Beginnings 1978

Welcome to Working Class Weekly

A few words of introduction:

The Great Recession of 2006-9 prompted me to begin this blog in 2010. I abandoned it in 2012 for reasons I do not remember.

The current world wide situation as of March 2025 prompts me to go back in time again to 1978 when I first entered the factory.

Maybe my story will shed some light on how Democrats in the US lost the working-class and how Donald Trump was elected President for the second time.

Sometimes I also think of the blog as Blue Collar Economics 101.  Economics from Main Street rather than Wall Street.

The Factory:

 I lost my job of four years in 1976 due to the mid-seventies recessions.  I bounced around for a couple of years working in a Nursery, as a Park Ranger, for a couple of environmental organizations and day-care.

 In 1978 I wiggled my way into a seasonal job as a “box boy” in a factory, bringing materials to various part of the facility as needed.

 Luckily the economy improved and within months I was accepted in training for a more skilled job.

 The “Neckties”:

 The company was growing under new management and soon began to expand. To get the capital to expand, they put more pressure on the workers—as did the corporations as a whole after the recession of the mid-seventies.

 Soon men with neckties and  clipboards were walking around with timers. Clearly they were trying to find ways to lower our piece work based on a system that analyzed the times of our various movements while working.

 The moral was terrible.  We hated being watched every minute, knowing that nothing good would come from this.  We were angry. The anger turned to discouragement.

 A bunch of us were sitting together at lunch one day. My co-workers were expressing frustration with these timers.  All throughout my upbringing I could not stand the hopelessness that shows on good working-class people.  I was starting to steam.

 One of my mentors told me that you should not appeal to people on the basis of painful emotion (such as anger).  But it seemed like our lunch break needed something that would break the sour mood.

 I, on the spot, invented a tactic that I later called “hard talking”. In a growling voice I said, “They give those guys a college degree, a necktie and  a clipboard and then they come out here and make our lives miserable.  Don’t let ‘The Neckties’ get you down! ”. 

We went back to work.

 People had known me as a quiet guy to that point. And I was still a bit isolated.

 When I came in on Monday, all of the men had on their Sunday suit coats and neckties and the  women had dress pants, Sunday blouses, ear-rings, make-up etc.  All of them were working and laughing and having a heck of a good time. They looked fantastic. 

 It was quite a contradiction to the tendency to think that we were just a bunch of losers. 

 A supervisor from another section came walking through our shop, looked up and laughed at what he saw. 

 But as he kept walking through, his facial expression dropped into something like:  “Is this the beginning of a revolution?". I liked the look on his face as he chewed on that thought.

 Do not criticize a worker’s work.

 As the whole US was trying to expand and cut costs, all of the  best materials that we used were being sent oversees where workers, paid less than us, made high end products. 

 It was enough  that the poor materials make our work harder.  We were on piece work and it took more time to work with this low-quality material.  Then management made the mistake of criticizing the quality of our work.

 People in our trade were known as a rowdy bunch.  It was a brutal job.  As one of the older men said—it is a job that breaks you down rather than builds you up.

 We could tolerate a lot of abuse but one thing that our trade would not stand for was criticizing the quality of our work.

 The buzz went around during lunch. We were going to stop working in protest.

 We (there were fifty of us) demanded a meeting with the manager.  We were asking that the criticism end and that we get better materials. 

 You have to understand that we did not have a union. How could we pull this off without losing our jobs? Some of us, on our arrival, began to work on make solid relationships within our shop.  This meant finding ways to break through differences in gender, race, etc. and all of the other grudges that develop under the stresses that exist in a factory.

 But more and more people coalesced into a unit of trust with each other.

 After lunch two of the firebrands had stopped working and were glowering at the few that were still working.  This did not look good, so others of us got busy going around talking to folks.

 The firebrands said, “Well the Asians won’t back us”.  I asked “Did you talk to them?”.  “No.” (Sheepishly).

 I had been making friends with them. I asked them if they knew what was going on. They had no idea.  I told them what we were doing and why.  One translated to the others.  He then said to me that he really didn’t care about the issue.  I said, “OK I  just wanted you to know.”

