Chance democratic

Chance democratic

Thursday, October 20, 2016

Can’t Make It Here Anymore: Local Workers Talk About Globalization, Displacement and Retraining

This is a paper I presented at "Illinois Works," a conference my friend Bucky Halker and I organized at John A. Logan College in Carterville, Illinois, on October 23, 2013 

In 2006, the appliance factory in Herrin—which had recently been purchased by Whirlpool after being owned by Maytag for years—closed after almost sixty years of operation, displacing 1,000 workers. Of those, approximately 400 came to school here at John A. Logan for retraining with funding provided through the Free Trade Adjustment Act, which allowed for two years of education in any field so long as it ended in some kind of certification or degree that would qualify a person for a job. The FTAA grant was administered by Man-Tra-Con, a non-profit state agency designed to help, in the words of its website, “create quality workforce solutions.”
In the fall of 2012, I was granted a sabbatical to conduct oral histories with some of those workers to ask about such topics as their personal histories working at the plant; the impact of the shutdown on their lives; the usefulness of their education/retraining; and their interpretation of the corporate decision-making process as to why the plant was closed. In the process, I met some amazing people who graciously shared their stories with me. Here are a few reflections on what I learned.
Scientific Management
          In class, I focus a lot of attention on the revolution in the nature and structure of work with the rise of scientific management (also known as Taylorism), a concerted effort by industrialists in the early twentieth century to take control of the work process away from the workers themselves and re-order labor by breaking it down into its smallest component parts; eliminating excess motion; and timing every step to see how it can be done more quickly. The consequences of Taylorism were to destroy several things, at least from the workers’ point of view, including any sense of autonomy or individualism; the older tradition of craft skills, which had to be mastered over an extended period; and much of the Protestant Work Ethic, which saw hard work itself as morally rewarding and spiritually fulfilling.
Thus I asked people to describe exactly what their jobs were in the factory. Some of the descriptions are impressively intricate. One woman told of her work on the dryer line.
It was just assembly of different parts and screws or clips and untangling wires or putting stickers on and just a lot of manual labor with your hands. Lots of small parts and probably one of the most odd skills for me, I thought, that I had to learn was to roll small screws. You wouldn’t realize how important it was but all those tiny screws in a machine or in a part, and your fingers, you had to learn how to roll them quickly to get them into your machine, you know, to get them in to your screw gun. Because you’d hold a whole handful in your palm and just roll them and go as quick as you could. The dryer line was producing, like, 900 and something machines a day per shift. And then the washer line was at 1500 or something a day so there were quite a lot of screws because you’d put in at least three or four per machine. At least.

The speed and the number of workers on the line put a lot of pressure on individual workers. “There are [jobs] where you're just constantly, like, putting screws in the cabinet and you make one little mistake and get a screw in crooked or something, you start getting behind, and everybody starts getting mad at you.” At the same time, talking about people’s jobs forced me to rethink many of the facile assumptions I had about Taylorized factory work. One of the points I have traditionally made when teaching is that this work is not especially difficult, at least intellectually (on the other hand, physically, the job can be extremely taxing). But according to an engineer at the plant, the human element—calling on the skill and judgment of individual workers—was crucial, especially given the age of the factory.
We underestimate the value of human beings that have great hand-eye coordination and they know how things feel and they adapt to changes in the product and so they know pretty quickly how good stuff feels and also how the bad parts feel.  Everything goes together a little bit differently, none are exactly the same.  If you can install machines in hazardous areas, or to reduce repetitive motion injuries, then fewer people are at risk.  And that's good for the production line; you're taking care of the workers. But an old plant with old machines is sometimes more variable when making parts, and we found out that we needed people on the line because the people can and are willing to make the adjustments.  So they could put it together where a robot or automation couldn't and still get a good product out of it. . . . Human beings gave us flexibility that we could never get out of machines.

