When I was eighteen, I joined the United Auto Workers Local 677 to earn money for college. I wore a hard hat, safety goggles and steel-toed shoes and was paid three times more than the current minimum wage. Coming home sweaty, smelly— and if I worked on the axel line, covered in grease —was well worth it. Manufacturing paid very well. It was on that Mack Truck assembly line that I saw the value of teamwork—what I did or didn’t do directly affected my co-workers—something essential for every employee, in every type of work setting. This important lesson stayed with me in the decades since, but so did my misconception that manufacturing is still a boring, dirty profession. This all changed last year, when one of our clients, Aerotech, gave me a tour of their facilities. I was shocked. The place was clean and quiet. And, as they told me the tasks the workers performed, it became clear that this was … Continue reading →