There’s a piece in The Wall Street Journal today about how “Gen Z Plumbers and Construction Workers Are Making #BlueCollar Cool.” They’re filming themselves laying pipe or repairing electrical lines, and becoming influencers on TikTok.
Lexis Czumak-Abreau has 2.2 million followers, and gets recognized in airports. From the WSJ:
“You feel just like a normal person, until you actually get confronted by people and you’re like, oh, my goodness, this is real, people know who I am,” says Czumak-Abreu, the 27-year-old daughter and granddaughter of electricians. Since she began posting videos from her job in 2022, she’s gotten thousands of messages from viewers saying she sparked their interest in trade work.
I love this; and have actually experienced the sensibility, in young plumbers who have come to work around my house on a couple of projects over the last year. They love to show me what they’re going to do, how the technology works—and they want me to watch them in action. “It’s going to be all asses and elbows,” one plumber told me, promoting the excitement of a sewer-pipe-sealing operation he was about to conduct. Another young plumber walked through my basement, telling me the 110-year history of my house just by looking up at the jangled plumbing in the ceiling. “These pipes speak to me,” he said with a grin.
Good. This kind of stuff is cool. It requires an understanding of the physical world and an appetite for daily adventure that I wrote about four years ago, in the context of wishing Presidential Candidate Joe Biden would, Studs Terkel-like, find ways to elevate and celebrate the kinds of working people he knows.
In fall of 2020 I wrote:
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Here’s what you have to respect—and show that you respect—in working-class people: The physical courage of iron workers, the exquisite skill of construction machine operators, the sheer adventure of a local handyman who, unlike you, tackles a new problem in an unfamiliar setting for a new customer every day. The earned wisdom of farmers. Hard physical work, long hours and monotony—and going home and helping the kid with homework instead of kicking the dog.
We used to celebrate that shit in this country, in our culture. Seriously, watch this commercial and try to imagine seeing anything like it now.
When I was a kid we all wanted to be train engineers, firemen, cops. … Because they were fucking cool. Because our culture told us they were cool, our movies showed they were cool. Every 1970s singer-songwriter had a song about long-haul truckers.
“I am a lineman for the county, and I drive the main road, searchin’ in the sun for another overload.”
“There is a young cowboy, who lives on the range. His horse and his cattle are his only companion.”
“In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed, in the maritime sailors’ cathedral. The church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times. For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
Was that a lot of romantic bullshit? Yes—and actually, no.
I came by my personal acquaintance with such men after college. I’d taken my Kent State English degree to Chicago and found a job with a little publisher filled just the kinds of urban intellectuals I’d left Ohio to seek. On many weekends, though, I found myself in Cleveland, visiting a friend who was establishing an environmental consulting firm there. He was working with his brother, who ran an underground construction company that pulled out the huge underground oil and gas tanks. His other brother ran an industrial plumbing company that put sprinkler systems in factories. They were surrounded by heavy equipment operators, painters, pipe fitters, construction workers. (No iron workers that I remember. Iron workers are on another level.)
I’d stand in a circle of those guys at Hooples Bar in the Flats at Miller Time, the red soles of my tan bucks crunching peanut shells on the wood floor, listening to these guys tell impossible, dangerous, dirty, funny, mad, gigantic, teetering stories about their work days. Not work days of yore, long-remembered as legend. No, they were talking about shit that had happened that day.
The fuck-head new kid popped his eardrum with a cue-tip this morning and called to ask if he could get worker’s comp, can you believe that? And then without the Fuck-Head’s help, Billy managed to fix a frozen water main on East Ninth all by himself in the middle of rush-hour traffic, five-below zero with a back-hoe that was leaking hydraulic fluid. On the way back to the shop, the lowboy came loose and passed the tractor on the Shoreway. Oh, did you hear that old man Carney got shot in the forehead with a .38 last night at his bar? Yeah. It bounced off, and Carney’s supposed to be back at work tomorrow.
“We have more problems before nine o’clock,” went the mantra of a couple of these guys, “than most people have all day.”
I listened, wide-eyed, to their stories as the ultimate sign of respect. I genuinely and with awe, respected how capable they were of manipulating the real, brick and steel world to make things happen—on time and on budget. I understood their world was very different from mine—and yet every bit as complex and difficult. Once I understood that, it wasn’t hard for me to feel the same way about an ER nurse I came to know, or the Chicago school teacher I’m married to. It’s sentimental to call them “heroes” all the time. But it’s only correct to respect their work and honor their contribution.
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Well now, it appears, some trades workers are taking it upon themselves to honor their own contribution, bringing people along on their daily adventures—and along the way, inspiring other young people to follow them into these trades.
Good for them. And good for America.
Postscript: I created a Miller Time commercial, for the LinkedIn crowd. Not quite the same, is it?
Jim Nichols says
Hey David — I used to play softball in Lakewood with Norm, the owner of Hoople’s, back in the early 1990s. He was a hoot – and a PITA! 😉
David Murray says
LOL, I knew Norm; actually went down on a misbegotten Hooples golf outing in Myrtle Beach. I was known as the “Chicago Ringer.”