At the chip shop in Minnesota It was 1975 and I was able to study at the University of Minnesota for a year on a scholarship. However, the money was only enough for living expenses, so I had to earn some extra money to be able to afford small extras. The problem: the lack of a work permit. Working was only possible for me. A friend gave me the job at the Minnesota State Fair, the world’s largest agricultural trade fair. Selling hamburgers and French fries for 14 days sounded possible. We were a total of six students, all from different countries – all employed black people. We recognized the catch on the first day: it was pure exploitation. The stand was a gold mine, and each of us had to work 15 hours a day, from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. We got half an hour breaks twice a day. The hourly wage was $2.50 – not much even back then. Luckily the customers gave tips, the later in the evening the more. And when the accent sounded particularly cute in English, it was either made even more so or accompanied by suggestive sayings. Do they pay better today? A concession stand at the Minnesota State Fair in 2008Picture AllianceWhen I got home, I submerged myself in the bathtub every night to get rid of the smell of cooking grease until the next morning. The six of us all persevered and became a close-knit community over the 14 days. They were hard days, but I learned a lot about myself and what community means. And since then I have appreciated the value of work – no matter what it is.Kristine Hausch, Hamburg As a saddler on the paddle steamerI saved up for a “Berlin” motor scooter when I was 17 and was able to work as a busboy on the paddle steamer on the weekends and during the summer holidays Take the “Schmilka” up and down the Elbe between Riesa and Schmilka. It was an Ascension Day afternoon trip from Dresden to Pillnitz and not only the steamer but also the passengers swayed slightly. The ship was overloaded to the point of sinking, and only a few could reach the bar. So the bar had to go to the guest and I set out with my large tray on my shoulder, despite the crowd, to serve beer and apple juice to the man and woman bring to. This was a big balance challenge as I had to overcome the narrow stairs to the lower and upper decks. The loss of time in getting through had a particular impact on the loss of beer foam and earned me many a stale look. I therefore decided, as the need for juice and soda was huge, that I would only use these drinks to make my way through the crowd. It was already in the evening on the return journey when I put my tray of unsold drinks on the lower deck to help a colleague on the upper deck. Shortly afterwards, a guest came to us and excitedly reported that a man in a slurred voice said: “It’s not beer, it’s disgusting water and it has to go back into the Elbe”. It said and poured all the juices and lemonades out the window into the Elbe. Of course I was also warned not to leave unsold drinks anywhere. However, I continued to sell almost exclusively non-alcoholic drinks when the ship was full, which earned me the nickname “Säftel” from my colleagues.Professor Winfried Harzer, DresdenKeeping an overview on the construction siteIn order to improve my pocket money, I started as a 14-year-old at the end of the year In the 1970s, he decided to work for a local shell construction company during the school holidays. The foreman’s journeys to the construction site between Taunus and Spessart with a sky-blue, rocked-out 1300 VW Beetle with a full crate of beer under the front hood into the sunrises remain in our memories. One day a basement floor slab was to be cast on a construction site in Hesse. Curious as I waited for the concrete, I had the foreman explain the basement plan to me. I noticed that a sewage pipe in the excavation pit was missing from the work plan. Then the team got moving and the forgotten sewer pipe was installed in no time. As an intern, I still had to get breakfast for the bricklayers. The fact that this would later become my career as an architect in the construction industry was neither planned nor foreseen, but perhaps emerged subconsciously.Harald Wientgens, AschaffenburgCounting the penny in the payroll officeI had an experience many years ago that stays with me to this day. I worked as a summer job in the payroll office of a large sewing machine factory in Kaiserslautern. Every day we received pay packets with names and sums of earnings. In one box was all the money for all the pay packets that we then had to fill. If at the end there was even ONE penny left in the box, our job was to count all the pay packets again and put the missing penny in it. For me it has been my whole life: Every penny is worth giving to the right owner!Gisela Braun, Schwerin Delivering mail with a handcartThree times the summer holidays turned me into a postman. And in a very early riser who, for six weeks, scared up hundreds of rabbits on his half-hour bike path through the Rhine meadows between Bad Honnef and Königswinter. The service always began at half past four: unloading the yellow