Kathy Newman

By Kathy M. Newman
Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University

As we hurtle towards Super Bowl Sunday the Rust Belt cities of Pittsburgh (where I live) and Green Bay, Wisconsin are gearing up for a showdown between two of the smallest market teams in the NFL which also boast the two most devoted fan bases in the country.  Both cities have lost the industries that made them famous, but each continues to stand for everything that we think of as working class.  Pittsburgh, known for its steel mills, rivers, and bridges, has its own section under the entry for “Blue Collar Worker” on Wikipedia.  And Green Bay, known for its meat packing industry, boasts the oldest professional football team in the US, which in turn has the awesome distinction of being cooperatively owned by the denizens of Green Bay.  Next to the socialist tendencies of profit sharing (as Bill Maher recently argued), The Green Bay Packers might be the closest thing the NFL has to bonafide socialism.

Dozens of articles leading up to Sunday’s game have paid homage to the blue-collar pedigrees of Green Bay and Pittsburgh.  Some have focused on the cities’ working-class food, matching up Brats and Beer Cheese Soup from Green Bay against Iron City Beer and pirogies and the giant sandwiches made by The Primanti Brothers in Pittsburgh. According to Primanti Brothers lore, the high stacked meat sandwiches, filled with coleslaw, french fries, and tomatoes, were created to fill the bellies of Pittsburgh’s working men in the 1930s.

Others have focused on the names of the teams;  no other teams in the NFL have names that relate so directly to the kind of work that was done in the region that the teams represent.  In 1919, a Green Bay employee of the Indian (meat) Packing Company, Curly Lambeau, asked his employer for some money for jerseys and some practice space for a football team.  The company agreed on the condition that he name the team after the company.  Curly’s team joined the precursor to the NFL, the American Professional Football Association, in 1921, and, as you have already guessed, in 1957 Curly had a football stadium, Lambeau Field, named after him. (more…)

Kathy Newman

By Kathy M. Newman
Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University

The billboard is arresting.  As I drive down Boulevard of the Allies, a postwar mini-highway that runs along the south edge of Pittsburgh, I look up at the giant image of six-year-old old Jarral People, an African-American child, adjusting the collar of his dad’s faded denim shirt.  His father, twenty-three year old Anthony Price, is looking down at his son and holding back his own hair—a massive mane of narrow dreads.  They are both beautifully lit in this black and white photo and seemingly caught in a tender family moment.  A caption runs across the photo that says WE ARE ALL WORKERS.  And, in the corner, in red, there is the iconic, 150 year old Levis logo.

Yes, this is a Levis ad.  And what is more, it was shot in Braddock, PA, just outside of Pittsburgh: a ghost town with 3,000 residents, boarded-up buildings, and crushing poverty—though it was once a thriving metropolis of 20,000.  Levis partnered with Braddock earlier this year to produce a unique and perhaps unprecedented advertising campaign.

According to Levi company press releases, the advertising firm that created Levi’s Go Forth campaign, the Portland based Wieden+Kennedy, noticed a profile of Braddock’s young mayor, John Fetterman, in The Atlantic magazine issue on “25 Brave Thinkers” of 2009.  They approached Fetterman with the idea of making Braddock the centerpiece of their advertising campaign with slogans like “Real People + Real Work = Real Change” and “Everybody’s Work is Equally Important.”  They offered Braddock one million dollars in aid to help with restoring the historic Carnegie Library in Braddock, the Braddock community center, and Braddock’s urban farm. Finally, they partnered with IFC Channel and Sundance to make eleven exquisite “mini-films” about the town, featuring the key development issues in the town.  In return, the people of Braddock would wear the new line of Levis jeans and pose for (and get paid for) photo shoots doing the “real work” of roofing, farming and neighborhood revitalization.

The criticisms of this campaign have been many, loud, and angry.  There are at least three lines of argument against Levis and Fetterman for this partnership. First, from within Braddock itself, veteran filmmaker Tony Buba—who has made Braddock the star of virtually all of his films and political activism for thirty years—complains that few of the models in the Braddock/Levis campaign look like anyone who still lives in Braddock. “I never knew there were that many thin people in Braddock until I watched those spots — or that many people with six-pack abs. You don’t see anybody 300 pounds and wearing a pair of Levi’s jeans walking across the screen.” Another critic of the campaign, long time Braddock City Councilman Jesse Brown, has never been a fan of mayor Fetterman: “Him and I don’t see eye to eye. For some reason he’s come to Braddock which is a predominantly Afro-American community that he seems want to be the– the white savior for this community and I just feel different.” (more…)

Mike Boyle

By Mike Boyle
Ph.D. student in Cultural Anthropology at the City University of New York

According to the popular stereotype, evangelical Christians want little to do with working-class politics.  Instead, we tend to imagine evangelicals as people who are either uninterested in politics or focused entirely on fighting the culture wars, rather than as people who care about issues like unemployment, inequality, and poverty.  If the stereotype were accurate, that would be bad news for people hoping for policy changes that would benefit working-class Americans.  Such changes only come about when the public puts pressure on governmental leaders, and evangelicals make up about one-third of the American public.

