Minimum Wage R&D
By just another friendly old guy

Getting Hired

He took a job as a delivery driver at a small Chicago manufacturer. He was nineteen. The pay was minimum wage. The job was simple: drive the truck.

Getting the job was simple, too, by the standards of the time. You took the Northwest Highway bus out of Jefferson Park Terminal, got off near an industrial strip, and started walking. Door to door. Small shops. Job shops. Places with open bays and hand-lettered signs. You asked if they were hiring. Sometimes they were.

It might have been summer. He doesn’t remember. Chicago blurs seasons together when you’re young, broke, and focused on getting hired before the day runs out.

When you got a job, you took it. And when you took it, this is what you got.

Minimum Wage R&D

Within weeks, he was running research and development.

Someone noticed he had some training in electronics. In a small business, that sort of thing spreads fast and costs nothing to the owner. Without a raise or a title, he was assigned to build a prototype automatic line-cord tester—forty-eight volts, relays, continuity checks—quality-control equipment for a manufacturing line.

It blew up.

This surprised the owner. It should not have. Prototypes blow up. That is normal. In professional engineering environments, this is expected, budgeted for, documented, and handled by people paid far more than a minimum-wage truck driver.

The owner expected professional results anyway. The expectation was never discussed. It was simply assumed.

No Paper Trail

At one point, the owner explained that writing things down was immature. Mature people talked instead. The logic became clear soon enough. Spoken instructions leave no record.

He was later sent out to purchase specialized electrical outlets for one of the company’s plugs. The manufacturer sold them only in lots of one hundred. The business needed a few. This mismatch between ambition and scale was treated as his problem.

Everyone Thought This Was Normal

What made the situation harder to see clearly was that everyone in his social circle thought this treatment was normal.

Friends, peers, and people he talked to regularly saw nothing unusual in being hired for one job and quietly assigned several more. They saw nothing wrong with unpaid professional labor, unsafe work, or arbitrary authority. This included people he knew through his church, Forrest Glenn Baptist Church, who regarded this kind of employer behavior as acceptable, even admirable.

In that environment, being “trusted with more responsibility” was framed as a blessing. Questioning it was framed as immaturity, ingratitude, or a lack of character.

This was simply how things worked.

Extra Duties

He also mowed the company lawn.

That was where he lost three fingertips to a lawn mower.

He was still classified as a delivery driver. He was still being paid minimum wage.

The Myth of the 1970s

People like to say that in the 1970s you could walk into a place and get hired the same day. That part is true. You could ride the bus, pound the pavement, and have a job by afternoon.

It was also easy to be used, injured, and blamed before lunch.

The company no longer exists. This is not unusual. Small businesses with god complexes tend to resolve themselves eventually.

The era is often romanticized.

The jobs were plentiful.
The protections were not.

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