Book review - "What Work is" -- What does your job mean to you?

In six words, if you had to answer the question, “Work is…,” what would you reply?

For nearly thirty years University of Illinois Labor Education Program director Dr. Robert Bruno has asked his worker students that question.  Answers varied from “work is a pain” to some deep philosophical ruminations about what work.  Bruno reflects on those answers in his latest book, What is Work.

The Labor Education Program provides union-related training for workers by the hundreds annually.  Some classes are very practically oriented on steward or contract negotiation training, while others cover labor history, communications and working class mass media images.  As steelworkers, electricians, laborers, nurses, fire fighters and public employees gathered for union sponsored classes, his provocative question was raised, leading to involved class discussions.

Bruno peppers the book with his own poetry and childhood memories, watching his father trudge off to a Youngstown, Ohio steel mill and his mother operate her own basement beauty shop and eventually gains a clerical position.  Work is a necessity to eat, house and survive, but is there some deeper motivation that gives life meaning, transforming work into a valuable contribution to the larger society?  Or as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in Memphis the night before he died, “whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth.”

Bruno divides the book into five chapters, each reflecting the answers he received.  They include Time, Space, Impact, Purpose and Subject.  Answers from worker students frame each chapter.  Work involves an individual’s time exchange for payment; work happens in a unique space, that might legally belong to a corporation or government, but workers transform that space into their own; work has an impact on the person and on the larger world; work has a purpose that perhaps gives the individual meaning; and, finally, work is the contributing activity that frames our lives and builds the human community. 

Besides the individual responses that Bruno gathered, he delves deep into philosophy to see what thinkers said about work, including ruminations from Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Karl Marx, Frederich Nietzsche and others.  The responses note that work is more than survival and family care, it is a human activity that builds social good and hopefully gives the individual satisfaction.  Whether it’s collecting garbage, taking a patient’s blood pressure, paving a road or repairing a furnace, a worker’s talent and skills help maintain the human family and mutual connection.  Thus work is hopefully more than a paycheck for people.

Besides the author’s reflections, the workers’ reflections are most powerful.  Humorous, poignant, meaningful, they span the deeply philosophical to the loving obligation that parents feel for their children and their partners.

We spend our waking hours at work and often think and worry about work during our supposed down time or perhaps even haunting our dreams.  Bruno effectively channels his students’ varied responses to craft a volume that helps the reader reflect on work’s meaning to life and perhaps can spark the reader’s reflections on their own contributions.

What Work Is

By Robert Bruno

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Reviewed by Mike Matejka

WAR: AN EXCUSE TO CRUSH LABOR VOICES

American Midnight: the Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

By Adam Hochschild

Mariner Books, New York

Dissenting during wartime is not always a popular stance; attacking, imprisoning and deporting dissenters refutes the American promise of free speech and a free press.  It is also an opportunity to attack unions, labeling them as subversive enemy agents.

World War I, known as the “Great War” before conflict again erupting in 1939, is remembered today with marching soldiers in vintage newsreels and the George M. Cohen song Over There.  What few Americans remember is that civil liberties, free speech and union activists were jailed and suppressed.

In American Midnight Adam Hochschild chillingly tells the ruthless onslaught against any negative word, particularly directed toward immigrants, union activists and the Socialist Party.  Self-appointed Committees of Defense with government-issued badges materialized across the country, attacking supposed subversives.  Federal agents monitored union and political meetings and extensive files were gathered on citizens, led by an aggressive young federal worker, J. Edgar Hoover.

The American Federation of Labor (AFL) supported the war effort while the more radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) opposed it, believing the working class was being dispatched to kill fellow workers.  Business leaders feared and hated the small but vocal anti-capitalist union and the war legitimatized attacks against it.  IWW union halls were plundered, government agents were sent undercover to formant illegal actions and union activists were imprisoned.  In Chicago Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis rendered 388 guilty verdicts on 97 union members, totally 807 years imprisonment and $2 million in fines.

