Reflections on the War on Work as a War on Workers

Yves here. KLG reminisces about his first real job in a chemical factory, where he was paid well to clock regular hours accumulating skills and doing scut work too, and how employment has devolved since then. His overview:

Last time here was a local reflection as a lens to focus on the consequences of AGW – Anthropogenic Global Warming. This post is another personal reflection on the degradation of work and workers during the neoliberal transformation (“anthropogenic” indeed) from someone whose entire working life has coincided with these changes. I do remember “before.” I have not been completely immune but I have been very fortunate at junctures that required unearned grace. Understanding what has happened to actual people and their livelihoods and their places is essential to repairing the damage, if such repair is possible.

To add to his later point on the local economy and how people in the community promoted it: one important driver of the hollowing out was corporate consolidation. When I was young, many secondary cities like Dayton, Ohio were headquarters for national companies like NCR, Mead, Stouffers and Delco. So their executives were at the top of their corporate pecking orders and thus generally didn’t aspire to move up by moving out.

By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health

I began my working life at the end of the Great Compression (GC) in the United States that lasted from the end of or World War II through the mid-1970s.  Thus, my working life is coextensive with the Neoliberal Dispensation, which began in earnest when President Jimmy Carter turned Alfred E. Kahn of Cornell loose on his idea of the “regulatory state.”  For personal reasons, I date the end of the GC to the Gerald Ford Recession of 1975, when my 4-months-per-year job that paid very good wages in a unionized heavy chemical plant disappeared.

That loss of my “scholarship” led to the very long and productive apprenticeship I served in two biochemistry laboratories in my university plus two degrees and a rewarding career as an academic scientist and professor who has finally become an administrator/teacher.  The good thing about that is I have left the Research Grant Lottery for good.  The Ford Recession was relatively short lived, especially compared to the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) that began much earlier than 2008 [1], but it was deep and had far-reaching consequences for many.  It presaged our future, not that anyone understood that at the time.  I was fortunate.  Many of my friends became lost in the shuffle and some never found their way again.

But back to that chemical plant job for a 17-year-old high school graduate who was teachable, had endurance and a strong back and was willing to serve in what was known as the Labor Gang.  We gang members began at the G-2 level.  No one started at G-1, and the highest rating was G-13 for a relief operator who was qualified to do every production task in the plant.  Maintenance workers, who worked overtime [2] when needed, but otherwise had regular hours from 7:30-4:00 topped out at G-12 for high-level mechanics, machinists, and welders.  The Labor Gang was a good way to learn your way around the plant while also learning how not to hurt yourself or, worse, someone else through carelessness in an environment filled with dangerous chemicals, and powerful, noticeably indifferent machines of all kinds.

Fair and safe work rules prevented Labor Gang members from using mechanics’ tools, so the idiot stick (shovel) was often in my hands as the one who dug up the leaking pipeline and then covered up the repaired pipe after the mechanics finished their work.  I once did this at the edge of a tidal marsh, with the mud collapsing into the hole as fast as I dug.  Sometimes the pipe carried concentrated bleach (50% sodium hypochlorite; household bleach is ~2%) so work rules and safety mattered!  This was not so very long after OSHA was established during the Administration of our last liberal President in 1970, and even some of the crustiest of my industrial mentors [3] had come to appreciate the utility of OSHA.  I also became proficient in replacing 90-pounds-per-foot railroad ties using large prisebars and sledgehammers and driving a dump truck plus several varieties of forklifts.  Overall, it was good and well-paying work.

Yes, really well-paying work for someone who at the time could expect a lifetime of productive employment while advancing through the ranks, either in production as a shift worker (three 8-hour shifts per day, every day all year) or in maintenance, eventually as a mechanic or machinist or welder who could be trained on the job.  Some who began in the Labor Gang became “engineers-through-training” or shift or maintenance foremen and moved to good jobs for the “company.”  A certain amount of tension was inevitable, but “The Union” and “The Company” had no trouble reaching an accord as each new contract was negotiated every three years for the next 20 years in the life of the plant.

And this was true at the four other large, unionized industrial worksites that employed several thousand in our small Southern city.  Yes, there were unions in the South.  I remember well International Chemical Workers, Plumbers and Pipefitters, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, International Longshoremen, and Railroad Workers.  One of these plants produced precision-welded boilers for power plants on land and at sea, while another produced wallboard for the domestic and international markets.  A different chemical plant extracted chemical feed stocks for disinfectants, pesticides, and fragrances from pine tree stumps.  A large paper mill produced the coated paper that was used in milk cartons and other consumer products; it now produces industrial cellulosic products and is the only local industrial establishment of any size still in existence. [4]  The union wages paid by these employers kept other, smaller businesses in line if they did not want to lose their best employees to this or that “Plant” with an active personnel department.

