‘Unskilled’ labor is a misnomer: term disrespected by mainstream culture.

My grandson won the Lunch Bucket Award on his high school football team and his father’s reaction to it – and mine – surprised me.

The award is given to the player who makes the greatest contribution during practice leading up to the Friday night game. My grandson is a third-string running back and seldom gets into the game. Yet he was proud to carry the rusty lunch bucket to his classes for the week after the game. His father, my son, was dismissive, calling it “the tackling dummy award” and suggesting it should have been a humiliating signal to all his classmates that he was not first-team.

School has never come easy to my exuberant grandson, but he brings home good grades and is diligently prepping for his ACT test. He has some natural athletic ability, but his main assets are self-discipline and his willingness to work hard.

His job as a practice-squad running back is to learn and then run the offensive scheme of each week’s opponent to prepare the first-team defense for what they will face Friday night. It is a highly intellectual assignment learning, followed by running hard and being tackled by the hardest hitting players.

Sports iconography is full of working-class imagery about players who get little or no recognition. The lunch bucket is a powerful symbol of this just doing-your-part work ethic – especially when your part is dirty or distasteful.

Unskilled work almost always requires a wide variety of skills.

Most work that needs to be done in our society is like this. Even though what is often called “unskilled work” almost always requires a wide variety of skills, these jobs also require a daily kind of self-sacrifice that is very hard to do day in and day out – and that is actively disrespected in our mainstream culture with its celebration of the entrepreneurs and the innovators. Sports is just about the only place that celebrates the value of those who simply show up and do a good job.

My wife and I were raised in families that carried those lunch buckets to jobs. We were on our way to becoming thoroughly middle class by the time our son was our grandson’s age. Our son is determined to make sure his children have the education and skills they’ll need to avoid lunch-bucket jobs. He has a job at which he earns a very good living, but just as our fathers did, he hates the work itself. He wants better for his kids, and the Lunch Bucket Award challenges that aspiration.

I got emotional trying to congratulate my grandson by referencing my grandfather who walked out of a steel mill in 1916 “on his own” after losing both arms in an accident. I said something like, “That’s an award for character, buddy, and that will be with you long after you can’t juke and jive anymore.” He said, “Huh?” Followed by a polite, though possibly comprehending, “Thanks, Pap.”

Most of us need some lunch-bucket mentality for some or all of our lives. We’ll need the will to do what we have to do to earn a living and the integrity to do a good job even when we don’t feel like it and nobody is watching.

JACK METZGAR is a core member of the Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies.