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Work in progress
By Tina Griego
He's a fast-working 38-year-old roughneck on Ashby Drilling Rig No. 1 in a farmer's field near Platteville. Ronnie Robison and the crew have three days to reach the pay zone -- 8,000 feet down -- so it's 12-hour shifts with no down time. He eats on the run, takes breaks in a port-a-john and prays for good weather because nothing's worse than standing on the floor of the rig when hail is bouncing off your hard hat and the metal floor is slick with ice. But it's beautiful June day, and at 7 a.m., Rocket is squinting into the morning sun, slinging a heavy chain around a 30-foot pipe corkscrewing into the well. He throws chain 180 times a day -- if nothing breaks down. Two hours after he starts, every part of him not covered by clothing is splattered with grease and water. For this, he makes $11.50 an hour. Sixty miles away in a quiet golf course neighborhood in Arvada, Stephen Parker, 35, gets out of bed, puts on a pair of running shorts and a T-shirt and grabs a Diet Coke. Five minutes later, he is sitting at his desk. More than 40 e-mail messages flood his mailbox -- half of them resumes. Parker is looking for software analysts. His clients pay him $10,000 to $20,000 every time he finds one they hire, so he casts a wide net. It's quiet except for the click, click, click of the mouse. On his bookshelves sit Wealth without Risk, Strategic Internet Marketing and some old racquetball trophies he's hoping will inspire him to lose weight. Parker plans to retire in 10 years -- with $2 million in the bank.
This is how we work in Colorado. Steel-toe boots and silk ties. Telecommuters and nine-to-fivers. Part-time. Flex time. Overtime. Right now, 2.2 million people are working in Colorado, just about everyone who can. At the dawn of this century, most paid workers in this state were men with little formal education. Many labored on farms or ranches, in mines or factories. As we enter the next century, almost half of Colorado's workers are women, and women own almost half of all businesses. Workers in Colorado today are younger than their predecessors, better educated, more mobile. And though nearly half the state remains farms and ranches, few make their living on them. Almost 86 percent of all the jobs in the state are in Denver, Fort Collins, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Pueblo and Grand Junction. This is a state where cattle ranches have become hobby farms and mining towns have turned from silver to slot machines. Where the fastest-growing jobs are salespeople earning $8.54 an hour, executives averaging almost $30 and janitors making just under $7.50. Where roughnecks like Robison are an endangered species. Pervasive technology, elusive natural resources and the demand for college degrees and computer skills have condemned roustabouts, printers and reservations agents to the state's top 10 list of fastest disappearing jobs. "Who wants to be a meat cutter or a plumber anymore?" asks Doug Wax, director of operations for Lombardi Brothers Meat Packers in Denver. "Everyone wants to be a computer tech."
These are the days of brain equity, not sweat equity, says David Raduziner, director of real estate and the workplace for computer giant Sun Microsystems. "Colorado was valuable because there was gold in the mountains that could be mined," he says. "What we are mining now is intellectual capital."
