Bringing Back the Jobs

When I was seventeen I took a job at the local sawmill. I was on the picket crew, our job being to turn leftovers from the lumber side into usable pickets for survey stakes and snowfences. It was neither pretty nor elegant, and it was clearly noisy and dangerous. The saw band was exposed and inches away, the only safety assurance was in being surefooted and wary.

There were many a tale of lost fingers, hands, and worse. The great country singer, Johnny Cash, lost a brother who fell directly into an unprotected saw blade. That was life back in the day.

Over the years I took many a manual job working my way through university and law school. Even where safety rules applied, they were mostly only observed when inspectors showed up. It’s a wonder I can hear today (and Karen will tell you she sometimes has her doubts.)

One of my uncles worked on the line in a tire factory, making an honest living and raising a large family. But he died coughing his lungs up. Another uncle was a welder for the city gas company, spending most of his days down in unventilated trenches full of acetylene fumes. He also died hard. Another lost part of his hand in a press in the glass works. And that’s just my family.

The reason many manufacturing jobs got offshored is not just that workers in developing countries will work for less, much less, but they will also gladly accept jobs which make my sawmill experience look positively enviable. When we read about textile factories going up in flames, killing three hundred workers, those are not exceptions. That’s what life is like in the Third World so we can buy fashionwear for just a few dollars.

And we want to bring all this back to North America? Shake your heads, people. Roll back safety and environmental standards to make us “more efficient”? Guess in whose pocket those politicians are.

But not all nasty jobs are offshored. We can’t, for example, send our orchards, tomato fields, and nursing homes to Bangladesh or Guatemala, so we bring Bangladeshis and Guatemalans in to pick our apples, bring in our tomatoes, and wipe our seniors’ bums. Because “our people” won’t take these jobs. I wouldn’t, would you? My sawmill days are long past.

The veneer plant in Napadogan where my friend worked to pay for his schooling is long gone, its roof collapsed, vines and trees growing inside and out. The once prosperous village has perhaps three habitable houses left, speaking loosely. Are we going to rebuild it all, just to “bring back the jobs”? Let’s be honest – anyone who might think of recreating Napadogan’s veneer industry will fill the new plant with robots. The few jobs which would be created would be managerial and maintenance.

Every argument that can be made to “bring back the jobs” can also be made to ban motor vehicles so as to “bring back the blacksmiths and harness shops”. Would we actually be wealthier and happier if professional women were sent back to creating apple pies from scratch on wood stoves? Seriously, who is dreaming up these false nostalgias?

And that’s the important giveaway. The “old days” were actually pretty amazing if you owned the mill, lived in a fine house on the hill, and had servants. But not so much for the rest of us.

Next time you hear some politician railing on about “bringing back the jobs”, ask him probing questions about which jobs, what conditions, who pays for all this, and by the way, who’s bankrolling him?