19. Working For A Living

Work, Men, Muscle, Weather: A Memoir of Building Houses

Driving home at the end of the last day of building a house, I was uncomfortably aware that I was on my own again for the foreseeable future. There was never money in the bank to tide things over. The bank was my wife’s job. Insuring a positive balance was mine. I call myself a house carpenter, and I was a house carpenter as much as anyone could be, but house projects were not stacked end to end into a rosy future. I would have promises of employment—I would hear that such and such a project might, indeed, start sometime soon, but clarity about the date was never forthcoming till the loan was secured and the sky sunny. It was shocking to realize that in the beginning I had not understood that to be a house carpenter, I needed a backup plan. My ambition, as always, was to be permanently employed forever and ever. But this earnest hope was for something that would never be, and could never be. It was the late seventies, early eighties and the word “entrepreneur” was just coming into popular usage. At the time, I had the feeling that the word was part euphemism to help justify the increasing insecurity of the American worker. I could not conceive of how the word had anything to do with myself. Nevertheless, reality quickly forced itself on me. Rapidly, the pattern of downtime between house projects became recognizable as a fact of life I had to do something about.

Sometime around the six-month mark of my two years in the advertising industry, I knew in my gut that I would never want what I was supposed to want badly enough to climb their ladder to get it. The motivating desire, somehow, had atrophied in me, if it had ever been sufficiently developed, and that insufficiency didn't bode well for my future. I could accept, in the abstract, the necessity of advertising in the world of business, but I also knew, I could not deny, that what we were doing was repugnant to me. I wondered how I could have ever thought otherwise—I guess I had just hoped for it, futilely. Since then, on the job site, I have known men who, picking up a shovel with the intention of putting it to use, could be seen to almost shudder with disgust. And I would wonder how a man like that found his way onto a construction site. Usually he was just a kid on summer break from UC Berkeley, but I knew, for a fact, that he would have had no problem climbing the ladder that I had balked at. I concluded that the world's assaults on the estate of our personhood, however similar they might seem on the surface, are of more than one kind.

Studs Terkel’s book of interviews with Americans about their jobs,“Working” was published in 1974. At that time it was probably the definitive survey of how Americans felt about what they did all day. In one of Terkel’s interviews, Nora Watson, a magazine writer, conveniently summarizes the thesis of his book: “I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit.” Reading those words now, with the departure of all the assembly line jobs an accomplished fact, I wonder how Watson and Terkel might feel about the prospect for the human spirit? The millions of quasi-jobs? The trillions of digital pages uselessly moving from desk to desk? It makes me want to ask: Is the state of the job market to be represented quantitatively only, as in government reports, or is there, instead, something else that's been left undescribed for a half a century, some more qualitative kind of representation of the transition we've undergone? At one point in his introduction, Terkel ponders what a lousy lawyer he might have made—and I wonder if it ever crossed his mind that, possibly, the converse of his thesis was also true: that, sometimes, our spirits are just too small for our jobs.

In the beginning I could hardly understand where the side jobs came from, but not long after I began pounding the pavement, it seemed, the calls came in. Sometimes from a contractor who wanted to be relieved of a smaller job. Sometimes from family, family friends, and friends of friends. My alternate life, my backup plan, as a self-employed carpenter happened because it had to happen. I picked up a contractors license but that was a mistake. For me. Bidding accurately was a full time job for me, and the prospect of losing more than I could afford to lose was the shadow behind every bid. So I let the license lapse. I never advertised. Everything was word of mouth. It was far safer for me to work hourly for customers who trusted me, and fortunately, many were happy to get the first-rate work without a markup. So I made my wages, as did the men who worked with me. And as for the materials we used, they simply cost what they cost. In later years, I built pretty large projects using this template, each man on the crew being paid directly by the client, and when a house project came along, I was free. The money I made on the side went into my account as cash, and reduced my taxes on the books. As a result of my fabulous success, I drove a ten-year-old truck, rented a small cottage, supported a wife and kids, and took a one-week vacation.