"The great dreams that were realized by the people who came to build a better life through hard work, sweat and tears ... are almost all gone. We once again have wide-open prairie with its wild grasses and flowers and the lonesome howl of the coyote." -- Joyce Manweiler Attached to Sweetness: Chronicle of Sugar City, 1982
At the end of Sugar City's main street stand brick gates that open to a field littered with chunks of cement, rusting wire and abandoned railroad tracks. Two towering black tanks sit nearby, their insides caked with blackened molasses, hard and crunchy as peanut brittle. A wary rabbit bounds out of a rusting hole in the side of one tank, and Roy Downey, 85, shakes his head. "God, this used to be pretty," he says. "Yeah," says his neighbor, Helmuth "Moot" Geringer, 68. "Now, it's a whole bunch of nothing." Sugar City isn't a city. And there's no more sugar. In this town, once home of the nation's last independent sugar company, the only reminders of a past way of life are the crumbling molasses tanks and the callused hands of old men. Ninety-nine years ago, sugar beets built this town on Colorado's southeastern plains near Rocky Ford, and for almost 70 years, they helped pay the bills for the people who lived here. "It was hard work, but we didn't know any different," says Sugar City resident Don Markus, 68. "You either worked hard or you didn't have anything to eat. I would venture to say a lot of the young folk today don't know what it is to work hard and never will." Men, women and children began planting in the spring. It was done by hand, pressing the seeds into the ground, thinning the beets as they grew, hoeing the weeds. "When I was a kid, well, we were probably 10 or 11, we had to start working in the field," Markus says. "I would kneel in a row right beside my mother and my brother would take a row on the other side, and we'd start thinning the beets. She'd always finish before us and then have to help us." The owners of the National Sugar Manufacturing Co. recruited German-Russian immigrants to do much of the planting and harvesting. "They believed children were born to work," University of Colorado graduate student Dena Sabin Markoff wrote in her 1980 master's thesis. "They had no great respect for education that imparted anything more than the ability to read the Scriptures." The plant never stopped running, turning beets to sugar all day, every day from October to February. At one time, the company had a thousand people on its payroll, almost the entire adult population of Sugar City. Moot's wife, Marilou Geringer, remembers walking with her father on his night rounds. He was plant superintendent, and the family lived in privilege on company grounds in a company house with a big yard and shade trees. "I must have been about four or five, and oh, it was just such a thrill to walk through," she says. "All of the engines were running and all the men working processing the beets. It was loud, real loud. And it smelled of sugar beets. The sugar beet smell, that was a good smell." The air inside the factory was full of sugar dust that coated the steam pipes and ran in syrupy streaks down to the floor where it cooked and hardened and became burnt sugar candy that workers brought home to their kids. Once the beets had been drained of their sweetness, the pulp was tossed behind the mill for the cattle. Sometimes, the winter wind carried the stench of rotting pulp through the town, past the two hotels and the Sugar Bowl Cafe, past Ringles Hardware and Schmidt's Grocery and the Sugar City Gazette. "God, it was awful," remembers Downey, who was a master mechanic at the plant. "Once you got it on you, it just seemed to soak clear through your skin." In 1966, the factory closed and never reopened. The owners declared bankruptcy before they paid all the farmers for their beets. "And that," Moot Geringer says, "was that." Residents still argue over why the sugar factory closed. Bad luck. Bad management. Downey and Geringer figure it was imported cane sugar. The town withered. Many residents, including Markus, went to work for the Pueblo Ordnance Depot, 36 miles away. Today, Sugar City is 10 blocks long and seven blocks wide -- dirt roads, the tidy houses of retirees, a post office and not much else. Of the 20 sugar factories that once dotted the state, only two remain. At Great Western Sugar Co. in Fort Morgan, tractors plant 24 rows at a time. Machines yank the beets, top them, process them. The only manual laborers are weed-cutters, and even that job is expected to disappear soon. The company has six mills in the country that produce as much as 22 did earlier this century. "I don't think anyone is crying crocodile tears," says Emma Giese, who picked beets as a child and later worked in the factory lab, testing sugar content. "The work was hard. The modern way is better." But what Moot Geringer remembers is the salvage company tearing down the factory, brick by brick and hauling it down main street. "There were people whose whole life was here in the factory," he says. "When they started hauling pieces of it out, grown men went to the window and cried."
