America's working man

What's on the worker's mind? The urgency of this question for socialists, for business executives, for politicians, for advertisers, and for trade unionists has produced a steady flow of journalistic reports, fictional portrayals, legislative investigations, scholarly studies, and accounts "by one who put on overalls to find out," from the 1830s to the present. David Halle, te author of America's Working Man: Work, Home, and Politics Among Blue-Collar Property Owners, and a British-born sociologist who now teaches at Fordham University, insists that the question cannot be answered today (if it ever could be) by examining working people in only one setting: on the job or in their kitchens or at a ball game or as they leave the voting booth. All aspects of their lives must be considered together. Moreover, he warns against envisaging "life at work as the sole source of 'real' consciousness," because this is offset by the media, consumerism, or other forms of imposing the "hegemony of ruling-class ideas." Marxists who have reasoned in that way, Halle writes "may have abandoned materialism too easily, or at least not applied it in as thorough a manner as they should have. Position at work is only one of the material spheres that influence ideology. The other spheres are life outside the workplace and life as a 'citizen' of a nation-state."

Halle lived among the workers at a New Jersey chemical plant for more than six years (1974-1981), not as a fellow worker but as an investigator conversing with them at their job stations, in taverns and union halls, in their homes, and in other places which the workers considered their own. The people he interviewed with evident sensitivity and warmth were workers of a special rule: well-paid white male employees of a highly automated enterprise in a region long dominated by heavy industry. They were not "typical" American workers (whatever that might be). They were, however, representative of that important segment of the country's workers who built, sustained, and were the primary beneficiaries of the new industrial unions of the 1930s and 1940s in all respects but two: the almost total absence of black employees where they work and the small size of the firm's payrol (fluctuating between 115 and 171 production workers). Both peculiarities represent important attributes of the chemical industry in the Northeast, which distinguish it from, say, the automobile, electrical, or metalurgical industries of the region.

The first noteworthy characteristic of these workers is the continuity of the social experience which they represent. Almost all of them were born in northern New Jersey, the sons of industrial workers, and most of their sons anticipate jobs similar to those of their fathers. In fact, the oil refining and chemicals establishments which were built on the eve of the First World War in the Elizabeth-Bayonne area to draw upon and export to global markets through the Hudson River's harbor complex were staffed from the start by Polish and Italian immigrants, whose descendents Halle interviewed in the same location. The IWW, the triumph of Polish nationalism in local politics during the 1920s, the corrupt and recationary Democratic Party urban machines which defined the New Deal in northern New Jersey, and the coming of some measure of civil liberties with the victories of the CIO, all lie in the past of these workers, even though their memory was never evoked by either Halle or the workers themselves. The latter are aware of an important break in that continuity: their presents lived in parts of Elizabeth which are now almost entirely black or Hispanic. Those areas, which house the highest proportion of blue collar workers of any in the region today, are viewed by Halle's interviewees not as "working-class neighborhoods" but as "ghettos."

The chemical workers dwell among white neighbors, in a variety of settings, but usually separated from blacks and Hispanics by some physical barrier (a river, railroad yards, or a highway). Some have moved to prewar suburbs, other reside in new housing tracts. In both places their automobiles are indispensable. Even in the old suburbs, the commuter lines run to office areas, not to factories. Homeownership has come with marriage since the 1940s: more than three fourths of these chemical workers own their homes. That proportion is matched by AFL-CIO members nationally, though its future is threatened by the current upsurge in the prices of housing and mortgage loans. Moreover, the average earnings of Halle's workers in 1983 ranged from a low of $24,167 for warehouse workers to a high of $30,589 for process workers, who put in 57-hour weeks to get that pay. Two thirds of the workers' wives also had paid employment. Most of them were clerical or sales workers, though 20 percent were teachers, nurses, or other professionals. Consequently, these couples could afford homes among neighbors of very diverse occupations. Income and race, not job status, define New Jersey's housing areas. For these workers, unlike their parents, there is no such thing as a "working-class neighborhood."

Young couples with small children, high mortgage and installment payments, and only one income pay a heavy price in toil and worry for their style of life. Among other things, the husbands hustle for overtime and devote much of their spare time to improving the house itself. Older couples have it better. Dining out, New York's theaters, travel, and even a second house for vacations or for rental property are familiar fare to them. Old and young alike, writes Halle, "see life outside work as an arena where they can escape the humiliation and constraints of the factory." There they are "middle class," sharing the activities and the neighborhood concerns of the many other Americans of comparable incomes and material possessions.