But working side jobs didn’t have the comfortable anonymity of working on a spec house. You had a customer you had to talk to. You were in his house and in his yard. But the fact that I was taking time off from building houses to do a smaller project helped contextualize the relationship. Sometimes the projects were interesting, usually not. Never did I experience the ennui that prevented my engagement with the particulars of each task. I’m not even sure why—but I find this fact interesting, I worked for a number of architects and designers on their own homes and offices, one memorable project was the restoration of a Maybeck. And there was always something refreshing about converting a conversation and a few casual sketches into a reality. An oak library ladder. A spiral staircase. Postmodern columns made of pvc pipe. A conference room table of bamboo and stainless steel. The architects enjoyed the informality of the process, and so did I. It was reminiscent of an older time when there was less of a distinction between architect and builder. They trusted me to think carefully and raise the right questions. I had a decent eye, and homeowners often leaned on me for design ideas as well. Very often a single project would lead to a second project, and then a third, and a fourth. Some customers, I began to realize, the unmarried especially, just liked having me around when they got home from work. I could spend months on an endless list of little things, and this paid the bills as well as anything else.

In the all-male world of house construction, as late as the eighties and early nineties, employees had expectations of employers that were non-negotiable as well as responsible for the unique ethos of a construction site. The work day began at 8am and ended at 4:30pm. Lunch was a half hour. A fifteen minute break mid-morning. Everyone was compensated for an eight-hour day. With the exception of Christmas, holidays were never paid, and we worked most holidays including labor day. Builders had zero expectation that employees would work late, unless preparing for an inspection or a concrete pour. Tools were picked up and put away on company time. Journeymen invested in a minimum of ten thousand dollars of hand and power tools. But digging tools, jackhammers, chainsaws, and steel cutter/benders were on the builder’s dime, as well as the heavy duty cords we used back then. The lowliest laborer jealously guarded his time off, and could not be faulted for doing so. No one worked weekends, ever. A contractor who floated the possibility was met with blank stares from the crew.

But, anyone could be fired for any reason at any time. The employer who took seriously a workman’s need to “make his wages” received the highest praise. “He keeps us going” was the singular expression of a happy crew. Being unemployed a day here and there during a year was common, but the best builders made every effort to keep a crew working, and preserve it as a unit, even in conditions that were less than optimal. The worst builders thought nothing of shutting down a job to avoid some small inefficiency—for which they were rewarded with loyalty less than ideal. Some employers paid employees as if they were independent contractors, without making the usual employer’s contribution to social security, and this led to significantly larger tax obligations for men living paycheck to paycheck. We solved the problem by under-reporting our side jobs. Cash was king. All these permutations combined to make the usual employer/employee relationship more open-ended. But workers who were merely competent and reliable expected and received more than ordinary consideration and respect.

Around the time of the dot-com boom, the relationship between employers and employees began to change. Startups employed workers who put in eighty hour weeks and forfeited salaries for future profits. New employees sometimes served internships by working for free. Around this time, too, contractors and builders became more bold about stretching traditional agreements, especially in trying to get employees to work weekends, often with success. But the unavoidable physicality of construction work, and its particular kind of suffering, was a counterforce, a moral force that influenced relations as well. But, in truth, the biggest difference between working in an office, as had been my lot in advertising, and working with my body on the jobsite was the experience of an unexpected freedom of mind. In a way, everything I’ve ever written about construction work is a response to my startled discovery of this fact. While my arms thrust the posthole digger into the ground to make a hole for a fence post—in this example of unremitting labor—my mind was quite free to wander where it would, all day long, everyday, without direction or supervision. No one could own or rent my thoughts. Even if I dared to speak, no one felt entitled to object except as one man does to another. The servitude of my body had limits not enjoyed by the ordinary office worker. Would everyone delight in that freedom as I had? Probably not. Certainly not the Cal student who shuddered at the prospect of digging a ditch. But, it seems to me, the qualitative change in the nature of work from the seventies to the present, from a manufacturing to a service economy, has concealed consequences, and kinds of oppression, that have rarely or never been addressed.

(Working Man is 100% AI-free and free to all subscribers. Posts every other Tuesday.)