I was watching 8 Mile last night, for the first time since I saw it when it came out in the theater.
Eminem’s character, in the movie, works at a factory in Detroit that makes car parts by stamping them out of sheet metal. It’s portrayed as the epitome of a shitty job, tedious, boring, mindless, and robotic - he literally just presses a big red button, over and over again. His mom’s boyfriend (played by the great Michael Shannon in a very early role) even makes fun of him for working there, saying that it’s a job for “ex cons and welfare moms.”
Would this job actually have been that bad, though? I was under the impression that most of these jobs are now being replaced by automation and a lot of people WISH they could have jobs like this. Politicians are constantly talking about bringing back manufacturing jobs. I assume these kind of jobs would be included in what they’re talking about.
Wouldn’t the workers be part of a union and be entitled to some benefits? Does anyone know how much the job depicted in that movie would have actually paid?
I’m with you on this, having grown up in the heart of the Michigan car manufacturing world.
A manufacturing job like that would have been highly sought after, and well paying. Sure it was boring and unfulfilling, but for some people that’s a feature, not a bug.
I attribute the framing of the job in the movie as being “awful” to the Hollywood writer sensibility. To a Hollywood script writer they would see the job as awful, so that’s how they wrote it. They would have lacked the sense of local culture and how they would have seen the job. Maybe it would have been a slightly more interesting story if there were conflict about “don’t quit that great job to pursue your dream of being a rapper”?
My dad was a press operator in a stamping plant for many years. He started at the plant in the 60s and retired in 2004.
I think when you’re in the job at the moment, especially when you’re young, it’s absolutely boring, soul-crushing, dirty, dangerous work. You do work with a lot of not-so-ambitious people. There’s always a chance of layoff. Your shifts get moved around. You can get repetitive-motion injuries. All of this stuff happened to my dad.
If you keep your eyes on the prize and have some self-confidence and drive, you can work your way through the factory to better jobs like foreman or skilled trades. That’s what my dad did but only after about 25 years. Then after all that he retired in his 50s and now gets a pension and excellent health care.
But if you’re a messed-up young man with no self confidence who isn’t interested in a factory career, it’s different. And probably in the time period that 8 Mile was set in, the job didn’t pay as much as it would have when my dad started. Factory wages did start going down. Also in 8 Mile time, factories were shutting down not booming, so there would be more guys ahead of Eminem in seniority to get the better hours and better positions than him (at Ford at least when your plant shuts down you had the option of keeping your seniority and moving to some other plant). His opportunity to leave the presses and advance were way less than my dad’s.
Well, I guess you have the difference between what politicians THINK they would be bringing back and the reality of what they would actually bring back. Yeah, these are almost certainly the jobs politicians like Trump think they would be bringing back to the US. No, these aren’t actually the jobs that would be brought back, as it would be a huge waste to pay someone to stand around all day pushing a button. One of the reasons most of these kinds of jobs are gone now is that machines do this, and you only need a few people to oversee what the machines are doing or maybe to do some finish or detail work that a machine can’t do as well as a well-trained human (yet).
Almost certainly he would have been in a union, yes. As for high paid, he would have been relatively well paid, but he would have lacked seniority so would have had to work his way up (basically meaning pay his dues and grind out the seniority year after year). I only vaguely remember the movie, but as he was basically a kid he’d be low man on the totem pole for years to come.
I had a friend in Detroit who worked for a place that ford outsourced parts to in the late 90s early 00s … important parts like brakes and it was exactly like described nothing but ex cons welfare moms and undocumented workers working inside for the winter or pot heads pressing buttons making pocket change for their next bag …
one week they laid him off because the welfare authorities raided the place and caught a bunch of people for welfare fraud and there wasn’t enough people left to run the shop
most of the stuff they made was sent back 3 or 4 times…just horrible quality he was scared to buy fords after that but it wasn’t just ford tho …all the us car places used places like that
OP is correct, the shitty-ness is way exaggerated because that fits the movie. Tedious, boring, mindless, and robotic? Sure, and especially so for a poet. Your co-workers probably don’t want to borrow your Walt Whitman either. No long-term prospects? I’ll grant that too, but you probably would not be living in a trailer with your mom for very long, even if you did something stupidly typical like finance a brand new Chevrolet Camaro. Compared to the brick wall young people face today, the luxury of getting paid to get in shape is a dream.
It will be great progress when people will only be familiar with such jobs from old novels and films, with the thought of making a living that way ranging from risible to deeply disturbing. Robotic jobs are what robots are for.
Exactly how are people supposed to earn a living when robotics has stolen all the jobs?
Will the gov. issue checks and benefits to the unemployed? We could easily ***see 40% to 50% unemployment within 50 years. Where’s that money coming from?
***A WAG, no one can predict just how fast robotics will grow. The technology seems to grow faster every year.
I don’t see the problem with it being both a good job that people would love to land, and the sort of job that Eminem would view as soul crushing and miserable.
People line up to join the military, it’s a good job with great benefits that might kill you and people still want to sign up. But when you get to your first duty station at the ripe old age of 18 and you have to pull 14 hour shifts sitting in a box guarding a flightline, it sucks, and you’re going to bitch about it every minute of every day. It’s miserable. And even still, there are people who would love to have that opportunity.
This seems to be the perennial prediction for the last, um, say 200 years…give or take a few. I’m fairly sure the same thing that happened when over 80% of US workers lost their good, juicy agricultural jobs will happen…i.e. they will end up doing something else. And, in fact, though we’ve shed a large percentage of those old school push a button for 8 hours a day manufacturing jobs we still aren’t at 40 or 50% unemployment.
At this point we’ve already shed them, so not sure what your point is or where you think that now we are going to have huge unemployment. Perhaps China has to worry about what happens when the majority of manufacturing jobs go away (and, in fact, they are also moving on as we speak), but not the US as it’s happened. Robots won the race for those nice button pushing jobs and, sadly, they will never make a comeback here in the States, despite Trump’s promises. I know…heartbreaking, not least because it seems that, contrary to all expectation, Trump was, you know, wrong. Just this one time though…
“The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.”
Glad to hear his dreams are coming true.
