Work

            Starting my working life in the 1960's was, by and large, stepping into a man's world. Not a macho world, but very few women in the hands-on type of jobs. In construction I didn't have a female apprentice until the mid-1980's. In the sixties on the railroad, I only ran into one woman worker, Elinor, a telegrapher, and she took no guff from anybody but still very pleasant as a co-worker. Most of the clerks had a whisky bottle in the third drawer of the desk and weren't shy about indulging - not right in front of the boss, of course, unless he needed a drink too.

            Work was meant to be work. The section gangs still spiked by hand and pushed the ballast under the ties by hand. I saw a video clip recently of a machine that did everything continuously - laid the ties, rail, spiked and tamped the ballast too. The men just made sure that the flat cars didn't run empty. The section foreman in those days, Frank Horne I think he was, encouraged me to continue with school and not get stuck in manual labour. A lot of older men walked all hunched over because hard work had ruined their backs.

            There is a feeling today that if you do manual labour, you just aren't bright enough to do anything else. That is just as opposite from the reality of  it as can be. All the trades jobs - carpenter, plumber, electrician, mill wright, glazier, cabinetmaker, ship wright (forgive me if I have excluded your trade) - requires that the individual can think on his, or her, feet, can articulate to others what is needed or what the problem is, can do complicated calculations of layout, loads, and sizing and if they are working for themselves do the financial side of the business too. Very few other jobs require as much from the worker. And on top of all that they must be able to use their hands to shape their work in a workmanlike manner. Of course, the harshest critics are their co-workers.

            So you can see that it really gripes me when the Federal Government (people that are supposed to be looking after our well being) just legislated civil servants back to work and had the utter gall to legislate the wage rate as well. Of course, the posties' wage rate was legislated downwards, unlike what the MP's do for themselves. I always thought that the job of government was to pave the way, to expedite, to fill the cracks where citizens might fall, in short, to make this a country where all might prosper.  Instead, we now have an us and them situation, where we have a government that is pursuing an agenda of its own and not pursuing our ideals as a country where everyone can enjoy food, family, home, and worthwhile employment. When did we let the cart start leading the horse?

            Back to boat building.  In the late 1960's, Federal Fisheries scientists were aware of declining Salmon stocks on the west coast. Nowhere nearly as bad as today, but declining due to spawning habitat degradation, pollution of the ocean, overfishing by nations with factory fleets beyond our territorial limits.  The government solution was to reduce the number of boats fishing by paying fishermen that were wanting to give up their commercial licences. That was swell in theory but it resulted in the fish boats becoming larger and there wasn't a reduction in the catch and less people were doing the catching. However, for a while there was a boom in building bigger boats. Big aluminum seine boats were being built that could corral a school of fish in one set. I guess to my old fashioned thinking and with some hindsight, it would have been better to limit the size of the boat instead of the fleet. Perhaps then we could have had more people fishing with young people able to afford to buy or build a more modest boat and buy a license from a retiring fisherman. Now, some licence holders have multiple licences and never go to sea but rent out these licences to other fishermen at tens of thousands of dollars. Hmm.