Blue-Collar Brilliance - An educator challenges society’s assumptions about intelligence, work, clas

[BridgeTheGap]

My mother, Rose Meraglio Rose, shaped her adult identity as a waitress in coffee shops and family restaurants. When I was growing up in Los Angeles during the 1950s, my father and I would occasionally hang out at the restaurant until her shift ended, and then we’d ride the bus home with her. Sometimes she worked the register and the counter, and we sat there; when she waited booths and tables, we found a booth in the back where the waitresses took their breaks.

There wasn’t much for a child to do at the restaurants, and so as the hours stretched out, I watched the cooks and waitresses and listened to what they said. At mealtimes, the pace of the kitchen staff and the din from customers picked up. Weaving in and out around the room, waitresses warned behind you in impassive but urgent voices. Standing at the service window facing the kitchen, they called out abbreviated orders. Fry four on two, my mother would say as she clipped a check onto the metal wheel. Her tables were deuces, four-tops, or six-tops according to their size; seating areas also were nicknamed. The racetrack, for instance, was the fast-turnover front section. Lingo conferred authority and signaled know-how.

Rosie took customers’ orders, pencil poised over pad, while fielding questions about the food. She walked full tilt through the room with plates stretching up her left arm and two cups of coffee somehow cradled in her right hand. She stood at a table or booth and removed a plate for this person, another for that person, then another, remembering who had the hamburger, who had the fried shrimp, almost always getting it right. She would haggle with the cook about a returned order and rush by us, saying, He gave me lip, but I got him. She’d take a minute to flop down in the booth next to my father. I’m all in, she’d say, and whisper something about a customer. Gripping the outer edge of the table with one hand, she’d watch the room and note, in the flow of our conversation, who needed a refill, whose order was taking longer to prepare than it should, who was finishing up.

I couldn’t have put it in words when I was growing up, but what I observed in my mother’s restaurant defined the world of adults, a place where competence was synonymous with physical work. I’ve since studied the working habits of blue-collar workers and have come to understand how much my mother’s kind of work demands of both body and brain. A waitress acquires knowledge and intuition about the ways and the rhythms of the restaurant business. Waiting on seven to nine tables, each with two to six customers, Rosie devised memory strategies so that she could remember who ordered what. And because she knew the average time it took to prepare different dishes, she could monitor an order that was taking too long at the service station.

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[Brickbat]

1. Anyone who thinks blue-collar work is easy or brainless hasn't done it.

Work is work, no matter what it is.

[BridgeTheGap]

2. I paid my way through college working in a bread factory. My dad worked there too.

I took sociology class on Marxism, wanting to know more about it. The teacher made statements that socialism would never work because workers just weren't smart enough. I asked her if she had ever worked in a factory or had to do any kind of manual labor. "No" she replied. I told her about my job and stated flat out that the people I worked with could get the job done without management (or, in other words, were capable of self-managment). Just tell us how many loaves of bread you want and we can make it happen.

[Brickbat]

4. I worked in a bread factory, too!

And a bottling plant, and other places. It *is* work. I used to take home a fresh loaf at the end of a shift, and I felt *so* proletarian.

Mr. Brickbat was in commercial construction for many years, and it was frustrating for him to have people say, "Yeah, this weekend I put together some cabinets -- it wasn't so bad, I should be a carpenter and make the big bucks! Haw haw!" Meanwhile, Mr. Brickbat was putting together scaffolding inside a water plant that hadn't been finished yet, so the January sleet was coming down on him and he was standing in four inches of water. Ten hours a day, five days a week; if you call in sick, you don't get paid. It's not the same. It's back-breaking, devastating work.

The big problem assumption the middle and upper classes have is that blue-collar workers pick their jobs because they can't do anything else. I have no doubt that that is true for many. But for many others, they pick those professions because they enjoy the work, they like being outside, they like having set hours and no work to bring home, they like working on things with a beginning and an end and little room for busywork, and many other reasons. Mr. Brickbat now works on the railroad, and he comes home full of joy and excitement after running a train through the woods on a brisk autumn morning. The railroad (and construction) is full of people who just want to do their job, go home, and get paid enough to take two weeks in the summer and go to the little family cabin on days off for hunting and fishing. Why people are contemptuous of that is beyond me -- it seems to me that many of the blue-collar people have it right, as long as they're in a job where they can make enough to support themselves. They're not getting phone calls or e-mails from the boss on their days off. They're not bringing home folders full of useless PowerPoint projects. And if they have to stay late, they get paid for it. Who's the stupid one here?