 But he spoke to the others. They stopped working and began doing things like sweeping up around the benches. 

Homework for Organizing 101: "How to be the person who people will trust even if they don't agree with you?"

 By this time only one person was working, so I went over and started listing to him rant to me on how this kind of thing never works.  People never stand up for each other. I am a patient listener so when the Manager of the facility came out no one was working.

 There are more significant details to the story but one important fact:  There were no visible leaders. There was no one that the manager could fire.  He was like a cat in a barnyard with the Barn Swallows flying from each side and pinning the cat on the ground.

 That is what good organizing can do.

 We did not get better materials but the criticism stopped and they gave us a 50 cent piece rate increase for toughest shoes. 

 We laughed because we had not asked for money, just respect.  However we did not quarrel about the money.

 About six months later they fired the manager. We knew why.

 A seasoned and successful union organizer later told me that the “bread and butter” issues are not what wins union drives—it is the demand for respect.

 This I believe explains where some election drives have failed also—something to keep in mind.

 The next post will cover the Reagan Era and its impact on the working class.

 

 

 

Who is the "Middle Class" Anyway?: December, 2010

A few words of introduction:

Welcome to Working Class Weekly

The current situation world wide has prompted me to revive this blog that began in 2010 just after the "Great Recession" in the United States.

Perhaps you get your information on the economy from academics, economists, politicians and the like, but rarely from the working class--the people on the front lines of the economy and without whom the economy would collapse.  

We had a brief look at their significance during the COVID crisis. People cheered "Essential Workers". After the dusts settled, that quickly went away but the anger of much of the working class did not. We then went back to "the middle class". That didn't make a lot of us feel better either. You will hear more about that below.

We are a diverse bunch of people but there is an unrest that is becoming evident around the world.

So, Blue Collar 101--the nuts and bolts of our economic system.  Straight from the front lines.  Enjoy!

The posts below go backward in time to 2010 to 2011. 

Check them out and the next series of posts will be "A Time Line of the United States Front Line Workers from 1978 to the Present."

Who is the "Middle Class" Anyway?: December 2010

 The politicians and pundits nowadays speak about the "middle class". Where did the working class go?

This term paints us all with the same brush. The politicians and pundits hope to cast their nets as widely as possible and draw us all in around their vision and their ideology.

The reality is that that amorphous "middle class" as they characterize it is a widely diverse group of people facing a wide variety of economic conditions and challenges from elders to youth, disabled and able-bodied, the fairly well off to the constantly struggling. We are divided by race, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference, ....

The attempt is to bring us along.

I like the term "working class" for the vast majority of us.

Why? Because that is who we are--that is what we do-work--production--and our position in society as workers most closely and accurately defines our relationship to the economic system. And the economic system more than any other single factor, other than the geography and political system, influences the life that any person on earth lives.

I built my first house when I was eight. It was my great uncle's house. He was the brains behind it but everyone we could find who could swing a hammer played some role. My mother's brother did the wiring and one of my Dad's friends did the plumbing. They were not paid for their labor--we did the same thing for them when the time came.

All the men had their regular jobs and then worked on their houses or someone else's house after work or on weekends.

The women worked pretty much all of the time housekeeping or raising children. Some were also employed. This was back "in the day"--in the post WWII boom in the USA--and the division of work between men and women was different than it is today, when it takes two employed people to even come close to owning a house here in the USA.

The first job that I can remember was following my grandfather around the garden as he turned it over--by hand--in the spring. My job was to pick up worms to use for trout fishing and put them in coffee cans. I learned to pay attention to things and to be methodical. I admired my grandfather's strength even though he seemed very old to me. 

He grew up a farm boy with nine siblings and knew everything one needed to know about tending a garden. He had shoveled coal into the steam boilers on the freight trains and knew how to handle a shovel or a garden spade. When he stood on the ground he was planted into the earth like an oak. He looked like he belonged there.

Nowadays the trend is to call all workers "Middle Class". Bill Clinton was the first President I can remember who was sort of in love with calling us the "Middle Class". A few times he did talk about the working class, but the "Middle Class" has generally been more popular among our politicians and leaders because it makes it sound like everyone is making it, that everyone is doing well. 

