follow up comment to my previous one about working in a cabinet factory - when I was a kid, there were other places to work that had shift work and worked wood. Most of them just made plain factory furniture, which is probably easier than making fancy furniture, but competitive. If both household members worked at the same factory, it was possible to have a plain house and live spartan, but think of wages as being in the $15 an hour or 11 pounds range currently.
The cabinet factory where I worked closed, and now there's fewer people on the same site making metal commercial cabinetry.
The typical wage when I worked there in the late 1990s was about $8.80 an hour for an assembler, with benefits. Take home pay after health care for folks seemed to be about $300 a week. There were no new cars in the parking lot except young people who were dippy and spending all of their money and then some. Most folks were pretty pleasant, but the work was eye-wateringly boring. On a given day, I may put hinges in many hundreds of doors or end up on one of the assembly lines. A line with a dozen people could assemble and pack 70 cabinets an hour more or less (the parts arrived in order so four people running two clamps could put together the box and then down the line the cabinet went. The people running the clamps used staples and hot melt - their arms looked terrible from drips of hot melt over the years. Not something that happened to them every day, but if a line of melt landed on your forearm, it burned deep enough to open into a wound. They didn't have summer help work the clamps (thankfully) because if the box isn't put together right, there's no way you can just send the cabinet out.
After that, drawer guides, hardware, drawers and packing. The line always went a step faster than you could go comfortably - if you shut the line down, the whole line rate dropped and the bonus that I described wasn't per shift or per factory, it was per line and shift. Most of the people had no clue how the bonus worked and if you asked them separate questions, they didn't put it together. They just knew their check might be 10 -20 cents an hour less in a bad week or maybe 25, and you became public enemy number one, so you did a lot of jogging to get things to and from the line. The first two weeks, you dragged.
There were sanding and finishing rooms - the people in them looked like zombies, but to do nothing but wipe stain from doors coming by on hooks for 8-10 hours a day, you'd have to be a zombie.
In general, other than a couple of rednecks who were out to make people miserable and tell everyone how tough they were, though, the folks working there were fantastic. Nothing pretentious, all friendly with each other, no ego games. But they did not live high on the hog.
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One of the other factories the next town over I only knew about because a lady who was a former student of my mother's worked with me at a fast food restaurant in the evenings. She made $5 an hour at the fast food restaurant. She did nothing but hand sand *all day* at the furniture factory and I don't know what she made, but it was less than what folks made at the cabinet factory. She had to work at the fast food restaurant to make ends meet.
There are a lot of stories about how someone could have a steel mill or car factory job in the US and live well, but the reality is if those were one income families even with those jobs (with benefits), there wasn't a whole lot of extra anything to go around and the mill jobs were dangerous and life shortening.
We all started somewhere.
