‘WORST-EVER SUMMER JOB’
Teen learns a life-changing lesson while handling siding
At the end of the 1962 school year, I needed a summer job. So I responded to a newspaper ad from a company in Millvale that made aluminum siding.
The company’s plant occupied a building which was originally a slaughterhouse along the Allegheny River. It had thick, mostly windowless walls, presumably to keep fresh carcasses from spoiling, but those same walls also kept the plant’s workspace dank and cool in the summer heat.
My job mostly involved working with a forming press. A coil of aluminum would be lifted onto a spindle at one end, then the metal would spool through a series of rollers which shaped it into a piece of aluminum siding. Once the siding reached the required length, it would trip a cutter that sliced the metal into individual strips about six feet long.
Then I would take the newly cut strip, move it into a box and overlay it with a protective sheet of paper. Next, I’d take another strip, flip it, put it into the box, cover it with paper and do the same operation over and over again until the box held 15 pieces. There was no counter on the press, so I was tasked with keeping count of the pieces.
Like most people, I learned to count as a young child. But I discovered, on this particular job, that counting from one to fifteen over and over again isn’t easy. It was mind-numbingly repetitive and so I would occasionally make mistakes. Some boxes ended up with 17 pieces; others with 13 and so on. For a company whose work involved delivering reliably accurate counts of pieces, that wasn’t a good business practice, even though it was completely unintentional on my part.
However, soon after starting at the plant, I learned that the true objective of the people working there wasn’t actually to make good siding; that was simply a byproduct. The real objective was to get overtime pay. That way, the plant’s appallingly low wages would be increased to a still appalling, although slightly higher, hourly rate. But the company didn’t usually have enough customer demand to justify keeping its people over. So the workplace custom was to make believe you were working hard, in spite of the fact that meeting the plant’s customary demand didn’t usually require overtime work.
One ploy, for example, was to take a hand-tool and carry it, with a grimly determined look on your face, over to the other end of the plant. A few minutes later, someone else would pick it up and, with an equally grim look, carry it back. It was completely unproductive, but it burned up time. And if you burned enough time on the clock doing nothing, it would lead to overtime.
I decided not to participate in that charade. First, because I thought it was dishonest, and second, I couldn’t stand the place and wanted to leave as soon as my shift was over. The last thing I wanted was to stay around longer for overtime. And when things got slow on the plant floor, which happened fairly often, I would just sit down.
That turned out to be a serious faux pas, because it telegraphed to the foreman and his supervisors, as well as to my fellow laborers, that I wasn’t even pretending to work. So, after just a week on the job, I was fired. But, I don’t fault the plant for that; I probably deserved it. And it turned out that getting canned was the best outcome I could have imagined. That’s because it freed me to find another summer job which much better suited my interests, at a startup tech company in Irwin.
However, when I read my recollection of that summer job to an adult learning class at LaRoche University, a number of my classmates chimed in to tell me their own stories about how, as younger workers, they were pressured to slow down, to misrepresent tip income and do other things that would undermine a company’s trust in its workforce. Somehow, until then, I had naively assumed that my own experience was unique, but it turns out that was the norm. It may still be standard practice in workplaces across America. And if it is, I’m not sure its participants are benefiting from it as much as they seem to think.
What the plant experience taught me is that leaving a job you hate — no matter how it might come about — may be nature’s way of prodding you to find something better. I’ve heard it said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never have to work another day in your life. That’s because, in job situations you love, the distinction between work and play dissolves. You’re having fun and you don’t need to pretend to be productive; you’re being productive because it feels good.