"The land was everything," says Duane Smith, a history professor at Fort Lewis College in Durango. "It was the doorway to wealth. Today most of us don't make money off the land anymore. ... It's a huge change." In 1900, one-third of Coloradans lived on a farm. Today less than two percent do. In 1920, almost one-third of the state's jobs were on a farm or a ranch. By 1997, only six percent were, and the average age of a Colorado farmer had crept up to 54. Once, one in five workers were miners. Today, less than one in 100 are. "Mining has become almost insignificant. That's the biggest change this century," says Bill Harris, a statistical analyst for the state Department of Labor Market Information. "This state was built on mining, and now it makes up less than 1 percent of the jobs, and most of those are executives working in Denver. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more jobs cleaning up the mines than there are mining jobs. "If all the mining jobs disappeared, no one would notice." The 2,200 coal miners left in the state look nothing like the grimy, sweat-stained figures of the past. They are heavy equipment operators, riding high off the ground in the air-conditioned cabs of giant trucks, diggers and dozers that have allowed mining companies to produce more coal with fewer people than ever before. Conoco Oil once had more than 4,000 workers in the state. Today it has 1,400 -- none in production. John Ashby, a drilling contractor, isn't running any of his six rigs now, and every day looks grimmer. "Sometimes I feel the only reason I'm here is to turn off the lights," Ashby says. Ronnie Robison has been working on drilling rigs for 15 years. "I don't think people really understand what we do," he says. "They don't understand our words: chainman and rathole and cathead and mousehole. When you say you're out digging a hole, they just can't picture it. I have a nine-year-old daughter who thinks I'm out here all day long with a shovel. She says, 'Daddy, you have a hard job."' The story is the same on Colorado's farms and ranches. Betty Feazel sold her herd of breeding cattle eight years ago because they cost more than they brought in. "Now, we're supporting the ranch instead of the ranch supporting us," she says. What's happening is inevitable, says Mike McCarthy, a history professor at Metropolitan State College in Denver. Half the state is plains and difficult to work. A third belongs to the federal government. Natural resources have become more difficult and expensive to get. Throw in environmentalism, McCarthy says, "and it's just a complete reversal of where we were when we started in the 1860s. "In the early years, the land was all you had, so sure, you extracted. Now, in 1999, when mining is all but dead and farming is hanging on by its fingernails, we have basically abandoned the land. Or maybe the land has abandoned us." It's not just jobs of the land that are disappearing. So are the traditional, well-paying, blue-collar jobs, says Bill Kendall, president of the Center for Business and Economic Forecasting in Denver. In 1996, the state counted about 450,000 blue-collar workers -- jobs in construction, maintenance, repair and production. While many make a good living, Kendall said, salaries for others, particularly in maintenance and food processing, have fallen. The demand for more education, including computer skills, is also putting the squeeze on blue-collar workers, he said. "It's harder today for someone with a high school education to make it like a steelworker or a coal miner did 50 years ago," Kendall says. "If you have an education, you do well. If you don't, you end up at the bottom."
They are lone eagles, people who work where they want. With a phone, a computer, a fax machine, they can do whatever they want. -- Tom Dunn, Chief staff economist, Colorado Legislative Council.
Just off the lobby of Sun Microsystems in Broomfield, past the smooth curve of the receptionist's desk, a purple door beckons. Above it, a sign reads "Main Street." Whisk a security card through the panel on the right and enter the workplace of the future. Thick, springy carpet in shades of purple and jade pave this Main Street. Sunlight from the many windows dapples the floor and warms a corner where a couch and coffee table invite employees to take a minute and chat. Here is the cafeteria where a giant stone fireplace dominates one end of the room and the choices run from roasted free-range chicken with garlic and herb gravy to Hawaiian curried pork and buffalo burgers. Here is the Flatirons coffee shop, little tables running along a bridge with walls of glass. To the west lie the Rocky Mountains, to the east the grassy grounds and neat walkways of the campus in the sprawling Interlocken Business Center. Every department has its own kitchen. Big, gleaming kitchens stocked with gourmet coffee and tea and where, on Wednesday mornings, the counters are stacked with doughnuts, bagels and fruit. Eat too many doughnuts? Head downstairs to a gym equipped with the latest cardiovascular equipment and a bank of color TVs. "Each department got to pick what they wanted, a Ping-Pong table, Foosball table or a pool table," explains Rustin Lucken, who troubleshoots computer problems for Sun's top customers. "I went for the Foosball