Case study: A Tale of Two Friends and of Jobs Worth Having

I have a friend who took a job at the Mercedes plant in Tuscaloosa County. A high school graduate, my friend had worked steadily for several years as a pipefitter in a much smaller local plant. He was glad when Mercedes called him, thinking it was a dream job. The pay is better than $17 an hour and he began to accrue sick leave and vacation leave from the moment he signed the contract.

However, he has already turned down lots of voluntary overtime. He says the job, on an assembly line, is both astoundingly boring and very hard on him physically. He does the same thing over and over and over all day long, although as a pipefitter he did many different tasks. The Mercedes job also requires a type of physical activity in a cramped space that leaves him hurting and exhausted at work's end every day. The dream job is more like a nightmare- though, for that money, this sturdy and healthy young man with family cannot afford to quit. He is trapped.

Assembly line jobs-such as those at Mercedes, or at McDonald's-have always been like this. Listen to writer and auto factory worker Harvey Swados, describing assembly line work in 1957: ‘[Workers] hate work that is mindless, endless, stupefying, sweaty, filthy, noisy, exhausting, insecure in its prospects, and practically without any hope of advancement. The plain truth is that factory work is degrading ... to any man who ever dreams of doing something worthwhile with his life.' As President Teddy Roosevelt said a century ago, ‘Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.' All of us dream of doing something worthwhile with our lives, and all of us are and want to be good workers. But boring work, degrading work, miserable work, dehumanizing work is not work worth doing.

I have another friend who may beg to differ with me about this. He is a very effective, hard-working, pleasant, brilliant, and-best of all-militantly progressive State Senator. African American himself, he represents thousands of African Americans, and his primary political goal is to help his community and his constituents achieve the basics of human dignity and respect. The vast bulk are poor and otherwise beset with all of the racist and degrading legacies of slavery which black folk in Alabama's Black Belt must still endure every single day. Eliminating poverty seems of prime importance in the scheme of achieving dignity and respect. Many of my friend's constituents have no work and little chance to work, especially for $17 an hour.

The State Senator works hard to bring all sorts of economic development to the Black Belt. Most pertinently, he has worked tirelessly to get another new automobile plant established near Montgomery, so that high-paying jobs will be available to his needy constituents and community members. He is very supportive of ‘jobs'.

My position is different. I say that, with all respect, my friend the State Senator is being short-sighted and unmindful of history in his solution for poverty and lack of respect in the Black Belt. I say he is failing to take into account the experience that workers in the first world have always had with economic development-experiences like those of my friend at Mercedes. I say that the work provided to workers by existing capitalist producers of ‘jobs' will not actually pay them well, will sap their self-respect because it will treat them with utter indignity, will only strengthen racist attitudes, and will thus augment rather than cure poverty, racism, and discontent.

It is no accident that assembly line jobs are boring and require almost no skill. That is how they were designed. Skilled workers-crafts persons-know enough about the manufacturing process to control it themselves. They don't need bosses. They don't like being herded into factories, the historical reason for which is so that bosses can control production, keep workers captive, and sap the individuality and courage of the workers. Skilled workers protest the control that bosses implement. They form unions and they strike, in order to regain control and reassert their dignity.

So bosses deskill workers. They divide up the tasks of production into minute and boring repetitive segments, requiring no skill. They demand absolute obedience, and deny workers any opportunity for ingenuity or innovation. They steal the knowledge of the manufacturing process out from under the workers' hats. Andrew Carnegie did this to skilled steelworkers in 1894. Henry Ford did it to skilled auto machinists 20 years later.

Questions

1. Is the writer right in what he says?

2. What points can you agree with?

3. What points would you take issue with? How would you do that?

4. What evidence would you use to support your argument?