Let
me tell you the story of an “unskilled” worker in America who lived
better than most of today’s college graduates. In the winter of 1965,
Rob Stanley graduated from Chicago Vocational High School, on the city’s
Far South Side. Pay rent, his father told him, or get out of the house.
So Stanley walked over to Interlake Steel, where he was immediately
hired to shovel taconite into the blast furnace on the midnight shift.
It was the crummiest job in the mill, mindless grunt work, but it paid
$2.32 an hour — enough for an apartment and a car. That was enough for
Stanley, whose main ambition was playing football with the local sandlot
all-stars, the Bonivirs.
” movement
is demanding for fast-food workers. Stanley’s job was more difficult,
more dangerous and more unpleasant than working the fryer at KFC (the
blast furnace could heat up to 2,000 degrees). According to the laws of
the free market, though, none of that is supposed to matter. All that is
supposed to matter is how many people are capable of doing your job.
And anyone with two arms could shovel taconite. It required even less
skill than preparing dozens of finger lickin’ good menu items, or
keeping straight the orders of 10 customers waiting at the counter.
Shovelers didn’t need to speak English. In the early days of the steel
industry, the job was often assigned to immigrants off the boat from
Poland or Bohemia.
“You’d just sort of go on automatic pilot, shoveling ore balls all night,” is how Stanley remembers the work.
Stanley’s
ore-shoveling gig was also considered an entry-level position. After a
year in Vietnam, he came home to Chicago and enrolled in a pipefitters’
apprenticeship program at Wisconsin Steel.
So why did Rob Stanley,
an unskilled high school graduate, live so much better than someone
with similar qualifications could even dream of today? Because the
workers at Interlake Steel were represented by the United Steelworkers
of America, who demanded a decent salary for all jobs. The workers at
KFC are represented by nobody but themselves, so they have to accept a
wage a few cents above what Congress has decided is criminal.
The
argument given against paying a living wage in fast-food restaurants is
that workers are paid according to their skills, and if the teenager
cleaning the grease trap wants more money, he should get an education.
Like most conservative arguments, it makes sense logically, but has
little connection to economic reality. Workers are not simply paid
according to their skills, they’re paid according to what they can
negotiate with their employers. And in an era when only 6 percent of
private-sector workers belong to a
union, and
when going on strike is almost certain to result in losing your job,
low-skill workers have no negotiating power whatsoever.
Granted,
Interlake Steel produced a much more useful, much more profitable
product than KFC. Steel built the Brooklyn Bridge, the U.S. Navy and the
Saturn rocket program. KFC spares people the hassle of frying chicken
at home. So let’s look at how wages have declined from middle-class to
minimum-wage in a single industry: meat processing.
Slaughterhouses
insist they hire immigrants because the work is so unpleasant Americans
won’t do it. They hired European immigrants when Upton Sinclair wrote
“The Jungle,” and they hire Latin American immigrants today. But it’s a
canard that Americans won’t slaughter pigs, sheep and cows. How do we
know this? Because immigration to the United States was more or less
banned from 1925 to 1965, and millions of pigs, sheep and cows were
slaughtered during those years. But they were slaughtered by
American-born workers, earning middle-class wages. Mother Jones magazine
explains what changed:
“[S]tarting
in the early 1960s, a company called Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) began to
revolutionize the industry, opening plants in rural areas far from union
strongholds, recruiting immigrant workers from Mexico, introducing a
new division of labor that eliminated the need for skilled butchers, and
ruthlessly battling unions. By the late 1970s, meatpacking companies
that wanted to compete with IBP had to adopt its business methods — or
go out of business. Wages in the meatpacking industry soon fell by as
much as 50 percent.”
In Nick Reding’s book “
Methland,”
he interviews Roland Jarvis, who earned $18 an hour throwing hocks at
Iowa Ham…until 1992, when the slaughterhouse was bought out by a company
that broke the union, cut wages to $6.20 an hour, and eliminated all
benefits. Jarvis began taking meth so he could work extra shifts, then
dealing the drug to make up for his lost income.
Would Americans
kill pigs for $18 an hour? Hell, yes, they would. There would be a line
from Sioux City to Dubuque for those jobs. But Big Meat’s defeat of Big
Labor means it can now negotiate the lowest possible wages with the most
desperate workers: usually Mexican immigrants who are willing to endure
dangerous conditions for what would be considered a huge pile of money
in their home country.
Slaughterhouses hire immigrants not because
they’re the only workers willing to kill and cut apart pigs, but because
they’re the only workers willing to kill and cut apart pigs for low
wages, in unsafe conditions.
