CrocMother
Banned
When I was 13 I started working in an onion factory. Basically, onions were loaded from trucks on to a belt type sorting machine. They were sorted by size and grade; most of the sorting was done by hand. At end of each station, a bag was filled, removed, and stacked on a pallet for shipping.
The women did the sorting. That's just the way it was. The men did the lifting of the bags and putting them on pallets.
The sorting was shit because you basically had to stand on a little box for hours at a time only moving your arms. We got hurt a lot (I broke a finger and ripped out a finger nail on the machine, another woman was scalped when her hair got caught in it). A few of us wanted to try the bagging sometimes.
"No, that's men's work, women can lift the 50 lb bags."
We begged for months, and finally, one day, acting like it was a joke, the forman let us switch spots. The men sorted and the women bagged.
We had a blast. We could move around, we could use our muscles, it was awesome.
The men started complaining an hour in and lasted two. We were put back on the sorting and they never let us bag again
I want to tell you a story.
I recently worked a few summers ago at a fish processing plant in Alaska. Basically, ships would come dump their fish, and we would process them on an assembly line to prepare them to be shipped to your nearest Costco.
To my surprise, a lot of girls had signed up for this as well. Mostly college aged like myself (I am male). Our supervisors were mostly Filipino, and misogynistic as all hell. We worked on an assembly line, and pretty early they established that there were "womens jobs" and "mens jobs". The women, unsurprisingly, had the most monotonous jobs. Now, keep in mind that we were working 16 hour days, 4 hours at a time with two 15 minute breaks for coffee and two 30 minute breaks for meals. The "women jobs" involved using tweezers to pick whatever tiny bones out of the fish that were missed with the other equipment. I felt so bad for them, because that job sucked.
Anyway, over the course of the 6 weeks I worked there I made friends with a group of women that had come together from an all women's college on the west coast. There were about 6 of them, and they were super cool. These girls were tired of the sexists bosses shit and frankly I was too. One day at lunch I conspired with them to get back to the shift early and just take over the "men's jobs". We all got there about 10 minutes early and I quickly trained them at what to do. This was the part of the assembly line that slid the fileted fish off the racks and onto trays which were stacked on rolling pallets about 30 trays high. It consisted of 7 people working together, with everyone responsible for making sure that no fish made it all the way down the line without being racked (at which point they just fell on the floor and were thrown away).
The bosses came back from break and were noticeably stunned. Most of the other men applauded our stunt and were supportive. The bosses couldn't and didn't have time to tell these women that they "didn't belong there", so the shift started. They were all nervous at first but I kept assuring them that it wasn't hard like they were led to believe, and just encouraged them.
After about an hour, these girls were killing it. They were all working together so well and were so enthusiastic about doing something that actually required them to use their brains that they proved to be the best line crew that place had all summer after that. Even the bosses were impressed.
Your story just reminded me of that incident in my life and I thought it might make you feel good that a few women in some random muckhole in Alaska broke free of that "women's job" mentality and kicked some ass.