I think this is an allusion.  I don't know if it is intentional or just the way the disconnection of those that facilitate our economic system perceive things. So the language of economics and class just drift that way.

By world standards I, as a citizen of the USA  am doing well.  I should not be complaining. But on the scale of things here in the USA I am right out there on the front lines. Many of my friends are looking up to the bottom of the "middle". I have been a front-line worker for 30 years. 16 in production work and 14 in the service industry. Such a change is the trend in the USA today and I am right with it. As is often the case that change cost me $2.50 in hourly pay. The cost of living, of holding a job, doesn't always match up to our wages.

I like the word "Working Class" better than "Middle Class" to describe me and the people I work with.  We get paid for the direct production of goods or services. The economy goes up, we work; the economy goes down, we don't work. 

I like to say: If capitalism hiccups we know it. The stock market takes a dive and the next week we may have fewer hours. Some weeks or months later we feel the layoffs. The words "Middle Class" are used to lump us all together and I think they are meant to blur some important distinction, to make us feel like we have some status or some control over our lives but sooner or later that wears off.

Sadly, I think it also puts a greater distance between us and the poor, despite the fact that during that decade of jobless recoveries it was said that nearly half of us were two weeks without a paycheck away from poverty. 

There is a subtle or sometimes not so subtle idea that if you fail in this society it is your fault.  As I said above these ups and downs are not the fault of any working class or poor person. It is a necessity of the system that there be unemployment in order to keep wages low.  I like to listen to economists.  They pretty consistently think that 4% unemployment is idea to keep our system in business.  Hhmm. At one point they were tossing around 5% as a possible ideal.  Sure that would drop wages and fuel the production for a while but then there is the problem of who will they sell their wares or services to? Racism is a cloud drifting through this quagmire.  It is easy for burdened white folks to scorn those who are still trying to rise from the effects of slavery, the Reconstruction and Jim Crow.

Maybe the scorn for the poor, is a generational thing.  My generation grew up with parents of the Great Depression.  It was tough for everyone.  My Mom knew a woman whose husband was one of those Wall Street guys who threw himself out of a window.  She had no skills other than Mom of four children and house keeper--not to denigrate that--it was just that she had no skills that paid money.  

She was clever though. She went to the library and picked out some books on fortune telling. It was a time that people were scared and looking for some hope and in this tourist town there were lots of people who were hoping to know what would happen and a fortune teller was as close as you could come to a therapist.

One side of my family barely made it through.  Family issues, pneumonia before the era of antibiotics and other issues almost did them in. I asked once to my Mom, "Were you poor?"

She said, "I suppose we were but then again everybody was (not quite true).  We got by.  People helped each other.  If you needed a quart of milk maybe your neighbor had extra. r if they needed flour maybe you could give them some."

At least in my family and in the culture of that time there was pride in being poor, being resilient, clever.  There were songs we sang lauding poor people "Oh, we ain't got a barrel of money, maybe we're ragged and funny but we travel along singing a song, side by side.    

When we first got a TV, a favorite show was "Leave It to Beaver".  Beaver was a young boy and walking along a railroad track he came along a raggedy man sitting aside the track.  They talked for a while and innocently he asked the guy, "What do you do for work?" The actor was great. His expression showed he was fighting with his shame and then he got control of his emotions, thought for a minute, and said, "I am a philosopher." 

Beaver asked "What is a philosopher?".  The tramp says, "It is someone who thinks about things." Beaver was impressed and decided that that was a great thing to be.  He told his Mom that he had met a philosopher and could he come to dinner.  She said yes and so it was.

I miss that.  It is very painful to me to see how the working class has been turned against the poor. I did not see this coming and I feel sad about the hard edge in our society now.

 I have not given up.  Apparently that gene has been passed on to me. The classes in Sunday school enforced what I saw in my family.  I am very pleased with them and myself and all of the people around me despite our differences.  I learned that there is something good about not caring very much about the idea of people being "better" or "worse."

Again...

 March 2011

Again, some media outlets (notably Forbes magazine and The O'Reilly Factor) are blaming budget crisis on politicians who "made pension promises to the public employee unions that cannot be met".

