The WorkGroup

During the early part of the industrial revolution, in the days of shameless laissez-faire, the industrialists came up with the brilliant idea of hiring children. In addition to being able to pay them less, their little fingers could perform intricate work that bigger fingers couldn’t do, and their small bodies fit places where bigger bodies wouldn’t fit. Hence, children would climb into machines to fix them, often with the machines still moving. It was all about where you could who, or what, at the cheapest price. The glory days of child labor.

During my summer of construction work I faced a situation that was kind of like this one. Only instead of climbing into the machine so that the machine can do the work of humans, I had to climb into the workspace because the machines couldn’t get in.

During the building frenzy of the early 90’s, the construction company I worked for was in a frenzy to complete a luxury apartment complex in a snooty suburb. Winter was fast approaching, and the company was eager to continue indoor construction, so they laid the footers for the building (that’s what the building stands on) and then built the building without pouring the basement floors. Therefore, they’d built four buildings without basement floors and in some cases, in buildings without basement stairs.

In the spring the engineers needed to figure out how they were going to level and pour the floors. Usually, this is done with a Bobcat tractor or a bigger tractor if there’s access. After the floor is leveled, then gravel is shot in from a gravel truck to complete the leveling. Since the building had already been built, they couldn’t do it this time.

Hence, the summer job for me and my three colleagues. Two were recent high school grads on their way to college and Mike, who’d blown his mind on something in the early 70’s, but was a very strong laborer nonetheless. The construction company paid us for an entire summer to painstakingly remove the dirt necessary to level the floor wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow, day by day, month after month.

The job wasn’t so bad in the first two buildings because there were basement garages, with plenty of exits. The third building we cleared didn’t have garages. To make matters worse, there was no drainage, and the winter snows and spring rain had flooded the mud floor, covering the straw the earlier workers had laid down to “protect” the floor.

The result was like working in a swamp. It smelled like swamp. The mud was several inches thick, and the water above the mud was nearing stagnation. After managing to pump out a lot of the water, we lifted trash barrels up a pulley instead of hauling out our usual wheelbarrows full of dirt. And instead of dirt, it was mud and straw muck.

We figured that in the big scheme of the construction site food chain, we were at the bottom in terms of the least skill and sheer brute force of our labor. The only people on site with harder jobs than ours were the roofer’s laborers, who hauled big rolls of roofing paper and shingles up the scaffolding.

Toward the end of the summer I finally realized just how big a mistake the construction company had made when I got the opportunity to see a basement poured the way it was supposed to be poured. Tractors removed the extra dirt in a matter of minutes, and a specialized shovel attachment dug the trenches for the drainage pipes. A gravel truck came in with a very loud rock shooter, and covered the basement floor with a ton of gravel in about ten minutes, and was leveled out shortly after.

The entire process, which took our gang of laborers almost two weeks, took just under four hours done correctly. But had it been left up to the machines, it wouldn’t have been done.

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