#steelworking

[taggerung234]

Little stainless steel gauge piece I was able to film :)

[gender0bender]

Picture of Alice Puerala, a steelworker and union organiser who was also a lesbian, and lived with a female partner for many years while being closeted. Taken from the book Steel closets : voices of gay, lesbian, and transgender steelworker by Anne Belay, available on the Internet Archive.

[eelhound]

"The Fordist factory seems to require a particular family form. The male-headed nuclear family arose in coordination or correspondence with the transformations of employment in the twentieth century and got codified into law in various ways. For example, as Alice Kessler-Harris shows in her book In Pursuit of Equity, the Social Security system very strongly encouraged women to be housewives, making that make financially more sense than to work the low-wage jobs that were available to women. Women would accrue more Social Security benefits by means of the housewife formula than they would likely accrue in a job as a waitress or a secretary or the other jobs that were available to most women. This is one of the many examples of how the welfare state herds working-class people into this particular family form...

Why is it that the structure of the capitalist welfare state social formation prefers and seeks to produce this family organization?... the labor force upon which industrial production depends has to get produced and reproduced in the family. This is particularly true for industrial mass production like steel and auto. For long-term planning purposes, managers need a stabilized workforce. And for this, they need the labor force to be consistent and reliable and to show up in more or less the same form that they can anticipate every day. This is part of why they were willing ultimately to accept collective bargaining.

What that means is that the family has a particular role to play. The family has to produce steelworkers. It has to raise male children who are in one way or another ready for this role. It has to refresh them each night.

And it’s a more complex undertaking than you might think. Steel mills run twenty-hour hours a day. You can’t turn them off because they’re too hot and it takes too long to heat them back up again, so you just run them constantly. They run in three eight-hour shifts, which means that every steelworker at various points is going to be doing an 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. shift, a 4:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. shift, and sometimes a 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. shift. If he’s doing a 4:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. shift, and the family has four or five kids — these are typically pretty big families, especially in the earlier Cold War period — the wife has to make dinner for the kids at 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. and then stay up and make him dinner again at midnight when he gets home.

Moreover, when he gets home, he is going to be filthy, because he works in a steel mill. His clothes are going to be caked in industrial grease, and there will be grease under his fingernails, in his hair, on his eyelids. She has to help him get clean. He’s going to be tired, frustrated, worn out, maybe humiliated from the shit he went through with his foreman that day, and he’s maybe going to want to have one or two drinks, a very common ritual. So she has to do what we could think of as emotional work to deal with that. She needs to keep him from waking up the kids. He’s then going to sleep through the next day because he was up late working at the steel mill, and so she has to keep the kids from making any noise that would wake him up during the next day.

Just from these little examples I’m giving you, you can see how the family has this economic function supplying a steady supply of labor power, but it’s people who make it up. It’s not just a series of input factors — it’s people living their lives, with human experiences and needs and desires and conflict. And basically it’s a wife and mother’s job to square that right, to figure out how to keep it all going. It’s a very difficult job, emotionally and physically. I read diaries and letters and all kinds of things from steelworkers’ wives saying things like, 'I typically do the laundry at two in the morning because that’s when I know no one will need me for anything else.' And it’s also impossible: they can never make it fully line up. They can’t ever be the family that postwar Cold War America imagined that they should be able to be."

- Gabriel Winant being interviewed by Daniel Denvir, from "For Workers, Hospitals Have Become the New Steel Mills — Minus the Strong Unions." Jacobin, 28 January 2023.

[taggerung234]

Guaranteed Tumblr fuckable (forklift certified)

[taggerung234]

Was able to film one of my forming parts today. Really proud of this program :)

[taggerung234]

My area for the work day, 500 ton hydraulic Cincinnati press brake on the left, and a German-made 150 ton Bystronic press on the right. A little hard to believe I was able to find a job that interests and engages me like this.

[taggerung234]

Press brake hungry

Feed it another tape measure

[ornovastudios-blog]

2016 Chilliwack Eagle Gate: Installing the gate was surprisingly smooth. Here you can see the double post and the welded steel frame that supports the mesh. ⁣ ⁣ Next step is to install the eagle and then hand trowel concrete onto the posts to make it look like dry stacked stone pillars. ⁣ ⁣ #chilliwack #customgates #weldedmetal #steelworking #madebyhandeh #themework #concreteartisan #stonetreestudiosbc #collaboration (at Chilliwack, British Columbia) https://www.instagram.com/p/CB0cjTcjk4j/?igshid=1juo5hrqjtsv2