There are, however, good reasons to believe that this stereotype oversimplifies what is in fact a complicated topic.  I’d like to review a few of those reasons here, including a survey of evangelical clergy that I conducted last year in Stark County, Ohio.  Stark County, which is located near Cleveland, Akron, and Youngstown in Northeastern Ohio, is home to about 380,000 people who are spread across a diverse collection of cities, suburbs, and rural hamlets.  For the better part of the 20^th century, the three principal cities of Stark County—Canton, Massillon, and Alliance—were important manufacturing centers, particularly in steel and related heavy industries.  Over the course of the past several decades, however, Stark County has conformed to the postindustrial storyline of manufacturing job loss and deepening economic insecurity for the working class.  By 2008, 27.9 percent of families in Canton were living below the poverty line, a rate that is nearly three times the national average and also the highest among Ohio’s big cities.  In March of 2009, the Stark County job market drew national and even international attention when a whopping 835 people applied to fill a vacant custodial position at the Edison Junior High School in Perry Township.

Because Stark County voting patterns have resembled national ones for a long time, Stark has also earned a reputation as “a bellwether county in a bellwether state,” making it a magnet to campaigning politicians, as well as a better-than-average spot to check the pulse of American opinion with a survey.  Two hundred thirty-one clergy from the 553 congregations in Stark County filled out, at least in part, the questionnaire sent to them last year.  Along with conventional questions about theology, membership, and so on, the survey gave respondents an open-ended opportunity to identify what they considered to be “the most serious issue facing residents of Stark County today.”  The responses to that question don’t quite fit the stereotype.

Evangelical ministers are far more concerned with economic issues than prevailing stereotypes suggest.  Ninety of the Protestant churches that answered this final question self-identified as ‘born-again’ congregations—a very good indicator of evangelical belief.  Eighty-two of these churches were predominantly white, while eight were predominantly African-American.  Forty-two of the 90 ‘born-again’ churches listed an economic problem of some sort as the most serious issue facing Stark County residents.  Thirty out of these 42 identified the need for jobs as Stark County’s number one issue.  The remaining 12 churches identified poverty, food security, and child care, among other things. (more…)

Jack Metzgar

I think the top one-tenth of U.S. households should get about one-third of all income.  I may be unduly influenced by living in a household that is part of that top tenth, but here’s my reasoning.

Absolute income equality would be great, but it won’t work.  Per capita income in the U.S. is about $47,000, so if income were shared equally, every person would receive that amount, regardless of their age, whether they worked, and whether they are talented or hard-working.  Thus, a single parent with two children would have $141,000 to live on, while a couple with two children would have $188,000, and an empty-nester married couple like my wife and me would have $94,000.  These are not averages.  Every three-person household, for example, would get exactly the same amount, $141,000 — and that amount happens to be enough for everybody to live pretty well and for the vast majority of people to live much, much better than they do now.  And, as productivity increased and the economy grew, everybody would get more.

Most economists will tell you, however, that the economy would not grow under those conditions because incentives to work and innovate would disappear.  Though I suspect they’re probably right, these economists’ wisdom is based on a speculative assumption about a fixed human nature that a lot of world-class philosophers have contested.  And that would be a great discussion to rekindle if only somebody could figure out a workable, sustainable, and just mechanism for completely equalizing income without giving the government totalitarian powers.  So far as I know, nobody has figured out such a mechanism, and those who were trying to find a way have given up trying.

So, anything like absolute equality of income is impossible – or at least not practical enough to be worth thinking about for now.  Nor is it necessary.  During the period in American history when economic growth was strongest and when real wages, family incomes, and the general standard of living improved the most – from the 1940s into the 1970s – the top ten percent received one-third of all income in the U.S.  Historians refer to this era as “postwar prosperity.”  One-third was our share of the pie when the pie was growing at its best, and almost everybody benefited from that distribution. (more…)

Sherry Linkon

By Sherry Linkon
Co-Director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University

When the latest report was released last September, the poverty rate in the U.S. stood at 13.2 percent, the highest rate in 11 years.  Given the recession, the increase shouldn’t surprise us, and we’ll probably see higher numbers when the next report is issued in August.  I was surprised that the increase wasn’t more dramatic, but in fact the national poverty rate has hovered between about 10 and 13 percent for most of the past four decades.  While a few percentage points represent a whole lot of people, I was struck by the relative stability of the figures.  Clearly, today’s higher rate of poverty illustrates the effects of the recession.  But if we almost always have more than 10 percent of Americans living in poverty, then it’s clearly a persistent and troublingly-policy-resistant problem.

A conversation with a tour guide and another American tourist on a van in Argentina a few weeks ago got me started thinking about all this.  The tour guide was explaining that her government provides subsidies to families with children, and she was lamenting that some families choose to subsist on those government payments instead of entering the workforce.  The American tourist agreed that this was a problem.  She suggested that the right answer would be to “incentivize” poor people, so they would choose work over idleness.

