At 9:20 AM +0000 2002/03/04, Keith Hudson wrote:
We have a particular problem in England because, for century-old historical
reasons, and quite unlike countries such as America and Germany, there is a
strong prejudice against jobs where you get your hands dirty. Nevertheless,
the same deficiency in basic skills seems to be fairly widespread in most
developed countries -- and this also seems to be the case in New Zealand
from what you say.
Hi Keith,
The strong prejudice about getting your hands dirty is alive and
thriving in the colonies too! This is linked to the arrogance of 'city
slickers' towards 'country bumpkins'. I've taught in schools where
kids, who had to do chores on farms in the morning before going to
school, were laughed at because of the faint odour of cow manure.
These are kids who know how to birth and care for animals, plant and
harvest crops, fix machinery, drive tractors and operate machinery.
What do the city kids know? skate boarding, hanging out at
malls...
Schools add to this prejudice. Academic courses leading to
university are held in much greater esteem than tech courses.'Dummies'
take tech courses. Below I am copying an article that was written by
the editor of our local newspaper. He left his position at my
university as an English professor to become a newspaper
journalist.
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Mud, brawn and brain
"MUD!" FOR TWO years, 50 hours a week, I lived with that shout. My job was to answer it promptly or, better still, to work so as not to have "Mud!" shouted at all. As a laborer for a masonry contractor I was paid - handsomely, I thought - to make sure that the bricklayers kept laying bricks. So keeping them constantly supplied with mortar, or mud as it is called in the trade, was my reason for being during the working day. An empty mud board (the plywood square on which I put the mud) meant I failed. And if the bossman or foreman saw the empty board, or noticed a bricklayer waiting with an empty trowel, I caught hell.
I resented the scolding. I also like my job and took pride in it. So I learned to do what every good masonry laborer must: anticipate, think ahead, plan. To make sure the bricklayers I looked after kept laying bricks, I had to keep constant track of their mud supply. This not only meant making sure that they always had a fresh shovel of it on their mud boards. A bricklayer hates nothing worse than bad mud, or mud that he cannot smoothly spread with his trowel. So the mud had to be just right. And there were so many ways it could go wrong.
The mud could have been badly mixed to begin with. The laborer at the mud mixer could have put in wrong measures of sand, water or mortar mix (or Portland cement and quick lime, if we used another mud recipe). The resulting batch, which I either got in a wheelbarrow, or had hoisted up to me on the scaffold in a metal box could be too wet or not wet enough.
The sloppy stuff was the worst. "What is this soupy shit?" I would hear. Then I would echo this mild reproach (there were far more aggressive and vulgar variations) to the mixer man. If the mud was so wet as to be unworkable, so that it slid off the trowel. I might have to mix more cement in it to stiffen it up, all under the glare of an indignant bricklayer, whose every waiting gesture scowled "Hurry up!"
Hard mud, mixed without enough water or dried out by sun and wind, also required my attention. It didn't take me long to learn that putting a shovel of mortar on a dry board made the wood suck the moisture out of the mix. So my first job before the bricklayers even arrived was to wet down the boards. A wet board also eased the resistance of the trowel. My pail of water was also a necessity to freshen up dried-out mud, a pretty constant problem on hot summer days.
How much to put on the boards also needed steady attention. You didn't load up the boards close to coffee, lunch and quitting times, otherwise it would dry out or go to waste. Then there is the ever-present upward climb, course by course of blocks or bricks, of every masonry structure. As the wall is built up, so the mud supply must move upward. Beginning the first courses near the foundation, or on the floor of the scaffold, the mud boards had to be raised up on blocks or piles of bricks. No bricklayer likes to stoop more than he has to. Different bricklayers might insist that you raise their boards extra high. A board loaded with shovel-fulls of mud is heavy and awkward to lift and hold, sometimes needing extra help to place supporting bricks underneath. So again, you had to anticipate raising up the boards when they were nearly empty.
And mud is but one concern of the masonry laborer. He must also make sure that there are adequate supplies of blocks or bricks, carefully stacked for use. Other materials like reinforcing wire and brick ties must be ready at hand. Scaffold planks and foot planks need to be moved and adjusted as the building rises. Mixing the mud, building scaffolds, driving a forklift, and all the hundreds of other exacting tasks easily took up the day. Adding the complications of weather and season, and the constantly varying conditions of the job site introduced new variables to be factored into the equation of laboring and masonry construction.
