This unit represents part of a year-long goal to make my students more aware of the numerous realistic career possibilities they can choose from, along with the special skills necessary to obtain the job they want. The focus of this unit is on the workers themselves and the reality of working class life in America today. The first half of this essay will concentrate on issues and events which have shaped American working class consciousness as it exists today and the reasons for the failure of those workers to form a social tradition and political culture of their own. The second half is a subjective description based on published interviews with workers about their search for daily meaning or as Freud put it “a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.”
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This section of the essay reflects the monumental work of Studs Terkels’
Working
, an 800-page sharing of American worker’s feelings about their jobs and their lives in general.
Unlike most societies, it is difficult to categorize individuals by class in the United States. Unwilling or unable to stay in one area for any length of time, divided by differences of nationality, race, religion, sex and skills, the mass of Americans do not lend themselves readily to a definition as a people or a class. So in discussing workers with students, it is difficult to present them with a clear idea of whom we are talking about. Traditionally, the working class has been defined as “those engaged in the production and distribution of goods and services who do not own or control the object of their labor or its uses.”
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More recently events have forced reevaluation of this definition. Today’s work force in America may be more loosely described as performing “an activity that produces something of value for other people.”
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The transformation of this country between 1865 and 1920 from an agrarian to an industrial society created lasting divisions among American workers. Some of these divisions were self-imposed; others, importantly, came from forces more powerful.
As capital organized and separated specific tasks, it created a heirarchy within the industrial world. Different skills were required for different jobs as workers were classified skilled, semiskilled and unskilled. This was truly a diversifying factor as each group formed its own social and work-related organizations and developed a mistrust, dislike and even hostility toward the others.
As technology increased and new machines were invented, there occurred a reshifting of the groups and a deepening of the already existing divisions. Employers hired unskilled, low-paid and more “manageable” workers to operate simple machines. Skilled workers, no longer the core of productive labor, were incorporated into management as engineers and technicians. Given the task of finding means to enlarge profit, the skilled workers realized that mechanization did not mean easier work and shorter days as they first thought. Many of the benefits they had gained through their trade unions were lost as were their unions. When employers demanded 12 hour days, cuts in pay, continuous production, and reduction in benefits, skilled workers protested e.g., (Homestead Strike of 1892) but eventually accepted the terms in order to maintain the heirarchical division of labor within industry. Industrial capitalists thus succeeded in maintaining a greater dependency by the skilled workers on the corporations while at the same time dividing the working class. Those who resisted this arrangement were dismissed and blacklisted.
Immigrants blacks and women were caught in the middle of this strategy and were often betrayed by both employers and fellow employees. Another aspect of the American dream promised them equality of opportunity and social mobility. The reality of daily survival, however, made it clear to them that these were promises rarely to be realized. Making up the bulk of the unskilled workers, these groups were excluded from trade unions and politically and socially targeted by discriminatory policies and attitudes. Such relationships only served to further degrade their skills and social position. In some cases immigrants returned to their homelands rather than face the “false promises” of American society.
While Northern European immigrants (especially British and German) comprised more than 62 percent of the skilled immigrant workers, among Eastern and Southern Europeans (especially Slav, Italian, and Hungarian) more than 70 percent were unskilled. Average weekly salaries in 1907 at the Homestead Steel Mill reflected the stratification of labor based, in part, on the ethnic distribution within the hierarchies. Slavs earned $12 a week, English-speaking immigrants $16 a week, native-born whites $22 a week and blacks, who had been brought in 15 years earlier to help break the strike, earned $17 a week.
lt would be impossible to stress the influence of the Catholic Church on working class consciousness. “Home of religion of the immigrant”, as Richard Hofstadter labeled it, the church was extremely important in reinforcing the work ethic: work hard now, be thrifty and gratification will come later. Operating as an ethnic shield for the worker in an alien society, the church stressed obedience and promised deliverance from this hell-on-earth daily life. Helping new arrivals survive and find their place in American society, the church was sympathetic to the struggles of the worker. Urging their parishioners to be content with what they had, to find dignity in their work, the church actually encouraged many workers not to associate with middle class and thus Protestant workers. Sometimes the church became involved with trade unions over issues of corruption or Communism (later on), but basically has successfully integrated its followers into American society by reinforcing many of the attitudes that were at the heart of capitalism.
Just as powerful a force in splitting the working class as nativism was racism. Black people were at the center of the agricultural force that allowed the accumulation of capital both before and after the Civil War. With the fall of cotton prices after 1890 and the increasing mechanization of agriculture, especially after 1890, blacks were thrown off the land and began their long migration to the cities of the South and then to the North.
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The exclusion of blacks from Southern industry constituted a major impetus for the move North, the main migration taking place during the interwar period. The situation in the North was no better, with only the most menial jobs available and with more blacks permanently joining the ranks of the unemployed. Despite (or perhaps because of) the discriminatory policies of the A.F.L. and the C.I.O. increasing numbers of blacks entered industry, especially the auto industry just before World War II. Organizing independent councils and unions, blacks made few gains by 1960 with only 14.1 percent attaining the status of skilled workers and professionals. However, the experience gained by those who fulfilled mobility ideologies and social aspirations had important consequences for the civil rights movement of the ‘60’s.
The transition from agricultural to industrial society had profound effects on the American family and especially on women. Even though there was a sexual division of labor in the agricultural society, in the sense that women were expected to raise the children, be housekeepers, and make necessary articles for the family, while men did the bulk of the farming, women still participated in planting, harvesting, and caring for animals. Women and children were expected to participate in all aspects of farming and thus were partners with the men, more equal with them than later.
During the beginnings of the factory system, women constituted the bulk of textile workers and even by 1850 represented about 24 percent of all employees in manufacturing industries, including heavier industry. Most of the time supplementing family income, they were paid low wages ($4.50 a week was an average salary in 1890). Toward the end of the 19th century with large numbers of Americans moving from the farms to the cities, with mass unemployment among men and with industry shifting from textiles to iron, steel, machine tool production, mining and oil and heavy chemical production, women found themselves excluded from industrial labor. Agitation for “protective legislation” to safeguard the health of women and children coincided with the beginning of mass compulsory public schooling and the development of the ideologies that glorified the nuclear family and the “woman’s place” in the home.
By the time of World War II, most of these ideologies were conveniently forgotten as women suddenly were called upon to do heavy lifting, work long hours, and learn trades for which they had been presumed to be intellectually and physically unfit. But with the end of the war and the return of 11 million men to civilian life, millions of women were reminded once again of the importance of the nuclear family and the “feminine mystique” was reinstated. The fact that both women and blacks have been pushed to the outer edges of the American economy, acting as a reserve labor force in times of war or real economic growth, has forced them to perform the lowest paying and least secure jobs available.
