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.