The Construction (or Deconstruction?) of a Laborer

Hi all,

It has been a while since I’ve gotten around to posting a new WSP, over a month in fact, which a whole 2 people have pointed out to me! This is truly a better following than I could have ever hoped for with this little pet project, and for that I am both humbled and truly grateful!

So why the long delay? Well, part of it is, after getting done with my prospectus, a big part of my brain just went “FUCK IT! I DON’T HAVE TO WRITE ANYMORE!” However, the bigger reason is that upon my return from my Spring Break vacay in Seattle, I started working 40+ hour weeks for Garney Construction (“Advancing Water” TM) building Lawrence’s new Waste Water facility outside of town on the Wakarusa River. Unlike substitute teaching, by the end of a 10 hour day on a construction site, I have very little will to do much of anything, let alone write. I’ve been feeling a bit guilty about it, but not guilty enough for me to not spend every evening drinking cheap beer, watching Netflix with my wife, and going to bed by 10:30 sharp.

But no longer! After the aforementioned nudges onward this week, I decided I would try to crank something out this weekend, mostly just to give everyone a glimpse into what my life is like now. It has been a rather massive lifestyle shift, and I’m still working out the kinks of it, but on the whole I’m enjoying what I’m doing (and the paychecks make up for the parts of the job I don’t).

There’s actually kind of a lot to cover. One of the cool things about manual labor is that there’s no shortage of repetitive tasks that you can physically set yourself on automatic and let your mind wander. I’ve had no shortage of thoughts and witticisms while I trudge around on rebar or haul shit around massive concrete slabs… it’s just I haven’t found the will to commit any of them to paper. I end up writing an awful lot of D&D in my head too, but that’s been a constant for much longer than this. I digress.

This job has taught me a lot about just what it means to labor. “Labor” as a concept has always for me been a very important theme, between the historical obsession with world communism and my own political views, but actually becoming a “laborer” (literally my job title) has really opened my eyes to some stuff that always seemed apparent but really is driven home by actually doing it.

Though modern construction work is defined by gargantuan pieces of heavy machinery, all working in concert like if dinosaurs formed an ant colony, and has reached new levels of precision with our advanced understandings of engineering, which we can now implement in the real world with laser-guided precision, construction can ultimately not be achieved without laboring human bodies. More often than not, all we’re needed for is to move heavy shit around, or swing a hammer, or break shit that’s been stuck together apart. But the real nitty-gritty of the day to day can only be achieved through the movement of the human form, and usually in ways which are directly inimical to our own comfort or well-being.

First of all, (obvi) labor is taxing. Before I was hired on, I had to complete a physical examination. I don’t mean I was given a physical, where a doctor checks my blood pressure and I turn my head and cough, I mean they sent me to a controlled environment where I had to complete a mini “construction Olympics” before I could be cleared, which included climbing up and down ladders, swinging a weighted shovel, carrying shoulder loads around the room, and prolonged cardio conditioning. The company, before they could offer me a job, needed to know my body was capable of performing these tasks. (All this took place in a rehab center that had the same vibe as a Cross Fit gym. Which reminded me: there are people who don’t do labor who then choose to pay money and devote their time and energy to perform meaningless labor to better achieve their ideal of a perfected human form… that will in turn, never be used to do any meaningful work. That’s the world we live in).  Now, while I did feel a bit like a show horse being led about before prospective buyers, I can totally see why they did this: if you can’t do it, they don’t need you, and if doing it is going to actually probably kill you, they don’t actually want to kill you. So good on them there.

Actually, I have to say, Garney is kind of a pretty solid company. They put the safety of their employees above all else on the jobsite: our onsite OSHA inspector Gracey can be a real pain in the ass at times, but she never lets you forget that at the end of the day they want you going home safe and sound. Which is great because construction sites are extraordinarily hazardous. My first week on the job actually did involve a fair amount of getting over the fact that the crane probably isn’t going to just fall over on me or drop its load while it swings over my head, or that with enough precaution there is really no cut a skill saw can’t achieve, or that the roof I’m walking on isn’t going to fall through because we reinforced that shit. There was a certain element of mastering anxiety, as well as coming to terms with my own mortality involved.

