I share this post with you as a mid-life, disillusioned, college-educated corporate indentured servant drone of the billionaire class.
The grit is worse than you think, and the oligarchs are paying attention to this and other subs. Don't think they aren't.
I came out of college as a bright-eyed idealistic materials engineer ready to make a difference in the world, hoping to help make the world a better place, make good money, and get my piece of the American Dream. I was and still am equipped with excellent problem solving skills, and was ready to put my skills and talents to use.
Steel manufacturing in the late 1990s and early 2000s was a perilous boom and bust time. In one of the steel manufacturers I worked for, I was asked to implement an Excel based program that was meant to drive down raw material cost and reduce customer complaints about chemistry in finished product. No one else was able to do it. It was initially given to a purchasing department employee, let's call him Dug, to integrate. But, he was an office guy. Not a hands dirty guy. As an engineer, I was meant to get out into the dust and dirt and really hot inner workings of the plant, AND come back to my office, clean off my hands, and do technical reporting and calculations on quality control projects and process improvements.
I worked with Dug, and we did it. I crawled around 50 – 200 ton piles of scrap iron doing a visual analysis on how much illicit copper windings from electric motors, and other things were in those small hills, among other things, and fine tuned the actual chemistry of each of them. It took months of hard work.
This allowed us to use the absolute cheapest scrap possible, to make steel that was right up against specification limits for a host of things people don't want in their steel.
MINIMUM, we saved that company $500,000 a MONTH.
After that, I was given a purchasing account and told to troubleshoot a spectral analytical device, purchase the fix, program it, and then teach hourly employees how to use the new machine.
I'm not a programmer. But, an engineer solves problems. I took that book home, and figured it out. Can't even guess how much that saved them. It allowed them to keep big customers that didn't like lead and tin in their steel.
I came up with a Magnesium based powder that allowed the company to remove ingots faster and without getting stuck after being poured. Again, unknown sum of money saved.
Union goes on strike. They ask me to work shifts. I put on a blue full length overall and figured out how to drive a forklift truck (no one to train me) and how to move raw materials into position for tons of steel production. Did any shift they asked. Really hard, dirty work.
They break the back of the union, negotiate a contract that screws the union workers over. Cheap steel starts flooding the US market. I get laid off in the 2 or 3 round of layoffs because I'm a low man on the pole in regards to seniority.
Management keeps their jobs. They rung me out. When things got better, they just started hiring fresh young college graduates to work hard like I did, again, and grind them up.
I got a “We're sorry” speech, a barely sympathetic stare, and a few months of severance.
I got out of steel and now I work in commercial insurance. I don't try to solve problems anymore, even when a solution is super obvious to me. It doesn't pay to do so. The work culture is common American grind. Get as much out of each employee as possible, and pay them as little as you can get away with. Demand that every hour be accounted for on a Outlook calendar. Make no allowances for life outside of work.
I will do all in my power to free my children from this stupid game of life extraction for profit.
It's worse than you think. We all need a change, and we need it now.