No mention whatsover that these pension funds were drained by a crashing stock market. They are trying to manipulate our anger and direct it to the politicians and to the unions and away from regulation of Wall Street. Wall Street does not want regulation.

O'Reilly says that Walker's Wisconsin is an example of how democracy works. Though he freely admits that the public is wary of Governor Walker's attack on unions. Governor Walker says his limiting of collective bargaining and paring down of union benefits will create 250,000 jobs.

Really?

Yes, this is the same supply side economics that reduced wages and benefits for workers over the last couple of decades and brought about at least one "jobless recovery". Shall we call Walker's move the last test of supply side theory?

O'Reilly says that if Walker fails to create those jobs that then he deserves to be voted out. Will he hold him accountable to that?

It is hard to see how paring down paychecks in Wisconsin will create the demand to support those new jobs.

Having O'Reilly swing his support to unions over supply-siders would be an interesting paradigm shift.

I have always suspected that O'Reilly, like many of the talking heads of the right, ride on the wave of resentmentful working class purely for personal economic gain, while being the agents of big money. If the public anger begins to shift I think O'Reilly will go wherever it leads. The Fox Network makes big money by manipulating and riding public anger.

Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I think soon the American public will see the man behind the curtain in the Emerald City of our economy. I think many of them have already. Perhaps ironically Governor Walker is to credit for making the contradictions of his economic theory more obvious.

Blue Collar Economics 101

Welcome to Working Class Weekly.

Our origins, beginning October 2010:

Let's get right down to it. It is 2010 and the world economy is still reeling from the dramatic crash of 2008. Economists have all kinds of ideas about what could be done but none of them can tell you with any certainty when--or if--things will take an upturn.

If the economists hint too strongly that there is something that is fundamentally wrong with our economic system, they will lose their jobs. Their job is to convince people like you and I that if we invest our labor and hard-earned dollars in this economic system we will come out ahead of the game.

Well, as a factory worker, I don't make those assumptions. I have seen things go south for workers for at least three decades now.

I will lose my job if I don't make my production and quality quotas and show up for work on time, but I won't lose my job if I tell you that the economic system is fundamentally flawed.

So, from the mind of a factory worker--Blue Collar Economics 101:

Many of you lost big chunks of money from your 401K. As a friend of mine said, "When you lose money in the stock market where does it go?".

Good question.

Let me share a little known fact about about this thing called a "Depression". Oh, OK, if you insist, I will call it a "recession". Not very convincing to those on the hurting end of it but I can work with it for now.

Depressions--or "recessions"--are accompanied by a dramatic transfer of wealth from those lower on the economic scale to those higher on the economic scale.

You could almost say that this transfer of wealth is one of the things that most characterizes a depression.

Before the Great Depression of the 1930's eighty per cent of farms were family owned. After the recession 30% were. This is a dramatic concentration of wealth transferred from those at the bottom of the economic scale to those at the top.

The current real estate foreclosures? Same deal. Corporate bail-outs? Same deal. More wealth being transferred--being moved away from people like you and I and concentrated in the hands of people at the upper levels of our economic system.

In the case of home foreclosures it is people's life savings being transferred. In the case of corporate bail-outs it is our tax money. No matter to those at the top where it comes from as long as they maintain their dominance in the economic system.

The A-student of Blue Collar Economics asks, "What about my 401k?". Go to the head of the class. And sorry you got burned in the recession. Same deal though. "Thanks for letting us play with your money at your expense. By the way you don't have as much as you used to before you let us invest it for you."

And don't blame yourself if you weren't the A-student. We had some of the "brightest minds" in the country telling us to invest our future in this booming economic engine.

The head of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan who was the nearest thing to a god in the financial world admits that he blew the call on the economy.

It is no wonder we were confused. We wanted to believe. The American dream dies hard. 

So just know--this current recession that is causing your depression is nothing new. It is the cyclical nature of a system that requires illogical growth and investment in financial instruments that have only speculative (and no inherent) value and are not regulated in any way that protects the consumer. 