Railroad workers and Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to a decade in jail for questioning the war.  The early 20th century Socialist Party had built a formidable electoral base, promising clean government and basic sanitation.  Milwaukee’s elected Socialist Congressman Victor Berger was refused his U.S. House seat.  Before the War, the pro-labor Socialists had elected 33 state legislators, 79 mayor and well over 10,000 city council members.  After the war-time onslaught the organization had fewer than 10,000 members nationwide.

Waterboarding and other tortures were not invented during the Middle Eastern wars.  In conquering the Philippines from 1898-1905 to make it a U.S. colony, Army personnel created the technique.  It was freely used on suspects imprisoned in Army bases during the World War.  Religious minorities who refused the draft were shackled on high bars, forced to stand on their toes all day.  After bombs exploded outside prominent homes, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched a “Red Scare,” rounding up immigrants and other suspects on often flimsy charges.  The U.S. Postmaster Albert Burleson declared multiple African-American, Socialist, foreign language and labor publications as subversive and refused to mail them.

As the war fever faded and exposes on big business war profiteering spread, many reconsider the supposed fight for democracy that not only wounded and killed U.S. military personnel by the thousands but also shredded basic American rights.  Republican Warren Harding freed Debs on Christmas Day 1921, telling an Ohio reporter, “Debs was right.  We shouldn’t have been in that war.” 

The damage was done and many pro-labor voices were squelched.  Steelworker, shipyard and packinghouse workers strikes were crushed in 1919, the workers tarnished as subversives.  U.S. business embarked on the “American Plan,” which meant no unions.  Working class voices for change were silenced.

Hochschild has written an admirable book that is a page turner.  He weaves the story from presidential politics through government agents and the labor and dissenting voices who bore the onslaught. While President Woodrow Wilson heralded his Fourteen Points across Europe and promised democracy and freedom, American citizens languished in jail cells or in cold cemetery plots for daring to ask questions.  This is a provocative and insightful book and a stark reminder in today’s political climate of democracy’s fragility.

Reviewed by Mike Matejka

Carpenter shares vision of construction trades' futue.

Book Review

“The Way we Build: Restoring Dignity to Construction Work”

By Mark Erlich

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Union construction is a proud tradition that created successful unions over a century ago.  At one time, every city had strong construction locals that covered everything from residential to commercial to heavy and highway work.

So what happened and where do we need to go?

Those answers are available in this succinct 140-page volume from retired Carpenters New England Regional Council executive secretary Mark Erlich.  From his own on the job experience, union organizing and political involvement, Mark reviews how construction labor controlled the marketplace into the 1980s and how that power has diminished.   Illinois remains an island with strong unions in almost every city, but particularly in the south and southwest, construction has diminished to an immigrant, low wage, no benefits workforce, who barely survive terrible conditions in a cash economy.

From the early 20th century on, local businesses, contractors, unions and local politicians banded together to uphold union construction, so that by mid-century construction unions had higher pay and benefits.

What happened?  Large corporations banded together in the Business Roundtable in 1972.  U.S. Steel’s Edwin Gott claimed the nation’s most serious economic problem was “the effect of the high costs of labor settlements in the construction industry.”  With a vengeance, large corporations began undermining local agreements.  In some regions union construction almost totally disappeared or was limited to a few trades. 

The other serious breakdown was IRS codes that allowed for independent contractors, forcing individual workers into job situations where the worker was responsible for their own workers’ compensation, Social Security payments, taxes and other payments.  If a worker was hurt, it was their problem – although they were supervised by others, they were held legally liable.  Payroll fraud became rampant.  In 2021 two Miami shell companies pleaded guilty to providing Certificates of Insurances to work crews by the hundred, avoiding $3.6 million in insurance premiums.  Taxing bodies, insurance companies and the workers themselves were all defrauded.  The Nashville Tennessean studied sixteen construction deaths in two years, 2016-2017.  Half were Latinos and two-thirds died from construction falls with no safety harnesses.