Underlying the conversation were several assumptions about poverty and the role of government.  The first is that most people are poor because they choose not to work.  I suppose this is true for some, but I’m skeptical that laziness explains most instances of poverty.   According to a 2007 report from the U.S. Census, only 21.5 percent of people in poverty don’t work.  Today, the percentage may be higher, but given the unemployment rate, that’s not surprising, and we can’t read it as evidence of laziness.  Indeed, the New York Times has been running a terrific series on “The New Poor,” presenting stories and analysis of how a complex mix of accident and policies are driving people from the middle and working classes into poverty.  For a good example, read a recent report in the New York Times about how state cuts to child care subsidies are making it impossible for some low-income women to hold on to their jobs.  The women profiled in the story are far from lazy.  They want to work, but they can’t leave their children at home alone and have few options.

Second, we assume that if people are poor, it’s entirely their own fault.  Common wisdom suggests that poor people would be comfortably middle class if only they were smart enough or worked hard enough to take advantage of the opportunities this country offers.  Great myth, but in fact, upward mobility is less common in the U.S. than we’d like to think.  Most Americans remain in the social class in which they grew up.  Poverty is often situational and temporary.  Equally important, as we have noted here previously, the U.S. can expect to see the most job growth over the next few decades in low-income jobs, meaning that increasing numbers of hard-working Americans will also be poor.

A third assumption in that tour van conversation is that government’s role should be to push people to work hard, not support those in need.  Social welfare, the assumption goes, teaches people to depend on the government and thus increases, or at least perpetuates, poverty.  While tracing this correlation can be tricky, a study by Lane Kenworthy, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona (who also writes for the conservative Cato Institute), found that Germany and Sweden, two European countries with the most generous state welfare programs, experienced lower levels of poverty than other nations.  Such programs don’t eliminate poverty, and the results are uneven across Europe and elsewhere, but they do seem to help more than hurt.  Based on his comparative study of the effects of social welfare programs, Kenworthy concludes that “relatively modest increases in benefit levels for programs that assist nonworking individuals and low-income workers might well be sufficient to bring the U.S. into line with at least a few of the other affluent nations in reducing poverty.”

Of course, we don’t address poverty only through direct supports.  Improvements in education, worker rights, and health care would create better opportunities for people in poverty to achieve economic stability and move toward prosperity, and many people and organizations are working on these issues, here in the U.S. and globally.  Yet such improvements are not only slow to develop, they are also – like most public policy – matters of intense debate.  What does “better education” look like?  What rights should workers have?  Is access to good health care a human right, and if so, how should we pay for it?  As the seemingly endless Congressional and media battles over health care demonstrated, solving the social problems that contribute to poverty is a cumbersome and frustrating process.

Much of the debate comes down to two big questions.  First, does the free market generate good social practices?  In other words, when corporations and business leaders pursue their interests, does that generate sufficient prosperity and opportunity to help the poor and working class?   Second, do we believe that society as a whole has an interest, either moral or economic, in supporting those who are living in poverty? Or do we view economic inequality as either a “natural” condition or a self-inflicted problem that should be left alone, either because we believe we can’t do anything about it or because we believe that those who are poor don’t deserve assistance?

Clearly, neither the American people nor our leaders agree on how to answer these questions, and because those on both sides are passionate and committed to their views, we may never reach consensus.  That means that policy debates will continue to be contested, and most likely, especially given the U.S. system of government (see James Fallows on this), the policies we develop will usually take moderate, often muddled and cautious approaches.

Policy solutions seem elusive, but we should nonetheless think carefully about how we characterize people in poverty.  When we treat them with disdain and suspicion, the result is the sort of demeaning, even dehumanizing legal and bureaucratic practices that Barbara Ehrenreich has been documenting.  Or we can view them as equal human beings, people worthy of not just our sympathy but our assistance and respect.  We can check our judgments and question our assumptions.  And perhaps most important, we can listen to their stories so that we can understand their experiences and perspectives.  When we listen to others, they become human.  They become part of “us,” members of our society whom we cannot so easily brush aside or condemn.

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This piece was first posted on the Working-Class Perspectives blog

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Sherry Linkon, is editor of the Working-Class Perspectives blog. Her Working-Class Studies research focuses on issues of education, diversity, literature and the arts, and pop culture. She is also an expert on teaching and learning in the humanities.

Leo W. Gerard

Richard McCormack

Q&A

Leo W. Gerard: Richard, when you appeared recently at Youngstown State University as a guest of the Center for Working-Class Lecture Series, you talked about how essential manufacturing is to the U.S. economy and how politicians seem clueless about that. In fact, you said, “Politicians don’t get it.” When did that happen because clearly politicians in the 1950s understood that a solid economy rests on manufacturing products of real value?

