Similar experience; working factory labor jobs during the Summer, between college academic years, in the 60's.
The companies where I worked, were happy to hire college students as Summer help, in the hopes that we might return after graduation, to work in management, engineering, finance, etc.
The average factory workers may have been hard-working, decent people; but they certainly weren't anyone you would want playing plant-manager.
Even worse today is the political left's move from Communism toward Fascism. Our left-wing Prof's have become bureaucrats with the power to dictate how private companies can and cannot do business; total control without the government having to bother with "owning the means of production".
The same with the construction workers I knew in the late 1970s. The point of Professor Hanson's lecture was not lost on me at the time; he believed that such workers would control the means of production but only through the "guidance" of the Party agitators. In other words, people of his ilk who could not compete economically in the workplace would seize businesses through political means, and run them for themselves as political enterprises, not economic ones.
And that's why socialism/communism fails. A political business plan isn't profitable, because political agitators trying to run a business don't know what they are doing.