The Blue Collar Work Ethic

My arms were starting to go numb and the sweat poured off my chin.  My boss Joe kept throwing 40 pound bags of fertilizer onto the pile from the top of the rack, and expected me to move them off quickly.  We had a store to run, another truck coming stuffed with more fertilizer, and no room for it.

One after one the bags came raining down, each landing with a dull thud that produced a cloud of toxic smoke.  The air I breathed was nothing but a chemically laden fertilizer haze.  This went on for what seemed like an eternity.  I probably moved a few tons of fertilizer, 40 pounds at a time.

I was 18, and determined to show Joe I could work.  Sure I may have been a no-good street-fighting drunk, but I could toe the line, and damn if he was gonna break me.

 

We Work

Where I’m from, we don’t get hurt
Where I’m from, we work.  We work.
– From “We Work“, by Silo The Huskie

My first job as a teenager was in a hardware store in Baltimore, working in the garden shop and driving the forklift.  I never missed work, never.  Outside of work life was booze, fighting, and general shenanigans. 

But when the boss put me down for the 2-10pm Saturday shift, nothing was gonna stop me from showing up. 

This is what you learned growing up in Baltimore in the 1970’s and 80’s.  It wasn’t taught, you observed and saw how things worked.  The blue collar work ethic was all around you, it was life.

What is the blue collar work ethic?  It could roughly be described as one that takes pride in working with your hands, getting dirty for a cause, and putting in a full day.  Getting shit done, and eventually going home and leaving it till tomorrow. 

Cities like Baltimore and Pittsburgh were blue collar cities, through and through.  Baltimore mostly still is.  When I grew up if you didn’t have an immediate family member who worked at Bethlehem Steel, your neighbor sure did.  It was the largest steel mill in the world in its prime, employing over 30,000 people at one site alone. 

My neighbor’s Dad worked there.  He never talked.  He’d come home around 6:00pm every night, get out of the car very slowly, and shuffle up the stairs to his house.  He was in his 40’s, but looked well over 60.  The man exuded fatigue, exhaustion.   

The quote from this article about Bethlehem’s Sparrows Point Plant captures it nicely:

You could always tell the ones who worked those hot places – they had singed eyebrows. And nearly everyone has tiny burn scars on their necks, chests and shoulders from tiny chips of hot flying steel.

That was my neighbors Dad.  I was afraid of him.

 

The Seedy Underbelly

That dirty, “get shit done at all cost” work ethic had an opposite force field driving it.  Booze, cigarettes, & drugs were just some of the vices that played yang to the workaday ying.  The taverns in Baltimore were full of shattered bodies in uniform every night, spending what they just earned and trying to forget about it. 

By the time I was 9 or 10 and quickly figuring out the workings of the world, I started to realize something.  Again, no one said it to me, but I just came to the conclusion on my own. 

Life is a struggle, and something to endure.   

That was my observation.

In those days Springsteen was all over the radio, and he basically sang that shit out.  I figured out his schtick pretty quickly.  He’d wear that huge tattered beanie on stage that might have had fish scales in it and sang about factories and coal mines, the kind of people I saw. 

But as I matured and his stardom grew in the 80’s it was all over, I figured him out again.  I see what you’re doing there Bruce.  You can still sing about it but you’re not living it.  You’re not punching a time card my friend.

 

Bye Bye Blue

I worked full time all through college.  My senior year it was split between two jobs, one with the Geography Department at my university, the other driving a forklift at a different hardware store.  I had a foot in both the blue collar and white collar worlds, and it was clear where I was headed. 

The last blue collar job I worked was the summer before I graduated, rocking the graveyard shift at a Baltimore grocery store chain re-stocking shelves.  It was a physically hard job, but with great camaraderie and hijinx. 

Then I graduated, got my first “real” job at what would become a dot.com startup pioneer, and the rest is history.  I hung up my blue collar. 

Now after 28 years of white collar work, I look at blue collar jobs with a lot of romanticism.  For years I’ve been telling friends how I’d love to take a job doing physically demanding work in the outdoors. 

But the realist in me knows that at my age I might be singing a different tune after a few months of that dream, and a resulting ibuprofen addiction.

 

More Than Endure

So after all this time do I still have a blue collar work ethic? 

If I’m being honest, I’d say I still have the ethic but I can’t identify with the struggle.  Kind of like Springsteen.  There was a time when I definitely lived the struggle, but I rose from those days.

My life now is one of riches and to be honest, kind of easy.  Over time I’ve altered that realization about life I formulated all those years ago. 

Life is still indeed a struggle, but it’s something to enjoy vice just endure.

Being financially independent allows me to dream any dream, take any path.  I could still take a blue collar gig if the right one emerged. 

But if I did I’d be nothing more than a blue collar tourist.  I’d be visiting that world because I want to, not because I have to. 

I’d be there to enjoy it, not just endure it.  That would surely change the whole game, and make the associated vices unnecessary. 

Did a blue collar work ethic help me get to financial independence?  Undoubtedly.