a David among Goliaths

To assume the mantle of the blue collar laborer you make bodily sacrifices. And paramount of all you must keep your mouth shut about the pain and discomfort you may feel from your labor. To reveal this is to be branded 'cunty.'

'Cunty.' It's a rather funny word. It reflects the heavily masculine coding that undergirds the culture of blue collar work where I practice it. At the core of this symbolic world is a body at work, and its relative place among other bodies engaged in the same or similar practice. The eyes are averted from the body per se, but the body is on display because it's the body's fruits, its labors, that are a means of judging the person.

The nature of the labor that I do is a grab bag of heavy lifting, holding oneself in stress positions, walking along precarious perches high in the air, and exposing oneself to general environmental dangers requisite to the type of work done and the tools used: fire, heat, vapors, combustible materials, electric shock. Granted, the majority of the work I perform isn't done under a stopwatch nor does it entail much heavy, repetitive lifting. Sometimes it does. In fact, just about once a day I may be required to lift something that is heavy. And with zeal I jump to it or am forced by the seniority of others to perform it anyway. This is where I am on display and pitifully so.

Into the cauldron of blue collar work I place my weakened and only mildly calloused body. I gingerly walk about high spaces. I grunt and strain under normal loads. I am the first to drop a collaborative carry. In all these instances there I perform my inadequacy, and there my colleagues register their vocal judgment of my abilities to do my job. I simply am not as big, nor as trained in the performance of these duties, duties that most of my colleagues grew into through circumstances stemming from their social settings.

Not me. I was sent to a wall of encyclopedias 30 years ago, and with some zeal I began to read. I loved those damn things. Strangely enough, the ideas and information contained within has, by many accounts, become outdated. And the medium itself has been supplanted by search. But I digress.

I am a small person among big people. Some of my colleagues enjoy my idiosyncrasies. Others set me up to fail for their own personal enjoyment. But on the whole, my body is on display. And through my work it is forced to engage in a ritual performance of labor. In that dramatic space I find myself straining both through age and a long tenure of mental work, and in doing so engage in producing the struggle. I suit up with all my tools and stumble over half of them, some of which I've hardly if at all used. I am learning a lot at my job about my job, yet at the same time this is a space of relative lax enjoyment for the majority of my colleagues. The magic word is "T and M," time and materials. Jobs bid by time and materials are not nearly as strenuous or time sensitive as those bid by the weight of the steel being put in place. The more notorious of the field's jobs are those requiring a multitude of reinforcing bars of varying weights and lengths to be tied into mats in place.

What does this brief discussion of my job and blue collar work tell me about the profession I am in, labor in general, or about me? I suspect is says a lot but not a lot worth discussing per se. The body says it all, and the basic tools of judgment employed by my trade 'brothers' more succinctly address the issue while simultaneously enacting a barrier for my 'graduation' into either proficiency with the tools and the trade or to the general conditions of my work. In a sense, they help to perform my inadequacy as my struggling body could have pointed to something else. Perhaps I am merely engaging the body in underused ways and my struggles reflect the learning curve required to acquire proficiency.

But so long as I am the short guy with all the education under his belt I will continue to labor under the stereotypes that both bring for the men that populate my current trade. They are ironworkers. I am not, at least not yet.