Themes from blue collar work

I am getting my first taste of the phenomenology of blue collar work. If there's one kind of labor that is performed it's the sometimes hard, and often times tightly regulated and time-coded work of the blue collar labor. I am a union iron worker.

Let me trace out a few themes:

The body in pain. This characterizes not only the constant struggle against the iron, which produces joint pain and muscle pain, but it registers the labor. Tools enter into this context to either mitigate the pain, but ultimately the trade's outlines are traced in the body's pain. Twisting rods, welding, connecting, and the like all require some constellation of body muscles to perform their functions, and they coalesce into trade knowledge, which has been bled from the iron workers union agreements with other trades and employers for decades.

Another body in pain references another interesting component of labor. The injured body is a body of legal evidence, which leverages legal judgments in the favor of the injured. These large financial settlements indicate that American human life is still at a premium, and employers do whatever they can to avoid them. The numerous recent safety protocols promoted by employers not only try to mitigate the number of injuries but they also regulate the actions of the workers who abide by them. They also are elaborate CYA policies that reduce the effectiveness and ultimate productivity measures of workers for the sake of reducing financial liability for the remaining workplace hazards. I also suspect that these are an in-road into the trades themselves. The more paper work that one must do in order to complete a job reveals the pace and function of each task done, such that every risky move as accounted for.

I am also considering a larger issue about who controls the meaning of work. I sense and hear a lot of pride in the work union iron workers do. "Ratty" operations, as they're called, tend to sacrifice pride and quality for quick work.