The Economy

The Christmas plum 50 years ago was to catch a holiday job sorting packages at UPS. Mid-November through January.

Unimaginably great part-time pay, but in the pre-digital dark ages it was slow going.

 

Best worst job I ever had was working in a foundry. Fantastic pay but terrible work.

Imagine Dante's Inferno, but with broken respirators.

 

My grandfather did 35 years in a General Motors foundry. I couldn’t imagine doing that for three-plus decades. But he made $3 an hour in 1965, which he described as a fantastic wage for a guy who skipped out of high school to go fight in World War II.

 

Place I worked had a precision casting business - mostly tractor diff housings and farm implement odds and ends - in one building and a knucklehead casting business - manhole covers, anvils, etc. - in the other.

I was a 'shifter.' During a pour, I worked a few molds in front of the crucible. I'd shift the big weights we put on top of the sand molds to keep them from bursting when the molten iron went in. The work on the knucklehead side was so hot and so airless and so awful we were limited to 4-hour shifts. Anything longer and guys started to fall over. Windows wide open in a Minnesota January it was 125° in there. They've automated a lot of it now.

Your grandpa must have been made of oak.

 

The fellas who ran the furnaces and the crucibles and the dippers had expertise and tenure and were an absolute elite in the lunchroom and at the lockers.

The moldmakers were a priesthood.

 

I did grinding in a gray-iron foundry, mostly on parts for Caterpillar. The guys who picked hot parts from broken-up sand molds at the shaker had a seriously bad job.

 

Many of the postwar manhole covers and storm drains in my county were cast at a local foundry, which is still in business. It's the only industrial-scale foundry I could find in north Jersey.

Also, I recently saw a pre-war promotional film for Ford that showed engine blocks being cast. The workers weren't wearing gloves, goggles or hard hats while handling dozens of blocks per minute.

Now, there's video of me working in a chocolate factory not so long ago, clearing bite-size pieces exiting an automated molding machine. It's EXACTLY like the scene in I Love Lucy...

 

I worked in a factory where one of my duties was to cut open the asbestos bags and pour them into the mixing tank, which was about 20ft long.

No respirator, I'd get covered like a powdered sugar doughnut.

Anyway:

 

Thomas Piketty Thinks America Is Primed for Wealth Redistribution

Piketty is set to publish “A Brief History of Equality,” in which he argues that we’re on a trajectory of greater, not less, equality and lays out his prescriptions for remedying our current corrosive wealth disparities. (In short: Tax the rich.) If the line from one book to the other looks slightly askew given the state of the world, then, Piketty suggests, you’re looking from the wrong vantage point. “I am relatively optimistic,” says Piketty, who is 50, “about the fact that there is a long-run movement toward more equality, which goes beyond the little details of what happens within a specific decade.”