Responding to Doug's response to me from a couple of days ago, copied below:
ÐChintzy is an interesting way to put , Doug, useful though. Looking at
the US in the post war period, it was kind of chintzy. © Levittown, malls and
suburban sprawl. A June and Ward, and Wally and the Beave veneer on the
military industrial complex. A real delusional moment in time.
You make a very clear and concise case for the upside, so I'm somewhat
overstating the downside here, but we shouldn't forget it. The fear of
communism also generated intense repression and diminution of intellectual
discourse. Much of the rebellion you talk about was crushed, and what
successes there were were fragmented and often coopted.
A welfare state that supports people through transitions or smoothes
inequalities among people or even over a person's or a household's life
span is one thing, but one that maintains second class status and
impoverishment for milliions is something else. The US had some of the
former and a lot of the latter.
What power unions had was more a matter of being in the right place at the
right time, a marriage of convenience between them and some very
powerful companies able to command mass markets, little competition, and
economies of scale. I don't know if much real strength or class consciousness
was involved. There were black workers who were moving on a class agenda, not
really much elsewhere. I don't really know what happened to them. I think
some of the auto plants where there were active black workers' organizations
shut down.
In 1969, the first year I lived in Louisville, GE was on strike for months.
That was the last national strike against GE. I remember going to the picket
lines before dawn handing out left propaganda and showing support. They didn't
exactly pay a lot of attention to us. In 1975, that local poured money into
the anti©busing movement and mobilized against the United Fund because some
donations went to Legal Aid.
When I worked at GE, the '69 strike was something that might get mentioned
once in a while, but it didn't seem like a great mythic event or anything.
But years later, after some of us finally got really angry about getting
laid off all the time and raised some hell about it, one of the Chief
Stewards got up at a union meeting and spoke very passionately about what
it was like when he first went to work there in the 60s. He said they got
laid off too. It was just part of paying dues. Mostly he talked about the
strike, how rough it was, how he had to go on the road to find work. Told some
hobo tales. I realized then that that strike had forged a bond; it was a
victory that laid the foundation for their solid middle class lives. It was
their union, not ours.
The seniority system shielded them from everything that came after that. The
oil shocks of the 70s. The '82 deep recession. Sourcing, automation. Those
of us who hired in in the 70s took the whole brunt of this. And nobody new got
hired there in production in the 80s - not one person. Same with auto, same
with a big telecom firm I did interviews at since going to grad school.
Whenever the company cut back on overtime, or started giving out long
vacations or short weeks, the high seniority folks would get restless. Once
the union publicly called for a layoff to protect the 40 hour week for those
who would still be there. Another time I heard there was a petition passed to
get the union to back a layoff.
A steward once told me (he was talking about a guy who had the same low
seniority I did, who wanted the union to file a grievance.) The steward was
bitching about it to me and he said©:"You know, you people are lucky to have a
job." My first reaction was, "Yeah, you're right." It was such a rush of
relief to get called back, always this love\hate thing with GE. But by the
end of the shift I was in a rage. I went off on him. I told him, "You know,
you're the lucky one .© You've had steady job your whole life to pay off your
house, put your kids through school, take your trips to Las Vegas every year."
And what he had to say to that was, "You're real cute when you get fired up.
I'll take you to Vegas with me next time I go." Never did make it though.
You want to do a culture gig, Doug? Forget trashing Stanley every chance you
get. Where is the challenge? Go on down to the Red Fox Bar at the bowling
alley on the corner of Poplar Level Road and Old Shep across from Appliance
Park. You can talk Wall Street with Charles who keeps up with that stuff, or
politics with Mike who is very smart, funny, a great big teddy bear of a guy
who collects assault weapons as a hobby, reads paramilitary literature and used
to be a small town cop. Discuss the perils of postmodernism with my friend
Becky (almost the only one besides me who did not buy the company\union
Support the Gulf War T-shirt.) Buy her a drink. She collects glasses in the
shape of a naked guy - a specialty of the house at the Red Fox. For yourself,
you could get a naked lady. Carol - who believes that men are like tires, every
woman should have a spare - will flirt with you until you start running by her
that globalization ain't nothing new. She gets fairly rabid on the subjects of
immigration and folks who don't buy American (US American, that is).
I'm not trying to be mean here. But this thread is really pushing my buttons
and I'm tired of feeling told to shut up because I don't have all my
coefficients in perfect order.
---------Laurie
Doug said:
>Yes, but....
What you say is true, but it wasn't *all* a saga of evil and horror. There
were episodes of serious rebellion - nationalist/anticolonial revolutions,
the civil rights struggle, student uprisings, feminism - from the 1930s to
the 1970s that forced capital all around the world to offer concessions.
Unions had power, and the state in most countries acquired some nonpunitive
and even quasi-benign functions. Fear of socialism and the USSR put
capitalist elites in a more concessional mood than they would have been
otherwise. "Offer[ing] some protection to some members of the US working
class" is a chintzy way of putting it.>
Doug