truck, emptying out the coarse jute sacks, distributing the mail to the districts, and finally sorting everything into streets and houses in “my” sorting cupboard. Don’t finish too quickly: A postal worker empties a mailbox in Potsdam in 1972.Picture AllianceFinally, we started on foot with a handcart, and that was quite fun for me, at least when the weather was nice – apart from the one yard with a big dog. In addition, my mother, through some connections, always managed to get me assigned to the smallest district. Which promptly earned me warnings from my civil servant colleagues: I would ruin their districts if I finished things too quickly!Ralph Hinterkeuser, MansfeldDrilling with the grease gunBetween the Bundeswehr and studying computer science, I had to do some work, according to my parents – sitting around for six months wasn’t an option. So I got into a company that manufactured grease guns through a temporary employment agency. I was put on the “oil machine”. Stand for eight hours, drill holes in metal lids. Slippery cooling oil flows over it (and over your hands). A completely different world that I had never seen as a 19-year-old who grew up in a sheltered environment. The first contact with real life. This world: early shift or late shift, so get up at 5 a.m. or come home at 11 p.m. Time clock, brought lunch, alcoholic colleague missing every third day, coffee from the machine. The old man who always shooed me away from the machine that was used to wash with nitrobenzene: “You’re still young, everything is already broken for me, it doesn’t matter anymore.” The view of the camp as the day progresses of the day’s production. I saw the wage as generous pocket money, the job as a stopover to “real” work. But over the six months it dawned on me that for the others it is a living wage that has to last until the end of the month. That was the reality. None of the prejudices about the “ordinary workers”, “the guest workers” or “the Turks” were true either. All lovely people like you and me.Alexander Woick, HeusenstammStamping bags in the seed shopThe story begins in 1950 as a student with a job in January/February and September/October in a seed shop. It was a key position in the company because the large seed packages that arrived from the wholesaler had to be bagged into individual orders. This required small seed bags (10 gram carrots, etc.), which I had to stamp: What do we need today? 50 × 10 gr. Savoy cabbage, 100 × 20 gr. Lettuce. Hourly wage 20 pfennigs, paid at the end of the season. The finished deliveries were temporarily stored in the seed dealer’s living room, and there I noticed a thick book on a chest of drawers. Title: The German colonies on January 1st, 1900. I was allowed to borrow the book; I had already heard about Togo and South West Africa at school, but never anything about Samoa. Where was that? With the help of a Westermann atlas, I found out that Samoa with its capital Apia was in the South Seas, around 18,000 kilometers from Germany. And what happened? I had the first “attack” of wanderlust, which is still a constant condition to this day. I have been to more than 80 countries in our beautiful world and was also in Samoa in 2020. Since then, only passports have been stamped.Gerd Luberichs, DüsseldorfIn search of the air bubblesTo finance a trip, I worked for an automotive supplier for a month. My job was to check the workmanship of rearview mirrors. To date, all rear-view mirror housings have been black on the outside. A novelty was to offer the color of the rearview mirror housing identical to the vehicle color. Blackberry was THE color of a popular vehicle series. I sat on a kind of bar stool at a high table. The rearview mirror housings were neatly lined up in front of me, the edges of which had to be felt with the index finger to check whether there were any air pockets in the paint. The poorer workmanship was placed in tubs to the left of the work table and the better workmanship to the right. To the astonishment of the foreman, I had generated too much scrap. So I received specific instructions as to what size of color bubble was tolerable. It was explained to me that when their new car is delivered, customers feel the edge of the rear-view mirror housing and report a defect when they feel bumps. I was extremely astonished and of course understanding. Over the course of the four weeks, I became a true bubble specialist in order to offer tactile Teutons a thousand percent correct motor vehicles.Andrea Pfitzer, DresdenAt 4.30 a.m. to the large construction siteAfter the school leaving examination in the summer of 1973 and until I entered basic military service in the German Bundeswehr, this was the case three months makes sense and can be bridged without gaps in the pension contribution period. At least that’s my father’s opinion. And so he got me a job as an unskilled worker at a large construction company in the central Baden area. There was a large industrial construction site not too far from where I lived, but I still had to get up around 4:30 a.m. to get there on time by bike.More on the