Oh, Sandwichman, I knew about you waaaaaaaaaay before you knew who the Snit Snat legend is. I was downloading your stuff from the Time/Work Web. Was that it? Memory is hazy at this hour and I'm too lazy to trek to the garage and peruse the filing cabinets. I used your stuff to teach courses in the sociology of work.
I grew up in a town like Flint, only worse: We didn't have a good union labor base. We just lost mostly shit jobs. Bluestone and Harrison took special note of it for its extreme antipathy to unions. I grew up watching shattered people, who'd once had factory jobs, try to figure out how to survive. At the ripe old age of 18 and one month, I was laid off when I was working the graveyard shift. Corporate entered at 5 a.m. after the bar rush, put a chain lock around the doors, and told us it was our last day. The guy looked the other way as we all carted food, plants, dishes, whatever we could scavange and packed it in our cars--even though we were supposed to toss it in the dumpster. They closed shop because the factory across the street had just laid off half the workforce.
I waited in an unemployment line that was blocks long, just to find out that I hadn't worked enough to collect. I lived by moving from friend to friend, party to party and passing out, and eventually setting up a mattress in the back of my $200 Ford Pinto wagon.
There were literally no jobs to be had in that town for about 18 months. The local newspaper let people advertise their skills for free. Because, otherwise, the only company that was hiring was Kirby and Rainbow--vaccuum cleaner sales. To this day, I detest those companies for their exploitive model and, in fact, I probably lost my job recently because I felt the company was moving to this redickulously similar model for selling a software product that I'd took the lead in developing. When I described it to Max, I think he called it the tupperware model. Exactly.
But anyway...I eventually took a job working for a man who'd been union boss (memory is hazy) at the Brockway Truck plant. (You may have heard of a doco called Huskietown, U.S.A. which was about the plant and the real reasons why it closed.) Boy, was that a man who had been destoyred by the lies and politics surrounding the closing.
Background: Back in the late 60s/early 70s, Mack truck bought Brockway with the intention of shutting it down. Brockway was this great union employer. IIRC, the guys who worked there made 15$/hour back in the late 70s. This was _great_ money in a small town in upstate NY. Mack sent in a CEO who fell in love with the town --Huskietown, USA--and did everything in his power to keep the place alive. In the 70s, the workers engaged in wildcat strikes which the company used as a pretext to do what they'd been planning to do anyway: plant shutdown.
Nonetheless, even my ex-BIL, who'd been a union steward, is convinced to this very day that the reason why the plant closed was be/c the workers were too uppity. My mother grew up with a girl who married a VP who knew the real story. He told my ex-BIL, the real story. The anti-union antipathy and self-blame was so strong that the ex-BIL refused to believe the truth. Everyone in town blamed the wildcatters for the shutdown (and the spiral of economic decline that followed) and not even reality was going to change their perception.
In my work at Syracuse, the Centertown project studied the effects of structural economic change on the civic life of that community. We held town forums, using the film as a mediating object, trying to develop what Harry Boyte calls the "free spaces" through which citizens can grapple with the 'big questions' that affect their lives. The doco told the real story behind the closing, exposing the lie that the Wildcat strikes were to blame for the loss of jobs.
It was an interesting, fascinating project: how to develop a civic infrastructure through which to raise consciousness about profound issues. My experience in the project was that, even people who appear to be extremely apathetic, politically, really groove on the opportunity to discuss these abstract, difficult ideas. They actually enjoy reading difficult material -- things that some here would denounce as too complicated and sophisticated and full of jargon for the ordinary person. No. Butchers, welfare mome, drummers, preacher's wives, and chamber of commerce types liked being given difficult, challenging reading and difficult, challenging questions like, "what is the meaning of work?"
A lot of people would think this was an abstract question for academic wankers. But, no, in a town were work couldn't be taken-for-granted, the meaning of work in all its abstract glory was important to people. They understood what it was like to have absolutely no work, have no benefits, have no nothing except the generosity of friends and family and, finally. But still, a profound sense of loss with no future, no hope, no desire, no nothing.
Hmmm. What ramble. Anyway, Gino, the former union boss at Brockway, offered me room and board to take care of his mother. Only thing was, she would only allow me to stay in her home if she thought it was because _she_ was offering me a place to live. She wouldn't countenance the idea that _she_ needed 'hired' help. I was laid off from that job--mama coudln't deal--and slept in my Pinto again, picking up odd jobs in exchange for food and the occasional warm place to sleep or safe place to park the car. I picked up work in a box factory eventually, but got laid off again before I could collect unemployment.
I can completely grok the need for a world where work hours are drastically reduced.
As I mentioned, while my boss has written a glowing recommendation letter and insisted that I was laid off for 'business reasons' I know the real reason is that I squawked about working 300 hours in the month of September. Boy, can I grok the need for reduced work hours. I probably would have just shut my mouth had she not tried to put the blame on me. At any rate, I got into a discussion with our "marketing dewd" around that time. He was asking me to do still more work. I said something like, "look, on a salary of $36k, I really have aproblem working more and more and more."
He told me that the long hours weren't his problem.
This sooooo fucking pissed me off. I shut my mouth at the time, but i thought. Look, fucker, _I_ am the one producing the product which the boss sells at four times his labor cost. My labor is paying your fucking salary and it's paying the salary of the people developing another product that the boss is going to make a profit on. If he makes four times his labor cost, WTF? You're telling me I have to keep donating my time for SALARY and its not your problem?
Samee thing happened with the boss's wife one day. She was going on about how the programmer went for days without sleep to finish a project on time. She was just all a flutter about his dedication. I thought, "Lady, do you and hubby work 90 hrs a week? For weeks and months at a time?"
I'm sorry, she can't possibly. If she did, she would know that it's not funny what sitting on your ass in front of a computer screeen typing can do to you body and your mind. It eats you alive. It destroys you physically. You can feel it. I have worked physically demanding jobs. At least you get outside and your lungs pump. Sitting on your ass. You feel like you're slowly dying.
About the only time boss ever shut his yap--he can blab more than I can--was the day I said this to him. Look, you have capital--money--to invest in this venture. All I have is my labor power. If you lose your money because this venture doesn't pan out, all you've lost is money. You can theoretically go back to what you were doing that enabled you to accumulate that capital. Acummulate and reinvest. Right? You may even recuperate all you lost and then some. Right? It's _theoretically_ possible, right?
He agreed.
What happens if this venture fails? I have my labor power. I donate 30 extra hours a week to get this operation off the ground. It fails. I go back to doing what I was doing, earning a living. Can I ever get my 30 hrs back? NEVER. Do I get it back if we make a millions? NEVER. No matter how much money I make, I died a little bit every minute I donated my labor power to this venture. I can never get back the lost little league game, the lost time spent reading books or making love with the beau. It is all gone.
He had nothing to day.
I got that from you and people like you Sandwichman.
Thanks.
Kelley
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling