Happy Labor Day
People loved their work once, and it didn’t matter if they worked in the public sector or in the private one. The men who worked in the CCC would take their grandchildren to see the forests they planted, while the men from the auto plants would point out the cars they’d built as they passed them on the new interstate highway system. The women who fastened the engines on the wings would watch the B-17’s fly off to make a liar out of Goering, and the women who taught in the public schools would point with pride when one of their old students got elected mayor. Work was about making money, certainly. It was about feeding the family and keeping the roof where it was, and maybe having a little left over at the end of the day, or at the end of the week, for some amusement. Maybe a trip to Lincoln Park or White City or a hundred other places, where you could take a moment and enjoy the cool of the evening, music riding the nightwind from a dance pavilion down along the lake.
But it was also about Doing A Job, and doing it well, which was different than simply Having A Job. It was about making good cars and strong steel and sturdy furniture. It was about learning a craft, even if what you were doing wasn’t recognized as one. There was a craft in tightening rivets, or feeding the open-hearth furnace, or planing the wood just so. You had your craft, and the person next to you had theirs, and, when all the work was done, and all the craft was practiced, and practiced well, there was something you could look at with pride and say, that is something I have given to the world. Job well done, as they used to say. You could teach seventh grade civics and then, one day, you’re on a podium outside of City Hall. That kid right there, you could say. That kid is something I have helped give to the world. Job well done, as they used to say.
Unions were greatly responsible for the pride that people took in the work they did, especially in the middle of the last century, when unions helped build the most formidable middle class in human history.
There was an autoworker, Ben Hamper, who wrote a column in the Flint (later Michigan) Voice, which was the alt-weekly Michael Moore first made his name by running. A lot of his columns got collected and repackaged in an excellent book, Rivethead that I read in college.
I read it in a class by Stuart Blumin, who was my favorite professor and de facto advisor. He was an American historian, focused on labor and class and the development of capitalism, you could tell he was heavily influenced by EP Thompson and the Communist Party Historians Group over in the UK.
He was quite open that he had expected Communism to ultimately triumph, and that he had been wrong about that, and in subtext that he had wanted it to ultimately triumph, and didn’t think he had been wrong about that.
Anyway, Rivethead. The story is that Hamper was born in 1956, a fairly clever kid growing up in Flint, Michigan, the chronological and geographic apex of American industrial unionism, where everyone’s dad worked for GM.
And he could have gone to college but he gets some girl pregnant and so he goes to work on the assembly line not even really out of obligation or Catholic guilt or whatever but because that seems as good a life course as any, it’s what every man he’s known does, under the mighty UAW the pay’s on par with the kind of “educated” jobs you could get anyway, why not.
And so he goes to work on the line and eventually he ends up writing a column about it, and he talks about the color of the factory culture, playing soccer with rivets for balls and cardboard boxes for goals, drinking mickeys of malt liquor in your car on lunch break, the absurd fursuited mascot “Howie Makem, The Quality Cat” that GM would feature at rallies and shop-floor tours, being laid off in economic downturns and put into the “job bank” where you get paid waiting to be rehired in the next upswing, developing a perfect rhythm with your partner, training into a rhythm so perfect you can each trade off doing the two-person job yourself for 4 hours while the other one goes out to a bar on the clock, the dignity and solidarity of the American worker.
And time goes on and eventually his marriage fails but he takes it in stride, and his column gets recognized and he takes pride in that and then eventually he has an epiphany, and a complete breakdown, which are basically the same thing. And the inciting incident is when an older line worker, some guy he’d looked up to as a model of quiet, philosophical stolidity, just shits himself and is barely coherent enough to even notice this and he realizes the guy hadn’t been a Zen master, he’d just been checked-out mindless drunk on the line every day.
And he realizes that the rivethead life is destroying him, that the only thing holding it together was a budding alcoholism, and that it’s doing the same to all his co-workers, and looks back and realizes it had done the same to every grown-up man he knew, his father and uncles that growing up he had looked up to as models of masculine strength and fortitude really had just had their spark snuffed out and the life beaten out of them long before, and whatever pride they took in the cars out on the road was a defensive attempt to locate in an external form the sense of self-value that had been exterminated within them.
When Marx talked about “alienation”, well.
And he went crazy, and couldn’t bear to work on the line anymore, and there’s no redemption, that’s where the book ends.
And that was a theme that cropped up again in Professor Blumin’s class, that there were two great working class traditions that echoed through the ages, and they were
1) avoiding work
and
2) drinking
Back in the premechanized age of small-group workshop manufacturing, workers would celebrate “Saint Monday”, which was to say just not showing up for work, hung over after the weekend.
(This was riffing off of Catholic feast days, or holy days, from which we take the word “holiday”, and as time went on counted an increasing share of the days of the year. There was a reason that poor workers were aligned with the Church, and nobility, in “Altar and Throne” coalitions resisting the development of industrial capitalist liberal democracy.)
In the ‘80s, the crap time of American auto manufacturing, one trick that was passed around (pre-internet, so by word of mouth largely) was to look at the codes stamped on car bodies, which would tell you what day of the week they were manufactured, and to avoid Mondays and Fridays. Because those days had the highest defect rates, because the workers tended to be drunk, or hungover, or absent.
And back in the workshop days, you’d drink at work. Apprentices would be sent out for growlers or buckets of beer, there were elaborate rules of who in the hierarchy of workers was expected to buy rounds for who and when. And there was hellacious resistance to attempts to get them to knock this off, as the industrial era kicked into swing.
Those great satanic mills, where women and children worked in shifts at great water- or steam-driven sewing and spinning machines, stories of little kids getting their hands mangled by the machinery? One of the major reasons women and children were preferred was because they would actually show up on time every day, and stay sober around all those hand-manglers.
And I mean, this maybe sounds like an argument for socialism. Though not of any actually-existing- variety, as capitalist propaganda will be glad to tell you, Soviet work culture, at least when the morale thrills of the Revolution and Great Patriotic War faded from personal to institutional memory, was all about shirking and vodka.
So those complaints about how America celebrates Labor Day instead of May Day, ignoring the true meaning of labor - solidarity - in favor of mindless distraction? Psssh. Labor Day is a celebration of the truest, most ancient, most fundamental traditions of labor: not working (especially on Mondays), and getting drunk.
Happy Labor Day!