Richard McCormack:  It happened imperceptibly over the past three decades, but perhaps the defining (though little observed) event was when Wal-Mart overtook General Motors as the country’s largest employer. When that happened, the retail industry became one of the most powerful political entities in the country, replacing the manufacturing industry.

The crossover from GM to Wal-Mart is important because retail started setting the terms of the debate not only with politicians, but also with manufacturers. Retailers are driven by increasing profits by pennies on the dollar by paying workers low wages with no benefits and buying cheap imports.

The loss of the manufacturing sector’s political influence also occurred with the rise of the finance sector, which became the dominant force in political gift-giving. The Wall Street financial sector does not give one-half hoot about American jobs.

The loss of America’s industrial capability also coincided with the persistent selling of economic ideology to the American public and its politicians that the country would be a lot more prosperous getting rid of crappy manufacturing jobs and creating jobs in the service and “knowledge” sectors. That grand experiment in creating a “post-industrial economy” just suffered a monumental collapse.

Americans have allowed the big corporate multinational companies and their agents to take control of their political system. It remains to this day a system that is stacked against American workers and American taxpayers. Americans have not entered the fight to save American jobs. I wonder if the middle class is drugged up on Britney Spears, Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods; addicted to sugar, salt and fat; fake “news” shows on television; and Prozac to deal with depression and lull them into thinking that their condition is beyond control. Something is stopping Americans from getting off their couches and demanding a voice in America’s economic future. Americans have lost their country to a few people who make a lot of money off outsourcing, off-shoring and importing everything Americans used to make and continue to buy. Americans must take their country back before it is too late.

Gerard: You have written about this problem in the book, “Manufacturing A Better Future for America,” and elsewhere. How do we make politicians understand how vital manufacturing is?

 McCormack: Politicians need to be hit over their heads with a baseball bat as forcefully as is possible, with Americans insisting that they at least acknowledge that a country that doesn’t make what is consumes is going to fail. It is a simple concept. There are many historical precedents of countries and empires failingafter having lost their productive capacity. It is an ancient concept: a country that does not have industry cannot support an army. 

The United States has just gone through a period of unprecedented loss of wealth. Its citizens have taken a collective economic step down. Yet politicians are sitting smug in the belief that they can borrow more money. They work in Washington, D.C., where I live. This place is humming. Most of them have no idea what the country looks like. Have they been to Detroit, Saginaw, Youngstown – America’s heartland? America’s heartland is dead. That means its heart has stopped beating. What happens to a person when their heart stops beating?

The financial meltdown wasn’t caused by the housing bubble or the financial bubble or the dot-com bubble, although all of those things contributed. It was caused by the simple fact that American consumers have sent all of their wealth to China, Korea, Japan, Germany and Mexico buying all of the things they once made. Tell that to the politicians. They don’t get it. They don’t get it and they don’t get it, which means they have to be hit over the head and be hit over the head and be hit over the head as hard as is possible to hit them with the simple message, over and again: the country cannot survive if it sends all of its wealth offshore. The country has to produce what it consumes. Our politicians do not understand this basic FACT. Have they looked at why China is becoming a superpower? It’s not because China exports its sports heroes and pop culture. It’s because China has embraced manufacturing as THE means to economic superiority. It is the same path the United States took to reach global dominance. Inexplicably, the United States abandoned that path.

Gerard: In Youngstown, you quoted Ralph E. Gomory, the retired IBM senior vice president for Science and Technology and a winner of the Heinz Award for Technology, the Economy and Employment, as saying the interests of American corporations have diverged from the interests of America, yet politicians act as if they’re still the same. Can you explain what that means both in terms of the economy and employment?

McCormack: Ralph Gomory has made one of the most profound and important observations on the current global economic situation. He says that outsourcing is not free trade. Yet the federal government still represents the interests of the powerful companies that are firing millions of American workers and shifting those jobs offshore. 

Domestic manufacturers have told me repeatedly that the greatest protectionists in our country are the corporate and financial companies that are doing everything in their power to protect their assets in China. To influence policy in their favor, the multinationals, retailers, importers and foreign producers fund think tanks, trade associations, lobbyists, lawyers and public relations firms. These are the real protectionists, not American businessmen who want to save American jobs and the American middle class.

The U.S. government continues to craft policies that are beneficial for companies that outsource jobs. For instance, the U.S. government refuses to confront China over its currency manipulation because the companies that benefit most from China’s undervalued currency are the American companies that have shifted their production there. Who does the U.S. government represent? The tens of millions of American workers who get the ax due to China’s blatant cheating, or the few CEOs at multinational companies and the financial class who make more and more money?

It was no coincidence that the stock market had its best year ever in 2009 – the same year millions of Americans were losing their jobs. The dynamic still hasn’t changed, despite the financial sector’s meltdown: Every time a company announces American worker layoffs, its stock price goes up. Yet policymakers equate the stock market with a healthy economy. They are as wrong on that as they are on the belief that the world is flat.

Gerard:  You have also said that politicians’ decision to implement the concept of free trade – which is not fair trade – has largely contributed to the nation’s problems. Would you talk about how something as positive-sounding as free trade devastated American industry?