Similarly, I typically emphasize that scientifically-managed labor alienates workers from their product. As opposed, for instance, to craft skills in which a worker feels a sense of pride and ownership in the product of his labor, a factory worker performs only a few repetitive, predetermined motions and has no control over, and thus no sense of connection to, the finished product. But one worker was quick to disabuse me of that notion. When I asked, “So when you saw a Maytag machine did you feel a sense of personal investment in it?” she replied,
If you were just doing whatever job every day, you know, just filling in for someone, you didn’t have the same pride. Whenever you actually had your job and that was your position, and you knew you were accountable for those three screws in the back of the cabinet, or putting those five knobs on, you knew that it better be done right. You didn’t want it coming back and someone saying, “Wow, you did a horrible job.” You wanted to make it look as good as possible. I did take a little bit more pride in it. It meant more at the end of the day—“I’m really doing a pretty good job here.” You can look and see that they went down and that they had been boxed and you could see it. It made you feel good. 

Within the confines of their responsibilities, workers still struggled to exert as much control over their situation as possible. One worker commented that he liked to get as far ahead as he could on the line, and then he would read until the line caught up. Another told me, “Once you got good at what you were assigned to do, it was pretty easy. So many hooks would come by and you could count them out and you knew. So you could let the empty ones go so far down and then you just, you know, hang them right back up. And then you stand there and talk, or do whatever. Because the work was just steady pace with the conveyor. As long as you could keep up with that, the rest of the time was yours."
          One of the engineering department’s jobs was to institute reforms cutting down on this worker free time. One engineer—a self-described “time-study guy”—went onto the shop floor and learned the various jobs to “find out what the work really is and where the complications are—what looks like easy work to a bystander might in fact have taken years of practice by the person doing it and it just looks easy, but is actually quite difficult.” After learning the jobs, he broached the subject of increasing productivity, which workers typically resisted.
Making people work more proficiently in that place was often seen as making them work harder, and no one liked that. First you had to show them that what they were doing was easier than the jobs around them - easier than it ought to be. Once that was done, most of the folks eventually admitted they could probably take on a little more work.  When they accepted that I had their best interests in mind as well as the company's, it worked out okay. That was the tough part of the job—I worked for the company . . . but I also work closely with the Union and they have to have reason to trust you if they were going to accept your changes. . . if they didn't trust you, you got nothing done.  So you go out on the floor, you pay attention to folks that have never seen an engineer on the floor before, and you use their suggestions to make the process and product better.

From the workers’ point of view, though, time study not only resulted in lost control over what free time they had, but also a cut in pay. “They started re-tooling,” one former press room worker said.  “And when they re-tool, they re-time study, and when they re-time study they cut your pay, big time.  It's always an excuse to cut people's pay, because it was piece rate.  So they cut my pay almost in half.”
          As several people pointed out, the good workers tended to get taken advantage of. “Being young and strong and just out of the Army, I could do a wide variety of jobs. And you find out real quick that if you’re a good worker, they’ll abuse you, because there’s a lot of people that don’t want to work real hard.” Another recalled a banner that used to hang at the plant entrance reading, “Your quality is your job insurance: Good work means more work.” “Now you can take that several ways and I know how they meant it,” he laughed as he told me, “but in the plant you got the drones that get by doing nothing and you got the guys that are going to do the job. The guys that do their job end up doing their job and that guy’s job. Every time I think about that [sign], that symbolized factory work.”
          Working conditions
          In describing the physical conditions in the plant, several workers mention the temperature extremes. One woman remembered, “The heat was horrible. God love them, they really should’ve thought that out a little bit better, but there was no air conditioning really. They would pump in fresh air and it was somewhat cooler but it wasn’t air-conditioned. The winters were kind of cool in there as well because they didn’t heat it very well. It was an older building and just not really set up for heating and cooling very well."   The work was physically demanding. “Oh man, I worked my butt off,” one woman recalled.
I worked second shift, had a newborn. . . . I worked in what’s called the press room. The press room takes the long sheets of steel and we just press them into all the different parts for the washer or the dryer. Some of the sheets were as long as, like, from this table to the end of that [gestures at something several feet away] and it would be two of us lifting, or maybe it might be cut in half and it would be two lifting on one side and one pulling out on the other side. . . . And I worked really hard. I worked really hard and I’m going to give you an example of how hard I worked. I weigh—I had just had my daughter and I was almost 230 pounds. After a year of working there, I weighed 130 pounds. And I didn’t work out anywhere, just working there. In that press room, I lost 100 pounds.

