The Blue Collar Worker's Lowdown Blues
THE competing power groups that make up the American system have never operated in complete harmony. They have moved ahead according to the clout--electoral, financial and sometimes moral--that they could muster. During the 1960s, the blacks, the poor and the young spoke up and pushed forward. The blue collar workers, who sweated in the mines and factories, built the roads and drove the halftracks, seemed to accept stoically the role of providers and members of the Silent Majority. No longer. Today they are making themselves heard as they have not done since the turbulent 1930s. Their voices are loud, angry and aggressive.
Blue collar power has become a mighty and unpredictable political force that was bound to swing many House and Senate races this week and will heavily influence the decisions of the 92nd Congress. Throughout the campaign, both parties assiduously courted the blue collar vote, and many candidates even donned that new symbol of rock-ribbed Americanism, the hard hat. Vice President Spiro Agnew appealed to the workers' fears of crime, drugs and bombings, and to their suspicion of intellectuals. After President Nixon had A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany in for a cozy chat "to discuss foreign policy," Republicans made good use of pictures of the meeting around workingmen's neighborhoods. (Feeling that he had been used, Meany later roasted the Republicans in radio speeches.) On the other side, the Democrats and their old friends in the union leadership played up the pocketbook issues of unemployment and inflation.
The blue collar workers have been wooed not only by the political parties but also by the New Left. For Election
Day this week, the Students for a Democratic Society planned a march on General Motors' Detroit headquarters in clenched-fist support of the auto workers, who are now in the eighth week of a bitter strike against G.M. Reviving the faded dream of a Socialist alliance with labor, the S.D.S. hoped to draw 10,000 students and strikers to the demonstration. Considering the way that workers generally feel about the longhairs and left-wingers, however, the students seemed to be more in danger of violence than the company.
While they are being hotly courted on all sides, blue collar workers are also being severely criticized by traditional friends and opponents alike. Political liberals, who once considered workingmen their most reliable allies, now often see them--rather simplistically--as supporters of racism and repression. Black leaders condemn many unions for systematically excluding Negroes. Many other Americans think of labor as fat, lazy and arrogant, a condition exemplified in their minds by the $10-an-hour auto mechanic, the $15-an-hour plumber and the $18,000-a-year carpenter.
Business leaders complain that the workingman's extravagant wage demands are the real cause of inflation. Unless labor costs can be held down and productivity pushed up, they argue, the basic nature of the economy will be changed; economic growth, profits, exports and the global power of the dollar will dwindle. General Electric Chairman Fred Borch blames the nation's economic ills on "an unbalanced concentration of power in the hands of organized labor." One top industrialist compares the wage raises in the building trades, which have been running at 12% this year, to "a kid in class with a case of measles. You've got to isolate it before they all catch it." Inspired in part by the construction workers' successful militancy, unions in general have wrung out wage-and-benefit increases averaging 10% in major contract settlements so far this year.
The Causes of Anger
From this odd combination of public criticism and political courtship, blue collar workers are gaining a renewed sense of identity, of collective power and class that used to be called solidarity. It often takes a negative form, because workers are the Americans most affected by rapid social disruption and technological change--and least prepared for it. The workingman is angered and bewildered by what he sees happening in the nation. As psychologists and social researchers have confirmed, he believes in God and country--if not necessarily in equality for all and the right of dissent. He is convinced of the virtues of hard work, the necessity of saving and a steady, ordered way of life. He is proud of paying his own way and standing on his own feet. He is respectful toward authority but not subservient, and he still has faith in the future, even though that faith has diminished somewhat of late.
Now he finds his values challenged on every side. He sees young people --sometimes his own children--turning on with drugs or even turning to revolution (or what he considers revolution). His neighborhoods, formerly bastions of familiar order, are often being transformed by the upheaval in the cities. Says Eugene Schafer, a hardhat ironworker and Democratic candidate for the state assembly from Brooklyn: "I think that I'm a forgotten American because my community is falling apart. The streets are caving in, the sanitation's lousy, the sewer system stinks, industry's gone out of the community, welfare's on the rise."
