Living and Dying on the Factory Floor: From the Outside In and the Inside Out by David Ranney (PM Press 2019)

 

I am suddenly interrupted from this reverie by an annoying ding from my cellphone. It is a CNN news alert about yet another presidential tweet. In this one the president claims that his proposed tax reform will bring “middle-class jobs” back to the U.S. For some reason this really sets me off. Feeling angry and agitated, my mind goes back forty years to a time when I was working in a number of factories in Southeast Chicago. It was another time in my life, one when I was both an outsider looking into the world of the factory workers and an insider looking out at the outside world.

I realized that the perspective I gained then is still with me today and accounts for my anger at the simplistic notion of “bringing back middle-class jobs.” So I began to write about that time in my life, not as a memoir but as an account of life and even death on the factory floor, the raw class and race relations, the exploitation of backbreaking and dangerous labor, and the often unhealthy and unsafe working conditions. Sharing that perspective with others today seems timely and important.

In 1973, I was comfortably employed as a tenured professor at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. It was a time of great optimism and hope that we could replace a society based on greed, sexism, racism, and wars aimed at global domination with something new. I strongly believed, and still do, that we can achieve a totally new society in which “the full and free development of every human being is its ruling principle.” It would be a society where the measure of wealth would be, in Marx’s words, “the needs, capacities, enjoyments, and creative abilities” of each individual.

As these ideas were forming in Iowa City in the early 1970s, I was highly involved in local political and social activities, including opposition to the Vietnam War, supporting the demands of various civil rights groups, critiquing the political outlook of textbooks used in major survey courses at the University of Iowa, and experimenting with new social forms by organizing cooperative daycare, food co-ops, and housing co-ops. I helped to develop community education events about both the Vietnam War and the Southern African wars for national liberation from colonial powers. The political work and political education were intense and productive, but I increasingly began to feel that we were operating in a bubble that didn’t really extend beyond Iowa City. I longed to engage the growing social justice and revolutionary movements all over the world and couldn’t really do so from my comfortable perch.

So I took a one-year leave of absence and moved to Chicago, following my Iowa City friend Kingsley, who had opened up a unique pro bono legal clinic he called the Workers’ Rights Center in a storefront office in Southeast Chicago. Initially I joined a socialist group called New American Movement (NAM) and worked in its national office but later joined the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) and began working with Kingsley in the Workers’ Rights Center.

By this time my one-year leave of absence at the University of Iowa had run out and so had my money. I made the difficult decision to leave academia. Many left-wing organizations, STO included, had members working in factories for a variety of reasons. STO believed, for reasons I will discuss at the end of this book, that a new society could be built from the initiatives of “mass organizations at the workplace.” So it made sense that my financial needs could best be met by working in Southeast Chicago factories. The work was consistent with STO priorities and also engaged the sort of people who were coming to the Workers’ Rights Center for legal help. This is how I came to work at a number of different factories from 1976 to 1982.

. . .

One night when I am leaving the plant, I have a flat tire. I open the trunk to get the jack and spare. Ken stops to help. I realize that the trunk is full of leaflets advocating Puerto Rican independence and freedom for Puerto Rican nationalist political prisoners. Ken picks a leaflet up and reads it. He says nothing about it as he lifts the spare tire out while I jack up the car and remove the flat tire. He puts the flat tire back in the trunk and helps me lift the spare onto the car. Then he goes back and shuts the trunk, and we finish bolting the tire on. When we are finished:

“Thanks Ken.”

“I’m with Workers World. Who are you with?”

“Sojourner Truth Organization. Fifteen guys working here and two are commies. Who would have guessed? Any more?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well thanks and let’s Free the Five Puerto Rican Prisoners of War! Why not try to recruit the prick? Workers World can have him.”

Ken laughs, and we go our separate ways. Politics never comes up again.”

"The have's and those who have been had."

Bill Maher gets in a few body shots before the proposed writers' strike leaves him speechless.

Don't Mention The C Word

"The very idea of class makes Americans, including journalists, uncomfortable. It grates against the myth, so firmly ingrained in our national psyche, that ours is a society of self-made men, with bootstraps. This idea persists even though upward mobility, in any broad sense, is becoming a myth. It adds a moral tinge to discussions of poverty, a notion that the poor must shoulder much of the blame for their plight, and the corollary, that the wealthy should be credited for their success."

Hat tip to Skookum Talk for bringing to my attention Brent Cunningham's article, Across the Great Class Divide,which appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review and where the quote above is originally from.

I think I first realised that class was a thorny subject in America when years back whilst still at school, I remember watching an Oprah Winfrey show - yes, I'm not proud of it but for the purposes of this post I am prepared to admit that I have in the past watched an Oprah Winfrey show all the way through; though if you fling it back at me at some later date I'll just claim false memory syndrome as my defence which I'm a bit of an expert on 'cos Oprah devoted two separate one hour long specials on the subject in series 4 show 17 and 18 back in 1989 - where a mailman on the show described himself as an ordinary middle class kind of guy.

Reading through Cunningham's article it looks like whatever false class syndrome that postie had is ten fold for the majority of Americans. Apparently the majority of America is seen by itself as 'middle class', with the exception of those on one side who can be labelled as the super rich and the underclass/white trash/urban poor on the other side. ("Urban poor is a polite way of saying black or hispanic.) Journalists, according to Cunningham, in America has done very little to challenge this myth because apart from the obvious reasons cited above in the excerpt from Cunningham piece, the working poor are never newsworthy. The right in Britain keep on harping on about middle England that never gets reported on or catered for, and yet from the other side of the pond there is the hidden America, 35 million in poverty according to official statistics, 44 million without healthcare and we can watch re-runs of Friends and Will & Grace on E4 until our lottery numbers finally come up but the C word won't be mentioned in Central Perk or anywhere else.

I'm okay though - I saw through the myth of there being no working class in the United States armed only with some back issues of the Western Socialist in my back pocket and a copy of a well thumbed collection of Raymond Carver's short stories.

I can't get too sniffy about the American view of class anyway. The so called obsession with class that we apparently have in this country is misnamed - we have an obsession with caste. The right schooling, the right breeding and the right sort of credit card and even that is being chipped away with the supposed meriocratic revolution kickstarted by Thatcher and her minions all those years ago. It's not the done thing to refer to yourself as working class nowadays. It's interpreted as being anti-aspirational, not wanting to get on in life, which you can if you work hard enough. People who refer to themselves as working class these days can be placed in two categories: 1) The lefty politicos with a chip on their shoulder - guilty as charged. 2) And what used to be known in my Gran's day as the Nouveau Riche. Various pop stars, actors and footballers who like to refer to themselves as working class 'cos it is a measure of how far they have travelled in life. The Latin term for this phenomenon is Micimus Cainicus , and the suggested family motto to be placed on the ceremonial coat of arms is: Look How Far I've Come Mother.