I work as a service tech in a medium sized machine shop in Ct. I've rendered my services for just shy of twenty years now. I didn't set out to be a mechanic... it's just where I landed. I was working a different blue collar job, then one day stumbled into this blue collar job. They offered me more money and better benefits. So I took it. I suspect many of us have similar career trajectories.
I've had quite a few revelations about the machine industry through the years. My shop happens to inhabit a corner of the industry that is a junction between aerospace, automotive and medical manufacturing. I spend a lot of my time talking to folks across a huge spectrum of the manufacturing ecosystem, and there are certain accepted truths - 1. The auto parts manufacturers are always maxed out and stressed out by circumstances created entirely by underbidding on contracts. 2. Aerospace is “feast or famine”, depending on what government money is getting spewed in that direction, at that time. There is probably a lot to be said about why there is such disparity between the industries.
The other revelation was just how blue collar this industry really is. You can completely disregard the fact that we are in a "blue" state. This is an industry of the men, by the men and for the men. Testosterone hangs thick in the air. Inter-employee disputes are rarely settled by reasoned consideration. Boisterous peacocking usually rules the day. The owners of the company do not intervene unless there is a real chance of blood being spilled. Not that anyone's blood really matters though... the concern really is only about the lawsuit that might follow.
Over the years there have been many incidents that have made my jaw go slack. Once I was with a small group that included the majority shop owner. We were kidding around, sharing seasonal greetings. One of us exclaimed "merry Christmas", another quipped "happy Hanukkah", and not to be outdone, I exclaimed "happy Kwanzaa". The shop owner turned to me and said "I don't know if you noticed, but we don't have any Kwanzaa’s around here". Another shining moment was when the other shop owner had convened a shop meeting to discuss the importance of voting. He went on to stress how important it was for the company to vote for somebody with business experience. While he didn't name names, it was stupidly clear that he was asking us to vote Romney. I'll never forget looking around at the rest of my fellow employees to see if anybody else was struck by the obvious impropriety of the situation. I didn't see anyone outwardly objecting. If it was happening, it was happening while examining their shoelaces.
As you might imagine incidents like this happen regularly. It has only been in the last few years (four years, completely incidentally I'm sure) that I started to grasp just how corrosive and pervasive this onslaught of misogyny, toxic masculinity, covert / overt racism has been. I push back a little sometimes, but I am a poor vessel of logic and reason apparently. My noting that the "Black Lives Matter" motto sets the bar pretty low was met by a chorus of angry middle-aged white guys all shouting "ALL LIVES MATTER!" in unison. Sigh.
But maybe, just maybe, I witnessed a glimmer of hope the other day. Rewind for a second. My boss and I go back a long time. He is a good guy. He has always been very carefully and deliberately apolitical. Within the last year or so, he privately started to express some concerns about the 45th administration. I was probably overenthusiastic in trying to engage him with more and more insights into whatever horrors the day's news had. I had thought I had put him off.... but then, one day a discussion broke out in our shared office space. One of the techs had started bad-mouthing a young guy that is a recent hire. He went on with the usual generational warfare styled rhetoric. "He's slow. He's doesn't learn. He's never going to get it. Kids these days are just coddled". I was in the middle of formulating a reasoned rebuttal that was absolutely destined for failure and derision when my boss spoke out - "Let him be. He's young. He's learning". Immediately the adjacent Ukrainian ex-pat who identifies as Russian and won't let her kid play with black kids spoke up and parroted "Yeah, leave him alone. He's trying". The tech immediately backed down. "Yeah, I guess so... maybe he'll get better with more practice...".
I was so pleasantly stunned that I just sat and listened. It was glorious. Maybe the seeds I planted had started to come to fruition. Maybe the tide can be turned. Maybe rainbows can actually propagate from unicorns' butts.
Further reflection strongly tempers these fantasies. The only reason said tech backed down was that the boss told him it wasn't nice to say those things. The only reason the Ukrainian - Russian - American racist spoke out was to pile on. The voice of authority had spoken. It's a shit deal really. Two out of four of us exhibited independent thinking. Two of us just went along. It's a horrible thought that only hierarchal structures can tamp down poisonous ideas.
But it's also a wonderful thought that individual people within hierarchal power structures can be influenced to do good.