A Good Day's Work (3 page)

My next question is, have you ever met a “rectifier,” a “notion maker” or a “huckster”? To your knowledge, have you made the acquaintance of a producer of aerated water; a crafter of axles, bags, boxes, brushes, carriages or cigars; or a manufacturer of feathers, glue, gloves, hammocks or lanterns? Run a finger down the list of “occupations of persons 10 years of age and over engaged in gainful employment, arranged in alphabetical order, 1911” and there they were.

Yet they're all gone now. As forgotten as buffalo hunters, town criers, cinder wenches, buggy whip makers and cord-wainers. Leaving us all to wonder, who is next? Well, dear reader, the numbers again tell the story. It's a gloomy one for anyone with an attachment to the iconic, traditional ways of making a living. From 2000 to 2010 the number of fishermen in this country—a land first discovered by European whites when they came in search of cod—were expected to fall by 60 percent. During the same period nearly half of Canada's farmers were predicted to disappear. That decade was forecast to see an equal proportion of our fabled locomotive engineers finish their last ride.

The old trades are also dying, no question about it: tool and die makers (down 50 percent from 2000 to 2010); telephone linemen and ship's officers (down 35 percent); sheet metal workers, shoemakers and printing press operators (down 30 percent). In just ten short years typesetters essentially disappeared in this country. Au revoir, if things keep going the way they are going, barbers, boat builders and stockbrokers.
Sayonara, tailors and machine repairers. See ya later, people who wait on others from behind a desk, like travel agents and bank tellers.

IN my lifetime I've seen the pattern play out. My first real summer job was as a gas jockey at a Gulf Oil service station at a spot in mid-Halifax where a ganglia of roads met. It was years before I learned that service stations started out as adjuncts to general stores in Canada, and that gas would be put in buckets and funnelled into vehicles. Eventually service stations became roadside pumps, with an attendant on hand to dispense gas manually. By the summer of 1972, when I clocked in for the first time, gas jockeys were everywhere in this country. They wore coveralls with first names stitched on their sleeves and change belts around their waists. They filled tanks, pumped air into tires, cleaned windshields, and checked and added various fluids.

Having never worked anywhere before, I was a bad hire. I didn't understand that sitting down beside the gas pumps between cars failed to convey the kind of snappy image that a multinational oil company wanted. It helped not that the first time I lifted the hood of a car to check someone's oil was literally the first time I had ever gazed at the engine of a car. Or that my math skills were so rudimentary that at the close of some shifts my cash was off enough that I ended up toiling for almost nothing. Working at the service station still meant a little money and one of the first tentative steps into manhood.

That service station is a parking lot now. In fact, finding someone to fill 'er up at a gas station anywhere in this country
grows harder with each passing day. The only human working at most service stations is inside, behind a counter or, sometimes, a glass window like a pawnbroker. If so desired, you don't even need to talk to a human at all: just swipe a debit card right there are at the pump, then go back about your business.

That got me thinking. One day I decided to make a list of all the jobs I had ever had. I stopped counting at twenty-two. What's interesting is that so many of them are completely gone or locked into some sort of unalterable death spiral. Oh sure, there are still hospital cleaners, Pinkerton Security guards, house painters, even a few assembly line workers. But paper boys have been replaced by car-driving paper “men” and “women.” No one sells candy, shoes or toys for Eaton's for the simple reason that global competition put the department store out of business in 1999. Even the small independent retailers where I once toiled have been vapourized by the big-box stores.

My most interesting summer job was as a labourer for a ship's chandlery operation on the Halifax waterfront. I spent much of that single summer in a big rubber suit, clambering around inside pipes running from Halifax Harbour to the local power utility. My job was to scrape mussel shells off the walls of the pipes, then load the shells into the wooden box lowered from the surface. Did I mention that I was twenty-one years old and it was summer? Sometimes the sun was rising as I was getting in from the night's carousing. At noon I would wolf down my sandwich at the end of a waterfront wharf, then lower my head onto a pier and power-snooze for the rest of the lunch break as curious seals popped their heads out of the skanky harbour water nearby.

