Expanding on Maggie Coleman's list of gossip topics by gender, the following
is based on years of working (when I wasn't laid off) on General Electric
assembly lines in Louisville, KY. In this particular variant gender balance,
on the the assembly lines anyway, was roughly equal. (Skilled trades were
overwhelmingly male and white.) Many people who worked there lived in or came
from rural areas, contributing a distinct flavor to many conversations, let
alone the ones about butchering hogs or taking a personal day to forage for
wild ginseng to sell to the Japanese, (reduction in the trade deficit of
unknown magnitude.)
Both men and women talked about what was in Ann Landers or Dear Abby, in the
National Enquirer, crime news in the daily paper (the more bizarre the better),
TV shows. On second shift both men and women talked about soap operas
(stories); and Oprah & Phil, et al. Marital and extra-marital affairs. Who
did what with whom in a van in the parking lot or an empty boxcar on the
railroad siding. (According to legend, one couple got caught when the train
pulled out.) D-I-V-O-R-C-E. Remarriage. Step: children, parents grandchildren,
cousins. Kin of all kinds and their in-laws and neighbors and exes. The trip
to Las Vegas, the vacation at Disney World or Opryland. Getting done early:
how to get everybody to get it together to get done early it; how to get a job
where you get done early; how much you could get away with once you got done
early given the foreman, the ambient level of disciplinary vigor, and your own
nerve, disciplinary status and access to a vehicle. Rumors: "My stepmother's
neighbor works in the warehouse and told her it's getting full." "The secretary
in Relations (i.e. Human Relations) goes to my church and she said they might
call some people back by the end of the year." "GE's going to sell us off to the
Japanese." Hey, maybe we'll be better off.
Farming and gardening, (even people who lived in the city had vegetable gardens
in the back yard.) Many people who didn't own land in the country wanted it,
dreamed about it, saved for it, retired to it. They leased, borrowed and shared
it. In the days before Jack Welch wrote the book on proactive downsizing, and
winning hearts and minds to the company line through sheer fear - back in those
days, Appliance Park was famous for its quickie wildcat strikes. We looked for
them to happen in good weather in spring and fall when the old boys needed a
couple days off to set and cut tobacco. (I have no doubt that the big tobacco
companies are powerful, but another reason why tobacco is so hard to lick is
that the growing of it is so widely distributed. Everybody and his or her
brother-in-law has a tobacco allotment. Even some guys who lived in the city
would spend a couple weekends in the fall helping a buddy get his tobacco in.)
In Building 2, every day at high noon, some guy in incoming inspection would
hook a radio to the loudspeaker and play the hog price report for somebody too
far into the building to pick up AM radio. (FM we could get, & whether to play
rock or country and how loud was hotly contested terrain. The only soul music
station was AM and we couldn't pick it up inside the buildings.)
So this gets into some of the subcultures. Farmers are one. Guys talked about
planting and plowing and women talked about canning. (Once my sister and I
were driving through the upper midwest. We passed vast fields that were
clearly under cultivation, but empty of people. She kept wondering why no one
was toiling in the fields. Finally it hit me - they were all at work.) For men
there are large subcultures built around sports, as has been noted by someone
else, and gambling on sports. Both men and women get into University of
Louisville or University of Kentucky basketball (one or the other; we're
talking serious sectarianism here) bowling and softball leagues. Then there's
hunting, fishing, and going to the lake. Guns. Drugs. Gambling on anything
(the old check pool, using paycheck #s as a poker hand). Guns. Building and
fixing things around the house. The car, van, motorcycle, or pick-up truck of
choice. These are mainly guy things to talk about, although some women carried
guns in their purses and some did drugs and gambled - bingo at the parish hall
and on chartered bus trips to South Carolina for $1000 games. But the guys
built little social and business networks around drugs, their bookies and
handicapping the horses.)
