I had a friend who worked at a plant and was an author on the side. I don’t think there’s any evidence that good novelists (let alone merely promising ones) are likely to have personalities that make them likely to be bosses.
(I'm in the UK, and I tend to associate that kind of approach to casual employment with dock work in sea ports. That ended with containerisation in the 1980s)
There are still union trades in the US, but they're a dying breed.