It's Been A Hard Day's Night
On the Assembly Line by Virgil Suarez Cousin Irene worked in the cold of a warehouse basement in New Jersey, soldering the filaments to GE lightbulbs. The job required steady hands, without gloves, bare fingers for sensitivity, and her hands cramped up eventually, after six hours or so, but the workday lasted ten or twelve, in so much cold. This was her life for several years in America—back home, in Cuba, she'd been a chicken sexer, a botanist caring for orchids, a potato peeler, a cigar ring paster, a picker of papayas—all as a volunteer worker because she wanted to leave the country. So in Trenton, Union City, Elizabeth, at least she got paid for the work she did with her hands, though her choices continued to be blue-collar work, and she thanked god for her hands, her reliable hands, so necessary. She came to the United States through the Peter Pan Project as a teenager with the promise of a scholarship to an all-girl boarding school in Kentucky, which never materialized—she go...