In the course of working my way through school, I have taken many jobs
I would rather forget. I have spent nine hours a day lifting heavy automobile
and truck batteries off the end of an assembly belt. I have risked the loss
of eyes and fingers working a punch press in a textile factory. I have served
as a ward aide in a mental hospital, helping care for brain-damaged men
who would break into violent fits at unexpected moments. But none
of these jobs was as dreadful as my job in an apple plant. The work was
physically hard, the pay was poor, and most of all, the working conditions
were dismal.

First, the job made enormous demands on my strength and energy.
For ten hours a night, I took cartons that rolled down a metal track and
stacked them onto wooden skids in a tractor trailer. Each carton contained
twelve heavy bottles of apple juice. A carton shot down the track about
every fifteen seconds. I once figured out that I was lifting an average
of twelve tons of apple juice every night. When a truck was almost filled,
I or my partner had to drag fourteen bulky wooden skids into the empty
trailer nearby and then set up added sections of the heavy metal track
so that we could start routing cartons to the back of the empty van.
While one of us did that, the other performed the stacking work of two men.

I would not have minded the difficulty of the work so much if the
pay had not been so poor. I was paid the minimum wage at that time, $3.65
an hour, plus just a quarter extra for working the night shift. Because of the
low salary, I felt compelled to get as much overtime pay as possible. Everything
over eight hours a night was time-and-a-half, so I typically worked twelve hours
a night. On Friday I would sometimes work straight through until Saturday
at noon - eighteen hours. I averaged over sixty hours a week but did not take
home much more than $180.00.

But even more than the low pay, what upset me about my apple plant job
was the working conditions. Our humorless supervisor cared only about his
production record for each night and tried to keep the assembly line moving at
breakneck pace. During work I was limited to two ten-minute breaks and an unpaid
half hour for lunch. Most of my time was spent outside on the truck loading dock
in near-zero-degree temperatures. The steel floors of the trucks were like ice; the
quickly penetrating cold made my feet feel like stone. I had no shared interests with
the man I loaded cartons with, so I had to work without companionship on the job.
And after the production line shut down and most people left, I had to spend two
hours alone scrubbing clean the apple vats, which were coated with a sticky residue.

I stayed on the job for five months, all the while hating the difficulty of the work,
the poor money, and the conditions under which I worked. By the time I quit, I was
determined never to do such degrading work again.