A Hard Day’s Work: The Most Contemplative of Seasons What is the value of striving to become a blue collar worker? Our society has a never-ending conflict between white and blue collar workers. The first tend to educate themselves to avoid a life of manual labor; the latter discover their work consists of this. A commonly ignored fact is that without the contributions of the working class, our country would not be able to function. We are all taught from a young age that we need college for an education in order to avoid manual labor. We have a sense of pride that comes with education; in the security that it will enable us to avoid the poor life, and the nuisances associated with being poor. These people work harder than the privileged, yet receive no prestige, and sometimes are frowned upon for lack of an education. Stephens, a young college student in Grounds Crew by Stephen Benz, learns the true value of a hard day of work from these unnoticed and unappreciated workers that enable our society to function; Benz helps us realize their devaluation in our society through the use of understatement and symbols for the workers unappreciated plight.
Stephens, an incoming college student, signs up for a work study job intending to save money in college. Having lived a fairly work-free life, he realizes that he possesses no work skills, and is assigned to assist the grounds crew. The embarrassment of this job is too much for Stephens who spends more time pretending not to work, rather than working. Stephens considers these workers beneath him and their work more so, needless to say, he is eventually fired by his bible thumping boss due to poor performance. Two months later during a large snow storm he witnesses his former co-workers shoveling snow. Guilt ridden and unable to sleep, he decides to join them. He begins to see the smaller beauties in hard work, and desires to stay on the job. Stephens starts to treat his crew as equals, learning from them and relationships develop. Even as new jobs open up he turns them down to remain a part of the grounds crew for four years.
We lose the first person point of view to see a scene that symbolizes the endless responsibilities of the grounds crew, as they fix a leak the day before commencement. The entire process for repairing the leak takes a complete day and involves the crew working through the night. At the commencement the president gets the credit for his beautiful school, but his only role in repairing the leak was making a phone call. Stephens is graduating from college but finds himself disappointed; his professors have little real interest in him and he is left feeling incomplete. He realizes that his crew were invaluable teachers and during their final moment together, Stephens is credited with becoming a man. We follow the life of a college student who views manual labor, such as picking up trash, a job for poorer less educated folk. He said, “I remained aloof and afraid, as if their ‘conditions’ -blackness and epilepsy- might somehow rub off on me” (Benz 118). The grounds crew is treated as “a last hope for the incompetent” (Benz 114). At the start of the passage the workers are treated as uneducated idiots. This job seems to be clouded in failure and embarrassment, yet they managed to save the commencement. They are never given an award for their hard work, nor is it even acknowledged. When the president discovers the flood, “water lapping at his jogging shoes [he] must have been devastated” (Benz 128). This is symbolic for our society as a whole, for too much of our high