>Kelley wrote:
>>ittle more on our knee jerk reactions regarding the generation gap. i cut
>>my teeth on labor activism, such as it was. and i got burned in the
>>process, feeling entirely alienated by hoity toity professional organizers
>>and marxists who never did a day's hard labor in their life
halloooo yoshie!
>It's my understanding that "professional" labor organizers tend to put in
>long hours & get paid very badly -- at least the ones I know. I have yet
>to meet any "hoity toity" ones. What's the median wage for labor
>organizers?
>
>Yoshie
well, you're in columbus. what can i say. subjective experiences. both yours and mine. however, i'd say i have the weight of social science evidence and various other kinds of accounts of the dynamics of labor activism on my side.
furthermore, i didn't type *labor* organizers but, rather, *professional* organizers. and i don't care how little they are paid or how hard they work, their assumptions were generally that white factory workers and rural residents were racist and sexist, more so than them and more so than people in urban/suburban areas and more so than professional/managerial strata. i'm a little older than you yoshie so this was more than 15 years ago, so we're talking a generation of activists and organizers who were still hanging on from the 60s. they were NOT single mindedly about labor, but activists from the daze.... they were people who'd grown up in the suburbs and been engaged in campus activism of the 60/70s. they were good and decent people. they were humans.
that doesn't mitigate the fact that they alienated potential allies with their hidden assumptions. and, while i take a structural analysis of their attitudes, rather than blaming them as individuals, that doesn't mean that i don't and we shouldn't hold them accountable.
any way you slice it, these are unwarranted assumptions. they are especially damaging for labor activism because, if you're trying to organize people who are quite aware of these stereotypes and do their own stereotyping of "labor" and "academic" and "activist" types, then we might do well and try rilly rilly hard to catch an errant klew and deal with the problem rather than pretend it doesn't exist.
i spent many a morning from 5-7 standing outside factory gates and trying to talk with people about plant closing leg and later about unionizing a nursing home and a plastics factory that had a wildly high rate of limb mutilation/loss. all located in heavily anti union towns, thanks to the efforts of paternalistic corps. my own ex brother in law was union steward at the brockway truck plant. to this day he maintains that the plant was shut down b/c the union got too uppity. and to this day he wouldn't listen to "professional" organizers or academics about the issue--even when we held numerous fora on the issue and even produced a film called huskietown USA that revealed that brockway did not shut down b/c of union demands but was a decision made nearly a decade prior. he wouldn't listen to any of it. he blames himself. the union leader, gino patriarcho, was a broken man from the experience, as i remember him. it was sad. *that's* how anti union the town was that i was from. to this day he rejects "professionals" and "activists" because he felt that they had no respect for him or what he did or where he'd come from and what made his life a joy.
that's why it's a good idea to get a grip on these issues--the hidden injuries of class. they have very real consequences for union organizing dynamics.
none of the above or my previous post is blaming individuals or indicting any party for anything other than being humans. but with all the leisure time and knowledge that people like you and i have at our fingertips, then i think it a huge shame if we don't draw on that wealth of knowledge and experience and make good use of it, trying to avoid demonizing or romanticizing any party but looking at the situation and understanding why people sometimes think the way they do. draw on analyses of this issue--and there are plenty of them. it's not like it's a peculiarly unique phenomena, though surely it was particularly acute where i lived.
you *ought* to support efforts to ensure that such stereotypes aren't reproduced and that racism and sexism are seen as inhabiting the office floors and the halls of academe just as much as they lurk on the farms and factory floors that dominated the world where i grew up. and, yes, i'd like to throttle the people in the town where i grew up sometimes for holding the stereotypes they hold too. nonetheless.
finally, tell me something. mike yates posted a moving analysis of the way in which the gendered division of labor deeply shaped the consciousness and lives of his mother and father. he starts out writing about a clock on the mantle that his father'd rec'd for his yrs of "service". substitute in that narrative people from different class strata who often see themselves as having different interests and experiences, sources of knowledge and experience (men are from mars, women from venus kinda thang) and who, sometimes, share interests and experiences, just as mike's parents likely did.
the klew is programmed to for slo mo, i'm sure you'll be able to catch it.
in other words, please explain how you can maintain that gender/race are important distinctions that can be analyzed, even though, in the final analysis, it's class that matters as you argued not too long ago and not also recognize that divisions among the working class are just as important and often just as integrally bound up with identity as are race/gender and operate in the very same ways as race/gender divisions. please see bhaskar for an explanation of relatively enduring social institutions, relations, practices and why they need to be addressed.
in close, thanks for the willful misreading. i've not had the pleasure in quite some time.
kelley
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kelley Number one reason Beer is better than Jesus: If you build your life around beer, there are programs to help you change that.