All of this planning and calculation, this attention to detail, is lost to someone watching bricklayers on the job. Your attention would probably be attracted by the skilled tradesman's smooth troweling of the mud off the board, the slight flick of the wrist that makes it stick to the trowel, the strong wrist action that spreads the mud in an even line on the course already laid. Next you might admire the poise and balance required to lift a block or brick, butter (spread) its one end with mud, then lift and place it on the wall, the mortar joints even, the block plumb and level. The occasional adjusting tap with the butt of the trowel, a quick check with the level would be the only disturbances to this masonry ballet-weight-lifting act.
You probably wouldn't even notice the masonry laborer hovering around the tradesmen at all. But without him, without his labor and minding the supply of materials, the bricklaying act of the masonry performance could not be staged so capably. Here is yet another example of Adam Smith's division of labor working its economic efficiency. Have the bricklayer mix his own mud and look after supplying himself with it and all his other necessary materials, and his skilled production capacity is cut at least in half.
And yet he wears the respected title of tradesman, while his helpers are laborers, a generic term for an unskilled worker in the eyes of the world. How I used to resent the leveling unfairness of "laborer" when I worked construction. Masonry laboring was hard, skilled work. On the job a good laborer was as respected as a good tradesman because their skills complemented each other. Only the name laborer damned us as inferior to those ignorant of what we did.
For to labor, to work primarily with the skill invested in your body, is, as every reader of the Book of Genesis knows, a curse. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the ground," reproaches the angry Creator in the Bible, condemning the sinful pair from Eden to a lifetime of punishing work. But the intelligence lodged in the skull of every sweating laborer seeks for ways to lessen that sweat - I mean honorably, not by shirking from the task. I learned the lessons of that ingenuity all the time when I worked as a masonary laborer. I learned it often from men whom the world, arrogant of its trappings and trash of prestige and formal education, smirked at as uneducated, even illiterate.
But education, a laborer's education, while not a result of books, may be deep, learned and wise. Educating your body and mind (often during the entire course of a lifetime) to work efficiently against the resistance of weight and gravity requires powers of observing, thinking and studying worthy of any university professor. And sometimes the results of this knowledge bear fruit in seemingly little things and actions, but ones displaying careful, elegant thought about solving a problem.
A task I always hated as a laborer was to prepare the small batches of concrete needed on the job. We would mix bagfuls of cement and sand with water in the mud mixer, but the aggregate (the pea-gravel that makes the concrete) had to be mixed into the batch by hand. Mortar and gravel are mortal enemies - no bricklayer wants small stones hindering the adjustment of bricks. To prevent gravel from contaminating the mud mixer, shovel-fulls of gravel had to be mixed into the concrete after the mixture had been dumped out into a separate box.
You mixed in the gravel with a large hoe. It was back - and arm - breaking work. I hated it - until Eeb showed me his clever trick. "Hey kid, why are you busting your gut?" he asked me as I hoed in the gravel. I squinted through my sweat and was ready to brain him with the hoe. But he didn't give me a chance to even cuss him in reply. Show you something when you do the next mix," he said and walked off, his big beer belly leading him away.
He was back when I had the next load of concrete emptied into the cement box. He watched and dragged on his cigarette as I added the dozen shovels of gravel. "Hold it now," he cautioned, flicking the butt away, motioning me aside. He heaved out a bucket of water from the water drum, then threw it on the gravel laying on top of the concrete-sand mix. "Now. Take your hoe and mix it up."
I readied myself for the strain of pulling the hoe through the heavy mix but instead I hoed with less resistance than I was ready for. Then it his me. Right! The water! It had lubricated the gravel, turning each pebble into a little ball-bearing, and it now slid easily into the mix. A hard job had been made a lot easier. Brain had again helped ease brawn. Eeb smiled, another cigarette already lit and between his lips. He had an encyclopedia of such practical, laboring knowledge in his head. I felt proud to be a student at his school.
Remembering Eeb's lesson, I thought of some lines from a poem, Adam's Curse by W.B. Yeats: "it's certain there is no fine thing/ Since Adam's fall but needs much laboring." The cultivated Anglo Irish poet would certainly never have thought of mixing concrete as a "fine thing." But I think Yeats would have appreciated this little rebellion, by Eeb the professional laborer, against the angry Creator's curse against laboring humankind.
Steve Lukits
Kingston Whig Standard
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I use this article each year with my student teachers who will
become teachers of English Literature. I remind them that the majority
of students they teach will not be going to university. Arrogance is
often a mask for fear.
Take care,
Brian McAndrews
( whose father was a carpenter after leaving the farm for the
city)