Cruel Illusions
As wrenching change has overtaken the blue collar worker's neighborhood and home, technology has changed his life on the job--for the worse. The celebrated productivity gains of the 1950s were largely accomplished by the expansion of automation and by breaking down jobs into smaller and smaller functions, enabling the assembly lines to move faster. A great many workers have lost any sense of control over what they are doing and often have to move so fast and steadily on assembly lines or at piecework that there is hardly time even to go to the toilet. The image of Charlie Chaplin, in Modern Times, leaving a plant and turning and twisting an invisible wrench all the way home is less funny than ever. "Do you know what I do?" asks a striker outside G.M.'s assembly plant at Tarrytown, N.Y. "I fix seven bolts. Seven bolts! Day in and day out, the same seven bolts. What do I think about? Raquel Welch."
Often lacking the education to seek better jobs or the money to flee to suburbia, blue collar workers live with nagging fears of muggings, of illness or layoffs at work, and of automation. According to a recent survey by the University of Michigan, one-half of all industrial workers worry continually about their job security, and one-quarter are concerned about their safety; 14,000 were killed in on-the-job accidents last year, more than the number of U.S. servicemen who died in Viet Nam in 1969. Fully 28% have no medical coverage, 38% no life insurance and 39% no pension beyond Social Security.
The affluent society and a rising standard of living are cruel illusions to most blue collar workers. They are incensed by the charge that they have caused inflation; in fact, they are its chief victims. The average weekly wage of factory hands and clerks rose from $95 five years ago to $121 in September. But in real purchasing power, adjusted for inflation, it has actually declined (see chart page 72). Over the last decade, according to the Labor Department, the financial needs of a family with growing children have risen by 61%. In the same years, the average earnings of skilled workers have increased only 41%, compared with 64% for blacks as a group and 61% for executives. "The blue collar worker has seen the smart guy and the poor guy get theirs and has been wondering what was happening to him," says Economist Robert Nathan. "Now he is beginning to catch on." He has learned that those who push and speak up get attention and results.
Blue collar anger has burst out this year in the worst epidemic of strikes since just after World War II, and in the form of hardhat riots in New York City, St. Louis and elsewhere. This year postal employees have gone on strike for the first time in history, city workers have stomped off the job in Cincinnati, and tugboat crewmen and gravediggers have struck in New York. Municipal employees in San Francisco and Atlanta, rubber workers in Akron, and teamsters across the country--all have walked out. In this year's first nine months, the U.S. lost 41.5 million man-days through strikes, up 32% from the equivalent period last year.
The main ingredients of blue collar anger have combined and erupted in the crucible of Detroit. Determined to catch up with inflation, 400,000 G.M. workers are on strike. They demand that their hourly wages, which now average $4.05, be raised by 61.5-c- in the first year of a three-year contract (26-c- of it in deferred cost-of-living allowances), and they want additional increases if strong inflation continues. They are also in revolt against the numbing prospect of spending all their years until old age on the assembly lines. The central issue is a demand for "30 and out": retirement at any age after 30 years of service, on a pension of $500 a month. The walkout is costing the economy $1 billion a week and so far has led to layoffs of more than 50,000 other workers in industries that supply or service G.M.
General Motors, which last week reported its alltime high loss of $77 million in the third quarter and could lose up to $1 billion in this quarter, sees its role in the strike as a Horatio at the bridge, holding fast against the onslaught of inflationary demands. The company has offered the men "58 and out," or retirement on a $500-a-month pension at age 58. G.M. argues that it cannot afford to lose too many of its most experienced hands. Fully 42,000 workers have 25 years or more of service. The public interest and the needs of the economy and of society, argues management, require that everyone work until close to the accepted retirement age of 60 to 65.