True, they remain aware that society has its hierarchy of wealth and power. Above them are the "rich" and below them the "inner-city poor." They are keenly sensitive that modern America rewards educational credentials which they lack, and described themselves as "factory stiffs" or "working slobs." Nevertheless, the material conditions of their lives away from the job lead them to identify with the media's portrayal of "middle-class America," and rule out that convergence of workplace and neighborhood loyalties which their grandparents had exhibited so clearly, for example, in the Bayonne oil workers' strike of 1915. Even ties of kinship have lost the economic imperatives which once made them so intense. Medical insurance, social security, and veterans' or FHA home loans largely freed those who entered the factories after 1950 from the material dependence on family and women's neighborhood ties, which their parents had found necessary for survival. Ethnicity has also shrunk to a residual role, aroused to strong identification only when confronted by insult. On the last point Halle is quite right in his strong rebuff to Michael Novak and other apostles of the "new ethnicity": theirs is a gospel preached by professionals and by recent immigrants to workers, who respond with little enthusiasm.

How different is life on the job! Incessant physical toil, monotonous repetion which makes tasks interesting only when something goes wrong, and relentless supervision and authority stamp the working hours with the imprint of "them and us." Halle is aware that the chemical works typifies what is often considered the factory of the future: automatic process, technical expertise, the watching of dials, and intense physical effort only episodically (when valves must be opened or a spill corrected). Perilous fumes are everywhere, and the workers are as well aware of what happens to their bodies as were the region's workers in white lead, whose lives Alice Hamilton labored to prolong seventy years ago. "Chemical workers don't live long," they all say.

Halle also shows clearly that there is considerable diversity among jobs in a modern factory, much the way William Kornblum did in his fine study of Chicago's steel workers, Blue Collar Community (1974). Less than half of this plant's blue collar employees are production workers. The others perform handling, storage, cleaning, or repair tasks. Those who directly operate the automated equipment endure interminable hours and shift work. Young married men on the mortgage treadmill often opt for these jobs to maximize their income. Older men bid for the warehouse and maintenance jobs. Turnover is very low, because most workers realize they could find no other job to pay them as much. Promotion is even rarer (at least above the level of immediate supervisor). Bidding according to seniority allows considerable shifting from one job to another, but there are no careers here. Laboratory and managerial jobs require educational credentials which the workers know they lack. They say that America is a land of opportunity, and the success of some of their own children in college and the professions proves it. But they themselves have "missed the boat."

Here are the roots of solidarity. Workers battle constantly for some control over their working days or nights by guarding their secrets and shortcuts, which provide them some free time for conversation, gambling, playing tricks on each other, sleeping, reading, or cooking (to the extent that the plant's odors will allow). Much as the methods associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor have altered work in twentieth-century America, they have clearly not accomplished that "mental revolution," uniting the thoughts and aspirations of bosses and workers, of which he dreamed. The converse is, however, that if workers had no "secrets," and did only what they were told, the factory would come to a grinding halt. Similar ambivalence is evident in the role of their union and the members' attitude toward it. Since the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers was first recognized by the company in 1944, it has been an important part of the workers' daily lives. Although they battle frequently among themselves, view their officers (local and international) with suspicion, and always suspect corruption in high places, the workers approach contract negotiations and grievances alike with remarkable unity and have struck seven times in the fifteen contract negotiations since 1952. Despite that solidarity, they also frequently express the feat that "the union will demand too much" and provoke the company to shut down operations.

It is the juxtoposition of the very different realities of work-place and home that leads Halle's respondents to refer to themselves as "American working men"--never as "working class." Their discourse articulates a hierarchical society in which they perform the hard, dangerous, productive tasks that generate the nation's wealth. Those above them in the social order seize the advantages of birth and education to hold down cushy, relatively useless jobs. Lawyers, doctors, and teachers especially are viewed with distrust, and certainly not identified as "working men." The poor are often disdainfully regarded as unwilling to work, and virtually always identified as blacks or Hispanics. One significant change in their vision of society was apparent to Halle over the years: a growing willingness to include white women within the ranks of "working people." The notion that blue collar jobs were for men only is eroding fast, Halle concluded, and many men are also developing a sense of common interest with women who earn wages in clerical and sales work.

