Revering sweat - Book Review

Progressive, The, Jan, 2004 by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Unmaking of the American Working Class By Reg Theriault New Press. 224 pages. $24.95.

Back around the middle of the twentieth century, when my father was working night and day to escape from the blue collar working class, Reg Theriault decided to stay. He had other options, having been pushed toward college by his mother, an itinerant fruit-picker. After flunking out of an engineering program because his education as a child of migrant workers had not included long division, he settled briefly in English literature, only to return to "fruit tramping"--and then a longshoreman's life--himself. This decision passes by without much comment in the foreword of The Unmaking of the American Working Class, but there is never any doubt it was the right one: When Theriault's sons reach their teens, he makes sure they have at least a summer-long fruit-tramping experience.

There is, as there has to be in any book about blue collar work, plenty of pain and difficulty in Theriault's memories of life on the docks and in the fields of the American West. But what shines through here are the pleasures--and I don't think that's too strong a word--of the kind of jobs he held until an accident on the docks forced him to retire. The pleasure, for example, of mobility: Fruit tramps, who could still recall their anarchist (Industrial Workers of the World) heritage in Theriault's youth, loved the tramping life. Longshoremen could, and perhaps still can, apply for a permit to spend a few months at another port. "For me, it was a good feeling," he writes. "I'm leaving town, heading for a new place, new people, and a job is waiting for me when I get there."

Camaraderie was another attraction of the old style blue collar workplace, which Theriault describes as a "gabfest." "Talk goes on constantly," he reports, "and the conversation can cover just about every topic imaginable," including, in one instance, the nature and fate of the indigenous Tasmanians. And camaraderie shades over into its harder-edged version-solidarity. When Theriault has to raise $2,000 overnight to bail out a son who's been arrested at a fruit tramps' picket line, old friends and fellow workers dig deep into their pockets, no questions asked.

With the talk came politics or, beyond that, an entire culture of egalitarianism and vigorous participation. Among the longshoremen, Theriault reports, "almost everyone, including most of the rank and file, were seriously caught up in politics, both in the union and the world outside." The men debated everything from saluting the flag at union meetings to bomb testing in Nevada. Congressional candidates came down to the docks to woo them. A few longshoremen, notably longtime union president Harry Bridges, were Marxists. But most were simply doing what Marx had witnessed among nineteenth century European industrial workers: imagining how their power in the workplace might someday be extended to the larger world.

In an indirect way, what made the old style blue collar jobs pleasurable also made them untenable from management's vantage point. Workers who know their skills, who support each other socially and collegially, and who have, on top of all that, a conscious history of class struggle, are in a good position to get what they want. By striking repeatedly over the years, the longshoremen had brought their average pay up to over $77,000 a year in 1998. Their rising pay inspired, in no small part, the decimation of the longshoreman population through the introduction of containerized shipping. As for the farm workers, it was the introduction of tough-skinned tomatoes and other fruits that undid the fruit tramps--de-skilling the work of picking and packing, which could then be left to machines and grossly underpaid immigrants.

Theriault knows he is vulnerable to the derisive charge of "nostalgia." "We are urged," he says, "to get on the side of history and quit revering sweat." But it wasn't history that depopulated the docks, he insists. It was "economic class warfare." Moreover, what's wrong with a little nostalgia when the recent past offered so much more to the blue collar worker than the present begrudges him or her?

The Unmaking of the American Working Class does not extend to its "re-making," in the last couple of decades, as a class of short-order cooks, janitorial workers, hospital aides, and big-box floor clerks. These jobs are not inherently less dignified and compelling than the old forms of industrial labor--at least as far as I can see--but their occupants have been pounded into a level of servility that would appall a self-respecting longshoreman. The unions have been beaten back with the help of a $2 billion a year union-busting industry. Independent-minded individuals are routinely weeded out through pre-employment drug and personality testing. Mobility is discouraged, unless you're willing to start all over again in every site. As for the workplace "gabfest" that enriched the longshoreman's life with political zest and intellectual challenge, a growing number of employers have instituted rules against talking.