Making Things

I spent one summer working in a factory - H.H. Brown Shoe in Worcester Massachusetts , where I did finishing work on combat-boots - so I'm not going to get all dewy eyed and breathless over the manufacturing life. The work was tough, boring, and sweaty. At the level I was at - unskilled and slow - it didn't pay all that well either. The people who were relying on this type of work to make a living were, quite literally, living from paycheck to paycheck.

Believe me, I was thrilled when, halfway through the summer, I was promoted to working in the office. My promotion - which also included a $.30 an hour pay boost - was based solely on my knowing enough Spanish to let the workers in my section know whether they needed to come in on Saturday or not to work some O.T. College girl. "Spanish-speaker." When the call came down from upstairs for someone who could fill in in the office, the foreman gave them my name. (Or maybe he was just glad to get rid of me. I was a really terrible boot finisher. I was OK at cleaning the glue and gunk off the boots, but when it came to polishing the raw edges, my work was a mess - lots of polish dribbles down the insides of the boots. Some poor grunts in Vietnam were probably asking themselves why they got stuck with gear that, if not actually defective, was substandard and ugly.)

Little did I know that my main job "upstairs" would be running a small, handset rotary press that printed out the piece-work coupons (pronounced "kew-pons"). "Upstairs" was even dirtier work than "downstairs."

There are, of course, implications to exporting our manufacturing and industrial jobs and becoming an economy that doesn't actually make much that's tangible. One is clearly that one of the trade-offs we're making in exchange for "more and cheaper" is that we don't see all the true costs (environmental issues, working conditions) that wouldn't be allowed here in the US, but are more palatable when they're out of sight. On the upside, of course, living standards are going up in some direly poor parts of the world. But the most obvious implication is that, while at a macro level, we may be better off moving the economy to hirer value work, at the micro (i.e., human being) level, loss of manufacturing jobs causes many profound social and economic dislocations. For many (most?) who were already working in manufacturing - and for many (some?), for whom this would have been an attractive option - the change has not been for the better. Manufacturing work often provided a good income. It meant good income. Pride. Dignity.

Long-winded (or long blog-ged) way of saying that I'm of two minds about not having a solid manufacturing base here. And a long-winded (or long blog-ged) way of introducing an exhibit that's currently running at the Baker Library at Harvard Business School. The exhibit contains pictures taken of factory workers and machines, taken during the 1930's, and used at HBS for classroom instruction. (Hmmmm. I wonder just what they learned.) The exhibit is called, The Human Factor: Introducing the Industrial Life Photograph Collection at Baker Library, and the images - some by noted photographers like Lewis Hine and Margaret Bourke-White - are beautiful and haunting. (Ok. Some are more than a little odd.)

Anyway, take a look for a reminder of the way we were, back in the day of American industrial might. The photo I've included here was chosen for obvious reasons. It's titled Polishing Chrysler bodies similar to shining shoes. (I think not - although I probably wouldn't have been any better at polishing Chryslers, either.)

Even if you can't make it over to the exhibit by March 7th - hey, I live around here and probably won't see it in person - you can check it out online here.