On top of that, Garney is an employee owned company, which means in addition to the fantastic health care Jocie and I will start receiving for just $20/month after 30 days, I will become an “employee owner” with shares in the company that, were I not just working for a very temporary period, would start to funnel into a package that I could withdraw after a minimum of five years. Now, this isn’t my life ambition, but I’ve met guys on the job who have kept up careers at Garney simply because, once they retire, they are going to be fucking set for life. Even for just us “laborers,” we get a real stake in the company’s success if we’re willing to commit.

Granted, this makes a lot more sense for the machine operators or the office jockeys who don’t get down in the shit every day, because I honestly at the moment have a hard enough time seeing myself lasting at this to the end of the summer, let alone half a decade, before my body falls apart completely. Week 1 was my back just never feeling quite right, and by the end of week 2, it’s my hands. It turns out that motorized equipment and powertools for 10 hours a day is like an Easy Bake Oven recipe for carpal tunnel syndrome. I recently had to start splinting my left wrist at nights because I was getting tired of waking up at 4:45AM (like clockwork, it was fucking weird) with that painful/”pins and needles” feeling in my hands. My wife looked up some hand exercises I can do throughout the day and of course medicated the shit out of me, so the pain is at least manageable, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. The middle three fingers on my left hand haven’t stopped tingling for about a week now, and that’s getting rather annoying (and as I’m finding out now, they’re not feeling too much better after an hour of typing).

So yeah, I’m kind of beginning to think of construction in terms of FMA’s Law of Equivalent Exchange: in order for something to be created, something of equal value must be destroyed: it turns out, if you want a waste water plant of concrete and steel, you have to sacrifice the nerve endings in the hands of about 20 guys—pretty much everybody I’ve talked to deals with some form of chronic discomfort.

The work itself though, while taxing, I find interesting because with enough oversight and individual problem solving, anyone can do it. If I were to turn construction work into a college course (because that’s just the way I think now, I guess), it would be called “Advanced Application of Simple Tools.” Most jobs you do will involve little more than a wedge or a level, whether in the sophisticated form of a hammer, or just a big old sharp piece of rebar, not a whole lot can’t be achieved by putting those two basic physics-based principles into practice.

I wanted to dedicate a significant chunk here to the people I work with, because holy shit has that been a different crowd than what I’m used to, living in a bubble of almost exclusively other academics for the last 5 years. Let’s meet our cast of characters:

“Little Chris”—6’2”, probably a solid 275 lbs, there is nothing very little about Chris. His nickname came about to distinguish him from “Big Chris,” who is actually smaller, but been on the job longer (and outranks him as the sort of “assistant to the foreman”). Chris is from rural Oklahoma, his dad is native, and his mom is Thai, which means he holds an amazing blend of cultural influences in his head; he can wax poetic about Buddhism just as easily as explain the ritual of using sage to bless one’s new home. Chris has had a life experience that greatly differs from mine, even though we’re roughly the same age—he’s been in the Marines, owned a bar here in Lawrence, gotten married twice, spent a short stint in jail, and is more than willing to reflect on his past with anyone and everyone who will listen. He’s been with Garney for a couple of months now, but he’s also a laborer and falls pretty low on the totem pole within our work crew, so on my first day on the job, he and I were paired together to tackle most of the grunt work. He’s been showing me the ropes, and, like you do with coworkers that you spend roughly 40 hours a week in close proximity to, he and I have become pretty friendly. He’s an easy guy to get along with, and we often end up talking about the weirdest metaphysical shit, which I’m always for. He has this own certain “Tao of Chris” about him that is actually really inspiring and that I can totally relate to, just a constant desire to better oneself, even when (or especially when) coming up short of that ideal.

