WINTER 2026
ISSUE 05

Reading workers’ inquiries, I often recognize the experience of myself or my friends. Socialists embedded in some workplace or another: defiant, triumphant, the day-to-day indignity redeemed by a belief in another world. It’s much less common to see a perspective like that of my dad’s: a man whose vision of redemption more closely resembles a nice car, a nice house, tropical vacations, and a paycheck you can brag about. An acceptance that life – and work – are shit. Shit that must be endured within the terms on offer, and compensation – or oblivion – sought wherever possible.

It’s a perspective, though, that I recognized in Eddy Johnson’s American Dream, a collection of poems by the little-known William O. Boggs. The titular Johnson, like Boggs – and my dad – was a sheet metal welder, burning wire through the onset of deindustrialization. The poems, published as a pamphlet by the Hiram Poetry Review in 1990, chart the semi-fictionalized Johnson’s entry into industry, experience on the shop floor, and inexorable journey into unemployment.

I discovered the poems by chance, first seeing them on a stranger’s Instagram stories a couple of years ago. I actually can’t remember which poems they shared (potentially “Payday” and “Burned,” reproduced below), but I immediately recognized my dad and messaged the stranger to find out where they came from. They gave me the name of the collection and the publisher, and I scoured the internet to see what I could find. There wasn’t a lot on Boggs. At some point he became a teacher at a Pennsylvanian public college, and I found a cache of mediocre student reviews. My dad, too, trained as a teacher at one point, seeking a meritocratic escape from the factory before sacking it off to get a job in petrochemicals.

During my search I became obsessed with my idea of Boggs, full of rampant projection. I imagined him slugging away in the factory, writing poems on the side. I wondered if he ever shared them with his colleagues, yearning for a better life – which he did eventually find, if in an unremarkable kind of way in an alienating college job. I found the publisher and emailed them to see if they still had any copies. I heard back after a few days. They told me they’d check the storeroom for copies and then a few days later told me they had one last copy remaining, and they’d send it to me for free.

This would be generous at the best of times, but more so because I live in the UK. I grew up in a shitty northern city, once a major maritime center that was battered through several rounds of deindustrialization to become known as the UK’s shittest town. My dad’s parents were a mill worker and an office clerk, raising him to understand that his brother was the “smart one” and he was the “practical one,” inculcating an inferiority complex that no wage, or car, or holiday has ever really dislodged. He got a welding apprenticeship at 16 and, by the time I was young, worked as a machine operator at an American multinational producing “paper-based consumer products,” such as napkins and “diapers.” I grew up knowing it as the nappy factory.

In the pamphlet, 43 short poems describe the labor process and personalities of Johnson’s own workplace. As a kid, I often wondered what life was like in a factory, this place that stole my dad from me. For most of my early childhood I remember him mainly by the deep growl of his snoring and an atmosphere of danger whenever I crept up the stairs, scared of the shouting if I woke him. He worked nights for a lot of my childhood, and Boggs’s poems reconstruct this nocturnal industrial world that I was so curious about. “First Day on the Job” describes “the quarter mile of smoke / Rising fifty feet to the ceiling,” “the din of heavy hammers on steel,” “the arc light of two hundred welders,” the dirty tired men “covered with grime / And splatter and burn holes.” Injuries are ubiquitous: broken limbs, retinal burns, splashes of molten steel. Old Whitey, in “Dead Man,” is found slumped over a plow frame, having “died on the job / He hated.”

The welders, on piecework, hate their jobs and don’t give a shit about doing them well. They drink and smoke weed, hiding bottles of Jim Beam and Wild Turkey in parts lockers, air conditioning ducts, and hoisted on ropes up into the rafters, cloaked by the darkness and smoke. In “Slugging Gaps” (reproduced below), Johnson knowingly welds defective seals on the trains to boost up his piece rate, reasoning that “I don’t ride a slow freight train / Across China and don’t think I will.” “[P]iecework / And craftsmanship / Are the oil and water / Of this job,” he explains (“Give Me Some Amps, Baby”).

This is another stark difference from most socialist inquiries into work: there’s absolutely nothing romantic or idealistic about Johnson’s analysis. The poems are riddled with racial tropes and slurs (“g**ks” being the worst); the workers are as likely to injure each other as the managers; and women are demeaned throughout. When the workers do hit back against bullying supervisors and engineers, it takes the form of explosive individual violence: one is ploughed down by a jitney (“Knockdown”), another narrowly escapes a thrown sledgehammer (“Sledgehammer”), and in the most extreme case, an abusive ex-Marine foreman has half a gallon of paint thinner poured over him and ignited in a toilet cubicle (“Foreman Elmer”).

The prevailing atmosphere is one of short-term self-interest. When times are good and orders expanding, Johnson and his friends drink together, go hunting, and watch each others’ backs (“Brotherhood,” “Quality Control,” “Deer Hunt”), but when the business cycle contracts, suspicion and selfishness reign (“Do Your Job”). As automation (“It’s Them Robots”) and international competition (“Timeclock”) intensify, the layoffs become more and more frequent, and the quality of work deteriorates rapidly as the union seniority system bumps people out of work (“Bumping”). Johnson recognizes the self-defeating character of their short-term decisions (“7-12’s”) but fatalistically embraces it, seeing no other viable option. The corrupt union steward is the subject of multiple barbs (“Union Steward,” “7-12’s,” “Layoff”), and they’ve built no meaningful workplace organization with which to do anything about it.

It leads Johnson to a kind of nihilism, to identify his own mind as the problem: “I think I’m gonna buy me / A quart of vodka and / [. . .] trash my useless / Brain til Monday comes” (“Payday”); or more succinctly, “You’ve got to be stupid to survive this shit” (“Rewards of Stupidity”). In “Bottle of Beer,” Johnson and his friends finish a nightshift by drinking together, going “upstairs to the fixture room / Where we can sit in the cool / Darkness and wonder how we / Managed to screw up our lives / This bad.”

I have friends who’re overwhelmed by feelings of empathy and sadness when they see old people eating in public alone. For me, my equivalent is this: the thought of millions and millions of people trashing their “useless” brains at home on their own until Monday comes. The memory of my dad drinking a bottle of wine each night in front of his computer, or two on the weekend, and then doing the same myself as I reached adulthood. Drinking not for pleasure and connection with the world, but for oblivion, when no other way out is apparent. And it’s that feeling of resignation and the blocked paths to a better life, at the heart of Boggs’s poems and my dad’s whole worldview, that above all else, as socialists, we have to overcome.