Hartley Neita, Contributor
IN LAST Sunday's Gleaner, there was a report that an information technology company operating in the Montego Bay Freezone area has blamed a "factory" stigma which has apparently caused students in that city to fail to respond to advertisements offering them employment.
According to a company spokesman, some people associate Freezone work with "factory work"; and they don't want to be seen working there.
Interestingly, the jobs advertised were in the area of customer relations.
Now, the general manager of the Freezone said this belief about Freezone work being "factory" work no longer exists. Which suggests, of course, that it did at one time.
The news item, however, sent my memory back in time to some 40 years ago. In a discussion with Hugh Shearer about trade unionism (his favourite subject), he told me about studies which had been done by his union on worker attitudes. One such study referred to two men working as mechanics in a garage. Both were discussing their "family" life. One asked the other where his woman worked. His mate told him she was employed at Harty's Leather Factory. In turn, he was asked where his woman worked. He changed the subject, started talking about other things and did not reply to the question.
Domestic worker
That night he told his woman to leave her work and find a job in a factory. She was what was then called a domestic worker. And having learnt that his mate's woman worked in a factory, he was now ashamed of the work being done by his woman.
That, Hugh Shearer said, could probably have been only part of the story for the worker's mate, he said, could also have gone home and ordered his woman to leave Harty's Leather Factory where she was cutting leather from patterns and stitching them together to make the uppers for shoes and sandals. The reason, he suspected, that his mate at the garage did not tell him where his woman worked, was because she had another kind of job which was not as demeaning as sewing leather and coming home after work smelling of hide as his woman did. Better he told his woman to get domestic work in "a nice St. Andrew home."
The other study was done in Clarendon among men cutting cane on the Monymusk estate. This showed that at the end of a day's work, although they were cutting cane one mile away from the factory, and although the road to their homes was only 100 yards from where they were cutting cane, they walked to the factory and left through the main gate with the factory workers as if they, too, also worked in the factory.
In my own case, too, for example, I was not taught to cook as a child. The nearest I got to cooking was to fan the wood in the fireplace until it burst into flames. Oh, yes, my brother and I were called on to rub the butter and sugar in a bowl for the baking of cakes. And I grew up, sub-consciously believing that cooking was woman's work!
Soft and raw
So, you can imagine what I went through when my wife went into the hospital to have our first son. We had no helper then, and so I tried to make breakfast for the first two mornings. It was easy to toast the bread. Easy, too, to boil the water to make tea. No problem. But when I tried for the first two days to boil an egg, I failed. I liked my eggs hard then. I still do. So I boiled the water in a pot, took an egg from the ice box I didn't own a refrigerator then), and dropped it in the boiling water for three minutes the first day and four minutes on the second.
On both mornings the eggs were still soft and raw when I cracked them.
So, somewhat embarrassed, I asked a friend at work what was I doing wrong. I told her in detail what I had done.
She laughed. It was a Trinidadian belly-laugh (she was from Trinidad).
"Hartley," she said between ripples of laughter, "tomorrow when you wake (ha, ha, ha), take the egg from the ice box and put it in a pan of water on your oil stove. Then after you've showered (if you do ha, ha, ha) and put on your clothes, you light the fire. When the water begins to boil you keep it boiling for three minutes. Your egg will be hard then. What you've been doing wrong is trying to boil an ice-cold egg for three minutes, instead of letting it thaw first."
So, I can now boil an egg. Hard. I have not yet, after all these years, however, graduated into frying one or making an omelette.