Mick—Mick mentioned he was from a town called Fort Dodge, Iowa, a place I happened to pass through on RAGBRAI 2007 (a very memorable town, to be sure, of what I can remember of it…). Turns out he was a Hawkeyes fan and lived in Iowa City for about 15 years, frequenting a lot of my same favorite spots and even managing the Co-Op that my friends Blake and Amelia have been buying from for years. Hell, he even brought up Oasis Humus completely unprovoked, and we were blown away to figure out we both knew Ofer Sivan through wildly different means. Anyway, Mick is in his early 40s, but has the attitude of a high school class clown, and is just as lovable as all get out. He’s also a hobbling cripple due to chronic pain in his hip, which really limits his time on-site, which sucks because he always lightens up the work wherever he’s involved. Any time anyone gives him shit, his response to anything and everything is “DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM??” Somehow it never gets old, and it also illustrates for me how quickly memetization happens on a site like this, where you’re around the same people all the time. People will make the same joke every morning during stretches, when the leader says “grab an ankle” for quad stretch, some asshole will invariably chime in “you didn’t say it had to be mine!” and it always gets a laugh. Fucking fascinating.

“Flip(-flop)”—Phil is a good old boy, and also just a really nice guy. My first day on the job he offered me a Sprite from his lunch cause I had nothing to drink, and while he can be rather blunt when telling you you’re fucking everything up, he does so from a good place, because he’s wanting to teach you how to do it right. He recently won the first Garney “employee of the month” thing, and it’s because he’s really fucking good at his job. Flip is basically like the Peyton Manning of our crew, he’s basically a foreman in the position of laborer—he could run the show on his own if he needed to. His little catchphrase, which spreads like wildfire, is “AT-TA BAY-BAAAAAAYYYYYYY” whenever you swing that sledge extra hard down on a stake, or when the rebar finally fits into place. Everybody will say it, but the way he belts it lets you know it was Phil who definitely started that meme. At first I wasn’t too sure about Phil, cause he made some comments about Trump that I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not, but the more I got to know him the more I realized that underneath his rather country Kansas exterior, he still was very much a Lawrencian.

Terry—Terry Miller is the foreman of the crew I work with, and the man just reminds me of Odin, in everything from stature to demeanor. He’s a man of few words, but he’s very fatherly to all of us and looks out for us, and will even dig in and get in the dirt alongside us. I’m glad to have him as a boss, and especially glad to have him in my corner.

Then there are the office jockeys, the site managers that sit in the trailer all day and only come around to make sure that A) the work is proceeding smoothly B) the plans match what’s on the ground and C) to be complete dicks about telling you how to do your job. Notoriously worst for point C here is a guy we’ll call Tom. Tom started out at Garney a lot like I am now about ten years prior, and I guess because he didn’t go anywhere else, rose up the ranks to site manager, and now gets to be the guy telling all the grunts to work faster or do whatever asinine thing. He and a couple of the other office guys actually brought smokers onto the site, and smoke their own meats during work hours. Hell, last week they even put out a “patio” slab of ‘crete that we had left over from a pour. Tom is loud as all hell and has the laugh of a hyena that can be heard all over the site. However, as much shit as we like to give Tom for being a dick, he is the one dick that will stand up to the contracted engineer whose sole job seems to be coming around us right as we reach a crucial deadline to tell us we need to make some impossible thing happen before we can continue. So Tom, in his weird way, has found his niche in the weird construction site ecosystem.

So I’ve gotten the question a lot from people, “are there a lot of undocumented Mexicans working there?” and my honest answer is: “I couldn’t give two shits.” But the realistic answer in probably. Garney requires proof of citizenship to be hired by them directly, and there are plenty of Hispanic guys on the crew, all of them fantastic. Anthony, who’s been on a crew under Terry for going on 7 years now, is a superstar grandpa. “Anthony is the Manthony” is the only meme that I can take credit for, and I’ve only heard like, two other people say it other than me, but it holds true. Anthony can do it all. His English is limited, but he’s so infectiously cheerful and so earnest with you that communication has never really been a problem for us. I love working with Anthony, he’s just a genuinely nice guy. And when I say grandpa, I mean it. The Manthony is like 50, and has 5 grandkids, and whenever he performs a task that no grandpa in their right mind should be attempting and making it look easy, he’ll remind you he’s got kids that have kids. Also he’s shown me pictures, they’re all adorable, he buys them all cowboy hats because when he’s not on the job that’s the look he likes to sport. Fantastic guy, I almost bought a truck for him, but Freedom beat me to it.