McCormack:  A friend of mine works at the Commerce Department. He says that free trade is a farce. The United States has tariffs of 2 percent or 3 percent on incoming products. Yet the United States trades with countries with tariffs that are 10 times higher. Is that free trade? He has a simple solution to the U.S. trade crisis: hold up a mirror to any nation trading with the United States. Whatever their tariffs are on U.S. products entering their country, that is what the U.S. tariff should be on their products entering America. 

How can U.S. producers compete when they must pay for all of the costs that foreign producers don’t have to add to the price of their product? These costs include things like scrubbers and baghouses on coal plants. Not requiring the generation of clean power is a Chinese subsidy offered to all manufacturers setting up shop in China. It is an unfair subsidy that U.S. companies cannot counter without the U.S. government saying that it is unfair. Even worse, 75 percent of the mercury pollution in the United States can be attributed to Asian coal-fired plants that do not have emissions controls. The majority of these plants are located in China. China is poisoning America. If it was happening in the United States, the federal government would take the American utility or industrial company to court and impose fines of millions of dollars. What does the U.S. government do about China’s toxic emissions drifting over U.S. airspace? Nothing.

U.S. manufacturers have to abide by a thousand EPA rules and OSHA standards. Not so in China. That is a huge advantage. The United States government lets American companies that have set up shop in China get away with not having to abide by American standards – even though their products are being sold in the United States.

It is morally wrong.

Any foreign product sold in the United States should be required to be produced under the same conditions as is required for producers of the same product in the United States. If these requirements are not going to be enforced on overseas competitors, as they are here so vigorously by our federal government, then those cost advantages should be calculated and tacked onto the price of the product entering the United States.

Foreign producers should NOT have this unfair advantage. It is an outrage that the United States has allowed this to occur.

It is time for the country to stop listening to importers, their agents in Washington, including foreign governments, retailers and the financial industry. The U.S. government has to start representing the interest of American manufacturers, workers and business owners. It does not now. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is reality.

Gerard: In the chapter you wrote for the book, “Manufacturing A Better Future for America,” you said something that every American should find frightening. You said that when Congress cuts the taxes of individuals or gives them tax rebates in an attempt to stimulate the economy, the actual effect is to create jobs in foreign countries. Can you explain that?

McCormack: The U.S. government has just spent the past 10 years trying DESPERATELY to stimulate the U.S. economy, with trillion-dollar tax cuts, tax giveaways, low interest rates and even two wars that have lasted for nine years. Then the Democrats took office in 2009 and enacted their own $787 billion “stimulus.” Every time Americans have had a few extra bucks in their pocket (from tax cuts to direct government payments to home equity loans) they have spent that money on products that are now made somewhere else in the world. Is it any wonder why China’s economy was growing by 10 percent per year during the past 10 years, as U.S. consumers shipped more and more of their hard-earned dollars there to buy everything? 

Gerard: You have been critical of the second economic stimulus bill – called a jobs bill – that Congress is now talking about. You contend that the proposed bill won’t create new jobs. Here’s what you actually said, “I don’t see any jobs there. I just see more money being spent.” What’s wrong with that bill?

McCormack:  It is more of the same. Only a very small percentage of the bill encourages investment in U.S. production. There is not a single program aimed at countering the incentives that foreign countries are providing their companies and U.S. producers to set up operations in their country. The United States has to start competing – to start countering those incentives with its own incentives to manufacturing companies. It doesn’t matter if these companies are American companies or foreign companies. To create lasting, decent jobs, the United States needs global companies to open production in the United States to serve the U.S. market.

Small American companies do not need a $30-billion tax cut to hire workers. They need CUSTOMERS. They won’t hire a soul unless they have a customer to sell them a product. Yet the country continues to lose manufacturing plants to China.

Gerard: If you could actually get Congress to listen to you, what would you tell them is necessary to create good new jobs?

McCormick: Ask the 50 economic development officers from each of the states to form a U.S. Economic Development Council. These people and their offices know what is being planned in terms of company expansions. Give them a war chest, some of the TARP money or funding from the proposed “jobs” bill, and tell them to deploy the same tactics they use in their states to attract industry to America. All of the states are competing against each other to attract industrial investment. They should be working together, especially since supply chains cross state borders.

Gerard: When I go to Washington, what I hear is that we don’t need manufacturing. That’s old and dirty. So many politicians say the U.S. can move to a financial and service economy. You disagree with that. Why?

McCormick: I hear it too, though a little less often, thank goodness.  This argument is what has led to the demise of the United States. People are just starting to realize that as manufacturing goes offshore, high-end jobs in design and research and development go with it. When a plant closes, the supply chain disappears. This supply chain includes materials and parts producers, software providers, like CAD (computer-aided design), ERP (enterprise resource planning) and dozens of other high-tech equipment providers, machine tool companies, maintenance, accounting, packaging – the list goes on to include such things as the local restaurants, janitorial services and those dependent on the plant’s tax revenues, like librarians, county clerks, police officers and teachers. These are service jobs, all of which depend on manufacturing. One manufacturing job supports 15 other jobs. No other category of job has such a high multiplier. The United State must do whatever it can to start creating manufacturing jobs.