          Many long-time employees remembered how bad plant conditions had been in the 1970s. As one described the conditions when he started in 1972, “this was Dodge City. You go in the plant and the plant was nasty and filthy and had steam and gunk flying around in the air. I remember watching secretaries walk through there and you’d have forklifts bringing containers—especially in the machine shop they had containers—that they would be going through there and it would drip oil. After a while when it gets pounded down by the wheels like that it turns into a paste. I’d watch these secretaries trying to walk through there and they’d lose their shoes in the stuff."
          Work took a long-term physical toll on many. Most employees were on their feet throughout their shifts, and for many years they stood on concrete floors. As one woman remembered:
There’s hardly any sit down jobs in a factory like that. Very rare. I was on my feet all day long. They didn’t come out with mats until several years after I was out there. You were basically just on the concrete floor. And then they did bring out some mats. First set of mats they brought out were like a rug then you stand on that and you just wear it down. But then they did finally get the good mats, the thicker ones, it has like the holes in them, they gave you support but yet you couldn’t mash them down. But that was much later and because we were on our feet all that time and I’m sure my weight didn’t help. I mean I wasn’t always heavy but still you’ve got gravity pushing on you, pulling you down. I got really bad varicose veins and the main veins they said they’d probably have to go in and have stents put in because I don’t have the right blood flow. Evidently the blood goes down but it doesn’t want to come back up and they said that’s from the veins. So I need to go see a cardiovascular surgeon, but I don’t have health insurance so that’s just going to be by the wayside for a while.

Some workers suffered repetitive motion injuries.
Everything out there was repetitive motion. I have a shoulder that’s messed up because of that. You know, like I said you’re using a grinder all day long. Let’s say you put out 3200 pumps a day which was not unusual, you’re bringing that grinder down, not just 3200 times because you would bring it down once and start to cut and you had to let it go, then bring it down again and start to cut, the third time is when you buried it and it went to where it was supposed to go and stop. Okay, 3200 times three, at least times three. So I messed my shoulder up. There came a point to where we either had bad steel or I had bad blades on the cutter, because it wouldn’t cut. I mean, you actually had to pull down on it. You were actually making it do the job that it just so easily should be—it should be like cutting butter, and I was having to just haul butt to get it down and my shoulder just wouldn’t go anymore one day. It was done, that was it, and I had to go have physical therapy and work with the different pull of rubber bands and stuff. I think they said there was a muscle and tendon or something that was kind of like wrapped around each other and just got all messed up. It’s like it catches on something and then it lets go. So there’s something going on in the shoulder but I’m living with it because I can still use it so. . . (laughs) It’s all right. Yeah, I’ll live with it.

          In addition to repetitive motion injuries, several workers suffered trauma from accidents. One showed a long scar on her arm and explained how it happened while opening a cardboard container. “I’ve got nine stitches across and seven in the inside on this little scar. I was working in one of the—they call them sheets of metal. They’re like sharp as razors. I mean I just bumped it. And it cut my arm open like that. And then I cut my arm right here. That was crazy. A straight razor. . . . We had a—you know, you open up all your materials and that stuff, and our razors had been dull for months, and so you just get used to using a certain amount of force. . . . . You just get used to using a certain amount of force—this is dull. Well someone changed our razors, they were nice, and we came in using that same force and it just got away from me."
          I don’t mean to make it sound as if workers spent most of their time complaining about physical ailments. In fact, in almost all cases, they didn’t bring up the subject until I specifically asked. On the other hand, people often brought up on their own the sense of community that developed among co-workers. As one woman described it, co-workers were quick to lend support to colleagues they felt were making a good-faith effort, creating a sense of community that transcended lines of age, race and gender.
The work atmosphere with the employees to me was awesome. It was kind of a team and depending on what department you worked in, it was kind of a family. Each department had its own family, and Maytag was the mother and the father and each department you worked in, for instance, were the brothers and sisters, but we were all the kids. Like, I worked in the press room so we were all a family and we networked within ourselves. People were really good about helping one another if you were a worker. If you were a worker. If you were not a worker, you probably wouldn’t be there long. People would rally with a new employee and help them to stay. It was that kind of thing, nobody wanted to see anybody get fired or lose their jobs or anything like that unless you had an attitude where you just didn’t care, and you didn’t care about the work you put out or whatever, and after that people just kind of let you deal with it accordingly.