The Ultimate Weapon
If the G.M. stoppage continues into December, the entire economy could show a decline for the year's fourth quarter. In the event that the strike drags on beyond Christmas, that would signal an impasse so acute that the workers would probably stay out until February. But last week the company and the union went into what they called "intensive" bargaining and announced a news blackout--a traditional hint that rapid progress is being made. Any settlement is bound to exceed General Motors' final pre-strike offer of a 9.8% increase for the first year of a three-year contract, and will be inflationary. It will also set a target for other unions to match or exceed. Next year the steel industry will open wage talks, and a strike is widely expected when contracts expire Aug. 1.
Strikes may seem to be the last thing that the U.S. needs when it is struggling to regain price stability and social peace, but it was by wielding that blunt weapon that labor won its largest gains in the past. It is ironic that blue collar workers are suspicious of today's social disruptions; labor often created the disturbances of yesteryear, and they helped the workingman to come a long way from the bad old days. As late as 1900, seven-year-old boys worked in the mines of Pennsylvania, and girls of six helped run the mills of the South. The regular work week ran as high as 84 hours, the pay from $1 to $3 a week. Each time the workers tried to organize, they earned only public obloquy and a growing list of martyrs. The right to organize was not firmly and finally established until the 1930s, when more than 100 working men and women were killed by police or by company thugs during strikes and hunger marches. The decades since then have been almost unnaturally peaceful. Militancy was submerged during World War II and again during the Korean War. Then, in the late '50s and '60s, wages jumped in reward for fast-rising productivity.
Blue collar workers are more militant today largely because their aspirations have been raised while their real income remains static. "In a sense, businessmen bring labor militance on themselves by advertising and raising prices," says Clark Kerr, former chancellor of the University of California and a top labor expert. "They constantly raise the level of expectations of their own workers." Blue collar workers are also profoundly influenced by what Leonard Woodcock, president of the United Auto Workers, calls "the second life that everyone leads through TV." The worker and his wife constantly see advertised on television the products that he makes, but they often find it hard to buy them. TV programs also portray an alien world. "In the land of the media, whether it is movies, magazines or TV," complains Floyd Smith, president of the International Association of Machinists, "Daddy always goes to the office, not to the factory." And he brings home plenty of money without appearing to sweat hard for it.
Not Making It
The real-life world of the blue collar worker is one of not quite making it, and a keen sense of diminished status. Some of it is portrayed, in crude and exaggerated form, in the much-acclaimed movie Joe. Certainly not all workers are as bigoted as Joe Curran, though his counterpart can be found on any picket line or at the wheel of many a New York City taxi. But his pleasures are real enough--whisky, the bowling alley, a gun collection--and so are his yearnings for a taste of life on the other side of the middle-class line. The blue collar worker wants to take a vacation in some far-off place, but usually cannot. He likes to go out to a restaurant, but seldom does. He spends most of his free time at home, tries to avoid thinking about the job when he is away from it and tends to have a close-knit family life, raising his children according to the strict, old rules. Assistant Labor Secretary Jerome Rosow points out that "the American workingman has lost relative class status with the growth of higher education. All blue collar workers, skilled or not, have been denigrated so badly, so harshly, that their jobs have become a last resort instead of decent, respected careers. Fathers hesitate--and even apologize--for their occupation instead of holding it up as an aspiration for their own sons."
Often the sons have no choice but to follow their fathers into the hated plant. William West, a crane operator in a coil plant at Braddock, Pa., for example, brings home $100 a week, and he sees no way that he can finance a college education for his eight-year-old son. West asks: "What kind of a future does my kid have when you can't even get a job with a high school education?" In some blue collar neighborhoods, the high school dropout rate reaches 30%--the continuation of a cycle that locks the sons into the same working class as their fathers.
Rumbles from the Young
The average age of workers in auto plants has been declining, and often on the less desirable night shifts it is close to 20. The young workers are of the same generation as the students who have turned the universities into battlegrounds. Like college students, they are feisty, ebullient and unwilling to put up with things as they are. As union members, they are an unsettling force, pushing labor leaders to heighten their demands for fear of being voted out of their own jobs. In many instances, young unionists have ousted the old leadership. This year rank-and-file members have rejected a record one out of twelve contracts negotiated by their embarrassed and harassed leaders. In San Francisco last month, the ironworkers won a 30% increase in a one-year contract, a raise of $2.01 an hour. Even so, says their leader Jewel Drake, 56, "the younger leadership is not satisfied. I don't understand what they really want, what it would take to satisfy them."