So what is the solution?  Erlich notes the unionized industry’s two strengths – apprenticeship and diversification.  For employers and users, avoiding public shame and high insurance premiums means a competent workforce, which apprenticeship delivers.  For too long the construction industry was a white male, family enclave.  Attracting a more diverse workforce builds community support but that also means unions need to create a welcoming environment, on the job and in the union hall.  It also means advocacy and outreach to immigrant workers to demonstrate the union is their ally, not a threat.  This means organizers who can speak the languages and know those workers’ customs.

For those in union leadership and active members, this is an easy read, analyzing past downfalls and the long haul to restore the security union labor once enjoyed.

-       Mike Matejka

Union supporter Congressman Glenn Poshard biography

Son of Southern Illinois: Glenn Poshard’s Life in Politics and Education

Southern Illinois University Press, 2023

By Carl Walworth with Glenn Poshard

Who is a patriot?  Is it the person with the largest flag hanging by their door?

A true patriot is revealed in Son of Southern Illinois, the biography of former Illinois State Senator, U.S. Congressman, unsuccessful Illinois Governor candidate and Southern Illinois University (SIU) chancellor Glenn Poshard.  Poshard was not only an effective legislator, ensuring federal and state programs assisted the state’s south, but did so with high ethical standards.

Poshard was born into poverty in White County -- his father was an active Democrat and young Glenn learned those values along with a strict Baptist upbringing.  His family’s politics reflected 1930s Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s agenda – social uplift for people in need, jobs programs and union support.   Glenn went from high school to the U.S. Army, where he spent his late night guard duty memorizing President John F. Kennedy’s speeches and the nation’s founding documents.  He founded an outreach program for Korean orphans near his base, a program that survived his duty time.  He returned home to complete degrees at SIU, his family’s first to complete a higher education, and began an educator’s career.

He remained politically active and was soon appointed to an Illinois Senate seat vacancy (1984-1988).  His conscientious work for Southern Illinois soon earned him five U.S. congressional terms (1988-1998).  He had promised his constituents he would term limit himself.  His Democratic run for Governor in 1998 saw him lose to Republican George Ryan, who painted Poshard as an anti-woman, pro-gun extremist.

Poshard strongly holds his political beliefs -- balanced budgets, social program support and union jobs.  He refused to take PAC (Political Action Committee) funds, wanting no allegiances outside his constituents.  Ryan campaigned with $15 million in donations, Poshard, $4 million, stubbornly adhering to his no PAC donation principles.                   In the 1990s he was also anti-abortion and against LGBTQ rights, which was used against him during his gubernatorial quest. While running for Governor he tried to clarify that his abortion stance was personal, not a legislative agenda.  Republican candidate Ryan was also anti-abortion, but that did not stop his opponents from stereotyping Poshard as an extremist.  Poshard’s campaign was given corruption evidence within Ryan’s Secretary of State’s office but no official entities would investigate.  Ryan was later convicted and sentenced on those charges.  Although anti-abortion, Poshard was a strong proponent for women’s rights.  His campaign was centered on five themes: education, trust in government, protecting the vulnerable, fiscal responsibility and the economy.  Despite his chosen themes, guns and women’s rights dominated the campaign.   Leading SIU opened him to diversity and he widened his perspective toward inclusion and support for LGBTQ rights.

Poshard’s deep personal values, his bipartisan political skills and his deep love for Illinois’s neglected south shine through in this book.  He is very spiritual and while in Washington gathered every Tuesday for an hour to discuss spiritual issues with other legislators, particularly civil rights icon John Lewis.  Those efforts helped launch the Faith and Politics Institute, which is still active today.

With the divisive 2020 Presidential election, Poshard launched his own values tour, visiting each county seat in his old Congressional districts, marching around the courthouse square and reminding those communities that core American values should unite people, not separate.

Democrat Glenn Poshard won easily in what are considered “red” counties in rural, southern Illinois.   He accomplished this through retaining his values, constant communication with his constituents, by eschewing corporate cash and supporting decent jobs and economic development.  This book is a wonderful introduction to a representative who was a strong union supporter.  For some readers not immersed in the state’s south, there might be too many details about his time in SIU’s administration, yet his goal was maintaining an educational lifeline for that region.   Son of Southern Illinois reflects a thoughtful and caring American who deeply embraces this country’s highest values and seriously lived by his own ethical code.