Gerard: We are losing at the international trade game with imports far exceeding exports and creating a massive trade deficit. Is it over for the U.S., or can Washington actually do something to reverse this situation?

McCormick: The game is not over. Not yet. But the country is perilously close to a period of sustained pain caused by continuing huge trade and budget deficits. The United States is assuming greater and greater debt. The country cannot borrow its way to prosperity. At some point very soon, the United States has to stop accumulating debt and start the process of paying it down. The only way to do this is by producing the products Americans consume – like cellphones, televisions, digital cameras, computers, semiconductors, printed circuit boards, autos, steel, household items, appliances, luggage, clothes – everything – and to start producing a new generation of radical and revolutionary products that the rest of the world needs to buy.

***

Richard McCormack is editor and publisher of Manufacturing & Technology News, a publication he created in 1994. It is read by industry executives, government officials and academics on five continents. McCormack has reported on science and technology, industry and government in Washington, D.C. for 26 years specializing in economic competitiveness and globalization. He has won numerous journalism awards for investigative, analytical and interpretative reporting. He is author of the book, “Lean Machines: Learning from the Leaders of the Next Industrial Revolution.” And he is the editor of the new book, “Manufacturing A Better Future for America,” for which he wrote the first chapter, “The Plight of American Manufacturing.”

Tim Francisco

By Tim Francisco
Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Working-Class Studies

Following this year’s Superbowl, viewers who stayed tuned to CBS were treated to the premiere of the network’s new series, Undercover Boss, in which COO of Waste Management Corp., Larry O’Donnell, dons coveralls to go undercover in his own corporation.

The premise of the show according to CBS is that

Each week a different executive will leave the comfort of their corner office for an undercover mission to examine the inner workings of their company. While working alongside their employees, they will see the effects their decisions have on others, where the problems lie within their organization and get an up-close look at both the good and the bad while discovering the unsung heroes who make their company run… O’Donnell’s mission is to garner an up-close look at his company and workforce to see how and where improvements can be made from both an operational and morale standpoint.

In the premier episode, O’Donnell, alias “Randy,” cleans toilets, picks up trash and sorts recyclables alongside his workers, and in so doing he comes to realize that… wait for it…manual labor is hard! Randy is also surprised to learn that, unbelievably, when trash collectors are followed by supervisors in conspicuous white pick-ups, they feel as though they are being spied on and that when his company eliminates positions, the work load is shifted onto remaining employees who receive no additional compensation for their extra labor.

In the blogosphere the show has already attracted much attention, mostly negative, and largely deserved. The New York Post reported that unlike a “reality” show, for which participants are paid, the network has labeled the show both a “docu-narrative” and a “formatted documentary,” which CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler tells Josef Adalian “…hits all of the same visceral high points of our scripted shows. It’s emotional, it’s funny, it’s compelling, it’s full of surprises…”

And it’s also a bargain for the network because as “documentary” CBS is not bound to pay any of the participants as it would with scripted or “reality” shows. Responding to TV Squad’s reports of the uncompensated appearances, a CBS spokesman said, “No one in the company is being paid for participation in Undercover Boss. Neither the employees, the executives, nor the companies receive compensation for participating in the show.” The blog reports that the workers in the program signed releases to be in a documentary film, which means it is not covered by the television actors’ union, thus eliding the requirement for minimum payments for TV appearances.

As incredible as the irony of a “docu-narrative” that chronicles the plight of workers without paying them might be, equally disconcerting is the meta-narrative that drives the series, described by Tassler as “aspirational…it’s wish fulfillment and it’s a new form (of reality).”

Randy/Larry rides along with a female trash collector. When he learns that under the watchful eye of the aforementioned supervisor surveillance truck, she is reduced to urinating into a tin can rather than compromising productivity by taking a bathroom break, he appears visibly shaken., Undercover Boss suggests that O’Donnell’s experience will lead to better policies, as O’Donnell tells NPR’s Linda Holmes:

I was out working a residential route, and I then found out that one of the policies that I had put in place was actually causing a lot of frustration out there in the field. So we’re working right now on improving our communication and our coaching between the supervisors and the drivers.

When pressed by Holmes to reveal “tangible” changes in corporate policy, O’Donnell responds with non-specific corpo-speak about motivational videos and better communication instead of actual policy shifts. The white truck isn’t going away anytime soon, probably because it is part of a strategy to save the company more than $100 million and increase divided to stockholders, as outlined in the company’s most recent annual report.The episode focuses on five “unsung heroes”—the trash collector, a cancer-survivor field office worker performing three jobs (due to corporate streamlining of positions also noted in the annual report) to support her family and hang on to her home, a dialysis patient who blows O’Donnell away with his positive attitude, a plant worker who must race back from lunch to avoid what appears to be an illegal pay docking policy, and a toilet scrubber who makes his job “fun.” While the first two voice complaints about corporate policies, all perform their jobs with capability and aplomb, and each (save the trash collector) is tangibly rewarded: the field office worker is promoted to a salary position, while the dialysis patient and the toilet scrubber are given temp gigs as in-house motivational speakers. Meanwhile, the middle manager responsible for enforcing the time clock policy is roundly taken to task by O’Donnell, although O’Donnell later tells NPR the whole issue was a “miscommunication.”

