Real Work

A young, Canadian filmmaker explains himself.

This reminds me of the automatism I've experienced in the workplace, the soul searching that accompanied the deadness of my world as I prepared daily to confront the reality of industrialism--which I thought of not as a noble quest, but rather as the shits.

The four biggies in my case were, in order, a plywood mill, a frozen food plant, a mobile home factory, and a wire rope factory.

These jobs tried to kill me.

In the plywood mill where I went to work the summer after I graduated from high school, I stood on a platform in front of a massive, ostensibly fully-automated dryer that fed sheets of damp veneer into its hot belly. I was there to turn the machine off and on with a push of two buttons, one red, the other green. If the wood did not burn up in the intense heat (fires were frequent and controlled by another worker), it passed to the opposite end of the dryer, where it was "graded" and loaded onto carts to cool before being moved to the plugging, plying and gluing phase of the operation.

The dryer was fitted with a pair of spider-like armatures designed to feed the veneer into the machine a single sheet at a time.  It was a good theory, but in practice it seldom worked properly and I spent most of my time separating the veneer by hand before feeding it into the dryer.

For this monotony I was paid $9 and hour, a decent wage in 1969, and was able to go off to college in the fall.

In the summer of 1973, I tried my hand in a frozen food plant, where once more I found myself standing for long hours on another platform in front of another conveyor belt, a slave to time and tedium, as I graded fresh cauliflower before it was taken to the packaging and freezer sections of the plant.

I've forgotten what the job paid, though I'm sure it was not even close to what plywood paid. That summer, on the graveyard shift, a worker in the freezer warehouse was killed when a load of frozen beans fell on his head as he tried to stack a pallet.  He'd climbed down from his forklift to check his positioning when the palletized load crashed down and flattened him like, well, a bean.

My third blue-collar job was in a mobile home factory after I got out of VISTA.  It was just before I moved to Portland, Oregon to stay, in 1977.  The trailers were Commodores, I believe, and it was sort of an interesting process--as least the small aspect of it I saw seemed to be.  In fact, I spent all of my time standing--that's correct--on a platform bending metal of various widths at 90 degree angles.

To relieve my boredom with this one I spent breaks in the yard doing push ups to try to strengthen my skinny arms.

The wire rope factory was the last of my heavy-duty industrial jobs. There on the first day I went through a safety seminar, run by a young man with a missing hand.

He'd lost it the previous year to one of the heavy cutters used to section wire rope.

He was the most uniquely qualified employee of any factory I've ever been in.  He had that one thing every employer covets in a worker--experience; and he really loved his work.

TS