                                                            Reviewed by Mike Matejka

"Girls who Build" entices young readers

Girls Who Build
By Marisa L. Richards
BookBaby, New Jersey

Gracie is a glazier, Olive an operator, and Adeline an apprentice in a delightful new book aimed at younger
readers, Girls Who Build, by Painters District Council 30’s Marisa L. Richards. With two young girls, Maris had been searching through the bookstore aisles and online sites – where was the book that
could introduce her daughters to the trades?

Her search was fruitless, so she decided to write her own book.

Girls Who Build is an easily accessible, brightly illustrated volume that shows diverse girls on the job,
in various trades, hard at work with inviting smiles while they practice their crafts.

Marisa serves on multiple committees and notes that often, the discussion centers on how to expand the construction trades’ diversity. She asks, “Why don’t we start the conversation earlier? We can show girls that they have agency and teach girls about construction. The need was so unmet in this space.”
Marisa is a University of Illinois graduate in Creative Writing with a minor in Gender and Women’s Studies. Since 2011, she has served as the Outreach and Engagement Program Manager for Painters District Council 30 in Aurora, Illinois.

In her position, she has worked on improving policies, and also on implementing sexual harassment training to ensure all are welcome and supported at the worksite. Outreach efforts are centered toward high school and middle school students, but Marisa saw value in exposing younger girls. Chicago Women in Trades (CWIT) is an organization she has worked with, and they have helped lead the sexual harassment training for the Council. She said that this active group “is an example for the nation.”

As the book reaches young readers, Marisa hopes that “at the very minimum, this story can inspire one girl just to see the possibilities that she is capable of. I had many strong females in my life and there were many strong females in the stories I was reading when I was young. This book might have the ability to impact one girl, like those books impacted me. I wanted to show young girls what the construction trades were and help them see themselves in those careers.”

Just as a building trades worker is proud when a project is completed, Marisa is enjoying the whirlwind with her book’s completion and the many positive comments. If you have young girls of preschool through second grade age, this would be a most appropriate book to share. They will enjoy the bright colors, all the girls’ names that match with their trade, and the upbeat, positive attitude. Even if you don’t have young girls in your life, this would be a wonderful book for a local union or individuals to purchase
for area kindergartens, grade schools, and day care centers.

Books can be ordered for $22 for a hard cover edition,
plus shipping at: https://mrichards.squarespace.com.
Reviewed by ILHS VP Mike Matejka

Fiction mirrors real life union struggles in Gilded Mountain

“The paradise of the rich is built from the hell of the poor,” counsels famed labor organizer Mary “Mother” Jones to aspiring journalist Sylvie Pelletier in the Rocky Mountain mining camp novel Gilded Mountain, by Kate Manning.

Is it fame and fortune for Sylvie with a besotted rich man’s son or the tough row of union organizing?  Manning effectively plays out a young woman’s dire choices as luxury tempts her  while living the hard scrabble life that a miner’s daughter faces.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw workers barely subsisting, unions crushed and great wealth ostentatiously celebrating.

Sylvie Pelletier and her family move westward to a fictional Colorado marble mining company town.  With her French Canadian parents, the family fled after a failed Vermont quarry union organizing drive.  Perched in a mountain pass cabin, the family barely survives while her father Jacques cuts marble for the wealthy Padgett family, whose Elkhorne mansion stands in stark contrast to the workers’ ramshackle existence.

Because she speaks French, wealthy matron Inge Padgett hires Sylvie as her summer secretary.  While her hard-nosed husband Duke accumulates wealth, Inge elaborates worker upliftment schemes and tours the mine camp, passing chocolates to barely clad and fed children.  Duke’s son Jasper flirts with young Sylvie, who dreams that wealth’s door might open.  In the mansion’s bowels she befriends the African American Grady family.  The Padgett family were Confederate slave holders and deep secrets slowly emerge amongst the elegant meals Easter Grady prepares.

