Ways to Make Money - Unionized Factory Worker
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The next stop in my “Ways I’ve Made Money” saga was a brief summer job I had when I just turned 17 and my dad got me a job in the factory he worked at. There were two of us, son’s of a couple of the workers, hired on as “Materials Handlers.” Officially it was our job to gather the plastic and other materials needed to assemble large Plexiglass signs like the kinds in front of most businesses.
The signs made in the plant were actually really cool and I admired the work my dad did there. His work was to be seen all over Vancouver and as our family drove to visit my Grandparents he was always taking a little detour to show us some new sign that he had worked on.
The tools in the factory were fantastic. Huge presses for shaping plastic into huge molds and massive cutting beds with computerized routers that would cut the plastic to shape. They also had a sign-painting department where they had “real” painters that painted billboards by hand from stencils. My mind boggles that they actually painted them by hand, but it sure was cool to watch the sign painters.
Money
The money was good, as I recall I was making more than any of my friends. In those days the unions were strong and demanded top dollar for there workers. The plastic plant was owned by Vancouver billionaire Jimmy Patterson and things didn’t stay tipped in the workers favor for too long.
The Clock
When I look back now it is amusing to me that there was a buzzer to mark start time, all breaks beginning and end, lunch beginning and end, and quitting time. There was also a time clock and you had to punch your card in before the start buzzer and out after the end buzzer or else the ink of the time stamp was a different color…a bad thing.
Always Look Busy
I remember on one of my first days I had completed the tasks I had been given and was waiting for the foreman to come and assign me something to do. I hopped up on a work bench and relaxed while I waited.
My dad, spotted me and bolted across the room and in a tone that I knew to obey, told me to get down and look busy.
I think that was a defining moment for me, as the horror of being a grown-up crashed through my consciousness. It was painful to realize that perception was valued so highly in this bizarre world, that it was important to look busy, even if every one knew you weren’t.
Carving the Mediocre Path
After a couple weeks, I had gotten over and accepted my always look busy lesson and was settling in to the swing of things. The foreman had assigned us a big project of clearing up an huge warehouse of old signs and we were making good progress.
One day a particularly rough looking, long time worker cornered my co-worker and I in an aisle in the old warehouse [which was pretty much deserted].
“You guys shouldn’t work so hard.” Even though the tone of his voice was almost joking, the look on his face was dead serious.
“Do you understand what I mean?” I was scared now, hoping he wasn’t going to actually hurt us to reinforce his point.
What he was telling us was that we were getting too much work done. We were raising the bar and if we continued to work in the same manner, the bosses would notice and soon everyone would be expected to work harder.
I know I was scared to death. No, I didn’t tell anyone and I don’t remember consciously working less hard, but he never bothered us again.
Destroying Neon
It’s sad when I look back, but the warehouse I was cleaning out was actually a storage place for tons of old neon signs. These days they would have been valuable antiques, but we spent the better part of 2 months loading up dumpsters with them. Yes, at the time is was loads of fun, we got to toss these signs from the second story loft into a huge dumpster and watch them exploded to pieces. It didn’t get any better than that for a 17 year old guy.
Some interesting lessons were learned at that job. I was only there for 2 and half months and I went from isolated, inexperience teen to having my eyes wide open on the not so pleasant world of working for a paycheck.
Soon September came and I was off to take physics and calculus and computer science at university. The clash of realities of being the first person in my family [ever] to attend post secondary education was the next big lesson on the agenda.
- Jon Symons
P.S. this article is a part of my “Ways I’ve Made Money” series.
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[...] Unionized Factory Worker [...]
Ways to Make Money - Lessons Learned From Jobs I’ve Done | Art Of Money added these pithy words on Jan 13 07 at 7:45 pm