table." At 28, Lucken is on his third career. He's worked for Sun for six months, one of about 27,000 people worldwide. Nearly 2,000 of them now work near the Boulder Turnpike on a campus that is part Alpine Lodge, part Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. When all the construction is done, it will hold another 2,200 workers earning an average $70,000 a year. The entire population of Sugar City could live in one sunny corner. Sun's decision in 1996 to come to Colorado and spend $200 million building a 135-acre campus on rolling hills where cows once grazed confirmed the state's emergence as a hothouse of high-tech. The employees here do not build computers -- they help keep them running. Many work in support, a job that requires them to be on the phone all day, talking to customers having trouble. It's a high-stress job with a strict hierarchy. On the lower rung, workers field phone calls from regular customers. A large tote board on the wall keeps track of how many calls are on hold and for how long. The next rung up, employees field calls from Sun's larger clients, big companies that spend big money. This is the triage unit, where workers attack problems, sending the difficult ones to software engineers upstairs, the next rung. This Sun division also focuses on education. It has ongoing classes for its customers and its employees. Unlike the Germans and Russians of Sugar City, Sun believes its employees can never have too much education. David Raduziner, Sun's workplace guru, says the goal is to build an environment that stimulates creativity and then harnesses it. No detail goes unnoticed. Great, winding stairways connect floor to floor because Sun research showed that workers were more likely to stop and chat on an open stairwell than in an elevator. The dress code is so casual that Prentiss Donohue, the public relations manager, jokes that when they see someone walking through the building wearing a tie, they know he's not a Sun employee. "Everybody here is different," he says. "It can be kind of chaotic and disturbing to some people. It takes awhile to adjust. We want people to be individualistic, to have choice. It's different than in the industrial age, where you were a cog in a machine. That was the old world. This is the new." And this is typical of the way work is changing in the state, says Tucker Hart Adams, one of Colorado's leading economists. "The nature of work has changed from hands to mind," she says. "There's much less physical labor, much less work outdoors. Work requires much more formal education than it used to. It takes a lot fewer hours of the day. ... More work takes place in places that have high concentrations of people. "The job mix is different and different in a healthy kind of way. A friend of mine spent a couple years on an assembly line. Talk about totally mind-numbing repetitive work. People don't have to do much of that in Colorado." The state now has the second highest concentration of high-tech workers in the nation -- 80 per 1,000 -- according to a study by the American Electronics Association. Only New Hampshire ranks higher. According to the Colorado Department of Labor, almost half the new jobs in the state during the next decade will be in services. That's everything from doctors and nurses to engineers and waitresses. Everyone from Bill Gates to the person who cleans his office, Kendall says. That's another big change this century, Adams says. "We don't produce as many things anymore. We produce ideas and services." If services and ideas can be provided and produced anywhere, then why not go someplace where housing is cheaper than Silicon Valley, someplace where the nearest ski slope is never mre than two hours away, some place like Colorado? The main reason Sun chose Colorado over California or Massachusetts or Texas is the quality of the work force. The state offers a pool of young, bright, high-tech workers. But a close second,o Raduziner says, is the Colorado lifestyle. "The place was viewed as a comfortable fit for the lifestyle many of our workers are accustomed to," he says. "We thought it would be easy to recruit workers to come here." It worked for Bill Platt, a Sun employee who left the Silicon Valley division to bring his family to the Rocky Mountains. "It's gonna be great," he says in a company video designed to woo workers here. "Colorado is a wonderful place to work. The weather is great, and it makes you feel good when you come here." Stephen Parker, the high-tech headhunter, left Texas precisely because he wanted "the Rocky Mountain high" life. The first year he moved here, he skied every resort in the state but two. Most of the time he communicates with clients and candidates by e-mail or phone or fax. He rarely has to leave his new home. He plays racquetball for a couple of hours every day, picks up his son from the baby sitter every afternoon. "That's why I moved to Colorado," Parker says. "Not to work my life away, but to have a life and also work." This may be the formula of the New West. Instead of the land creating the jobs that bring the people, the land brings the people who create the jobs. "You play on the land, you enjoy the land, but you don't work the land anymore," historian Tom Noel says. "Scenery is something you can keep selling."