Contrasting mansion life is Sylvia’s second job, a printer’s apprentices with hard-bitten, sarcastic, whiskey-drinking Katherine Redmond, whose Moonstone City Record constantly pricks the Padgett family and the marble quarry, reporting worker deaths, injuries and misery.

So which path does Sylvie choose, or does she even have a choice?   Wealthy and alcoholic Jasper Padgett erratically pursues her.  Union organizer George Lonahan catches her eye as she pines for romance.  Will it be a gilded luxury cage for Sylvie or standing with her family and principles, joining the union struggle? 

Author Manning dug into labor and mining history to create a full story.  The miners’ dangerous work and union organizing reflects what working people endured alongside the wealth they produced for the Rockefellers, Goulds, Vanderbilts and fictional Padgetts.  She researched Marble, Colorado, founded in 1899, whose stone graces the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknowns.  The Marble City Times and its female publisher, Sylvia T. Smith, inspired the Moonstone City Record.  Colorado’s mine wars, the vicious Pinkerton hired guns and valiant union efforts all form background for the miners’ struggles in fictional Moonstone.

This is an American story; majestic mountains, struggling workers, racial undercurrents and fabulous wealth extracted from the workers’ hands and the land’s bounty.  Author Manning blends history well with enticing fiction, well worth a read to see what life paths Sylvie Pelletier follows.

 Reviewed by Mike Matejka

Gilded Mountain

By Kate Manning

Scribner Books, 2022

West Virginia Miners' bloody Blair Mountain stories

On Dark & Bloody Ground: An Oral History of the West Virginia Mine Wars

By Anne T. Lawrence

West Virginia University Press, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-952271-09-0

“The difference working in a nonunion mine and a union mine was like jumping out of the fire into a cool stream of water,” recalled Matewan, West Virginia miner Kelly Buchanan in 1972.

Buchanan’s stark life’s tale of organizing, coal mining and fierce confrontations highlights the real life experience of miners who survived the fierce West Virginia coal wars of 1920-21.

In 1972 21-year-old college student Anne Lawrence ventured deep into West Virginia’s coal hollers, seeking the elders who remembered the intensive battles from 50 years ago.  She encapsuled her transcriptions into short, descriptive articles for the Miner’s Voice, published by for Miners for Democracy.  They remained there in old newsprint until recently collected and printed by West Virginia University Press.

Blood stains mark too many labor organizing efforts; perhaps the bloodiest was the 1921 West Virginia mine wars, when miners and company guards plus local law enforcement faced off in the “Battle of Blair Mountain” in southwestern West Virginia.  Federal troops intervened and confiscated the miners’ weapons ended the encounter, breaking union organizing efforts for a decade.

Miners organized in northern and central West Virginia before World War I, but southwest Mingo, Logan and McDowell counties were non-union.  Union miners were encouraged to push southward by the coal companies, threatened by lower wage, non-union mines.  The non-union mines brought in strikebreakers, protected by Baldwin-Felts armed guards.  Strikers were evicted from their company houses, until challenged by Matewan Sheriff Sid Hatfield, who led a shoot out that killed seven guards, two miners and the town’s Mayor.  A year later Hatfield was assassinated by Baldwin-Felts guards on the McDowell County courthouse steps.

When Governor Ephraim F. Morgan refused to prosecute Hatfield’s murderers, miners commandeered trains and marched on the non-union mines.  Logan County Sheriff Don Chafin roused his own army and faced the miners on Blair Mountain.  The miners wore red kerchiefs (“rednecks”) versus the company’s white kerchiefs.  For five days they battled, until President Warren Harding dispatched federal troops. Miners surrendered to the U.S. Army leaving the non-union companies and Sheriff Chafin supreme.  The West Virginia mines were not organized until President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930s “New Deal” programs legitimatized union organization.

The collected stories here are memorable, including miners, widows, company guards, non-union miners and those who were children in 1920-21.  Lawrence does a superb job describing the small homes, porches and courthouse squares where these grizzled veterans shared their stories.   The individual essays are tightly edited, setting the scene and highlighting each participant’s unique perspective.