I was reminded of how well I was paid by a recent story about the Hyundai Electrical Vehicle Plant currently under construction in rural Bryan County inland from Savannah, Georgia.  I drive by this rapidly emerging industrial behemoth several times a year, and it is astonishing in scope.  And it promises an economic boon for Coastal Georgia, where in 2022 yearly wages averaged $30,686 in Bulloch County and $46,305 in Effingham County just to the north of the Hyundai Metaplant.  From The Current (26 July 2024), the only good source of news in the area:

This looks good at first glance, but the median would be more informative than the mean (average).  And it should, given that taxpayers of the State of Georgia have provided at least $2 billion in subsidies as part of a deal that promisesmore than 8,000 jobs.  But by comparison with our former world, how does this really look?  A personal view may be useful.

As a high school graduate in the mid-1970s, my annualized wage in the chemical plant not so far away was $8,145, including a 10% “bonus” for overtime.  Using the handy Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator, that translates into $57,894 (before taxes) in June 2024.  Remember, I was a lowly G-2 who recently graduated from high school (that diploma was the only essential credential to get through the gate).  A G-12 in the plant made $25,064, or $178,156.  Both jobs came with paid vacation (3 weeks for the young G-2, 6 weeks for the G-12, plus eight other holidays for everyone; shift workers received double-time on holidays), defined benefit pension, and health insurance that was sufficient – absolutely nobody worried about a medical bankruptcy.  And just as important, these jobs came with a sense of worth and permanency.

The BLS Inflation Calculator is not a perfect metric, but a dollar then is a dollar now, adjusted for inflation.  More importantly, very few people who worked in any job in my community or anywhere else through the 1970s and into the 1980s needed any kind of “welfare” to get by.  Thus, it can be argued the $31,304-to-$61,642 range at the Hyundai Metaplant and its ancillary establishments is historically insufficient.  Neoliberalism has done its work very well.  Billionaires by the thousands as good jobs continue to disappear as if into the ether, because reasons.  And the people now are “happy” to work in contingent industrial jobs for about half of what I made before I stepped onto a university campus as a student for the first time.

This sordid history has been covered well in a Michael Lind’s most recent book, Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America (2023).  I have been a reader of Lind since his The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (1995).  The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, Up from Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America, and Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics(!) were useful, to me.  Some of the others, not as much, but all have been worth reading.  An extended conversation with Michael Lind would be interesting.  Hell to Pay is bracing and it takes no prisoners in twelve focused chapters.

Lind begins with “The Big Lie: You Are Paid What You Deserve,” where he notes that even Lawrence Summers of Harvard has come around from his assertion that, “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up is that people are being treated closer to the way they are supposed to be treated.”  Typical of Summers.  And yes, worse than serfs in Medieval Europe, I suppose.  But to his credit Summers has also recently written, with Anna Stansbury (pdf):

The…American economy has become more ruthless, as declining unionization, increasingly demanding and empowered shareholders (thanks, Professor Friedman and The New York Times Magazine!), decreasing real minimum wages, reduced working protections, and the increases in outsourcing domestically and abroad have disempowered workers – with profound consequences for the labor market and the broader economy.”

Good summary.  This has been accomplished by the utter destruction of the labor movement in the United States.  For the most part, the union households of my youth are no more, having been devastated by labor arbitrage in both directions as employers use offshoring to destroy worker power and agency at home and in the other direction by abusing immigrants to weaken worker power, also at home.  Our current political unrest is not because Our Democracy™ is under attack by “The Other” as defined by the Professional Managerial Class (PMC).  Our current political distemper fills the void left by a democracy that does not exist.  One can argue at length about the meaning of democracy and whether previous imperfect incarnations were true democracy, but as Corey Robin recently noted “Our Democracy” is the precious construct of those who are immune (for now) to the depredations Late Neoliberalism.  I doubt the current Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate’s preferred construct “The Democracy” will be an improvement over “Our Democracy.”

The “Credential Arms Race” during my working life is only one manifestation of our impasse.  The jobs of my predecessors generally required at most a high school diploma and the willingness to learn on the job.  I knew many women and men in relatively high positions in the local economy, culture, and society who graduated from high school and went straight to work.  In their day, fewer than ten percent of high school graduates went to college.  This did not matter then, but now every job seems to require a college degree of some sort.  I have fought this battle with Human Resources (previously known by the much less euphemistic “Personnel”) on more than one occasion, but that digression is too depressing to pursue.

Although there were social distinctions, our local society was notable because doctors, lawyers, and business owners coached recreation department sports along with teachers, electricians, and mechanics.  My father bowled in a scratch league on a team that included the cardiothoracic surgeon who coached a youth football team in my league.  Nor do I remember the obligatory distinction between a job and a career, except at the margin represented by clergy Catholic and Protestant and the local Rabbi, plus doctors and lawyers and certified public accountants.  The typical local businessman or businesswoman (we had many of the latter) had jobs that were careers.  The then-local bankers (interstate “branch banking” lay in the future) kept to themselves and their hours but generally worked to build the local economy instead of extracting all value from it.

