Working the Factory Floor

On Eric Hoffer and freedom found in dull work

Amid the tariffs and trade wars discourse, there has been much discussion about returning manufacturing to the United States. In an effort to revitalize the working middle-class, tariffs are seen by some as a way to encourage the rebuilding of our manufacturing sector that has largely gone overseas in the last half a century. Some of the memes I saw on Twitter were hilarious like AI videos coming out of China that showed fat Americans in what looked like factories in purgatory assembling phones or cars. I laughed—I even shared them with friends.

Even those that agree that reshoring manufacturing would be good for the nation in theory, most would never want to work in these factories themselves as this graphic from Financial Times seems to show:

But why do we think factory jobs are so undesirable? I think it has something to do with the fact that we see such jobs as repetitive and boring—it is dull work. In a modern age that is committed to creativity and authenticity, dull work may be worse than dangerous work. We may be more concerned with self-actualization than coal mine fires.

I suspect that deep in my own consciousness I have even been won over by this sentiment—that work must be a creative craft if it is worth anything at all. Here at The Savage Collective, we like to stress the importance of understanding the formative nature of work. In our first ever post, we lamented that fact that industrial bakers merely push buttons on a giant machine instead of touching flour or water themselves. We have lamented the lack of creativity and personal expression—that this worker takes no part in their job. Work is then a fundamental way that humans enlarge their capacities. At face value, most factory jobs look antithetical to this.

But I wonder if we have underestimated the importance of dull work. There may be deep good to be found in dull work, even for the worker.

I think back to when I worked a factory job in 2014 when I took a break from college and moved back to PA to be with my family. During that time, I worked at a factory that refurbished 20lb propane tanks (the tanks you use for your gas grill). While I have no doubt that many people would look at this work as insufferably dull—a dystopian hell, I still classify this job as one of my favorites.

I have been reading a lot on and by the author, erudite and longshoreman Eric Hoffer who I hope to write more on soon. He was a fascinating thinker from the last century who was self-taught and primarily worked laboring jobs his entire life. In one short essay from the 70's entitled Dull Work, he challenged my assumptions that creative fulfillment is of vast importance on the job site:

There seems to be a general assumption that brilliant people cannot stand routine: that they need a varied, exciting life in order to do their best. It is also assumed that dull people are particularly suited for dull work. We are told that the reason the present-day young protest so loudly against the dullness of factory jobs is that they are better educated and brighter than the young of the past.

Actually, there is no evidence that people who achieve much crave for, let alone live, eventful lives. The opposite is nearer the truth. One thinks of Amos the sheepherder, Socrates the stonemason, Omar the tentmaker. Jesus probably had his first revelations while doing humdrum carpentry work. Einstein worked out his theory of relativity while serving as a clerk in a Swiss patent office. Machiavelli wrote The Prince and the Discourses while immersed in the dull life of a small country town where the only excitement he knew was playing cards with muleteers at the inn. Immanuel Kant's daily life was an unalterable routine. The housewives of Konigsberg set their clocks when they saw him pass on his way to the university. He took the same walk each morning, rain or shine. The greatest distance Kant ever traveled was sixty miles from Konigsberg.

The outstanding characteristic of man's creativeness is the ability to transmute trivial impulses into momentous consequences. The greatness of man is in what he can do with petty grievances and joys, and with common physiological pressures and hungers.

For all intents and purposes, my job at the factory was dull work. The old, grungy tanks came in the back of the building where we would take the labels off and load them onto a conveyor belt. We did this outside in all weather over an overhang so at least we'd stay mostly dry. From there, the tanks would take a ride through a giant washer and at the other end someone would scrape any labels or stickers from them and look for defects. Tanks that were dented, pitted or needed recertified got sorted over to the "quality" department and the rest got placed on hooks that would carry them through the paint booth, drying booth and then eventually back outside where they would get filled, relabeled and stacked on pallets for delivery. While I learned many of the different jobs as part of this line and was highly flexible, I most often got placed at the station where I had to remove the tanks from the paint line and enter in the TARE weight of the tank as I set them on a different line to go outside and get filled with propane on a carousel. This was a literal, slowly spinning carousel on which each placement for the tank was a scale and propane connection to fill the tank to the appropriate weight (35lbs full, ~15lbs for an empty tank, 20lbs of propane). In one eight hour shift, I would lift 15-35lb tanks off the line 3,000 times. It was the best work out of my life. I remember first starting this job and having to run to a vending machine an hour into my shift to buy a snickers bar because I was going through so many calories, and I was starving.

