Bruce Springsteen’s “Factory” has been rattling around my head recently. (If you are one of the handful of people to read my earlier diaries you may know I’m a big Bruce Springsteen fan. If not, well, I love the guy.)
“Factory” is the 7th track on Springsteen’s 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town. That album, one of Springsteen’s finest, is often thought of as a meditation on the “dark side” of the American dream. These are the songs one hears in the bleak, early morning dawn of a workday; in the drunken fight between a father and son, echoing up the street late at night; in the car tearing down the freeway just so the driver can pretend she has a place to go to. These aren’t hopeless songs; hope is Springsteen’s lodestar, and often the only thing his characters have to get them through their days.
But the songs on Darkness do reflect characters, or people, on the edge of hope. People who understand that their spirits are not invulnerable and can truly be broken if forced to bear too much of life’s weight. These men and women know that if they do not diverge from their current life paths soon, the world will crush them.
This mixture of hope and doom is especially present in “Factory.” Take a listen:
The song is about a blue-collar man who hates his job because it is everything he doesn’t want out of life. Only the need to survive has forced him into a job at the factory. Maybe this is the only work in town. Maybe he can’t move somewhere else because he lacks other job skills. Maybe he has a family to support. He knows he’s got to be a man and provide for them even if it kills his dreams. What are his dreams? The song doesn’t say.
Each lyric cuts like a cheap razor:
Early in the morning, factory whistle blows,
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes
We feel the ache in the man’s bones as he wakes into yet another workday, no different from any that have come before. An endless string of days, full of physically difficult yet tedious work that doesn’t bring him any satisfaction.
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light,
It’s the work, the working, just the working life.
Another morning in the hard light of adult reality. This is the life of a workingman, the one he was probably forced into only a few years out of childhood. He never had any real choice. It’s just what people have to do to get by; what most of the men he knows do. There’s not much joy to be had in his job, or “career” if you want to call it that. It’s just long hours of painful drudgery, and in the few moments of the day he has to himself – maybe while eating his lunch – he’s too tired or depressed to do anything but chew and watch his life slide past.
Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain,
I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain
The man’s young boy watches through a window as his father trudges off to the factory in the wet grey dawn. The boy sees the terrible burden his father carries for their family. He feels his father’s fear and sadness with the intensity of a child – the “mansions of fear” and “mansions of pain.” Bruce sings these lines operatically. The man’s deep anguish over his lot in life, as experienced through his empathic child, is certainly worthy of Puccini or Verdi.
Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life,
The work, the working, just the working life.
The work – in a mine, or a manufacturing plant, or on an assembly line – is killing the man. It’s already cost him his hearing. Either the man’s health or his sanity will go next. Yet the factory is, paradoxically, what keeps the man and his family alive, pays their bills, puts food on their table. So the man just has to keep going everyday. This is his life now. The working life. Ain’t never gonna change.
End of the day, factory whistle cries,
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes
The day is finally over. But it has wrecked the men who work in the factory. The job is so physically and emotionally draining that they stagger out exhausted, in pain. It has been a traumatic experience. They are shellshocked, like at the end of another day of war.
And you just better believe boy,
Somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight,
It’s the work, the working, just the working life.
‘Cause it’s the work, the working, just the working life.
Exhaustion gives way to anger. At the bars later that night, where the men try to obliviate their pain, fights will break out. They fight each other because they have to express their frustration and despair somehow, and the only societally-approved way for them to do it is through violence. They can’t hold all that inside. It’s the fallout from their lives of sacrifice. From the working life.
“Factory” makes me think about labor issues and the way that we on the American left often romanticize the types of blue-collar jobs that were widely available during the mid-20th century. The jobs that people like Bruce Spingsteen’s father had (in a rug mill and later in a plastics plant, where he actually did lose some of his hearing). Labor history often serves as our version of the “good old days”: we think fondly on the mid-20th century when middle-class manufacturing jobs were widely available to people with only high school educations, or less. Conservatives look at social issues through this kind of nostalgic lens; for us, it’s labor.
But the left’s desire to commemorate better economic times for the middle class (in order, hopefully, to bring those times back again) causes us to forget how difficult and unpleasant so much manufacturing work was and is. These are tough, tough jobs, often involving a toxic combination of long hours, monotony, and significant physical challenge and risk. A 2002 letter by a former Bethlehem steel worker put it well:
There seems to be a lot of negativity toward steelworkers’ wages, benefits and pensions lately. I wonder if the critics know what it’s like to work the swing shift for 30 years. I wonder if they know what it’s like to work every weekend. Do they know what it’s like to work 14 days in a row with no overtime pay?
I wonder if the critics know what it’s like to be out in an ice storm at 3 a.m., climbing 40 feet in the air on a frozen crane, holding flaming asbestos torches against live wires to thaw the ice so the crane runs. Do they know what it’s like to work in 95-degree heat with high humidity while pushing 30-pound cast iron lids on top of a coke oven that’s 135 degrees? We had to wear wooden shoes so our feet wouldn’t melt! Do they read signs at work that say, “Don’t eat or drink in this area because it contains cancer-causing smoke and dust”? I guess we shouldn’t have breathed there either. But it was okay to work there!
Or check out this article on life as a meatpacker:
Numbers aside, the GAO also says the industry is still plenty dangerous, with knife-wielding workers standing for long hours on fast-moving lines, chemicals, animal waste and factory floors that can be dark, loud, slippery or unbearably hot or bitterly cold.
The risks are many: cuts and stabbings, burns, repetitive stress injuries, amputations and worse.
Knife accidents blinded one meat worker and disfigured the face of another, the GAO said, citing OSHA records. Oscar Montoya lost most of his left index finger in a 1999 accident using a huge split-saw to divide cattle carcasses. He had three operations, returned to meatpacking, then finally quit.
“It was just a lot harder than I thought it would be,” he says. He’s now a heating and air-conditioner repairman.
And here’s a slightly out-of-date list of the worst jobs of 2011. Almost all of them are in the manufacturing industries or otherwise involve a lot of physical labor. These aren’t jobs most people would aspire to (although some of the comments at that site dispute this, and are worth a read). They’re jobs people take to support their families, and maybe one day push their kids another rung up the economic ladder.
The manufacturing jobs many workers had in the “good old days” of the middle class were also much more dangerous than they are today. For example, in 2012, there were 35 fatalities nationwide in the mining industry. In 1965, there were 255 fatalities in the coal sector alone. And that’s not to mention the slower but still agonizing deaths caused by black lung and other occupational diseases common to the manufacturing sector.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is that when progressives talk about old-school manufacturing jobs that a much bigger percentage of the working population used to have, we need to keep in mind what the actual lived experience of those jobs was and is. They are, generally speaking, very hard and often grueling. And over time they can become soul-killing, as Springsteen details in “Factory” and, less directly, in many of the other songs on Darkness.
So when we hear about outsourcing and technology eliminating manufacturing jobs in the US, we ought to keep in mind that in many ways Americans are better off not having to do that kind of work anymore, if other less backbreaking jobs for the same (and hopefully unionized) pay and benefits are available. Obviously, that’s not really the case these days, which is the whole reason we cherish those manufacturing jobs in the first place. Any job is better than no job at all. And for folks who still work in industries that require a lot of difficult physical labor, then all the more reason for them to get a living wage, decent health care, and real pensions.
But when we cast the employment levels of the 1950’s and 60’s as an ideal, we don’t have to romanticize the jobs many of those men and women did. They probably wouldn’t. It was the work, the working, just the working life. Nothing more.
