It was not factory jobs that created the great American middle class

[MADem]

16. I have a relative who worked for a summer in a manufacturing plant.

It was a college job. On the GRAVEYARD shift. It paid OK--i.e., about as good as a 19 or 20 year old kid could get, and it was paying better than the back of the garbage truck. The plant manufactured foam rubber, and his job was moving heavy slabs of foam from spot A to spot B--for eight hours, with two fifteen minute breaks and a half hour meal break.

The job was backbreaking and exhausting, but he was there so that the "regulars" could go on their summer vacation--they all could spell one another on various jobs on the line, but he was the walking, talking definition of "unskilled" labor, so he got the worst job. At the end of the summer, he said that this job taught him one thing: That he never, ever, EVER wanted to be in a position where doing that kind of work was his only choice in life.

It did create somewhat of an urgency in him to do well in school, too--to the point where he got a scholarship to grad school, the lucky skunk! Changed his life!

He's nearing retirement age now, but with very little prodding, he'll tell anyone (particularly the young whippersnappers) who listens how much that job sucked and how it prodded him to make the most of opportunities and work hard in school--LOL!