My Life Pouring Concrete

I worked on a construction crew one summer in 1966 building concrete structures for a sewage treatment plant. Based on this article, not much has changed.

It was interesting to see the hierarchy of the various trades. The rodbusters (rebar workers) were cocky, fast, and had no body-fat. The carpenters that built the forms for the concrete were fat, slow, and drank vodka all day. And the laborers (e.g. me) were there mainly to entertain everyone else, lol.

What a very weird article. My father spent most of his working years as a mason, it basically destroyed his body.

The article briefly mentions poor working conditions, extrapolates to the casual drug use to manage pain, then launches into Zionism somehow?

While also dismissing the worship of manual labor under the Soviet system.

> The revival of Zionism in the 19th century provides one notable cultural genre in which the common labourer received heroic treatment in a way that transcended merely socialist tropes. This included the so-called Muscular Judaism movement presented by Zionist leader Max Nordau as an answer to caricature of Jews as meek and cowardly parasites who got by on guile instead of effort.