If you’ve never had the pleasure of using Fiberlume, you’ll need a time machine to rectify that. Fiberlume, you see, was a “reflective asphalt based aluminum coating in the nature of a paint for metal roofs or buildings,” according to the page on its canceled trademark. In practice, the coating in the form of a paint was used to patch leaky mobile homes. That’s not what I used it for though.
Instead, I used it, alongside my coworker in the maintenance department, to cover the non-metal roof of the factory at which we worked. The large flat surface didn’t do well in the heat, humidity, and rain of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, so my coworker and I spent a large portion of our summer job going back and forth across the roof applying and reapplying Fiberlume as it cracked and started leaking again.
The reason for this approach was likely the fact that our jobs were temporary ones designed for young men getting ready for college rather than being truly necessary. There’s also the possibility that the budget didn’t allow for adding what the factory truly needed — a sloped roof.
In either case, we’d arrive in the morning, mix up the Fiberlume — which separated in the five-gallon buckets it came in — climb the ladder to the roof, haul the buckets up by hand using a rope, and then get to spreading. I still have scars on my legs from times when the sharp edges of the buckets caught me as I was pulling them up. It was silly, but time consuming and not as miserable as the day when they truly had nothing for us to do and sent us out to level the gravel on the walking trail that had been built for employees of the factory.
With arguments swirling around the possibility of reshoring at least some portion of America’s manufacturing base, one that keeps coming up is how awful factory jobs are and how no one will want to work them. I myself might not have done so had a leader from my Boy Scout troop not worked there and given the summer job to me via my dad, who called me at my girlfriend’s house to tell me I needed to show up at seven the next morning.
And reading the description above may suggest that those trashing the value of working at a factory have a point. Who wants to spend months spreading Fiberlume, RIP, on a leaking roof, particularly when one is constantly reminded that the work is largely for naught?
The thing is, though, it wasn’t that bad. The maintenance department was full of colorful characters with plenty of ribald stories that delighted my juvenile ears. The overall culture at the factory, one that made radiator caps, was good. People joked with one another, talked trash about the bosses, and formed cliques, just as they do in white-collar jobs. There was more meth (some) than I saw when I went into the white-collar world (none), but that could be because the white-collar culture tends to be less forgiving of offering your coworker illegal drugs.
It also wasn’t just a paycheck, but an opportunity to learn. There was the Indian mechanic who’d immigrated to America with his wife so they could have better lives. The plan was for her to go to school while he worked at the factory and then return the favor of working while he went to school. Alas, his wife got Americanized and divorced him once she had her degree. His telling of the story was much less entertaining than when Eddie Murphy riffed about his African princess demanding half his stuff, if equally profane.
That wasn’t the value of talking to him though. The value was that he served as a mentor, imploring us young men to always surround ourselves with people who were better than we were. If we did, we’d improve. If we hung around people who were worse than us, we’d sink to their level.
I also learned that if the EPA gets called out to inspect the remains of chemical barrels and other waste you’d been assigned to set fire to, nothing happens — though maybe I’ll come down with a mystery disease in my old age from all the mystery fumes I inhaled that day. Perhaps the fumes are why I went back for a second summer, that time as a picker, I think it was called. I kept the machines in a certain section stocked with the parts needed to make the radiator caps.
I kid, I kid, because I didn’t go back to the factory because of brain damage. I went because it was a good job. It paid well, and I enjoyed the people, even if I was a bit of a sheltered city boy who had grown up going to manners classes and the like and knew that sporting a rattail in 1995 was a fashion faux pas, a truth that had not yet reached the factory floor.
In other words, it wasn’t that different from any other job. It was hotter and grimier, but you could actually see what you were producing. I also don’t remember ever attending one meeting or having to undergo trainings on diversity, sexual harassment, or communication styles, which was a plus.
There’s an assumption that, because those jobs are often hot and grimy and based on using your hands for something other than typing emails (which is obviously the highest calling in life), they’re miserable and demeaning ones that no one would want to do. I, though, was surrounded by people who seemed genuinely happy and weren’t lamenting their station in life, except for the Indian mechanic, and he had a legitimate grievance.
At the end of Office Space, one of the finest documentaries on white-collar work ever produced, there’s a reason that Peter goes into construction instead of into another office job. It’s similar to the reason that I, in a previous role, used to jealously look out the windows of my corner office at the groundskeeping team. While I could point to my financial value and the revenue my team brought in, I also never really felt like I worked.
I certainly had no product to hold up at the end of the day. I could never say, “All the spring flowers are in, mulched, and looking beautiful.” It was just an assortment of tasks. Also, only psychopaths hold up a spreadsheet or PowerPoint and refer to it as beautiful or marvel at the workmanship that went into it.
Online people, who love to pretend that typing is noble, would have us believe that factory work is depressing, soulless, and meaningless, but it’s not. It’s work, it’s work people can get personal value and pride from, and it’s work that doesn’t follow you around on your phone, if for no other reason than it’s impossible to fabricate a radiator cap via an email.
But that’s also the reason I suspect that it’s looked down on. Because the biggest truth of white-collar work is that it often consists of wasting time in an effort to get to 40, 50, or 60 hours a week at the office. That’s why there are so many meetings and trainings, so people can pretend to be busy. Otherwise, it would become apparent that many only put in a few hours of actual work per week, unlike factory workers — which is a reality and source of shame that the laptop class doesn’t want people catching onto.