That ship's chandlery operation—like so many ships' chandlery operations—is long gone now; the site where salt-crusted scows used to dock for repairs has mutated into a high-end office tower. The newspapers where I've toiled and still work have to fight for every dollar. Circulation at
Maclean's
, the weekly newsmagazine, is about one-third what it was when I joined in 1988. At least it's still in business. So many of the Canadian magazines I once wrote for aren't.

Work, we all know, fulfills an economic imperative: things must be done and produced; a living must be made. But when the practitioners go, the skills themselves—often passed down person to person, forming a lineage that goes back to long-ago generations in distant countries—must eventually follow. That's lamentable for a whole host of reasons. Work steeped in long tradition is a form of living history. When the traditional talents disappear, a piece of our past goes with them. What's more, most Canadians want more than to trade labour for lucre. Writing some thirty years ago, Studs Terkel, the Homer of working America, championed the “search for daily meaning as well as daily bread” while one goes about one's daily labours. Meaningful work, Malcolm Gladwell declared in his book
Outliers
, must offer three things: autonomy, complexity and a direct connection between effort and reward. Which means there is only one possible conclusion to be drawn from the one in eight Canadians who, according to a recent poll, hate to get out of bed to go to work in the morning.

I can't say I'm surprised: BlackBerry-wielding wage slaves are always on; 4 percent of the Canadian workforce is employed in call centres, reading canned scripts. As the grandson of a man who went into the Cape Breton coal mines at eleven, I
know not to romanticize how livings used to be made in this country. Technology surely makes jobs safer and more efficient. But I know this too: work defines us and is how most of us get our sense of esteem, accomplishment and competence. Equally true is that something is definitely lost when so much of work becomes mindless rather than thoughtful. The world becomes a lesser place when people who once found fulfillment in their jobs are being transformed into automatons rather than artisans.

THIS book is the quest to distill some essence of our shared experience through people who make their living the time-honoured way. By that I mean in a manner attached to the historic traditions, performed with the kind of pride that comes from doing something right and well, not just for the money, but for its own sake. I wanted to meet these people now because they are as endangered as the rare white-headed woodpecker. Like a Tilley hat—wearing anthropologist, I needed to see them in action in their natural habitat, because someday soon no one will know what a milkman or lighthouse keeper does in the same way we are puzzled by the notion makers and corwainers of olde. I wanted to observe those challenged breeds up close for the same reason that I wanted to talk to ranchers, locomotive engineers and travelling salesmen. The great forces of globalization, technology and what we have taken to calling progress are allied against them. Their time may be coming, just as it seems to be near for drive-in movie projectionists, blacksmiths and doctors who make house calls.

The reporting for this book took place in the early twenty-first century, when the world was everywhere in turmoil and flux. These, then, are really wistful dispatches from a distant era and a simpler time. The world has changed shape since then, and Canada with it. But the men and women in this book, in the way they make their daily bread, have stood still. (A bold asterisk must follow that last statement, since the breadth of occupations for women has mushroomed in recent decades.) Visiting those people is like having your life played back to you. They make memories rush forward and bubble up. You see your neighbourhood and your childhood unroll before you in someone else's experience.

The urgency is great, because as Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist, points out, we're reaching the end of nostalgia as the distinctive landscape of our past is replaced by a reality that is pretty much identical whether you're in Pouch Cove or Portage la Prairie. We all know there's no turning back in the midst of a transformation of the global economy every bit as significant as the Industrial Revolution. The factories close, the mines go silent, the last person who knows how to do something—catch a fish, fix a car, build a wall that's plumb—hangs up his tools and closes the door behind him. It's not a happy thought. That is just how these things tend to go. Which is why I need you to come with me now. There are a few people I want you to meet, while there's still time.

CHAPTER
ONE

ACROSS THIS LAND