But as long as you were a worker, they helped out everybody. And they helped me a lot.

And the expectations were simple really. Nobody asked you to be the Incredible Hulk or Wonder Woman or anything like that. Maytag was so full of those old cats that came from the military; they could just see the heart of the thing. It’s like the heart, the eye of the tiger. When they saw that no matter what, you won’t give up, you had that eye of the tiger. They’ll cover you, they’ll say okay do this. They would help you.

          Several remembered, with varying degrees of approval, that this sense of community often fostered a party atmosphere. One former employee laughed as he described it: “The partying was rampant. Right before holidays, you know before Christmas vacation—and so they really cracked down on that. There were no drug tests, no alcohol [tests], nothing like that when I first walked in. It was just a wide-open, sort of a frontier type of attitude, like you know the wild-west type of thing."  Another described the work discipline when he started in 1989:
It was like a big party there in ’89. I was kind of taken aback. . . . I mean people were lighting up reefer underneath the line at break time or going out at lunch and getting a fifth of Jack, coming in, and I’m surprised there weren’t more accidents there. And the bosses knew of it happening, you know, and they didn’t do anything about it. . . . . I mean standing for eight hours, putting screws in, is just a mind-numbing chore, but it’s something that has to be done and it’s good to be able to break up that routine with something like that every now and then. There was sexcapades on the roof. . . . And in the bathrooms and then it was an old place and it had little cubby holes and there was actually an old train car caboose that was in one area where they used to unload steel and people would go in that one and it’d be a big dope hang-out place. Some people had jobs that would allow them the freedom to roam about pretty much when they wanted to as long as they got their work done. I used to work in that area and I’d go back and clean up stuff and I’d get the smell of reefer flowing through the air back there, so I know that it did happen and as far as people on break time underneath the line, I saw that happen, things like that. But they were happy workers.

          Over time, though, management took steps to cut back on the party atmosphere. Drug tests began to be instituted. Management ended the tradition of workers’ holiday pot lucks with, as one person remembered, consequent damage to morale.
We used to have, on certain occasions or certain holidays we worked—or right before, because we had most holidays off which was a good thing—people would bring in potluck stuff and we’d have parties. They started cutting that stuff out. And that kind of takes away from morale, I thought and most of us thought. It just seemed like it was more business-like. Not that that shouldn’t be the way it is, I mean, you need to allow human beings to have a little fun here and there at work. They used to give us shifts for those potlucks and they’d give us an hour for lunch and not pay us for it but, like I said, they’d give us an hour and then they’d cut that. It just seemed like they were streamlining everything, including us having a little bit of fun at work and enjoying the time we’re there.

Plant Closing and Aftermath
          Close to half of the factory’s work force used the benefits package negotiated by the union to go to school for retraining. But the entire process of unemployment and retraining was complicated by what might be called the “pig in the python” effect. As one worker described it, “losing your job was one thing; losing your job with seven or eight hundred people simultaneously was a shock because everybody was going to be going after pretty much the same jobs."
          Many expressed pride at how well they had done in school. One woman captured the mixed sense of accomplishment and disappointment many worker/students experienced.
I went to school for two years and I enjoyed that. I’ll tell you what, that was a high and low for me though. The high was I went to college—it would have never happened, you know? I did good in college and I was proud of myself. Got out of there thinking I was going to come out and kick some butt and get a job at what I went to school for and stuff and let me tell you it didn’t happen.

What did you study?

Medical administrative assistant. Me and about three or four hundred other people, I mean there was a lot of us, a lot of us. And some did find jobs, but I’m here to tell you I bet that 90 percent didn’t. I got out and immediately went and put in applications, went to work at a gas station. That’s humbling as hell, let me tell you. Went to work at the gas station for a while. Then I got a call. A friend was working down at [a nursing home] in the offices, and they needed somebody in dietary and she told them that she knew somebody that would be really good. And they hired me and I’ve been there for three years now. But that’s not been my goal in life either because you know I didn’t go to school for two years to work in dietary. I mean you can do that without nothing.