One of the things I ended up liking about this job was the fact that the rules were super strict around cellphone usage. We weren't allowed to take our phones outside the break room both because of the dangers of not paying attention but also for any sort of electrical spark risk. Other than for short breaks, we were separated from our phones. While this work could be boring and a very sisyphusian endeavor, it kept me busy, physically fit and I found (in agreement with Eric Hoffer) that it freed my mind up for deep thought. Since I couldn't even periodically check my phone, I would print out Pslams or passages of poetry and use a binder clip to attach them to my station. I could take tanks off the line and in little moments read and review what I was trying to memorize. To this day I still remember much of what I memorized while working that job, including Tecumsah's life mantra which I still repeat to myself often: "So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. . ." along with some Tennyson of course: “Though much is taken, much abides. . .”

There are a few caveats I have about this job to be clear—one, I made ~$14hr at the time and I wouldn't want to make that same wage today. And two, I worked there for eight months before I went back to Chicago to finish my undergraduate degree. Had it been years upon years I might have eventually felt differently. I was working there as a temporary measure--I wasn't stuck there in the same way many of my coworkers were. That being said, there are moments that I still think back upon that season of my life and the work and truly miss it.

If we are destined, as most of us are, to live in the modern world, the simple fact is that many of these jobs will continue to exist. In addition, they would not be made better by making them more "creative." If we envision making this job better by having all the employees hand paint beautiful little murals on the side of each tank, I think we've lost some deep connection to reality. People need propane tanks for their gas grills and campers at a fair price and you do that by pumping out 3000 tanks in one shift, not by turning it into some craftsman endeavor. But just because it looks like rote, boring, repetitive work doesn't mean it has no value. For one, there is great value in supplying your neighbor with a way to power his grill. And secondly, it may foster some form of interior life and contemplation in today's age when you are separated from your phone and forced to pay attention to one thing for long periods of time. Philosopher and mystic Simone Weil said that, "Every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves. . .Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer."

Perhaps these "dull" types of jobs will not be made better by finding a cure for their dullness. Perhaps that is actually a feature and not a bug, as Hoffer again writes here:

It may be true that work on the assembly line dulls the faculties and empties the mind, the cure only being fewer hours of work at higher pay. But during fifty years as a workingman, I have found dull routine compatible with an active mind. I can still savor the joy I used to derive from the fact that while doing dull, repetitive work on the waterfront, I could talk with my partners and compose sentences in the back of my mind, all at the same time. Life seemed glorious. Chances are that had my work been of absorbing interest I could not have done any thinking and composing on the company's time or even on my own time after returning from work.

People who find dull jobs unendurable are often dull people who do not know what to do with themselves when at leisure. Children and mature people thrive on dull routine, while the adolescent, who has lost the child's capacity for concentration and is without the inner resources of the mature, needs excitement and novelty to stave off boredom.

While I have often commented on work that enlarges the skills of a human agent, I think it is wrong to think that work is not good unless it involves some intense form of craftsmanship. In many ways, it is dull work that frees up our mind in other ways. While we want to promote better conditions for the American working class and along with Eric Hoffer would push for better pay and shorter hours as much as possible, the reality of our modern society is that many jobs necessary to our collective lives are not creative jobs. Many jobs really are dull and routine, doing the same things over and over again. Perhaps the problem lies less in the fact that these jobs exist and more in the fact that we have become a culture allergic to routine and boredom; we no longer have interior lives to foster. While working the factory might not aid in the creative fulfillment of a worker through that work itself, perhaps they can gain something even more rare in our modern crisis: the ability to pay attention and turn boredom into contemplation.