-pound hunks of concrete. Then the rock thrower bends down, his face inches from the pounding jack hammer, lifts the piece, or “rock,” and throws it onto the back of a truck—rock after rock, hour after hour, day after day. Throwing rocks: the toughest job at the toughest construction company in Chicago. When people ask me what I’m doing with my Notre Dame education, and I tell them I throw rocks, they say, “Your parents must be very proud.”<\/blockquote>\n
The book sounds quite good, actually, but the point is that it reminded me of John Henry. Not only in that the gang take (justifiable) pride in their strength and stamina (and that they could probably work better if they were singing a work song such as, oh, “John Henry”), but in that sooner or later, it will be more efficient to have a machine do it. Well, or not; it’s plausible to me that labor will be cheaper than power again in a generation, even in America, but I don’t like to think about that.\n
Anyway, there was also a conversation or three over the weekend that reminded me of a conversation I had a hundred years ago or so, where I was hocking on about Labor, and somebody said that it was crazy to prevent the auto factories from using robots on the assembly lines, to force them to hire humans to work in terrible conditions when the machines were cheaper and more efficient. And I responded at the time that the problem was that if they sacked all those workers, there wasn’t anywhere for them to go, and that was worse than inefficiency on the line.\n
Those people died with the hammers in their hands.\n
Oh, they didn’t, really. They made very good money, and although their working conditions weren’t like mine, they weren’t so bad, either. And their pensions were stolen and all, which sucks, but isn’t really connected. When I say they died with their hammers in their hands, what I mean is that they, like John Henry, stuck to a job that was doomed and outmoded, and that wasn’t inherently noble (I mean, in the product, not the men), and that their battle to save their jobs did not save their jobs. That isn’t to say it was misguided. Just to say it wasn’t enough.\n
So I am ambivalent about celebrating John Henry at this point. I think a lot of us are, essentially, hand-driving steel at this point; we’re doing things the slow and inefficient way, and the dangerous way, too, even if it’s not going to break our hearts this week but our grandchildren’s hearts in fifty years. And we are, again, presented with Big Business saying that the way to progress is kicking labor to the gutter. And let me make that clear: I still find that unacceptable. But in John Henry’s day, they could have found other jobs for him and his brothers, so they and their wives wouldn’t work themselves to death to put dinner on the table. The choice should not have been starving themselves to death and working themselves to death. The choice in the eighties should not have been between high unemployment and beginning the death spiral of the American Auto industry.\n
So I want to tell the Youngest Member that if he becomes a steel-driving man, Lord, Lord, that’s fine, and all that, but John Henry didn’t have a lot of choices, and a better thing, if you can do it, is to give both John Henry and his Captain another choice.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger loves work and could watch it all day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[200],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-music-music"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12145"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18784,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12145\/revisions\/18784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}