“A strain of boredom that’s uniquely crushing”

One thing that is not mentioned enough about the MANLY MAN FACTORY JOBS that the nation’s current president believes bringing back a modest number of is worth a great deal of net economic pain is that 1)the non-union ones Republicans want pay poorly, and 2)they’re mostly incredibly terrible:

Do Americans actually want those jobs back? Some think they do, but that’s only because most of them don’t know any better. Unfortunately, I do; I worked in a factory once. To this day, it remains one of the worst experiences I’ve ever endured. Believe me: If more people knew what it’s like to work these jobs, they wouldn’t be so eager to return to them.

I only took the job, at an Iowa cookie factory in the late ’90s, at my parents’ insistence. My father had grown up on a farm and my mother had worked in a factory in Korea in her teens, occasionally hiding candy in her beehive hairdo to give her siblings at home; they both subscribed to a parenting philosophy that believed the best way to prepare a child—or a shiftless 18-year-old on summer break, fresh from his first year of college—for the world was to forcibly expose them to the very worst parts of it, so they’d form a firm understanding of just how bad things could get.

I got my job through a temp agency, which is how many factories get around union hiring rules: The temp agencies supply disposable temporary workers, and in return take a cut of their earnings. It doesn’t save the factory much money, but saving money isn’t the point; the point is to dilute the power of the union. I made a little more than minimum wage—a whopping $8 per hour—but when I took my first-day tour, the manager was careful to point out that I also got as many free cookies as I could eat. My first two or three days, I must have eaten my weight in cookies, but by the end of the week you couldn’t have made me eat another one at gunpoint.

[…]

The work was simple: The three of us stood at a conveyor belt, onto which emerged an endless queue of clear plastic trays. Each plastic tray was divided into four slots, and each slot was supposed to hold four oatmeal cookies, for a total of 16 in each package. The trays were supposed to emerge onto the belt already filled with cookies, but the loader machine was unreliable. Our job was to stand at the line, head down, monitoring the trays as they passed; when you spotted one that was short, you took cookies—rock-hard, days- or even weeks-old things, with the consistency of acoustic ceiling tiles—from bins at your waist and quickly brought it up to full capacity.

The incomplete trays usually held 14 or 15 cookies, so you only had to drop in a couple of extras, but on days when the loader was temperamental, trays might roll past with only two or three cookies total, and you’d have to quickly, without taking your eyes from the rapidly advancing tray, find a dozen acceptably whole cookies in the reserve bin—not always easy, as many of them had been broken into pieces by our fumbling or when they’d been dumped in—and get them lined up in your hands and loaded onto the tray. If you weren’t fast enough, and a too-light tray reached the scale at the end of the conveyor belt, an automatic shutoff was triggered, a loud bell sounded, and your fellow loaders stared at you like you were a fool while you hurriedly brought the offending tray up to weight. When you were finished, Simone the forewoman would walk over and hit the restart switch. The filled trays were then conveyed into a packager and emerged on the other side sealed in still-warm plastic. We took turns working an hour at a time at this station, stacking the newly sealed packages in a box and then moving the full boxes onto a pallet to be forklifted away by Brad as soon as he got back from the bathroom.

I’d expected that working in the factory would be boring, and it was. Like most people, I thought of boredom as anodyne, not really an unpleasant sensation itself so much as the absence of sensation. But what I discovered is that in a factory you experience a strain of boredom that’s uniquely crushing. If you’re sitting in line at the DMV without your phone, you might be bored, but your mind is unconstrained; you can daydream, examine the people around you, walk out and come back another day. Even at the dreariest office job, you can click away from the spreadsheet, go for a coffee or a cigarette, or lean over and ask your cubicle neighbor if they saw the game last night. On the factory line you are bored, but your mind is not your own; your consciousness is pinioned to the line and its ceaseless movement. You have no control over the pace of your work or the direction of your attention; you are fully controlled by the machine. If your mind drifted or broke free for even an instant, you soon heard the heavy ka-chunk of the line auto-stopping, and the bell (which, in retrospect, had no purpose except humiliation), and off you scampered with a handful of cookies. In a different sort of factory, you might be pulled back from your momentary reverie by having your finger or arm severed.

The kind of “factory jobs” that Trump’s tariffs are theoretically (although not necessarily in practice) supposed to bring back are mostly as bad or worse on the mind and body as a low-level job in an Amazon distribution center, for worse pay and benefits. But of course the idea for the elite advocates an MAGA is not that they themselves or their children do these jobs, but purely hypothetical residents of cities they wouldn’t visit on a bet, And it’s also about a wish that a bunch of dying cities can be made prosperous again, but even if the tariffs could bring a lot of manufacturing online it’s still going to mostly be located in economically growing areas, not the most troubled areas of the Rust Belt or Appalachia, Nostalgia is just a really bad basis for policy.