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America's dirty work
Workers watch as the final steel beam removed from the World Trade Center is returned for installation in the 9/11 Memorial Museum.
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TEXT OF INTERVIEW
Tess Vigeland: On Friday the Labor Department issued the latest unemployment figures. You may have heard that another 215,000 workers lost their jobs just last month. More than half of those were in the construction and manufacturing industries. America's "dirty jobs," if you will. Mike Rowe argues that we are all losing something as those jobs disappear. He's the creator, producer, and host of the Discovery Channel show "Dirty Jobs."
Mike's done everything from coal mining to maggot farming and far beyond. Last year, on Labor Day, he launched a Web site called "Mike Rowe Works," dedicated to the folks we're supposed to be saluting on this day. Mike, welcome to the program.
Mike Rowe: Thanks Tess.
Vigeland: May I ask, what you are doing today, Labor Day?
Rowe: I'm working. What are you doing?
Vigeland: I'm working too.
Rowe: What else would I do, Tess? I've worked. We've literally been shooting this show almost daily for the last five years. Today is a little more laid back, I do think there's going to be a frosty beverage in my future, maybe a barbecue. But there'll be work after that.
Vigeland: All right. Sounds good. Well you launched this Web site a year ago, dedicated to celebrating America's blue-collar work. Why?
Rowe: My conscience was maybe a little troubled because "Dirty Jobs" has been really good to me. And it only works because regular people with regular jobs invite me into their homes, let me spend a day with them, basically shadowing them as an apprentice. And after a couple hundred of those, it became pretty obvious -- to me anyway -- that I was hearing the same stories week after week after week. And surprisingly, most of the people I met were having a better time than most of my friends. And you just don't expect to be on your belly in a sewer laughing. And yet, there I was. And I began to ask myself, and the viewers too, what might people with "dirty jobs" know that we don't?
Vigeland: Well you talk on the Web site, you say that our society has slowly redefined what it means to have a good job. How and why do you think that happened?
Rowe: You go into a bookstore and you look at the best sellers, titles like "The 4-Hour Workweek." You turn on the TV and you look at a typical portrayal of a plumber, and he's 300lbs with a giant butt crack. And example after example we see disparaging, simplistic, one-dimensional notions of work. And we begin to imagine the people who do these kinds of jobs in our mind's eye as very specific caricatures, and they're not.
Vigeland: What do you hear from the people that you work with in these jobs -- Do they feel cut out from the national conversation?
Rowe: I wouldn't say the people that I work with feel excluded from a national conversation, but I would say that they see themselves as being in on the joke. It's sort of an awareness that you find in the guy that picks up roadkill. He knows, for instance, that if he and his pals all called out stick for two weeks interstate trucking and commerce stops. He knows this. You know, the statistics bear it out.
Vigeland: You mentioned earlier on that you have a pretty nice job. But I wonder, any of these "dirty jobs" that you think you might actually want to do?
Rowe: I mean I'm in awe of many of them, really. But my own personal biography, unfortunately, is not ideally suited to that pursuit. I grew up in a small farm in Baltimore. My grandparents were next door, and my grandfather was one of those guys born hard-wired to build a house without a blueprint, to build an engine. He just knew how to fix stuff. And I didn't get the gene. And it actually drove me into entertainment because I was tired of failing at all of these typical, blue-collar jobs.
Vigeland: But now you get to do all of them.
Rowe: Now I don't know how to make it stop, Tess -- 252 so far, but who's counting?
Vigeland: Mike Rowe is the creator, producer and host of the Discovery Channel's great, great show "Dirty Jobs." Mike, it's been real fun talking to you. Thanks for being on the show.
Rowe: Tess, I'm honored that you called, and back to work.
Graduting in the late 90's, I ignored the crowd of engineering students rushing into the dot coms. Instead, I raised many eyebrows and went to work doing a "dirty job" in a steel mill in South Carolina. Mike Rowe was correct on many levels. My team and I take great pride and enjoyment in actually manufacturing a product in America, turning wrenches, burning steel, and building a strong local economy. Metallurgists and engineers work as a team, not in a cubicle, but on a shop floor, experimenting with tons of steel in new grades to compete on a global level. Some people may roll their eyes about the dust and grease covering my clothes, until I mention working four days a week, recession proof job security, and comparable compensation. I have found contentment and success in my "dirty job" and look forward to working with my team - after three more days off.
I would like to post Mike's inspiring speech at TED: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRVdiHu1VCc
Work, I too am working on Labor day, since 6am this morning and now it is 6:59 as I write. I have been working seven days a week for just over a year, only missed 7 days in that year. I no longer have a five day work week, I now have a three day work week. Yesterday, today and tomorrow. I own and manage a manufacturing company in Silicon Valley that had 140 employees two years ago and now down to 1/2 that. The economy is finally turning up here but not the nation at a minus 1.12% growth, due to inflation, compare that to China's at 7.8% and India's at 5%. Thanks good neighbor Sam, Walton! In the meantime my workers jobs have been transferred over seas with out my or anyone's consent. So now, I am stuck with almost the same front end work because of complexity and quality demands but not the volume to manufacture. We legalized the outsourcing of American jobs to less American minded leaders, than the ones we have on Wall street and our legislators, gave hard earned american taxes away, as incentives to do so! We are paying an American burglar, to break into our house and rob us using foreign help, what they steal, doesn't even stay here! What is up with that? Speaking of not living up to American values, Homer and Marge Simpson better learn to start working more if they are not going to be more vigilant of what is going on around them as they seek how Jesus saves, simply because he shops at Walmart. In the meantime a to many of us continue to live the illusion that simply because we live in a rich country, we too are rich.
Okay enough of my rant, back to work because I can hear the machinery on the other side of the pacific, diligently making the parts we use to. They may not be as good in quality but they are cheap and that's all that seduces this Corporate America! As long as we don't monitor wall street the way we are suppose to, the Bernie Madoff's of America, will continue to con us out of our hard earned future, through their convoluted systems of broadcast, news papers, news shows posing as unbiased and fair minded green eyed blond women lying to us for ratings and their lead pipe cinch profits! I think we are eventually just going lose our way of life for one we won't soon recognize.
White rice anyone?
Sincerely just working for a living.