In Rob Stanley’s native South Side,
there is more than one monument to the violence that resulted when the
right of industry to bargain without the interference of labor unions
was backed up by government force. In 1894, President Cleveland sent
2,500 troops to break a
strike at the Pullman Palace Car Factory. On Memorial Day, 1937, Chicago police killed 10 striking workers
outside the Republic Steel plant. The
names of those dead are cast on a brass plaque bolted to a flagpole
outside a defunct steelworkers’ hall. They were as polyglot as a platoon
in a World War II movie: Anderson, Causey, Francisco, Popovich,
Handley, Jones, Reed, Tagliori, Tisdale, Rothmund.
I first saw
those sites on a labor history tour led by “Oil Can Eddie” Sadlowski, a
retired labor leader who lost a race for the presidency of the USW in
1977. Sadlowski was teaching a group of ironworkers’ apprentices about
their blue-collar heritage, and invited me to ride along on the bus. Oil
Can Eddie had spent his life agitating for a labor movement that
transcended class boundaries. He wanted laborers to think of themselves
as poets, and poets to think of themselves as laborers.
“How many Mozarts are working in steel mills?” he once asked an interviewer.
In
the parking lot of the ironworkers’ hall, I noticed that most of the
apprentices were driving brand-new pickup trucks — Dodge Rams with
swollen hoods and quarter panels, a young man’s first purchase with
jackpot union wages. Meanwhile, I knew college graduates who earned
$9.50 an hour as editorial assistants, or worked in bookstores for even
less. None seemed interested in forming a union. So I asked Sadlowski
why white-collar workers had never embraced the labor movement as avidly
as blue-collar workers.
“The white-collar worker has kind of a
Bob Cratchit attitude,” he explained. “He feels he’s a half-step below
the boss. The boss says, ‘Call me Harry.’ He feels he’s made it. You go
to a shoe store, they got six managers. They call everybody a manager,
but they pay ’em all shit.”
The greatest victory of the anti-labor
movement has not been in busting industries traditionally organized by
unions. That’s unnecessary. Those jobs have disappeared as a result of
automation and outsourcing to foreign countries. In the U.S., steel
industry employment has declined from 521,000 in 1974 to 150,000 today.
“When
I joined the company, it had 28,000 employees,” said George Ranney, a
former executive at Inland Steel, an Indiana mill that was bought out by
ArcelorMittal in 1998. “When I left, it had between 5,000 and 6,000. We
were making the same amount of steel, 5 million tons a year, with
higher quality and lower cost.”
The anti-labor movement’s greatest
victory has been in preventing the unionization of the jobs that have
replaced well-paying industrial work. Stanley was lucky: After Wisconsin
Steel
shut down in 1980, a
casualty of obsolescence, he bounced through ill-paying gigs hanging
sheetrock and tending bar before finally catching on as a plumber for
the federal government. The public sector is the last bastion of the
labor movement, with a 35.9 percent unionization rate. But I know other
laid-off steelworkers who ended their working lives delivering soda pop
or working as security guards.
Where would a high-school graduate
go today if he were told to pay rent or get out of the house? He might
go to KFC, where the average team member earns $7.62 an hour — 57
percent less, in real dollars, than Stanley earned for shoveling
taconite. (No hourly worker at KFC
earns as much
as Stanley did.) The reasons given for the low pay — that fast-food
work is an entry-level job that was never meant to support a family or
lead to a career — are ex post facto justifications for the reality that
KFC can get away with paying low wages because it doesn’t fear
unionization. It’s a lot harder to organize workers spread across dozens
of franchises than it is to organize a single steel mill.
As Oil
Can Eddie pointed out, a class consciousness discourages office workers
from unionizing. There’s a popular discounting company in Chicago called
Groupon, where the account executives — who are all expected to have
bachelors’ degrees — earn
$37,800 a year. Adjusted
for modern dollars, that’s about Stanley’s starting wage, without
overtime. Because they’re educated and sit safely at desks, they don’t
think of themselves as blue-collar mopes who need to strike for higher
pay and better working conditions.
The fact that many of today’s
college graduates have the same standard of living as the lowest-skilled
workers of the 1960s proves that attitude is wrong, wrong, wrong. If we
want to restore what we’ve traditionally thought of as the middle
class, we have to stop thinking of ourselves as middle class, no matter
how much we earn, or what we do to earn it.
“Working class” should be
defined by your relationship to your employer, not whether you perform
physical labor. Unless you own the business, you’re working class.
“The smartest people I ever met were guys who ran cranes in the mill,” Oil Can Eddie once said.
They were smart enough, at least, to get their fair share of the company’s profits.
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