Why Working-Class Matter

That's one of the things that's really characteristic of working class jobs I think, much more so than more intellectually complicated abstract jobs. One of the things you have to be, you have to be a good person to be around to do well at a working class job because the jobs themselves are quite difficult. They're physically strenuous, they're demanding, and the payoff for that in part is that it can be the camaraderie that emerges as a consequence of the shared enterprise. That can make those jobs extremely worthwhile. You can make very, very good friends in a working class environment.

It's also very frequently the case that those working class environments are characterized by an extremely high level of sophisticated humor. They run on like derisive play, and it's one of the things I really liked about the restaurants. People are always playing tricks on each other and making jokes and having a kind of dark fun, and everyone was participating in that. It was certainly the case I had a lot of working-class jobs from the time I was 14 till the time I was about 25, I would say. It was definitely the case that that ethos of harsh play, when I worked at this railway crew in Northern Saskatchewan, in the summer one year.

I was up, what the hell they called it, a peanut pounder. I think that was my job. I had this thing that looked like a lead tin can on the end of a stick, and I followed this machine that went down the tracks and laid down the plates that rails fit in. There'd be a hole that was drilled into the plate, and then these things called peanuts held the plate in place so that someone could come along and then spike the plate into place. The guy in front of me would drop this little wooden dowel, which kind of looked like a peanut, hence the name, into the hole to hold the plate. So then I would whack it with this lead can on the end of a stick, and that's what I did all day for like 16 hours out in the hot sun.

I did that for months, and it was an interesting place to begin working at. I write about this a bit in Beyond Order, I believe it's in Beyond Order because there was an initiation ceremony that went along with the job. When I first showed up on the crew, no one was particularly friendly. It was all men, and they were rough guys. Like, a lot of them were Native guys from Cree Indian guys from Saskatchewan. A lot of them had been in prison; they were rough guys, and they weren't that friendly if you were new, and they gave you a rough time.

So everybody who came on board the crew got a stupid nickname. Mine was Howdy Duty, which was this red-headed puppet from the 1950s with big ears. I asked one guy why he called me Howdy Duty, and he said because you look nothing like him. I thought that was an extremely witty answer, you know, a very funny answer. Anyway, it was a bit of a derogatory nickname, and part of it was it was delivered to see if you had enough of a sense of humor to accept it without getting all, you know, narcissistically puffed up and irritable about it.

So it got shortened eventually to Howdy, which was a lot better because there was kind of a cowboy sheet thing going on with that, and that was a lot better. But there was this period where you got ribbed a lot, two weeks about. If you didn't collapse under the weight of the teasing, then you did your damn job and you were reasonably entertaining to be around, then the doors opened and you were now part of the crew.

There was one guy there—I wrote about him—Lunch Bucket was his name. That was his nickname, Lunch Bucket. He showed up on the crew with a lunch bucket, and that was a bad idea because it's obvious that his mom had packed it, and you don't want to show up to a work crew of ex-cons with a lunch bucket that your mom packed. It's a bad look, and so he was called Lunch Bucket from day one. He was a pretty touchy guy and pretty narcissistic, and people didn't like him very much. He was tested a lot, and the testing started out with people just throwing pebbles at him.

So, the crew would stretch out about a quarter of a mile across the line as we were working on the tracks, and Lunch Bucket would be doing whatever job he had. The game was to see if you could bounce a pebble off Lunch Bucket's helmet. He'd be working, and these pebbles would be flying out of God only knows where because people didn't make it obvious. It was a score for your mates if you bounced a pebble off Lunch Bucket's helmet, and he did not take to that well. The pebbles got larger as the days progressed, and eventually, he was driven off. It was because he didn't subjugate himself properly to the multi-dimensional discipline of the crew.

You know, because he wasn't a good guy to have around. He couldn't take a ribbing; he didn't have a sense of humor; he wasn't able to contribute to the game that was being played socially. Well, these men were doing what was pretty tedious and difficult work. Like we were literally out in the hot sun for 16 hours at a stretch, and it was rather mind-numbing work and somewhat physically demanding. The peanut pounding wasn't particularly difficult, but the state despite pounding was, and you need some camaraderie in those positions so that your life is rendered maybe not just tolerable but even enjoyable in principle.

So, you're playing a multi-dimensional game, and if you're willing to subjugate yourself to that discipline, then you learn how to play that game. If you get good at that, then that's a portable skill. Will the lack of a red wave during the midterms lead to more reckless spending by a more emboldened administration, higher taxes, deeper inflation? If you are unsure how the next two years will unfold, talk to Birch Gold Group about protecting your savings with gold. Birch Gold makes it easy to convert your IRA or 401k into an IRA in precious metals so you can own gold and silver in a tax-sheltered account.

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That's Jordan to 989898. So, you might ask yourself, well, what are you doing when you work as hard as you possibly can? At least one thing is that you’re molding yourself into someone who can aim at something and move forward with efficiency and skill. Maybe if you're doing that extraordinarily well, you’re not only molding yourself into someone who can aim at something and move towards it with efficiency and skill, but you can do that at the same time that you're helping other people around you do that, right?

So, you can think about this. Imagine you're a good athlete on a team, and you might say, well, what does it mean to be a good athlete? You might say, well, I'm a soccer player, a football player, and I'm great at being a top scorer. You might say, well, that's enough to make you a great athlete, and the truth is that’s actually not enough to make you a great athlete.

Because you need to have the skill—whatever the skill might be—and high level skill is, of course, extremely desirable in relationship to the goal. But you also have to be a good, let's say, a good sport. And that's a rather trivial description for something that's actually quite a profound moral accomplishment. So if you're not only a highly skilled athlete in the technical sense but you're a good sport, it means that while you practice your skill, whatever that is, you also elevate the ability of all your teammates to make their skill manifest and also to improve their skill. You do that simultaneously, right?

And that's a high level athletic ethos. You're a good athlete and you're a good team player. The union of those two things might make you something approximating a good person, and that's transportable. I think part of the reason that we admire sports heroes when they're sports heroes in the truest sense is because if they are ritual models of emulation in relationship to the development of high-level skill and they're also admirable team players in the highest sense, then they actually are something approximating admirable citizens in the truest sense.

That pattern of skilled, productive, generous cooperation is actually a model that you can extract out of multiple games, and it's a good model to emulate. And that’s something that isn't arbitrary, by the way. That also answers a question that I posed earlier in relationship to nihilism and belief. It's like, well, what should be foundational? The answer might be something like practice in developing the capacity for skilled movement forward in a manner that simultaneously encourages the others that you're cooperating with to do precisely the same thing.

That's not some arbitrary ethos. It's not arbitrary because if that doesn't happen, then nothing flourishes. If it does happen, then everything flourishes. It's also not relativistic in some sense because you have to do that no matter what you're doing. No matter what it is that you're doing, if you do that well, you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing well. In fact, that's really in some sense how you would define well.

You know that’s true. You'll be at home, and maybe you get a plumber to come over or an electrician, somebody who's skilled in the working class technical sense, and they do a good job. That's a great relief, especially let’s say if it's a plumbing problem because you really need your plumbing fixed. It's not optional; well, you know what the options are; they're not great.

So it's really important to be a good plumber. Then you think, well, what makes a good plumber? One is obviously technical skill. The man or the woman—generally the man when it's plumbing—knows what he's doing, and he does it efficiently. But that isn't all. If he's a really good plumber, well, he tells you what he's going to do, so he can communicate what he's going to do. He can identify the problem—this is a good diagnostician.

He can tell you what he's going to do; he can tell you how much what he's going to do will cost you. Then he does it, and that’s what it costs, right? So there's an honesty in interpersonal transaction that goes along with the diagnostic accuracy and the skill, and that's reflective of a very deep ethical orientation.

So to be a really good plumber, then you have to be highly skilled, but you have to be a clear and honest communicator. You have to play fair in the most fundamental sense. And then you might say, imagine he has some employees with him. Maybe you're deciding if you want to have the plumber come back if you have problems in the future. One of the things you're going to do is check out how he interacts with his subordinates.

If he's someone who's teaching them and doing that in a fair manner, and not talking down to them, and not manipulating them, and not tyrannizing over them, and is also able to do that in a manner that's sort of civilized, so that you don't feel like it's an imposition to have them in your house because there's no psychological tension surrounding the enterprise, then you think, well, he's a good boss.

He's done a really credible job, and he's very honest and reliable. He solved the problem, and he did it on time, and he didn't charge you any more than he told you he would charge you, and it was a fair price. Like, that's pretty multi-dimensional space to manage simultaneously, right? That's a very sophisticated mode of ethical conduct. It can't just be reduced to being a good plumber in the technical sense. It's being a good person who happens to be a plumber.

That success in a microcosm is truly reflective of society at a much broader level, and it's definitely the case I think—this is absolutely clear—that the integrity of our society depends in no small part on the minority of people, and often working-class people, who do that sort of thing exceptionally well, right? They're the people who keep—they build everything and they keep everything going.