Freedom is a crane operator, a hulking Phillipino-American who has been accurately described by his nieces and nephews as “King Kong.” I’ve done a coup of pours now where Freedom was the guy manning the crane, and has even gone out of his way to help me pick up the signals needed to help direct operators when navigating a drop in tight spaces. When you’ve got several tons of materials swinging over your head, it’s good to have a guy you can trust in the saddle, and I trust Freedom with my life on like, a twice a week basis pretty much.

Other than Anthony, there’s also Hector and Reuben, both career guys with the company that I really only get to see at lunch because they’re building another part of the site, and then Ronnie and the Rod Busters (which sounds like a great name for a 60s-style jiggle-billy rock band, a crew of all Hispanic guys that are subcontracted by Garney to do all the rebar work. These guys are im-fucking-pressive. They are all phenomenally good at their jobs, and I really hope they’re all getting paid accordingly, cause the site would shut down completely without them. Other than Ronnie, who knows a fair amount of English, I’m really only on speaking terms with a guy named Pancho, who likes to teach Spanish nouns and phrases in exchange for you teaching him the according English. The other guys don’t speak much English at all, so we don’t really have a rapport so to speak, but we’re still always welcome to help each other out moving a load or tying off a loose wire with little more than a simple “gracias amigo/de nada.” One day, while 8 feet down in a concrete hole in the ground, standing on the rebar above about 2 inches of barely unfrozen water (which was much preferable to the biting wind whipping up above—that day in March gave me the closest personal perspective to A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as I think I’ve been capable of imagining), me and Anthony hung out with the Rod Busters for a solid 30 minutes waiting to hear back from the higher-ups on what to do about a particular project. They all got a solid laugh when they found out the most Spanish I knew was from Resident Evil 4 (Asta aqui! Matalo!). Once again, I find myself kicking past-Matt for never actually even taking Spanish in high school, as it would be really nice to be able to connect with all these guys. I don’t know if their status is legal or not, and beyond than how it means they’re being paid and treated--perhaps naively, I hope it’s fairly—otherwise I don’t care. They’re all decent guys in my book.

Finally, to round out our tableau of “types” you can find on a site, we’ve come to the bottom of the barrel, let’s call him Joe. Joe, almost eerily, is like a mirror image of Phil, but a mirror darkly. Instead of a good ol’ boy, he’s a fairly rotten piece of shit. I’ve never seen him find a job he didn’t deem hard enough to try to find a way out of, is an unapologetic racist bigot, and basically pisses me off just by breathing. Joe’s racism, I think, comes from that special place of ignorance and fear that the reasons for one’s failings might actually be self-imposed. He’s the type of shitheel that will mutter his racism under his breath so that he can plausibly deny being said shitheel if you call him out on it. I know that among white working class males, this shouldn’t surprise me: this dude has “actual Trump supporter” written all over him. But god damn if it doesn’t bring home just who it is that are coming out of the woodwork that still exist in this country—white trash fuckups blaming everyone else for their own fucking problems, who actually thought being white would remain being "good enough" to receive the social benefits the feel entitled to.  He’s the kind of guy that I hope my social security payments will never actually reach, and I know that’s a bleak as fuck thing to say, but I’m not convinced that I’m actually joking when I say it.

But anyway, that’s just a sampling of the people who do the labor. There’s plenty more I could talk about, I supposed, but it’s probably best now to move along.

Construction sites are inherently dynamic places. The personnel is constantly shifting, new people being hired, others leaving for greener pastures (or getting fired). The site itself constantly changes: that hole wasn’t there yesterday; sweet, the new slab is poured, that makes this way easier to get to; the sand level keeps rising in this pit; was that wall there 2 hours ago? Even while relegated to doing the same mundane tasks over and over (sometimes even just moving the same pile of shit around), things are constantly getting more and more fleshed out, little by little. There is a real satisfaction in getting watch this big project take shape, even knowing the small role I ultimately played in it. There was one day, helping out at the lab, which is a much smaller site, where my impact was a bit more apparent: when I walked in that day, the building had no roof, when I walked out, the building did have a roof. Simple as that!

