Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do Read Online Free PDF Page B

time and I was single. The foreman came over and he grabbed my shoulder, kind of gave me a shove. I punched him and knocked him off the dock. I said, “Leave me alone. I’m doing my work, just stay away from me, just don’t give me the with-the-hands business.”
    Hell, if you whip a damn mule he might kick you. Stay out of my way, that’s all. Working is bad enough, don’t bug me. I would rather work my ass off for eight hours a day with nobody watching me than five minutes with a guy watching me. Who you gonna sock? You can’t sock General Motors, you can’t sock anybody in Washington, you can’t sock a system.
    A mule, an old mule, that’s the way I feel. Oh yeah. See. (Shows black and blue marks on arms and legs, burns.) You know what I heard from more than one guy at work? “If my kid wants to work in a factory, I am going to kick the hell out of him.” I want my kid to be an effete snob. Yeah, mm-hmm. (Laughs.) I want him to be able to quote Walt Whitman, to be proud of it.
    If you can’t improve yourself, you improve your posterity. Otherwise life isn’t worth nothing. You might as well go back to the cave and stay there. I’m sure the first caveman who went over the hill to see what was on the other side—I don’t think he went there wholly out of curiosity. He went there because he wanted to get his son out of the cave Just the same way I want to send my kid to college.
    I work so damn hard and want to come home and sit down and lay around. But I gotta get it out. I want to be able to turn around to somebody and say, “Hey, fuck you.” You know? (Laughs.) The guy sitting next to me on the bus too. ’Cause all day I wanted to tell my foreman to go fuck himself, but I can’t.
    So I find a guy in a tavern. To tell him that. And he tells me too. I’ve been in brawls. He’s punching me and I’m punching him, because we actually want to punch somebody else. The most that’ll happen is the bartender will bar us from the tavern. But at work, you lose your job.
    This one foreman I’ve got, he’s a kid. He’s a college graduate. He thinks he’s better than everybody else. He was chewing me out and I was saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He said, “What do you mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, sir.” I told him, “Who the hell are you, Hitler? What is this “ Yes, sir ” bullshit? I came here to work, I didn’t come here to crawl. There’s a fuckin’ difference.” One word led to another and I lost.
    I got broke down to a lower grade and lost twenty-five cents an hour, which is a hell of a lot. It amounts to about ten dollars a week. He came over—after breaking me down. The guy comes over and smiles at me. I blew up. He didn’t know it, but he was about two seconds and two feet away from a hospital. I said, “Stay the fuck away from me.” He was just about to say something and was pointing his finger. I just reached my hand up and just grabbed his finger and I just put it back in his pocket. He walked away. I grabbed his finger because I’m married. If I’d a been single, I’d a grabbed his head. That’s the difference.
    You’re doing this manual labor and you know that technology can do it. (Laughs.) Let’s face it, a machine can do the work of a man; otherwise they wouldn’t have space probes. Why can we send a rocket ship that’s unmanned and yet send a man in a steel mill to do a mule’s work?
    Automation? Depends how it’s applied. It frightens me if it puts me out on the street. It doesn’t frighten me if it shortens my work week. You read that little thing: what are you going to do when this computer replaces you? Blow up computers. (Laughs.) Really. Blow up computers. I’ll be goddamned if a computer is gonna eat before I do! I want milk for my kids and beer for me. Machines can either liberate man or enslave ’im, because they’re pretty neutral. It’s man who has the bias to put the thing one place or another.
    If I had a twenty-hour workweek, I’d get to know my kids