Of course, the key to this is that my community had a local economy that existed in and for itself, built by men and women with abiding interests in the outcome.  Now?  The city is slowly recovering from near-complete deindustrialization, if a distillery that makes very good rum and craft beer brewery that likewise produces good beer, along with a few “antique shops” and small clothing stores plus several chic casual restaurants and cocktail bars can sustain local prosperity, society, and culture.  Previously, family restaurants, local businesses of all kinds, and the intriguing-to-a-young-boy Sportsman’s Lounge (men only by convention) next to the movie theatre were the products of a healthy economy, not the foundation of a make-believe economy that caters primarily to the PMC, while leaving all others to their own devices.  As a paid-up member of the PMC who nurses much antipathy to same, I have enjoyed these recent establishments.  But I also remember what was, and what came before was better.

Lind’s contrast of our current low-wage/high-welfare political economy with a living wage/social insurance political economy (he leaves out “political”) is the basic argument of the book:

With few exceptions, no full-time worker should need to rely on means-tested public assistance, whether in the form of wage subsidies like the earned income tax credit, food stamps, or housing vouchers.  The paychecks of all workers should be adequate for two kinds of costs: the recurrent costs of shelter, food, clothing, transportation, and other necessities for workers and their families; and the cost of contributions or premiums like payroll taxes that pay for a system of income maintenance during periods of unemployment caused by retirement, illness, disability, temporary joblessness, or the need to provide family care…For those attracted to the ideal of a wage earner’s republic, the low wage/high-welfare system of the contemporary United States is a dystopian nightmare.

This war on work and workers must stop if there is to be any future in the coming, much smaller, world as regional, national, and local economies revive themselves.  Michael Lind’s prescriptions are doable, both from the top down and the bottom up.  From the top down this will require a business and cultural ethic embodied in Engine Charlie Wilson of General Motors and Charging Charlie Wilson of General Electric.  Both GM and GE were in their time foundational components of a vigorous economy, and each of these leaders was proud to be leading providers of good jobs at good wages across the nation.  GE and GM were not perfect by any means, but they were perfectible had they not essentially disappeared.  I would even venture to guess that both men thought of themselves as “rich,” but lacking the need for affectations such as this in a political economy that was finally beginning to include all.

From the bottom up, the people simply (that word is doing a heavy lift here) need to hold their erstwhile political and economic leaders to account.  This was done a hundred years ago.  This can and must be done again, even if the path forward is obscured by neoliberal nonsense of every sort, which is covered daily here at NC.

Notes

[1] For example, when I noticed in my first faculty position that graduate students were “buying” condominiums in 2002-2004 with no down payment and few assets other than their fellowship stipend.  There have always been a few students whose parents took care of their graduate student children’s housing and other needs, but this was different.  Everyone seemed to think the new normal was “great.”  I thought the whole situation was brought to us courtesy of the letters W-T-F, but I did not understand at the time how deeply ridiculous and thoroughly criminal the entire enterprise was.  ECONNED is the go-to source for this history.  My defined contribution “pension” will never recover completely from the GFC.  As a comparison, my young family had bought its first dwelling in 1989 in a very pleasant wooded suburb about six miles outside of a well-known college downtown.  The purchase, however, was nearly as unpleasant as seven weeks of chemotherapy and lasted longer – credit checks, background checks, private mortgage insurance – and our mortgage rate was 10.1%.  But those were the times and the 100% increase monthly housing costs was worth it.

[2] Time-and-a-half for every hour over 8 hours per day or 40 hours per week; double-time on holidays, with a 4-hour minimum plus meals while at work.  I did several simple jobs in an hour but got paid for four hours.  I do not think that transnational corporation was any worse the wear for fair labor practices.  The company was better off with employees who did not feel they were a burden to the bottom line and who were not the victims of wage theft.  According to friends made while working there, future management contracted out the Labor Gang, after which the good repair that have previously characterized the place got very ragged.  Which is not hard to believe.  A worker on a zero-hour contract has no interest in telling an engineer that the pipe in the back of the boiler room is leaking…not his job.

[3] I learned as much about good work from them as I did from the scientists who later taught me.  Both groups, the latter with as many women as men, sharpened my view of the world.

[4] I am perforce aware that these industrial sites were lousy stewards of the environment until the Clean Water Act and Environmental Protection Agency (also products of our last liberal Administration).  It is no excuse that “everyone was doing it.”  The site where I worked is probably the worst Superfund site in Georgia.  Final enforcement of the Clean Air Act of 1963 in the 1970s also made a big difference in my hometown.  Had these local employers not disappeared in an orgy of what is likely to be terminal deindustrialization, perhaps they would have engaged in the necessary cleanup, with public support, that is not being managed very well now by the Superfund.