But I guess what I mean to say is, to get these things done, to build these massive structures that will ultimately benefit the City of Lawrence, or the owners of the company, or whoever… labor is necessary. Without labor, it just doesn’t happen, and so therein lies the heart of the struggle, the moral conundrum that has remained central to human civilization since its very inception: the Search for Labor.

We need labor, and therefor laborers. How do we get them? Some of the answers to that question bring quick to the forefront some of the greatest travesties human kind has ever wrought. To build the pyramids at Giza, men portrayed themselves as gods and named other people their possessions. Hundreds of thousands of bodies lie sealed inside the Great Wall of China, those of the men and women who were forced to erect it. To maintain a cash crop economy, which you can bet your ass is labor intensive, the United States declared that all men are equal unless your skin is too dark and then you can be bought, sold, and owned by white men. Coal mines and textile mills alike in industrializing England were fine with the thought of children as laborers. To keep the factories running in Chicago, we’re going to call in the Pinkerton’s and their clubs to beat to death anyone foolish enough that worker’s should be allowed to strike and to unionize. Imperialists know that there is cheaper labor overseas than at home, and that means profits. How many tens of thousands died in Siberia chopping lumber and mining uranium in the Gulag? Hitler fought a war with the vision that Eastern Europeans would become the German’s slaves. The economies of the “Asian Tigers” rose on the backs of sweat shops to meet the insatiable consumer demands of the West. Cheap manufactured goods are even cheaper to produce when your laborers are incarcerated in the prison industrial complex under the New Jim Crow.

The current federal minimum wage in this country is $7.25 an hour.

The search for labor has been eternal, especially by those who realized that they might somehow get out of labor themselves if they convince enough others to do it for them. However you look at it, it’s the central question that continues to divide us. Who has to labor and who doesn’t is entrenched in every facet of our society: politics, laws, religion, economic theory, foreign policy. All of it is about codifying who has to work and who doesn’t (and you can bet your ass the people that don’t have to labor will go to great lengths to keep it that way). Recently NPR posted a story (http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/04/473004808/human-sacrifice-is-linked-to-social-hierarchies-in-new-study) about how human sacrifice was one of the original organizing principles of civilization; that it created hierarchy from which the rest of society could stem. I joked to my wife that it still was.

Puzzled, she asked how I could feasibly argue that? Well, I explained, there are those who, without pain in their backs or their hands, will benefit greatly from what I do, and they convince me that it is all worth doing to myself by giving me dollars, with which I can buy, you know, the food I eat to live and the roof that goes over my head. My (human) sacrifice for, ultimately for their gain. Hierarchy maintained.

Now of course this is all very “fuck the establishment,” Fight Club-esque Nihilistic and bleak. But I wanted to take it this far to prove a point: the question of who does the labor and who benefits from the labor is something we should never take for granted. If my short list above hopefully did anything, it should outline just how easy it is to morally fail that simple test. Just as much as ever, the scales are unbalanced: the people that labor reap considerably little of the benefits compared to the people that don’t. It starts with each and every one of us, however hard it may seem, to try to right the scales, to put the benefits of labor back in the hands of the laborers, the toilers, the working people of the world. For me this job is temporary. For many of my colleagues, it isn’t. This is their life, and I believe that (most of them; cough, Joe) deserve just as rich a life as anyone else. And that, kids, is what socialism means to me.

Anyway, it’s been great to set pen to paper again! Thanks for reading, I hope to get back to you soon! I’m sitting with a “why is Matt a historian” post sitting half-finished in my back pocket that, surprise, I still have trouble answering! I was meaning for a lot of the thoughts here to serve as part of another dialectic with WSP’s Mongolia Correspondent Eric Chase (assuming he hasn’t been swallowed whole into the grey clouds that still blanket the Asian steppe), and I hope he’ll still enlighten us with his look to the future in “the Search for Labor” as I tried to perhaps too concisely do here for the past: AI! Robots! THE PROTOMEN, ACT II: THE FATHER OF DEATH! Hopefully he’ll help me out, because as it stands, I’m still too fucking exhausted to do much more of this at all. But the hiatus is hopefully over! WSP shall return!

Until next time, Comrades…