I remember hearing references to WPA jobs as being “shovel leaners.†Those jobs were considered by many as money for no real work, much as you’ve described.
I had never heard that opinion about the WPA, but I suppose it is in line with what we hear today about “welfare†and government jobs in general. Pretty much everybody with a job considers themselves to be productive and probably worth more than they are paid. I would venture that pretty much everyone has a case of confirmation bias about it, too.
After a lifetime of grappling with being a person who has a job of taking on the responsibility for committing to deliver work products for a fixed price on a predetermined schedule, nobody works hard enough and efficiently enough to do the job properly (including me), and all contractors should be certified as suffering from delusional insanity for assuming such responsibility. Unfortunately, we suffer from a culturally rooted mass delusion that this is how the world works, or should work, when the fact is inefficiency and laziness are normal, natural conditions. (Did I mention that I am still grappling with it?) Private business is not more efficient than government business - that is propaganda.
A quick anecdote to dramatize what I am trying to share, vis-a-vis (did I just type that?) shovel leaning… when I lived in northern Idaho and was primarily a logger and log cabin builder, I became an unofficial partner with another ambitious and hard-working (and delusional) young man (call him Joe) who had similar skills and interests and complementary equipment. As logs are big and awkward things to move about, it pays to have two people who know what they are doing working together. I really appreciated working with Joe, it felt like dancing all day in a lumbering sort of way (that was for Katman) - what we could accomplish was magical.
Our ambitions diverged a bit, however - mine being dominated by the inspiration of the legacy that the WPA left us - Joe’s leaning more to becoming a rich and famous builder. So after building a few cabins together on the shores of Priest Lake, our casual partnership gave way to Joe putting together his own crew, and other circumstances of mine finding me moving to New Mexico. I still had property and unfinished business in Idaho that extended for several years so I frequently returned for lengthy stays, often working on projects that Joe had contracted, for some income. The magic was still there and I could merge with the crew as though I had always been there, and it was a relief to Joe that he didn’t have to ‘manage’ me like the rest of his crew - I would usually take on the difficult tasks that none of Joe’s crew could do, but that he didn’t have time for because of spending most of his time fixing his employees’ mistakes.
Now, I like to joke around all the time on the job, but I don’t stop working to do it. On one high-end lake house (not a log cabin) the task that awaited me was to run a bunch of curved wooden (molded, not plain flat) baseboard, which included making the curved boards onsite. The guy who was trying to do it had spent two weeks and only installed about 12’ (which Joe had to fix) and there was maybe 100’ to go. so there I was, on my knees installing trim and making puns and singing silly songs, when the owner came in. I was aware of him watching me for a little bit, and didn’t know for sure that he was even the client, but I didn’t care, anyway. I was having fun and getting satisfaction from doing some challenging work (stay with me, this story is getting close to where it is going). Owner Guy came back numerous times to watch for a little bit over the next few days, but never talked to me.
At the end of the week (I stayed long enough to finish the base so Joe wouldn’t have to) Joe and I were having a couple of beers before I came back to NM, and he told me two memorable things.
First, he said that Owner Guy was pissed off when he first showed up, at the annoying new clown he had hired to work on his seriously fancy house. But after awhile he realized that the curved baseboards that had been beginning to look like a real problem for the project, were appearing apace in spite of the apparent interference of the clearly unserious Joker. That news was good for my ego.
The second thing he told me was that he had gone through 80 hires in the last two years trying to put together a decent crew of just three or four. At first, his expectation was to get two experienced and competent people and two hard working laborers. But at the time of our beers he confessed that his definition of a good employee had evolved into ‘someone who showed up and wasn’t on drugs’.
A shovel leaner, perhaps?