But no, school was—how do I want to say this?—I was elated. I remember the day of graduation, I looked around and I just cried. I was just bursting, I was so happy. I accomplished a lot in two years, but not for what I needed it to help me with because I can’t find work in that. And I’m not saying it’s not out there, maybe it’s my age. You know, when I got out of college, I was 51. You go look in a doctor’s office and stuff and you see a lot of younger people in there and they’re not giving up their jobs. Why would they? They’re family jobs, that’s what they probably went to school for while they’re there. They’re not going to give them up and there’s just not enough doctor’s offices around to fulfill all the jobs. So yeah that was a high and a low two years there.

          Others have faced similar problems of a saturated job market in southern Illinois. One man explained the problems with getting a job in Information Technology. “I was glad [Man-Tra-Con] gave us the two years of free schooling. But some people in nursing and stuff, they were able to take off from the two years. With IT, it’s really hard to get a job in this area with just two years of schooling."  He borrowed money to finish an undergraduate degree from SIU, only to find that the glut of information technology graduates in the area has driven wages down significantly. “In this area I can tell you now the IT is not really there. The positions are there but they’re really low pay. I think there was an IT job here [at JALC] that was 10 dollars an hour, a little over 10 dollars an hour. That’s not enough pay I don’t think. But I guess in this area that’s what they think the wages should be."
Interpretation
          I was inspired to undertake this project by a conversation I had with a friend from Champaign who visited in early 2009. I told him about the shutdown and he was surprised he had never heard about it. Then he asked me how my students who were displaced workers interpreted the plant’s closing and I was embarrassed to admit I had never asked. So one of my major goals in talking to these workers was to get their view of what led Whirlpool to close the factory.
          Several workers point out that Maytag had been trying to find ways to cut costs for years. Part of the attempt to cut costs included moving various departments to Mexico, where labor costs were lower. One said, “for a period of time, [Maytag] had been farming out departments to other facilities and they had a big sister facility down in Reynosa in Mexico. When they shut the machine shop down over here that was pretty much like cutting the heart out of the plant." But, he continued, shipping departments out of the country did not necessarily save money. “They were trying to save money. They were trying to do that and it turned out they had this big plan on how to get them down there, make them cheap, and ship the completed transmissions back up here and save money, which worked out real well until the price of gas went up, and they lost their butt after that."
           Some people commented that the age of the plant and equipment, and its location were key factors in Whirlpool’s decision to close it. Others pointed to such factors as the decline of the housing market, leading to decreasing demand for appliances and Maytag’s bad business decisions.
Other workers sought to place the shutdown in a broader context of globalization and the concomitant war on American labor unions. One told me the decision was part of the effort to undermine the power of labor unions. “I feel that they’re trying to get rid of all unions and I understand that it’s all about the shareholders. They want to make profits for them, so you’ve got to go to a country where it allows more pollution and doesn’t have the high wages and you don’t have to worry about insurance and taking care of the workers as much. I’m kind of jaded that way by thinking it’s all about the money for the shareholders and owners or whoever, maybe."
          In the view of another, factory workers in Herrin were caught in an ongoing effort to gut the American middle class by destroying the power of labor and pitting American workers in competition with low-paid foreign workers—a process beginning in the 1980s and accelerating with NAFTA and other free trade agreements in the 1990s and 2000s. As he said:
A major issue with me is the disparity between income levels of higher income, upper-level, the ninety-nine compared to the one percent. That’s a big political statement now. But you do the math. Back in the sixties and early seventies, the average CEO was making twenty-five to fifty times what the average floor worker was in their factory, average worker in their firm, corporation was making. He was making twenty-five to fifty times more. Now it’s four to five hundred times. So to justify those huge salaries, you have to cut somebodies’ wages, because the profits, you know, you can’t raise your prices to where you can’t sell your product. So how are you going to do that? Well, you have to cut somewhere. So you cut out the middle class. You eliminate the unionized worker.

