Dad worked in a factory all his life, a union shop, to make money to raise a family. He was among the most clever people I've ever known, and could have done many things with his life. Still, he was happy making a living wage and putting a roof over our heads, food on the table.
He knew that his job would go away some day. I don't know when he realized it, I was just a kid and not concerned with matters of employment, but he knew the skills he brought to work were nothing special. He understood that the world was moving on, understood it well before most people. He pushed us as kids, afraid that we'd end up in his job or something like it.
His job lasted until I was, as the youngest, old enough to provide for myself. When the factory closed, his employer was one of the few that openly acknowledged they were packing up and leaving Canada because of the US-Canada free trade agreement. Dad had always just missed being in the layoff group at slow times, almost always by a year or so of seniority, but he couldn't escape this one.
He pushed us to go to college. I fought him for a while, always the one to push against the pressure of authority, but eventually I did what he always wanted me to do. He knew that factory jobs were a trap. It didn't matter if you worked for some rusted-out old hole always on the brink of bankruptcy, or the shiny new GM plant with its state-of-the-art production capabilities.
Factory jobs were a trap. They trapped you with money you couldn't make somewhere else, and you could make it right away. You didn't need to be burdened by student loan debt or spend four years making nothing. You walked into a job and bam, instant $20+/hour. What they didn't tell you was you'd spend twenty years doing things that no other employers would ever need, then be cast aside like a dirty Kleenex. That you would, just as you were starting to get comfortable, end up working the day shift at Arby's.
Do any of these damn fools think they were ever anything but another piece of equipment on the line? Do none of them realize that the world is moving on? Do they honestly believe that they can, with no appreciable skills to offer, continue pretending to be important? Are they just now, thirteen years after his death, seventeen years after his factory closed, learning the lesson he spent his life teaching me and my siblings?
Dad would be ashamed. Not because unions got fat, not because they got lazy, because they got so damn stupid.
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