We leave school and most of us eventually find ourselves work. No matter what that work is, how seemingly humble or high-faluting, it’s just work. It’s what we do. How we spend at least 40 hours of our week.
Some spend a lifetime doing one job, others roam around the job market, continually upskilling or retraining.
We sometimes lose our jobs through no fault of our own.
Most workers find this humiliating and somewhat distressing. Our work is us, our job defined us. We then have to either find a similar role elsewhere or head in a different vocational direction, sometimes later in life when we would prefer to be consolidating ourselves towards retirement.
Most of us, at times, groan about work, wishing we were elsewhere. But when that work disappears unexpectedly we can become lost.
My father taught me my work ethic. He worked most of his adult life in factories, either on the floor or as a bookkeeper in the office. He was gifted with numbers but had a very limited education. Not his fault.
He left school during the depression after Form 2, or year 8. His family needed him to be working so it was off to farm work - just like tens of thousands of children his age.
Dad worked 10- or 12-hour days, hard work, factory work, boring, heavy, well below his intellectual ability but he needed money.
He had eight kids to support and mums never worked much in those days.
He did get tired and frustrated but that was his lot. As he aged he managed to get office positions but still worked very long hours in factories.
We grew up as children seeing this, knowing Dad would be gone in the early hours and home late in the evening, knowing he would be working every Saturday morning of his working life on overtime to earn the money to support us.
One full day off a week.
So seeing that and knowing there was an expectation that work was going to be my life too, I just accepted it. My lot.
I could not wait to get a factory job in the school holidays.
When I turned 15, Dad presented me with a pair of leather safety shoes, terrible-looking things, clumpy, brown, and heavy, not for dancing in.
Every school holiday break from 15 on I worked as an oven-hand and fork-lift driver at Winstone’s Gracefield factory where Gibraltar Board, or gib board as it’s widely known, was made for the housing industry.
I’d leave from home with Dad in the factory van; a small Bedford crammed with guys, most smoking, at 6.15am Monday to Saturday for the trip to work after a working man’s breakfast at home. A fry-up of course.
I’d get the same van home at 4.30pm, 10-hour days. I loved it. The work was hard and, at times, boring but I worked with interesting characters.
Many men like Dad, working to support a family. Locked into this work through a lack of secondary education. Men not well from war struggling to still maintain the pride of work. Too stubborn to give up.
In time, it became clear to me that for me factory work was not a life plan. But that work gave me so many skills for use in later life.
Truck-driving, fork-lift driving, people skills: dealing with truck drivers all day long who delighted in giving schoolboys driving forklifts heaps when loading their trucks.
Too big and tough to fight so you learn to take it.
Character-forming.
Learning to know grown men and how they think. Learning tolerance. Learning good stuff from those men too.
Having pride in being a working man, even though still a kid.
After a lifetime of work I really feel for those who missed getting a work ethic, for whatever reason.