He continued, saying that organized labor sat meekly and allowed itself to be eviscerated. When I asked when he first should have seen this process beginning, he replied:
When Ronald Reagan eliminated the air traffic controllers [union] and the unions didn’t really respond because it was a government union, a public sector union. So the rest of the organized labor didn’t really respond a whole lot. There were a few naysayers but there was none of this retrenchment and “let’s get this guy out of there.” He got reelected by a landslide the second time around. It seemed to me that that was kind of a green light, they realized that they could start picking here and picking there and not hit the whole organized labor at once, but just hit here, there, a little bit, just these small agreements. It’s like putting a frog in boiling water. If you drop him in there, he’s going to jump right out. But if you just sit him in there and just turn the heat up slowly until it hits boiling, he’ll sit in there until he’s dead. And that’s what they did to organized labor; they just did it piece by piece by piece.

Conclusion
          Under various names, the Maytag factory was a centerpiece of the Herrin economy for 60 years, providing a large number of high-paying, union jobs, mostly for those with only a high school education. This worker’s experience was not unusual: “I graduated [from Herrin High School] on a Thursday and Monday I went to work at Maytag or Norge at the time. . . . Norge actually came to the high school, had an assembly, and had people fill out applications while you’re still in high school and then when you graduated they called you in. You just went to work."
          City leaders have argued the shutdown did not have nearly as bad an impact on the local economy as people had feared it would. An upbeat story in USA Today in 2010 held Herrin up as a model for other towns facing similar job losses, pointing out that the town’s population has increased since the plant closing and property and sales tax revenues have not been adversely affected. The view of the business community is that the loss of jobs has been partially offset by the rapid growth of the local health care industry with the advantage that such jobs cannot be shipped out of the country.
          Not surprisingly, many workers expressed a less rosy picture. As one told me:
You know what really drives me nuts? Is when the mayor actually made this statement that was in the paper that the shutdown of Maytag didn’t really hurt this town. Is he an idiot or what? You know it did. You know the money flow’s not here like it was, you know?

The first couple, three years, yeah might not have looked that bad because people were on unemployment or they were being paid to go to school so there was still some money floating around. But now you’ve got people—I know people that haven’t found a job yet, or they’re too damn picky and won’t take just any job. One way or the other, but I know some people that still don’t have jobs.

She further argued the idea that a growing health care industry can fill the void left by the de-industrialization of the community fails to take into account the realities of the local economy.
I realize that all the baby boomers are getting old now and they’re going to be needing care and whatnot, but I haven’t seen new doctor’s offices open or expand and things like what I went to school for. Nursing homes maybe, but the cost of the nursing home and the fact that the state doesn’t pay any money—you would be surprised at how many people are just taking other people in at home. They’re just doing the best they can because you can’t afford to go out at Shawnee Christian and pay $4500 a month, you know. You just can’t do it. And with the state not paying—I don’t know anything about the financial side of that place but I do know that if you’re just depending on your social security and Medicare you can’t pay. It ain’t happening.

          As one worker summarized the situation, there’s been a violation of the social contract—a violation, even, of the American dream.
It was a good bunch of people. You know, salt of the earth-type people. They just wanted a decent living to take care of their families. They didn’t want to be rich, they didn’t want to conquer the world. They just wanted a good decent job that paid enough that they could take good care of their families. Personally, I don’t see how that’s too much to ask. But apparently it is anymore in today’s world.

You see it all the time, that manufacturing’s making a comeback. Making a comeback. You know, what are they paying? We were making fifteen to twenty dollars an hour with very good benefits, pension plan, good insurance. What are these new factories that are opening up, what are they paying? Ten dollars an hour, no benefits? So yeah, they’re bringing manufacturing back, but they’ve already broke the back of organized labor. So what are they going to pay? Minimum wage? No pensions, some form of 401-K, maybe? Can you raise a family? Can you support a family with that? That’s the question. Is that too much to ask, a decent wage so you can support your family? To me, that’s not too much to ask for a company that wants to do business in the United States, at least pay a living wage for their employees.


One woman summed up the contradictory attitudes of many of the workers. “Do I miss the place? No. Do I miss the money? (laughs) Oh yeah. Do I miss the benefits? Yeah. Do I miss the wear and tear on my body? No. . . . No, I don’t miss that place. Just the benefits and the money.”

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