Women are more likely to talk about church activities: pot luck suppers, picnics
and services as semi-social events; but both men and women might be born again
Christians who preach incessantly, have visions and backslide, only to be born
again. One guy had been raised an atheist army brat on bases all over the
world. He undertook a serious study of the world's religions, could talk
intelligently about Buddhism and Hinduism and whatever. I learned from him
that Tao is pronounced with a "D" sound. Then he and his wife chose a
Pentacostal church for themselves and their kids because of the values it
offered. Women liked to talk about the furniture they just bought, or put on
layaway, or wanted - living room suites, dining room suites, bedroom suites.
Single guys were also fond of talking about their bedroom suites. (Then again,
a lot of women could really hang in there there in the raunch department.)
Cooking, crafts, exchanging recipes and what to fix for supper. The latest
Avon catalog.
Assembly line workers are supposed to be one great gray mass, but the thing is
- there's nothing to be but yourself, and nothing about the work to engage the
mind, so personality, interests, hobbies and relationships have a lot of play.
People have strong opinions on political and economic issues, but these topics
are generally not at the top of the list of things to hang out and talk about
unless somebody provokes a discussion. I provoked a few. I had a friend - a
smart, funny, endearing guy - who had an image of an assault rifle on his belt
buckle, not your run of the mill AK-47 either, and read paramilitary
literature, and once was a cop in a small town. I had a shop steward who was
in the NRA and was more or less a narrow minded jerk. I knew another shop
steward, a white guy who had framed the determination of a grievance on a
discrimination case that he won for a black woman. He quit hunting when a
squirrel looked at him with pleading eyes. And he went from second shift to
days when his son moved in with him. A lot of married guys work nights while
their wives work days so they can get the kids off to school in the morning or
care for the littlest ones. (Yes, the women still get the most of the child
care, but a few of these guys give some serious help, doing household chores
and errands, starting supper - of course there are more like Paul who may
condescend to "babysit" their kids, but wouldn't touch a broom.)
My 15 minutes of fame - name in the local paper, 30 second sound bite on TV
news - came during a shortlived, but well organized and very angry protest
against yet another layoff. The union did nothing but say they were sorry for
those of us who got laid off over and over again. (In fact once upon a time
the local president publicly called for a layoff to stabilize the high
seniority people at 40 hours\week and get them a bit of overtime. The
leadership learned not to do this up front over the years as Appliance Park
went from 23,000+ employees in 1974 to around 9000 in 1991. But there was
always an undercurrent from people who would rather see us laid off than have
their hours cut. I just found out from a friend in Louisville, that GE now
wants to source operation of the warehouse. There are some very desirable jobs
in that warehouse and a lot of good ole boys with a lot of seniority are
getting very mad. They won't get laid of. They will bump somebody lower.
But they will end up back in the factory and that does not sit well with them
at all. "First they came for the ...., and then they came for me." There are
now only 6800 people there. Solidarity is never having to say you're sorry.
The company offered early retirement several times and this got pretty
vicious with lower seniority people putting pressure on eligible people to
take the offer. Many of the older people were in the situation Maggie
described in another post with kids in college, mortgages on farms and
subdivision homes, payments for the car, the van, the pickup, the fishing
boat, the house at the lake, the last vacation. And telling us when we got
called back after a long layoff, "You're lucky you have this job." And just
when we managed to get caught up, "You better think twice about buying a new
car [or whatever]. You never know when you might out the door again." And
when we did get laid off, " I hate to see you go. Times sure are hard."
You want to talk about divisions in the working class. I had a friend who
cocked her finger like a pistol every time she saw an older worker.
