Low Value Labor

[mccoyxyz]

When I was young, I spent a year working mostly by myself in a giant storage facility. It was a mile away from the main plant, the overflow storage.
Most of the time it was a dream job, work by myself, pick orders for company truck drivers to pick up on their way.
Once every few weeks it was insane, the day the boxcar arrived you usually got several semi trailers arriving too.
They just never would loan me a real person from the plant, so what they'd do is phone Manpower Temporary Services and get me a couple of winos for the day.
Now the sad fact of it is none of these people could actually count, so they were useless receiving freight, I had to run around, be everywhere, count everything myself.
But then, after that, back to life as normal.
Now be honest you SS types, from what I've read, many of the labor details in the camps accomplished about as much in terms of real value.
Your comments please.

[Laurasia]

Warning! This post may be disturbing to some members!

Hi McCoy.

Well Ionly have a few memories of my time spent in actual labor camps, as the vast majority of my own "camp time" was spent in a death camp. I do, however, have some memories of overseeing work details in the quarries of Mauthausen. And, yes, the level of "good labor" that many of the prisoners were able to turn out was less than perfect. Though that was our own fault due to the conditions that we kept them in...don't tell us that though! And that led to some very nasty & inappropriate reactions from some of us (which is one of the most disturbing things that I recall from Hans' lifetime!).

But, as I said, it was our own fault for putting them in such terrible conditions that they were all but walking corpses trying to do work that was better suited to a team of horses.

Sincerely,
Laurasia

[mccoyxyz]

I hear what you're saying, my comment more concerned the sheer pointlessness of much of it. IE moving snow or rocks from one place to another and then back again, just to keep people busy, with no value added.
From what I've read, probably about the only good value got off this stuff was people involved in assembling electrical stuff.

And before any of you politically correct people jump all over me for my use of the word "wino", preferring to talk about the "homeless"; we're talking 40 years ago, the only people doing such work were the winos. Real jobs were readily available for everyone else.

[Miss Bothmann]

Another problem then and now regarding ineffective labor is this: Jobs are given to people who cannot do the job required. Not out of laziness do I speak..but of ignorance or impossibility. An example would be (as mentioned above) haveing Jews moving heavy stones, etc. Even if you took away the horrible conditions that they were being kept in (definitly a factor), most of them probably weighed 100 pounds wet. It is pretty much the rule of physics that a tiny person cannot lift a large boulder and relocate it. Same thing in today's society---like in mccoy's case---getting sent people from a temp service who cannopt do the work. 9 times out of 10 these temp services do not research or even read what you write down for your job abilities. They tend to stick anyone anywhere to try to get the job done. Hence, an illeterate woman is told to go fill in as a secretary for a few weks with no training. She is just expected to go in there and do it like she has been doing it for years. This is not fair to the people in question to automatically assume that they are lazy or stupid. It very well simply could be because they have no knowledge of what they are supposed to do.

[mccoyxyz]

Curiously enough, none of these people were lazy, nor did anyone cause any disciplinary problems. But hey, if you can't multiply 6 rows of 6 cases and get the right answer, not much you can do.

Amendment to the above: I realize that might seem a bit bizarre to the younger generation, but times were different. The Province of Quebec did not get around to passing compulsory school attendance laws til 1960. A lot of folks only slightly older than myself had never attended a day of school in their lives, all perfectly legally (ie needed at home on the farm). Remember I was a young guy and most of those temps were 20 years older than me.
As well, I've done two years of voluntary literacy work, once a week and wow, I could tell you some stories about that.
As well, bear in mind, people handling groceries and other stuff in Canada it usually works better if they can read enough of the other language, as one side of the box is in English, the other in French.
So, if your arithmetic is poor AND you can't read a label in either language, well good luck to you.

[msmir]

Sounds like the public school system to me LOL. Kids who cannot learn the way the "average" (no such thing but.. the public school system wants to believe it) can who are thrown into those classrooms with 40 kids (yep that is how large even a typical grade 3 class is these days, crazy.. definitely not like that when I was in school) are called "lazy" and "stupid"... because they cannot do the work that is expected of them!!! Believe me I know as both of my kids cannot learn in "typical classrooms"... and thankfully they are in the right school environment now, they are far from "lazy" and "stupid"!!!

[mccoyxyz]

Takes me back, by about Grade 4 or 5, everyone had basically just checked out, was a time server.
Then in Grade 6, ended up in a class run by a woman who could have been a guard in Ravensbruck (LOL - slight exaggeration intended).
I definitely was not one of the guys into defying authority, but those who were - well - physical was still in in those days.
Everyone else it was Prussian Guard style discipline in spelling and grammar. I hated her, but looking back, she's a large part of the reason why I thrive ok in places that need a lot of written (and back before spell checkers exist).
There were two Grade 6 classes, odds were 50-50 where you ended up. The other 50%, well who knows, that's me with that crappy written.