Money alone will not do it. The young workers are revolting against the job itself, or at least the way it is organized. They reject the principle enunciated in 1922 by Henry Ford I: "The average worker wants a job in which he does not have to put much physical effort. Above all, he wants a job in which he does not have to think." The job that has no meaning must often be performed in factories that seem bereft of human feeling. Auto plants are often old, dirty and so noisy that conversation is impossible. "That's why so many young people just go from shop to shop," says Eugene Brook, director of labor education at Detroit's Wayne State University. "They can't believe that it's this bad. A young guy will start working at Dodge, and after a week he'll be so shocked at how dull the job is and how unpleasant the working conditions are that he'll figure it has to be better somewhere else. So he goes to G.M. for three days, and then to Ford--and then he sees it's all the same. The young guy asks: 'Is this all there is to America?' They're not buying the myth any more."
The worker is also blamed by management for product defects, and there is much truth to the bosses' charge that craftsmanship is a thing of the past on the assembly line. Sabotage is not uncommon; upholstery is slashed or a tool welded inside a fender compartment to cause eternal rattles. But there is also some justice in the workers' countercharge that they are not given time to do their jobs properly. Says Raymond Galore, 51, president of U.A.W. Local 664 in Tarrytown, N.Y.: "Sure, we read how the workingman today has ho pride in his work, and it's true. But what you don't read is how the company has broken down the work into smaller and smaller units, so that no man can feel pride in what he's doing. If they'd just let us build a car occasionally. Just one." Manhattan Psychologist Harold Greenwald sees union grievances--frequently a long list of niggling complaints--as representing "a cry for recognition that the complainer is a man and not a machine."
Revolt of the Counter Culture
The worker is also trapped between the technology of the past and of the future. In return for hard and automaton-like work on the assembly lines, the technology of the past promised to provide leisure and plenty for all--and has not fully delivered. Future technology still holds out that promise, at a cost of making many blue collar workers obsolete by replacing them with machines. Thus the worker has paid one high price for yesterday's technology and will have to pay another for tomorrow's; meanwhile, he has received a short measure of the promised benefits. Under those circumstances, he can hardly be blamed for wanting out of the trap.
The New Left and a handful of scholars, led by Theodore Roszak, author of The Making of a Counter Culture, believe that technology in America has been enshrined as an end, rather than as a means to a better life. They challenge the proposition that society must be organized around the requirements of mass production and technology --and so do the militant young workers. Machines, they say, should work, and people should live; their own personalities are simply more important. If a machine will soon take over their jobs, then there is no reason to dedicate their lives to a dead end. The auto companies and other manufacturers have already designed machines to handle many assembly-line tasks--welding, stamping, hauling and lifting. But for now it is still cheaper to rent people than to buy machines.
The inherent contradiction is that the American worker's dream remains what it always has been: in modern terms, a house in the suburbs and two cars in the breezeway. Yet he is no longer willing to pay the traditional price of increased productivity--or, perhaps more accurately, unable to endure any more speedups. His contradictory yearnings were expressed by one striking G.M. worker in Tarrytown: "What I hope is, by the time my kids grow up, this plant will be automated. They'll sit here in business suits, looking at a panel of instruments, and they will be called technicians or technologists and get twice as much as I do for half the work."
Younger workers want at least part of the dream now. and they have the power to demand it. Unions have often been paid off at the expense of the consumer. The large unions in industries like trucking or construction have far more strength than the small, independent employers, who simply bow to wage demands, accept restrictive labor practices and pass on the increased costs to their customers. But many other industries--notably autos, steel and chemicals--run grave risks of losing markets when they kick prices up. Foreign automakers already build 15% of the cars that Americans buy. G.M.'s new Vega subcompact, which was designed to compete against the Volkswagen, had to be priced $211 higher than the Beetle. Other companies, similarly pressed, are shifting operations overseas for cheaper labor. The production of most typewriters, sewing machines and radios has been moved abroad.