[BridgeTheGap]

7. I got my degree in Poli Sci, with the intention of becoming an attorney. I changed my mind

just got my b.a. and that was that.
I'm still not averse to doing "grunt work," but mostly have been a desk jockey. Initially, my white collar goals were to climb the corporate ladder. The infighting, backstabbing tendencies that go on soured me on trying to "elevate" myself up that ladder. So I've been in low level jobs ever since, aside from a short stint in teaching. I have also done a fair amount of professional work on political campaigns, but typically in conjunction with my regular job. Long, long work weeks, those are!
A good book on the subject is: "Blue Collar Roots - White Collar Dreams" by Alfred Lubrano.

[indepat]

6. My summers working in a smokeless powder ((Korean War (police action)) plant and

a rayon plant where my Dad ultimately worked for 42 years forever instilled an appreciation of the enormous contribution blue-collar workers make to our society and economy. :D

[Sal Minella]

8. I worked in a factory department that had a great deal of expensive

material waste, and I figured out simple changes in procedure that would reduce the waste to almost zero while increasing production of finished product, and saving many hours of labor. It was a few simple (no-cost) changes in their age-old procedure, and would have made sense immediately to any manager who took a few minutes to see how the work flow actually functioned on the floor.

But my supervisor (who fancied himself FAR ABOVE actually setting foot on the floor) listened dully to my suggestions and then stared at me fixedly for awhile (having NO understanding of the waste problem OR the simple solution) and he said, staring at me without blinking, "After you've been here awhile, you'll understand why we do things the way we do."

And that was the end of that.

He went right on nagging us incessantly about increasing production while bragging to his cohorts how productive "his girls" were.

So I feel for good people doing their best under incompetent managers who think heavier use of the whip is the answer to everything.

[groovedaddy]

9. Reminds me of the Demming story - the Quality Circle guy. Just after WWII

He came up with a management method that leaned heavily on employee involvement in how the work was done, with a focus on improving processes. American management at the time scoffed at Demming and didn't want to hear any of it. Demming took his ideas to Japan and they latched on to them. When Japanese industrialists were asked about the key to their rise to dominance in the auto and electrical industries, they all sited Demming's method as the reason for their success.

Sony Corp. brought it's first U.S. plant to California in the 80s. The "wisdom" at the time still said that American workers were lazy and this would never work. The Japanese culture was different, more authoritarian and that's what facilitated Demmings methods working in Japan. Sony's California plant ended up being far more productive than any of it's Japanese plants.

[Sal Minella]

10. Word must have traveled, because in '87, the factory I worked at

made a big deal of establishing "Quality Circles."

Predictably, they managed to miss Demming's point utterly, and instead of including some upper-management types along with us greasy-handed peons actually working on the floor, the factory culture prevailed and nobody was willing to attend a sit-down meeting with anybody of lesser rank than his own (women did the work; men had the titles and the big paychecks).

So.

One of the "Quality Circles" consisted of no one but Executive Secretaries in the plant. Nobody else in that circle. Just Executive Secretaries from all departments.

And I'm sure my supervisor sat in a circle with other supervisors who were all equally totally clueless about how their departments actually worked and/or what could be done to make them work better.

No increased production resulted (I heard that the groups seemed to consider these gatherings as Social Circles more than anything), so the top management abandoned Demming's idea because unfortunately, it just didn't work in their factory. . . :)

[groovedaddy]

11. yeah, they won't work that way. My first experience with QCs was working in a bank.

For the most part, they did it right. Management was kept out of meetings and marked improvement happened. I was a group leader in our department for a few years. Once, our department manager called me in for "sit down." She wanted to know what people were saying about her in the QC meetings! I couldn't believe it. I did set her straight, saying "you know I can't talk about that."
There was a downside to that. I received no promotions for a few years after that. I really had to press the issue to get what I deserved.

[sarge43]

3. One I ran across

A civilization that values good philosophy, but scorns good plumbing will have neither.

[dhpgetsit]

5. K&R Let's hear it for working people!

Anyone who works that hard and that well deserves a good wage and a generous tip.