topicIt was really hard work from morning to evening. “Japanese people”, as the oversized wheelbarrows were called, filled with concrete, drove around the area, scraped sound panels clean with special metal spatulas, and unsailed an endless amount of construction timber. How was I supposed to manage this long time? I counted the days from the first week. Then something happened that I had by no means expected. The magazine maker, master of all aids, tools and snack orderers, suddenly fell ill. A replacement was sought, but of course an experienced skilled worker was out of the question, and so the foreman wearing a red helmet on the construction site remembered me. From that point on, I had a dream job, and things got even better. The store clerk also had the task of announcing the start/end of work and break times using an acoustic signal. And it went like this: I hit a U-shaped iron hanging freely in front of the construction barracks with a heavy hammer. Every construction worker knew what the hour had come. Once, when I unconsciously extended the lunch break with a short nod to wake up, so that the hammer struck later, I was able to see friendly faces on all sides. So it happened that I was slightly late at the start of work, but gave acoustic signals at the end of work on time. As far as break times were concerned, my goal was to get at least five minutes out of every snack time.Jürgen Deck, KarlsruheBohner in the primary schoolAs a student, I once cleaned a primary school in Münster during the summer semester holidays. One of my tasks was to polish the entrance hall. At first the floor polisher had me completely under control: I couldn’t control it specifically, but instead ran after it all over the hall. It was like a rodeo. Thank God I didn’t hit the display cases in the middle of the hall. I thought that was funny. At some point, when I got into a routine with her, I wanted to have fun again, but unfortunately I couldn’t manage it anymore. Now I had the machine firmly under control.Cornelia Kreutzer, Bonn Getting beer at the chemical factoryAt 16, an otherwise extremely well-adjusted high school student sometimes doesn’t feel like studying at school, and even the annual hiking vacation with his parents doesn’t always arouse enthusiasm. That’s why the offer to do a three-week holiday job in our local chemical factory fell on fertile ground for me. My field of work was called corundum filling. As a youngster among the real workers, I felt like a baby and was treated accordingly nicely. It was never really tiring, we just had to put this corundum (whatever that is?) into big bags. The only thing that gave me variety was going to the company kiosk in the morning, where I was allowed to pick up the breakfast orders for my work colleagues every morning. I have a lasting memory of my oldest colleague, a very friendly, grandfatherly man who was about to retire never seen eating anything solid. Instead, every morning he received his six, sometimes seven bottles of export beer (half-liter bottles!), which he drank with great regularity every hour! Unthinkable today: drinking alcohol while working was not only tolerated, but also promoted, so to speak, through kiosk sales! The three weeks went well, in the afternoons we went swimming in the swimming pool on the way home, and at the end of the month I was happy about the sizable money coming into my account. Andreas Dietsche, Weilheim The fastest way to type in the office is in grocery stores, where I go When I graduated from college in 1973 and applied to fill shelves, I was offered 4 D-Marks an hour, which my brash mother found outrageous. She then completed my job search with a call to a company that made lapel pins, carnival medals, pins and buttons. I was supposed to start there the very next day and help in the office. I was assigned my task at the company: I was supposed to create an inventory and sensibly organize all sorts of papers and letters from the last 20 years, which were stored like cabbage and beetroot in files and cardboard boxes in an adjoining room. Hitting the keys: Women at work, here in a postal distribution system in Hagen 1978Picture Alliance A month was scheduled for this work. But I was finished after a week. The young boss of the company was satisfied and did not want to punish me for my speed and send me home after the work was done, but instead wanted to keep me busy for the agreed month and gave me other small office tasks. In addition, his two secretaries quickly found out that I wanted to study foreign languages. And since the boss had the habit of recording his English and French business letters on a dictaphone, and the two ladies didn’t always understand everything, they asked me, shoo, shoo, as soon as the said boss left the house, to type out the foreign correspondence for them, which usually used a lot of paper, because the damned electric typewriter had a mind of its own and liked to jump to the next line after every word. After all, the secretaries quickly became my friends.Gabriele Sausen
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