Ticking Time Bomb
The unions are thus in a series of binds. Pressed by their members, they can demand higher wages and get them, but often only at the expense of forcing employers to shift more of the work to other countries or to machines. Even if the unions could force employers to pay higher wages out of profits, that would lead to a cutback in capital investment, postponing technological innovation and labor's share of its benefits.
Labor's white-haired leadership just does not understand what the younger members are saying. The average age of the A.F.L.-C.l.O. executive council is 63, which makes the council one of the oldest governing bodies in the world, in roughly the same league as the Vatican Curia and the Chinese Politburo. Seemingly innocent of new ideas, labor's gerontocracy has lost the loyalty of the young and the idealistic, which it had held in the time when labor led the battle for reform. Today, instead of seeking to change and improve the system, the union leadership has become a part of it. Textile-union leaders, for example, accompany mill owners to Congress to plead for higher tariffs.
The isolation of labor leaders from many of their own members is a ticking time bomb. "The '70s will be far more turbulent than the '60s," predicts Columbia Economist Eli Ginzberg, chairman of the National Manpower Committee. A major source of turbulence will be the civil service employees' rising drive for organization. There will be more disruptive strikes by teachers, police, garbage collectors, hospital workers and other public employees. Unless the unions form a coalition with minority groups like the blacks, who have their own insistent demands on squeezed municipal and federal budgets, those two forces are likely to conflict even more sharply.
The Nixon Administration wants to win more of the blue collar workers' support by doing more for them, yet the
Government is limited in what it can do. It cannot give them subsidies or generous tax relief because the sheer numbers of people involved would make the cost out of sight. At the President's order, Administration leaders are closely studying a much-discussed memo written by Assistant Secretary Rosow, who has a cornucopia of ideas. All of them fall far short of labor youth's demands but meet specific needs of their elders. The Administration, for instance, is considering legislation for the Government to regulate corporate pension plans more closely and require that all of them be vested, becoming the workers' property after ten years on the job. Partly because workers often quit their jobs before they qualify for pensions--and also because many plans are badly funded and ill-managed--half of the 30 million employees covered by them now will never draw a penny in benefits.
Other ideas must wait for the day that the budget squeeze is eased. Then the blue collar worker's new-found power will assure him at least a place in line for federal aid. One high priority: child-care centers (in half of the blue collar families, wives also hold jobs). More federal aid to community colleges would help working-class children rise beyond high school. Revenue sharing with the states could ease regressive local property taxes that often fall most heavily on blue collar families. In addition, the Government might update disability insurance laws. What Washington cannot do is give the workingman a renewed sense of pride in his job.
Much of the blue collar worker's lost sense of self could be restored by evidence that his employer cares about him, if only in little ways. Do the managers eat in the same cafeterias as the men, share the same parking lots? Are management's decisions clearly--not condescendingly--explained? Does the company offer small, appreciated extras, like Ford Motor's provision of a tow truck with jumper cables to help any worker who cannot start his car on winter nights? Companies are trying to find more and more incentives for executives, and Rosow argues that they could extend some of those ideas, like profit-sharing plans, to the men down in the plants. Health and safety conditions, he adds, "require dramatic improvements" --and higher federal standards.
Companies that neglect to consider the blue collar workers' worries and dissatisfactions pay a hidden price in low production, goofing off, absenteeism, high job turnover and union grievances. By contrast, management's reward for concerning itself more deeply and more knowledgeably about the blue collar worker's cares has been an increase in productivity. That, in turn, is the key to raising labor's living standards and meeting the demands for more leisure. Since World War II, U.S. productivity has risen an average of about 3.3% annually, but for the whole period from the end of 1967 to early this year it increased less than 2%. Lately, output per man-hour has rebounded, but only as a result of layoffs and the shutting down of older machines. (U.S. plants are operating at only 76% of capacity, the lowest rate in almost a decade.)
