11-30-2021, 11:31 AM
(11-29-2021, 08:56 PM)grampahol Wrote: My truck unloading and loading days were before all the containerized freight came along when the truck was whatever the weather was. I unloaded a long ass trailer full of frozen meat, all 50 pound bags stacked to the rafters. Took all day and there were no gloves or mittens available..That sucked big time.. No pallets back in those days.. The pallet never went inside the trailer so by the time we got to the front of the trailer we had to carry every bag the length of the trailer and back for a measly 20 bucks..we thought we were shittin in high cotton back then. lol
15 bucks an hour back then? In our dreams..We were lucky to get $2.50. Freight yards hardly paid minimum wage and if they did those jobs were grabbed up real quick. A lot of the older guys remember what it was like when all the big factories shut down all over the Midwest. Young, unskilled labor almost never got paid much more than 1.50.. Hard to believe I could afford an old hoopty on that money.
I got paid pretty well, but the work was brutal. The trailers were all packed with random stuff. Sometimes you would get a trailer with boxes of hats that weighed nothing, but one time I got a truck loaded with grave marker slabs that weighed like 50 lbs each. Stripping out the cargo was hard work but you could do it fast. Loading was brutal because there were so many random sized packages it was like putting a puzzle together to get them all loaded. And if you didn't do it fast enough the conveyor belt backed up.
The shifts started at 4 AM. They only lasted about 4-5 hours but it backbreaking labor.
