“Labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.” Adam Smith
We paused recently at one of our favorite stops – the boat landing at Weaver Cove off Burma Road on the west side of the island overlooking Narragansett Bay. Sunset is our favorite time there, but we often make our way over the rocks at other times and walk down the beach at low tide towards the Navy base and Coast Guard station. During the warm months, there is a lot of activity at the boat launch out on the bay. Fishing boats, sailing craft, barges and tugs headed up to Providence, freighters, luxury yachts. Some single mast sailing boats are moored just offshore from April until October. In the summer, families journey down from Fall River and New Bedford, setting up tents, chairs, and grill for a day of picnicking, swimming, playing with their kids, digging quahogs, and napping. A United Nations of languages and laughing.
By this time of year, the moored boats are back in storage, and only working craft come through the channel. When we stopped last week, there was a large yellow and red concrete truck waiting with its large, angled drum churning to keep its load from hardening. I thought the driver was on a break or waiting for a call from a local foundation being poured telling him that they were ready for him. Fifteen minutes later, a strange looking boat, which looked from a distance like it had an overly tall, awkward cabin at the stern, approached steadily from behind Dyer Island coming from Prudence Island directly west of Dyer.
As it got closer, it was a boat of a type I had never seen at the boat launch before with the odd appearance of a WWII landing craft at the bow. Another big truck perched on it – an exact match of the parked one near us. The driver of the waiting truck was affable with a full head of gray hair and a well-trimmed beard. I asked him if he was headed back to Prudence to continue a large foundation pour. Never taking his eyes off the boat, he told me that was precisely what they were up to. As soon as the truck ferry from Prudence got close to the Weaver Cove launch, our driver lined up to reload the boat. The switch was made quickly as soon as the odd looking boat pulled into the boat launch ramp, its inclined bow opening even as it approached.
The driver positioned himself directly in front of the ramp with enough room for his colleague in the other empty truck to disembark. Within seconds of the other truck clearing the ramp, he adeptly backed into the tight fit on the waiting boat without the appearance of one tiny course correction. The bow smoothly retracted back into position even as its pilot immediately started backing out, and the boat turned back to Prudence to continue the foundation pouring. The squat ferry sat noticeably deeper in the water with the fully loaded replacement. The whole switch and turn around took less than five minutes like a well-practiced dance.
“All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
As the ferry and concrete truck receded from our view around Dyer Island, Rita and I discussed how many jobs requiring years of experience and skill go unheralded: the pilot of the truck ferry, concrete truck drivers, the crew back at the building site who set the forms, tie rods, and rebar, the foundation pouring crew directing the cement into the forms so that there were no voids or weaknesses as it set, the site work heavy equipment operators backfilling around the new foundation once the forms were stripped.
Prior to the forms showing up others had built the roads to get there, cut the trees, cleared the lot, dug in the septic system, drilled the well, and excavated the foundation hole after others had tested the soil, surveyed the property lines, and pounded in the offset stakes located by a transit to site the house and grade the lot. The coordinated, complex choreography continues until the house is ready for mail in the mailbox and kid’s bikes in the driveway: framing carpenters, window and door installers, siding and roofing specialists, insulation crew, electricians, heating and ventilation specialists, plumbers, sheetrock board hangers, plasterers, interior finish carpenters, kitchen cabinet and countertop fabricators, flooring team, painters, landscapers, and more. Offsite manufacturers fabricate hundreds of components, milled lumber, appliances, and all the building materials necessary to construct the home. Hundreds of skilled laborers contribute to a finished home.
Much of it is hard physical work, some of it dangerous. Years of experience and apprenticeship are necessary to gain proficiency in each trade, including our new acquaintance who made backing a fully loaded concrete truck weighing over thirty tons on to the narrow ramp of a small ferry look routine. It’s not.
Each day they sweat or are cold or wet or sore with fresh small injuries to their hands – limb and brain weary at day’s end from steady effort and paying constant close attention to their movements.
Those who do these things daily are practiced and confident in their hard earned expertise. They are intelligent, committed to doing a good job, and proud of their proficiency. Some are scornful of those who don’t have such skills. Watching them perform is always a vicarious pleasure; I always learn something new. Some little trick, or shortcut, some clever and quicker way to do what they do and produce better work. Some of their skillfulness I learned in my long working career, albeit never as adroitly as someone who repeated their tasks a hundred times a month for decades.
There are thousands of different jobs from the multitude of various skills it takes to grow and harvest our food, and those who keep us safe in our beds, and those who manage our commerce, and the many who quietly bang away writing the code that is now so necessary to our communications and entertainment. We surely are not even aware of many of the more esoteric jobs that exist, yet each one is supported by and utilized within our complex civilization.
“Work is not a curse, it is the prerogative of intelligence, the only means to manhood, and the measure of civilization. Savages do not work. The growth of a sentiment that despises work is an appeal from civilization to barbarism.” Calvin Coolidge
Just a few moments ago in geological time, we were all subsistence scratch the earth farmers or hunter gatherers. We all shared the same skills and worked together, or we died. Formal government, increased specialization, and a division of labor were developed and slowly emerged into the complexity we accept as normal. Human beings built cities and civilizations. Without the myriad skills of laborers, neither would there be politicians, university professors, poets, musicians or artists who can buy their daily needs and live in the shelters created by the workers. No workers, no civilization.
I have been very fortunate in knowing so many of them. Throughout sixty years of earning a living, I worked variously for a few months or for years as a framing carpenter, a fence builder, a tree climber, a roofing laborer humping bundles of shingles up ladders, a landscaper planting and grooming, a land surveyor, a truck driver, a driveway asphalt laborer, a form setter and fabricator of septic tanks and concrete pipe sections, a bucket truck operator, and a newspaper reporter, an assembler of doors and windows in a small carpentry shop, a warehouse shipper and receiver, a purchasing agent and inside sales coordinator, a road salesperson of building materials on hundreds of job sites. These jobs were learned at least well enough to keep food on the table before I spent most of my career managing people and running lumberyards and light manufacturing facilities.
No job was a waste of time; all prepared me for others; all taught me something necessary to all the rest.
Each job and especially learning what was entailed to accomplish their work inculcated in me deep respect for those who do the work, build the houses, and drive the trucks that supply us every day with our needs.
So many jobs we will never learn even exist. They may contribute to our lives without our noticing. We may take them for granted, but I hope I never do.
“Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, some done,
Has earned a night’s repose.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Quo Vadis Blog 