Managers have discovered that at least in certain jobs, they can push productivity up by applying what labor economists call "participative management" and "job enrichment." The ideas are so new that only a handful of companies have tried them. One of the largest is Polaroid, where workers participate in planning changes in their job routines and help decide what new machinery to buy. They can also take company-sponsored courses ranging from English to engineering, either after hours or on company time, and they are encouraged to apply for higher positions. Polaroid officers say that the program has certainly enriched morale.
The notion of letting workers organize their jobs themselves instead of by the book might seem self-evident, since they know their own tasks better than anyone else does. It is most easily adopted in smaller companies, and it has been shown to improve production, quality and profits. Donnelly Mirrors of Holland, Mich., removed all its time clocks, put everyone on salary, and turned shop-floor decisions over to its employees. The company, which had sales of $14 million last year, has raised its profits roughly 20% annually in recent years and has lowered prices 25% since 1952. It has also given its employees a yearly bonus. When workers in Donnelly's largest department asked for raises last May, management suggested that the money would have to be saved; within three weeks the employees found ways to save the company more than twice as much, chiefly by cutting purchasing and materials costs and altering production procedures to trim waste.
About 40 U.S. companies have started a four-day week of nine-and ten-hour days; they report that productivity is up and absenteeism and turnover are down. In Germany, Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm has achieved much the same results by allowing its workers to choose, within limits, their own hours of work. The men themselves arrange their schedules without disrupting the production process. The practice is so successful that 50 other German companies have copied it, and unions are asking for a raise because of increased output.
Many companies are reluctant to embrace new ideas, largely because of the inertia of management in large organizations. Foremen resist any challenge to their authority, and plant managers, who figure that they will be transferred in a couple of years, are reluctant to undertake any long-term program that will not show immediate results. But there is a powerful incentive for top management to press for new ways of doing things. One of the best-known advocates of job enrichment, Industrial Psychologist Frederick Herzberg of Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University, suggests that strikes are often welcomed by workers as relief from their mind-numbing jobs and could be drastically reduced. As Herzberg puts it: "Managers must get more men going home to their wives saying, 'Honey, do you know what I did today?' instead of 'Honey, do you know what they did to me today?' "
Fitting the Job to the Man
The apostles of enriched labor insist that the idea can be profitably applied even to auto plants or steel mills. The cost would be high, since the assembly line would have to be redesigned to give each worker at least some responsibility for assembling an entire component rather than tightening a single bolt. In Volkswagen's Wolfsburg plant, for instance, groups of workers put together large components. That allows for more human contact and freedom on the line, relieves the boredom and permits a worker to take several minutes off from time to time. Comparisons with Detroit's plants are not wholly valid because Volkswagens are much simpler than almost all American cars, but Wolfsburg produces autos at three or four times the rate of U.S. plants. In Detroit, the U.A.W. has suggested that teams of workers assemble whole cars, but the notion was dropped by the union when the auto companies concluded that it was not feasible on present assembly lines. But in 1970 it is not too soon to suggest that the nature of the job should be changed to fit the man rather than the other way around. The time may come when it will be cheaper for the companies to enrich the workers' jobs than to pay ever higher wage increases as the price of continuing discontent.
Western industry long ago disproved Karl Marx's prediction that the workingman would become ever poorer in a capitalistic state. But it has yet to prove wrong his less well remembered forecast that workers would become progressively more alienated from their jobs. The young people now entering the factories present an opportunity for employers to end that alienation. Blue collar youngsters are as eager as the college students to become involved and to genuinely earn the pay and leisure that they seek. Essentially it is the task of management to give them that chance. As it is, the alienation of the blue collar worker compounds all the other ills of the U.S.. making it more difficult to integrate the blacks, or to bring the realities of the American system into closer conformity with the ideals of the young. The blue collar worker is exerting his new power to resist some social changes because the developments of the last decade have not been kind to him, and he has for too Jong been ignored. He is now insisting that the nation listen to him. He must accommodate himself to social change, but somehow he also must be accommodated if American society is to continue to progress.
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