It is the nature of an economy that relies on consumption and at the same time keeps the profits from getting into the hands of the consumer. Deregulation in theory reduces costs for consumers but it often comes with tax cuts for the corporations, taxes fall onto the consumers, the gained wealth is not shared with consumers which in the end lessens demand.

So the game grinds to a halt and the deck is reshuffled. Who will end up holding the cards this time? Who will rewrite the rules of the game?

We Can't Afford Teachers?

A friend posted the following on Facebook:

My son's teacher, pink-slipped

Last week, California's budget cuts put a pink slip in the hand on my son's teacher, Irma Navarette, one of the best educators I've ever met.

Robert Reich put it this way:

"Last year, America’s top thirteen hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion each. One of them took home $5 billion. Much of their income is taxed as capital gains – at 15 percent – due to a tax loophole that Republican members of Congress have steadfastly guarded.

If the earnings of those thirteen hedge-fund managers were taxed as ordinary income, the revenues generated would pay the salaries and benefits of 300,000 teachers. Who is more valuable to our society – thirteen hedge-fund managers or 300,000 teachers? Let’s make the question even simpler. Who is more valuable: One hedge fund manager or one teacher?"

Only One Reason: March 10, 2011

There is only one reason for right to work legislation or limits on collective bargaining. It is to reduce the wages and benefits of all workers--union or not. No employer or politician fights for these measures so that they can raise workers wages or provide them with more benefits or to work for a fairer deal for their employees. It is all about a concentration of wealth and power.

When they remove provisions of contracts that have been negotiated with the workers it is to drive more money into the hands of the wealthy to remove the limits on their concentration of their wealth.

Regarding workers in the public sector: it is not about balancing a budget. The unions have agreed to economic concessions. Just before these take-aways from workers, tax breaks for the wealthy added millions to budget shortfalls.

It is all about transferring wealth from those who create it to those who hoard it. It all adds up to increasing the gap between the tiny minority of the super rich and the vast majority of working people.

In the end this system is unworkable. It starves our economic engine of the fuel that it needs to run--wages.

Layoffs, decreased wages, will only deepen the economic crisis.

Mark Shields on Unions: March 8 2011

"Inside Washington" on Public Broadcasting hosted a panel discussion on various issues, one of which centered around the protests in Wisconsin over the Governor's attempt to limit collective bargaining rights for state employees.

Mark Shields, a noted commentator and columnist, was uncharacteristically passionate about the role of unions in the United States.

Here is the transcript in part:

MR. SHIELDS: Let’s be very blunt. The United States workers would never have had a five-day work week, an eight-hour work day. We would never have had minimum wage laws, child labor laws, health and pension benefits, without the skill, the passion, the commitment, and the clout of organized labor. Owners and employers just didn’t voluntarily wake up one morning and say, let’s be nice to the workers. So unions made a difference in America’s landscape. Do they make a difference every day? You better believe it.

At the same time, the same people, my good friend Evan, whom I respect enormously, endorses and embraces private sector unions, which now have fallen in strength to the point where they represent one out of 12 workers. They’re defanged. They’re basically powerless, okay? When they represented 35 percent of workers, a generation ago, not Evan, but many on the right said, they were a threat to American democracy. They’re a threat to the American way of life. Now public employees have the same right to collective bargain that any employee does. And it’s that simple. How does a school teacher, a lone school teacher negotiate with the city of New York or the city of Milwaukee. You’ve got to pool your resources to do that.

…..

MR. SHIELDS: Here’s the rub. Yes. This is ground zero in the fight for collective bargaining for unions. But here’s the rub. Between 1989 and 2009, the average hourly wage – the median hourly wage for the American male fell by 2 percent – fell by 2 percent. All of the concentration was in the top 1 percent, 56 percent of all the economic growth was in the top 1 percent. Thirty six percent was in the top one-tenth of 1 percent. The bottom 90 percent got 16 percent. That’s why this tension exists right now.

People in Wisconsin have had their own lives decimated and threatened and they bought into, quite frankly, the specious argument that the enemy is not the economic system that’s rigged against them with a tax system that’s exploitative. Somehow it’s a social worker [who wants to protect her rights to collective bargaining.]