Absent from the narrative is union representation, which is perhaps not surprising given Waste Management’s troubled history with the Teamsters that culminated with a lockout of workers in 2007 and has resulted in at least one settlement with the union over its practices toward organized labor.

Instead, even as the show glorifies the unsung worker, it also perpetuates the myththat all workers need to improve their lots is a positive attitude and a benevolent COO, a mythology that ignores some of the stark realities of corporate culture.

Media promote that mythology, perhaps unwittingly, through a recession narrative that valorizes workers’ willingness to sufferithe necessary indignities of work life because they are, and should be, grateful just to have a job during the economic downturn.. Such stories tend to ignore the contradictions of the narrative in favor of the media friendly package.The narrative says that companies are struggling, but a recent Sagework analytics study shows that waste collection is among the industries experiencing the largest sales growth over the last twelve months.

At the same time, overall worker productivity rose 7.2 percent, according to the most recent Labor Department statistics, as employers wring more labor from existing workers and, in many cases, engage policies that CNN’s Peter Walker notes “would have been seen as too radical, or too likely to antagonize unions, before the crisis.” , Indeed, pri.org charts a rise in wage and worker’s rights violations during the same period.

The goal of the CBS program is, in itself, laudable: to connect the disparate dots between top-level policy and the daily lives of workers. But by perpetuating the “feel-good” narrative over the more complex contingencies of the real story of workers and bosses in a tough economy, the show engages in nothing short of myth-making, which as John Drakakis notes, is born of an impulse to produce

…a series of essentialist meanings which function to transform a sequence of historical and political events into a series of permanent, one might say almost literary truths, which can when deployed by the powerful constituencies, deflect resistance or challenge by framing the historically contingent as a ‘tragic’ necessity…

While Drakakis is referring specifically to instances in which pundits evoke literary frames for politically complex realities, his thoughts are relevant for cultural productions like Undercover Boss, that in mythologizing the corporate narrative, reduce complexities to what Roland Barthes has called the “depoliticized speech” of myth. The idea that bosses value their workers and care about their needs enough to change company policies is, sadly, more a myth than a reality. It reinforces another problematic myth: that labor unions aren’t necessary. If workers do their jobs the best they can, then the boss will respond to their needs.

Perhaps CBS is banking on the appeal of these myths in producing Undercover Boss, but skeptical viewers will recognize the truth in the smirks of O’Donnell’s management team when he explains that the company’s policies make workers unhappy. And the strategies outlined in Waste Management’s annual report remind us that profit always matters more than people. So much for the myth of benevolent management.

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Tim Francisco is an assistant professor of English at Youngstown State University, where he also teaches journalism.

Kathy Newman

By Kathy M. Newman
Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University

No one was surprised to see Avatar and Up in the Air nominated for Oscars.    What is surprising, perhaps, is that these two films offer unusually direct commentaries on the current political economy.

Avatar, at first glance, is a classic tale of colonial invasion.  A white hero, a Marine named Jake Sully (one-time bricklayer, the Australian actor Sam Worthington) who lost the use of his legs in combat, agrees to be part of a “Blackwater” type military operation on the planet Pandora.  Pandora, a place of fantastical, tropical beauty, is peopled by a race of gorgeous ten foot blue human-like aliens with long braids, called the Na’vi.  A rapacious military operation is destroying their planet in pursuit of a priceless rock called “unobtainium.”

Sully joins the science mission on Pandora, which allows him to inhabit an avatar body and live among the Na’vi people.  A beautiful young princess, Neytiri (African American actress, Zoey Saldana), teaches Sully to hunt, speak, and ride giant dragons.  They fall in love, and the film climaxes in an epic battle between the literally tree-hugging Na’vi people and the metal-bound, corporate thugs who want to destroy them for profit.

Is Avatar a bizarro mashup of all things politically correct? Avatar has riled up conservatives across the globe.  The  Chinese government recently halted the showing of the 2D version of Avatar, where popular Chinese bloggers pointed out the connection between the displacement of the Na’vi by humans and the displacement of the Chinese people by the Chinese government and real estate developers.

The Weekly Standard attacked the film for “its mindless worship of a nature-loving tribe ….its hatred of the military….and the notion that to be human is just way uncool.”  The Vatican slammed the film for promoting the worship of nature (as opposed to God).

