In 1958, when he was nineteen, my father, Kevin O’Neill, got a job with Chicago Bridge & Iron, an American corporation active worldwide in the construction of industrial plants, at Whitegate refinery in Cork, which is my father’s hometown.[1] His subsequent career, mainly in hard-hat managerial …
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
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Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
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Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘One June dusk in 1999 I found myself walking across a rice field near Fishing Pond, in east Trinidad, in the company of a game warden and a self-described naturalist-at-large sometimes known as the Turtle Man.’
‘Finally! I thought. Now I get to work in a big factory. I was fifteen and a half years old. I was a child laborer.’
Xiao Hai on coming of age in the factories of Shenzhen, translated by Tony Hao.
‘The Eilat–Ashkelon pipeline went into operation in 1969, on the eve of the nationalisation of oil.’
Laleh Khalili on energy politics and the ‘secret’ pipeline transporting crude oil across southern Israel.
‘It became a kind of mission to find contemporaries of theirs that weren’t closing down, establishments that have continued to flourish, or at least endure.’