Clearly "hegemonic ideas" play a large role in the shaping of this conception of American society. Though Halle does not make the point, his evidence refutes the self-deprecating view of many intelectuals that in America writers, educational institutions, and the media have little impact on the thinking of people around them. Nevertheless, the hegemonic vocabulary and conceptual framework of "middle-class America" has been used by these workers to fashion an image of the country consistent with their own experience, and one which firmly locates their own place in an exploitative social order.

Politics is also very much a part of that society, and a part about which the chemical workers often speak. Their admiration for American political institutions and contempt for the people who run them reflects a very old mixture thought. Halle found the chemical workers well informed about politicians' corruptions' occasionally debated. The workers' involvement in neighborhoods, schools, and homeownership led them to share with nonworker neighbors a desire to "stop the politicians [from] spending our money." Most feared a "spread of communism," and none wanted America." But their belief that business both steers the country into wars and then, out of its own selfish interests, hinders the efforts of the patriotic people to win victory, has historically had a much longer grip on American workers than Halle seems to realize.

Halle's discussion of politics is part of a larger analysis of public rituals and beliefs, which is often insightful but is also repetitious (from a desire to touch all bases) and unsystematic. To describe workers as both populist and nationalistic is accurate, but redundant. By a very narrow margin, a majority of these chemical workers voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980, but his economic policies and his treatment of PATCO quickly led them to regret that act. Fully a third of them never vote at all, and for roughly half of that group abstention is a matter of principle. The rest continue to vote, in part out of a desire to punish some despised incumbent and in part to express faith in the legitimacy of democracy as such. All of them harbor a profound hatred of dictatorship (reflecting in part, I suspect, some popular memory of New Jersey's industrial and political life before the coming of the CIO). Moreover, they believe that every once in a while what they do in the voting booth does have an impact on the world in which they live. Frankly, I consider both their fear of tyranny and their belief in the occasional utility of voting much wiser than most esoteric theories of democracy expounded in the academy.

What Halle has offered his readers is an insightful glimpse of one important segment of the American working class frozen in time. A comparison with Kornblum's study of steel workers in the south Chicago area reveals how different the neighborhood and workplace dynamics of black and Hispanic workers are from those of Halle's respondents, and how important those differences are for the future of American labor and American democracry. The reader of America's Working Man is haunted by the memory that all around the chemical plant described here is a large Hispanic community, almost all of whose adult male residents are "working men," and in nearby Elizabeth is a black community whose residents are far more likely to be members of the AFL-CIO than are the neighbors of the white chemical workers. The notion that the whites are "working men," while blacks and Hispanics are "intruders" on their world is reflected as often in writings on labor history as it is in the thinking of the chemical workers. Only consider how many books use the phrase "black strike breaker" as though it were one word. Or look at a popular book like M.B. Schnapper's American Labor: A Pictorial Social History (1972), and notice that every time someone black or Chinese appears among its splendid photographs the caption refers to some disruption of the labor movement. While we must recognize the pervasiveness of this hegemonic frame of mind, we must also be aware of the dangers of incorporating it into our analysis of American workers as a whole.

Halle's time-bound portrayal of the chemical workers can be extremely useful, but only if we place the very important group of workers it represents in relationship to the other men and women who constitute the American working class, and also in the context of where Halle's respondents themselves have come from and where they are heading. Two and a half million industrial jobs have been lost to America since 1981, and many of them were held by workers just like these. Reaganism represents not simply old-fashioned hostility to labor unions, but rather a systematic restructuring of the American (and global) labor market, shutting down expensive operations and scaling down higher wage levels across the economy as a whole. No worker residing in a suburban ranch house feels secure today. Just as the lives of Halle's chemical workers have been very different from those of their parents and grandparents in the same area, so will they prove to be most unlike those of their children. New material conditions are already putting the "opportunities and dangers," which Halle properly discovers in the world view of these workers, to the acid test.

NOTE

1. David Halle, America's Working Man: Work, Home, and Politics Among Blue-Collar Property Owners (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating.... The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionizing practice.

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