But beneath the colonial exploitation and the eco-worship, however, lies Cameron’s critique of the American government’s failure to provide adequate healthcare for veterans.  Jake Sully, who is paralyzed from the waist down after a military tour of duty in Venezuela, joins the Pandora mission in large part because he wants a new pair of legs.  Back on earth doctors have the technology to make him walk again, but Sully can’t afford the procedure.  Sully’s mission commander promises him that if he betrays the Na’vi people and helps the mission get the unobtainium that he finally get his legs.

At the end of the day Avatar is not particularly radical, but it is surprisingly political for a blockbuster of such magnitude. Cameron makes a broad  plea for economic as well as ecological justice.  In addition, with the crudely drawn but still sympathetic Jake Sully, Cameron hints that our recent wars in the Middle East are class wars, in which working-class soldiers trade their limbs, and, sometimes, their lives, for financial security.  It hardly seems fair—not in 2026, and not now.

Up in the Air is Jason Reitman’s recessionary romantic comedy about a people who spend a lot of time breathing in the recycled air on jumbo jets. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is more at home in first class at 30,000 feet than he is in his barren apartment in Oklahoma.  Bingham works for a company that fires people for a living.  He spends a good portion of the film sitting across from nicely dressed, white-collar workers, telling them to see their layoff as a chance to finally pursue their dreams.  It’s a hollow message, but Bingham insists that if people have to be fired, he might as well do it with dignity.

Bingham also flirts with dignity, as he pursues Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), a woman who similarly spends her life on the road.  Bingham also develops a mentor relationship with a young co-worker, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick).  A know-it-all fresh out of Cornell’s business school, Keener wants to turn Bingham’s job into a virtual one.  She thinks that people can be fired just as easily with a video conferencing system.  Bingham sees his air born freedom under attack, and he takes her up in the air to show her the importance of firing people face to face.

And here’s where the movie made me cry—for real.  When Bingham and Keener sit across the table from about-to-be-laid-off workers, the human suffering of the recessionary economy comes to the surface.  Reitman used real-life laid-off workers to play these roles; he put classified ads in newspapers in St. Louis and Detroit and invited recently laid off workers to participate in a documentary.  He asked them to “re-enact” their firings, and he selected some of them to act in the film.  Their reward?  About $800 (the daily minimum for an actor set by the Screen Actors Guild) and the privilege of getting fired by George Clooney.

Cozy Bailey, a laid-off Styrofoam technician from Missouri, said that it “sucks to get fired, it doesn’t matter by who.”  But she also confessed that the whole experience was “cathartic.”  Another laid-off worker in the film, Kevin Pilla, was pleased that he was able to say the sorts of things on camera that he hadn’t thought to say in the moment because he was in “such shock.”

For Reitman, talking to these workers was an education. “The astonishing thing is,” Reitman said, “if you had asked me before I made this film, ‘What’s the hardest part about being fired?’ I would have probably said the loss of income…. But what I came to realize, at least when it came to the people, and I talked to a lot of people, it was the loss of purpose. The reason to get out of bed in the morning. The thing they would say that scared me the most was ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.’”
Reitman has come under fire for what some see as cynical choice to use real laid-off workers.  Dana Stevens at Slate magazine complains that “there’s something instrumentalizing about the way these interviews are shoehorned in for dramatic effect, especially when Reitman seamlessly cuts from the faces of out-of-work Americans to the familiar comic mugs of J.K. Simmons or Zach Galifianakis, playing out-of-work fictional characters.” Rob Humanick at The Projection Booth makes a similar charge, arguing that these “sequences never accrue a sense of purpose beyond mere lip service to social trends.”

Reitman can fairly be accused of mixing high and low, reality with slick unreality, and economic heartbreak with romantic fairy tale.  But the film ultimately sides with the laid-off workers and not with the company that has made a business out of routinizing termination. Up in the Air is about the value of human connection and the ways in which our closest relationships give us purpose.  The simple truth that the workplace can become a legitimate source for those relationships is not lost on the people losing their jobs, or on the audience.

We’ve been hearing a lot of numbers talk about the recession, but relatively little narrative.  The nightly news might focus on an individual family here or there or show some footage of foreclosed homes with yellow tape around them, but where do we go for the real stories?  We certainly wouldn’t expect to find some of the most moving and persuasive tales about the recession in Hollywood, but anyone who can afford to plunk down $10.00 to see Avatar or Up in the Air might, indeed, get more of an economic education that they were bargaining for.  Neither of these movies will encourage anyone to organize a rally or go on strike, but if it is becoming a “social trend” in Hollywood to put a human face on this devastating economy, I’m all for it.  And it seems that Oscar is, too.

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Kathy M. Newman was involved in the effort to unionize Teaching Assistants at Yale University in the 1990s. She is finishing a book, Blacklisted and Bluecollared: How Americans Saw Class in the 1950s” and is the author of a book published in 2004, Radio-Active: Advertising and Activism 1935-1947. Professor Newman also writes a bi-weekly media column for The Pittsburgh City Paper.

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This piece was first published on the Working-Class Perspectives blog site.