“There go our jobs,” the tetchy lakes veteran said. He punctuated his remark with a stream of
tobacco juice into the already ensepulchered waters of the Cuyahoga River. It was summer, 1969, and we were moving
slowly up the river, past the ship building activities that would culminate in
the MV Roger Blough, an eight hundred fifty foot ore carrier that would ply the
steel making routes of the Great Lakes.
Today, even the Blough is significantly smaller than the new
generation of 1,000 foot vessels that carry coal, taconite, limestone, and
grain in quantities that would keep dozens of one hundred car freight trains
moving overland each day.
I was one of the fortunate kids who left college for the
summer, jumped a ship, and worked the summer months hauling taconite from Duluth or Two Harbors , Minnesota Lake Michigan
or Lake Erie .
The work was hard, but the pay was good.
I did not have many opportunities to spend my pay, so there were savings
to finance the costs of a college education.
With college campuses inflamed with protest and unrest in
the late 1960s, it was also an enforced opportunity to stay in touch with the
real world of hard working people that had their own opinions about what was
going on in the country and the world.
It was a challenge to earn the respect of my shipmates who generally
prefaced the words, “college kid” with adjectives like “dumb” and far worse,
but this is supposed to be a decent column. Only by working as hard as the
hardest working person on the boat was I ever able to overcome the malediction
of pursuing a college degree.
The scene on the Cuyahoga that day was marvelously
prescient. I was on a ship that was six
hundred feet long and maybe carried one-fourth of what the one thousand foot,
automated, self unloading monsters are capable of hauling today. My ship had thirty people working on
board. Our work was comprised of
cleaning, chipping paint, priming and painting, shoveling, tending mooring
cables, taking soundings, and whatever else needed to be done. The newly automated vessels have largely
eliminated most of that kind of work.
At one time, during three straight days of dense fog,
approximately one hundred twenty ships went to anchor on either side of the
locks at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan . Today, a recurrence of those circumstances
would produce no more than forty ships waiting to lock through. I doubt that tourism at the “Soo” locks has
the same vitality as back then when people used to see in an hour what today
takes twenty four hours to see. Older
ships were shown the way to the ship graveyards as the new vessels came on
line.
Larger, more efficient ore carriers mean fewer ships are
necessary to carry the raw materials to the steel making process. The high degree of automation means fewer
sailors are necessary to do depth soundings and to tend mooring cables. The sophistication of the navigation
equipment means that the skill levels necessary for these jobs are far in
excess of what the summer college kid possesses, or for that matter, men who
had toiled the lakes for all of their lives.
The union halls of the Upper Midwest
teem with workers with considerable seniority, hoping for an opening within the
reduced numbers of people needed to transport raw materials for the steel
industry. The summer college kid working
on the boats is clearly a thing of the past.
A lost step on the ladder of upward mobility that went the way of the
summer factory job.
When we think about the transformation of business and
industry, one need only look at the changes that have taken place in Great Lakes shipping over the past thirty years to understand
how the process impacts the lives we lead and the lives we thought we would
lead.
The real lesson to be learned, contrary to what politicians
and special interests tell you, is that we do not lose most jobs to
“outsourcing” or to the Chinese or the Mexicans. Far more jobs are lost to productivity
improvements and technological advances.
The old lakes veteran was right. There went our jobs.
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