The point here is there is tremendous frustration and anger and many fervently
held opinions on political and economic issues. Tap into this and it can get
explosive, but people would rather talk about fishing and kids and sports and
sex. That's life. The rest of it is what's in the way of living life. Crime,
taxes, big government, politicians, management, us and them (by race, gender,
ethnicity, class, socio-economic status, national origin, sexual preference,
or political orientation); all seen through the lens of what's getting in "my"
way, threatening "my" job or "my" rights. There is a lot of political
disagreement, and a wide intellectual gap in the way of framing issues and
grappling with them between the left in general and working class people in
general. But there is also a disjuncture in what is worth time and thought
and energy. Clearly it is in the interest of the capitalist class to foster
and foment such divergence, but there is more to it than that. The right
wing is where people live their lives: at the church suppers, in the PTAs and
bowling leagues, at the gun shows and knife swaps and tractor pulls; fishing
and hunting and down at the feed mill on Saturday morning; in the hole in the
wall bars and the chekout line at Walmart; mowing lawns and talking over the
back fence in subdivisions and country towns. Not because they want to
"organize" these folks, but because this is the life they lead. They
share values about family, self reliance, a sense of community built on
circling the wagons around "people like us". (Of course this is most true of
white workers, but many black workers buy into some of it. There is too much
racism on the right for blacks to swallow it whole, but many don't have a lot
of sympathy for those who mess up or get left behind.) There is hostility to
change, anxiety about the unknown and intolerance of difference. The right
speaks to something hard and cold that lurks below the family values and
neighborly demeanor. "I've got mine and I'm going to keep it." Protected by
Smith and Wesson. Political talk comes up in context, in the every day
experiences, and the right wing is right there. Sometimes militancy is heroic
struggle. Sometimes it's just plain meanness.
I have a kind of double vision - like those kids' pictures that look like one
thing and then another depending on how you focus. The working class is under
tremendous attack. It comes down in the most visceral ways. Food, shelter,
family, community, identity are all at risk. There is loss and bitterness and
anger. In one focus, there is true grit - a struggle to survive with courage
and humor and deep caring (for those inside the circle). The other focus shows
a real breakdown of solidarity at all kinds of levels. GE folks want to "beat
Whirlpool" even though Whirlpool workers may be in the same union. GE workers
in Louisville went ballistic over a proposal to merge the seniority of several
people who transferred from a closed plant in Cicero IL. Many of them were
black women who had worked for GE in Cicero for a long time. But they had to
come to Louisville at the bottom of the seniority list. They kept pension and
vacation credits, but they would get laid off before any of us did. And of
course the most adamant about this were the youngest in seniority who weren't
about to let any one take "our" jobs. We knew our place on the seniority list
to the day. If we had the same day, we were sorted in alphabetical order. One
woman jumped ahead of a bunch of us when she got married and changed her
last name. She left the guy, but kept his name.
Then there are the hostile attitudes on the floor toward Mexicans or Japanese
who are seen as taking "our" jobs. (If you have doubts about globalization,
walk down any factory aisle at Appliance Park and see screws and wires and
brackets and whole damn components from all over the world. Look at the empty
sections, including one whole building the size of a city block and half of
another one, where subassemblies and even whole products have been sourced
out.) Hostility to welfare mothers living off "our" hard earned tax dollars;
to criminals and immigrants. These divisions are pushed by the ruling class,
but they won't go away until solidarity becomes a moral imperative, a core
value that people will live by and fight for. Solidarity that will protect
and raise up the most vulnerable, not just honor the picket lines of the most
privileged sectors of the working class or protect the two car suburban
subdivision American Dream middle class lifestyle for those who have it.
Getting back to gossip. It has a part to play in building solidarity. Through
swapping stories, sharing recipes and tips on where the fishing's good, the
unknown person becomes the known. The shy single white guy comes to respect
the wild and crazy black single mother for how she struggles to take care of
her kids through thick and thin, working when she can, getting welfare when
she can't. I once worked on a line with a young gay guy who took a lot of
teasing, some of it pretty raw, from other guys (although he was good friends
with several women in the section). I felt this strong urge to stick up for
him (sort of motherly and politically correct at the same time) until I
realized that when things were quiet for awhile, he would start up with the
guys who gave him the hardest way to go. He got some kind of kick out of the
other guys' threatened masculinity. And for all of them, it was a way to pass
the day. It had boundaries. It was like, Ricky's all right, he's our gay guy.
(Not the word of choice under the circumstances, however.) Gossip can be a
cruel way of crafting walls around who is in and who is out, but it can also
force issues to the fore in ways that demand concrete responses, and bring a
variety of perspectives and understanding to bear on everyday occurrences.
Sorry to get so wound up. Maggie's list really pushed some buttons
Back to lurking,
-------------Laurie Dougherty
