Extreme Conditions

August 27th, 2024

Our youngest son, Stefan, went to work before the sun was up. He’s an Ironworker and he has been busy at a jobsite where they are putting up a big box warehouse. He is doing connecting and welding at the site. He was muttering to himself when he packed his lunch. He told me,

“I don’t think I am going to make it through the day.”

“Oh?”

He said, “It’s already 87 degrees outside!”

Then he reconsidered and said, “Well, it was 87 when I came home last night from teaching the apprentices. The heat index is supposed to hit 105 today.”

He went on, “I can’t wait to hear some office worker to complain about how hot it is.”

He smiled ruefully and said, “Fuck you, Bitch”, to the imaginary cubicle geek.

Stefan’s job is brutal in the heat. He has to wear a long sleeve shirt, thick gloves, and welding helmet much of the time. He comes home after his shift utterly exhausted and more than a little bit irritable.

Taking it to another level, my other son, Hans, pumps concrete down in Texas. His work is physically demanding, and he is in the heat for hours on end. He fills his cooler with water, Pedialyte, and pickle juice. That still is never enough. He’s had heat exhaustion on the job more than once. His body can only tolerate so much. Many employers don’t seem very concerned about that sort of thing.

When I was working, I was a dock supervisor at a trucking company. I spent most of my time outside, Granted, the dock had a roof, but all the doors were open 24/7 while we were transferring freight from one trailer to another. Whatever the weather was outside was the weather we experienced on the dock.

I didn’t have too much trouble with heat on my shift. I worked nights for many years. I had issues at the other end of the temperature spectrum. I hated winter, absolutely hated it. There was usually a week or two at the beginning of February when the temps hovered around zero degrees. That was bad. There is nothing more depressing than working in the cold and the dark. I used to wait for the sunrise. It didn’t get any nicer, but the sunshine gave an illusion of warmth.

Several years before I retired, corporate management decreed that all supervisors had to spend all their time on the dock. The implication was that the supervisors needed to babysit the forklift drivers. In any case, that meant I had to do all my computer work, that I had previously been able to do in the office, out on the dock, which meant I had to take off my thick gloves to type on the keyboard. I would do that until my hands went numb. I then would scurry into the break room until my fingers ached, and then once I had feeling, I would go out and do the same shit again.

It was like with the forklift drivers too. Let me be clear about this: hypothermia sucks, as does frostbite. It doesn’t take long for extreme cold to penetrate, regardless of how many layers of clothes a person is wearing. The guys would work as long as they could and then tell me with their faces beet red from exposure,

“Hey, I need to go in, get a coffee, and warm up.”

Invariably, I told them,

“Go. Do it. Just remember to come back.”

I didn’t let the men go on break because I was a nice guy (I wasn’t a nice guy). It was all enlightened self-interest. Simply for productivity reasons, I wanted them to get a chance to get warm. Working in extreme conditions, be they hot or cold, wears a person down. It just makes economic sense to give these workers time to recover. Yet, the trend in corporate America seems to be in the direction of grinding employees until they drop. That isn’t just immoral. It’s also stupid.