What are the tradeoffs in this journey from the earth to cyberspace? Have we merely replaced one form of assembly line for another? Have we become a more mobile work force or a more shiftless one? Sugar City's Don Markus worked for the Pueblo Ordnance Depot for 36 years. His son, Kenneth, 41, a software analyst, has worked for a dozen companies in the past 15 years. Many of the companies were bought out by competitors. Others downsized. Today, he works for a computer consulting firm. "It's not one of those things where I do a lot of jumping around because I like jumping around," he says. "That's the way it worked out. It's like riding a wave. Once you're on the wave, you're committed. My father worries about me like any father, but I have to do what the industry dictates. I can't say it's good. I can't say it's bad. That's just the way it's turned out." Oleta Crain sees it another way. The 85-year-old Denver woman worked for 59 years, almost all of it for the federal government. "There's no loyalty to your employer anymore," she says. "It used to be that you would die for your company. Now, you'd just as soon see your company die." The work we do is "just so different," says Beth Pfalmer, director of the Work and Family Resource Center in Denver. "It used to be that work was building a thing," she says. "It had a start and a finish. I don't think we have the same measure of accomplishment. My work is never done. At the end of the day, I still have a list of things I need to do." As far as Bob McLavey, the state deputy commissioner of agriculture, is concerned, the change has not been all good. "Farm families were traditionally self-supportive," he says. "A family worked together to make a living off the land. Today, many of the spouses have to work off the farm to make ends meet. ... The thought of me coming home as a child and not having mother home is not positive. "We worked hard. We played hard. During wheat harvest, we would be in the field at the crack of dawn. It was not at all unusual to still be there at 11 p.m. My mom would bring food out to the field so we didn't have to stop. Frankly, sometimes I hoped for rain showers so we would have to quit. These are fond memories, and I think I'm better for it. I think we learned a work ethic I don't see often today." But Bill Riebsame, a University of Colorado professor of geography and editor of Atlas of the New West, cautions against waxing nostalgic about the "good ol' days." "Any thoughtful person can argue the good and bad of the West's economic transition," he says. "It is my strong view that the net is good. We have more meaningful employment for more Westerners than ever before, and as more mobile jobs develop, there is the chance for young people not to have to leave smaller towns and rural areas to get good work. "A job weeding sugar beets or mining coal is more mind-numbing than most jobs associated with the services/high-tech economy, and we should certainly not attach a false nostalgia to the loss of rote manual labor. Yes, the new economy will demand its share of house cleaners and yard mowers and ski-lift operators, and those jobs may not be any more fulfilling, but they are also no less fulfilling. In the richer economic ecology of the West, those jobs are not necessarily the end of the line for that worker." For all that has changed, much has remained the same. At the beginning of the century, the economy churned out thousands of service jobs. It still does. "The only difference is that the baker who baked for the miner is now baking for Sun Microsystems," Riebsame says. Or for the wealthy owner of a second home in Aspen. The maintenance of one such vacation home created 25 service jobs, including someone to maintain an expensive and fickle sound system, he says. Unchanged is the gap between those who have the resources and those who don't. Once that resource was gold or land. Today, it is knowledge, says David Larson, economist for the Colorado Department of Labor. "I think there is probably greater polarization between the two ends," he says. "There are those that have technological wherewithal and those who don't, and I think the gap between them has become more clear and harder to jump."
Here, she is a janitor. She cleans up after travelers in Concourse B of Denver International Airport, and she adds, with a blush, she's good at it. Yes, she says, sweeping floors and cleaning toilets isn't as prestigious as working as a medical technician. "I don't base my position on what I had before," she says. "Valor comes in confronting the task in front of you. I think if you act with respect and dignity in a job, it doesn't matter what you do."
It's 1:30 a.m. In Fort Morgan, Robison sleeps. He'll be up at 4 to make it to the rig by 6:30 for another 12 hours of throwing chain. In Arvada, Parker hunches over his computer, drinking another Diet Coke. A client needs a graphics software developer from the medical industry. Parker pokes around company Web sites, doing a little sleuthing. If he has to, he'll raid another company, tracking workers through the voice mail system, leaving blind messages. I'm looking for someone with just your skills, he'll say. Are you interested? Do you know someone who is? Light from Parker's office spills out into the dark neighborhood. Upstairs, his wife and son are asleep. He reaches for the mouse. Click. Click. Click.
July 25, 1999
Colorado Millennium 2000
is a yearlong project by the Denver
Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4
and the Colorado Historical Society |
