Last Friday, this ran in the Executive Communication Report—to which you would be crazy not to subscribe because unlike literally anything else in the world, it is both useful and free:
Gee, what are those leaders saying? And how are they sounding?
I’m conflicted on this. On the one hand, I’ve written a fair amount here about the need to celebrate the trades in this country, like we used to do:
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.”
The current cultural disregard for such work and such workers contributes to the cultural and political divide that’s ruining our society.
And yes, part of that disregard involves telling kids that the only way to be a success in life is to go to college and get a four-year degree, and that any other path is a fallback, a dead end, a GED. We’ve been telling kids that for about half a century now. And we ought to stop. And we ought to begin revering the trades and the trade schools and apprenticeships that make great trade workers.
That said:
It is pretty rich, isn’t it, for millionaire business people to get together and tell everybody how they ought to be technicians when they grow up?
First of all: I like Jim Farley—he’s the cousin of the late Chris, did you know?—and I think he’s about as regular a guy as a CEO can be. But in the end, do you really think young Farley is going to skip college and become a mechanic? Can you imagine what the grease monkeys down in the service pit will say when they discover the new guy’s dad made $25 million last year? Speaking of $25 million, that’s about how much I’ll bet Farley’s kid winds up at Cornell.
Second: The Fortune piece quotes pro-trades gasbag Mike Rowe—who got rich about 20 years ago doing a TV show called “Dirty Jobs,” where he titillated us by gigglingly performing disgusting or dangerous work for an hour, that some workers have to do all day every day. Now he tells Fortune, “Stigmas and stereotypes and myths and misperceptions have conspired to keep a whole generation of kids from giving trades an honest look.” Actually, “Dirty Jobs” probably didn’t help, either.
And really, the heads of the world’s biggest bank and a telecommunication giant, lecturing Americans about the coolness of blue-collar work? Hey: Maybe they’re trying to break it to us gently that AI is going to create a need for fewer analysts and more hard hats. That we’re going to have to replace our laptops with shovels and jackhammers, and those “writing boots” there, boy? Dust them off and lace them up.
Well, I wish they would just say that, then. And leave it to us workers to figure out how to make blue-collar work awesome again. We’re going to be on our own with that anyway.
Postscript: Did you ever see the Millertime commercial I made, for office workers? Like Budweiser’s “for all you do, this Bud’s for you,” Miller High Life commercials used to glorify the work of lobstermen, firefighters, loggers, trainmen and bush pilots by showing them unwinding after another long, hard day with their co-workers, trading stories of adventure in blood, sweat and toil. Well, if we tender-handed communication types no longer going to make commercials to honor those people … we might as well make one to honor ourselves.