This is an easy read, a recollection many would find astounding today, hardscrabble workers barely surviving in treacherous conditions, until that “cool water” the union brought lessened their misery.

For a visual perspective, see John Sayles 1987 film Matewan, a realistic, moving tribute to the mine wars.  

- Mike Matejka

Living Jim Crow and its transitions

The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

By Adolph L. Reed Jr.

Verso Books, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-83976-626-8

U.S. Southern racial segregation is represented in stark images: separate drinking fountains, waiting rooms clearly marked, portraying a clear, racial dividing line.

Yet each state, town, county had its own variations – a Black individual crossing a county line entered unknown territory.  Social custom that marked one community might be either more or less restrictive in the next.  Dismantling American apartheid in the 1960s granted more legal freedom, but how one navigated those spaces meant continued tension and apprehension.

Dr. Adolph Reed Jr. in The South not only offers political and historical analysis, but most telling, shares his own life experiences growing up in Jim Crow and then witnessing its awkward transition to a newer order.

Reed’s childhood encompassed the Bronx, Brooklyn, Washington, D.C. and New Orleans, with family forays across Louisiana into Arkansas.  This tight volume neatly encompasses personal memoir with cogent analysis.  Reed lived under Jim Crow, its collapse and its modern apparitions.  New Orleans saw more fluid boundaries, a multi-racial society that carried segregation’s trapping but also winked at occasional transgressions.  His educated, middle-class, Catholic upbringing contrasted with the rural, small town South.  Riding the Mississippi River ferry from New Orleans to adjoining Algiers, the boat deck separated by chicken wire, his grandmother would unashamedly proclaim in an audible stage whisper that the barrier was present because “a lot of crazy people ride this ferry and they have to sit on the other side.”

Neighborhoods, even blocks or a street side, might mark racial lines.  Reed grew up knowing which white-owned stores was acceptable for buying clothes, though a hat meant a different establishment.  Class lines were as clearly delineated as race.  Leaving New Orleans to visit Arkansas family meant a careful trip, cautiously traveling through certain counties while more relaxed in others.

As segregation crumbled apprehensions remained, as different localities maintained its vestiges.  In 1973 followed at night by a patrol car in the Carolina Low Country, the flashing lights stopped Reed.  He was called to the car’s literal “shotgun seat,” the officer wondering what the “Boycott Gulf” bumper sticker meant.   After sharing a brief history lesson on Portuguese African colonialism he was released.

Reed’s scholarship focuses not just on race but class.  His powerful last chapter draws sharp contrast between the upwardly mobile strivers, heralded in multicultural America, while working people still struggle with low wages and poor conditions.  He positions segregation as an economic system.  “While the segregationist system was clearly and obviously racist and white supremacist, it wasn’t merely about white supremacy for its own sake.  It was the instrument of a specific order of political and economic power that was clearly racial but that most fundamentally stabilized and reinforced the dominance of powerful political and economic interests,” he writes.

This concise volume invites the reader on multiple levels; there are the compelling, personal Jim Crow experiences, the haphazard transition as that false order crumbles and the current malingering racism.  He probes this with a class perspective and vividly portrays social changes, yet leaves clear signals on the remaining challenges.

- Mike Matejka

Book Review - How could a worker vote for Donald Trump?

Book Review

American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears

By Farah Stockman, 2021

Random-House, New York

“How could a worker vote for Donald Trump?” was a common refrain these past five years.  The most frequent TV talking head answer was “racism” and “white privilege.”  But was that the real or principal reason?

New York Times reporter Farah Stockman spent the last five years in Indianapolis, following 300 Steelworkers Union Local 1999 members as the Rexnord factory closed.  Rexnord is not a household name, but the brand “Link Belt” is an old one, the firm’s lineage before multiple leveraged buy-outs. The Rexnord plant produced ball bearings.

Stockman details the plant closing, the apprehension and lost dreams.  She intimately follows three workers: African-American Wally Hall and two white workers, John Feltner and Shannon Mulcahy.  On December 16, 2016, Rexnord announced the Indianapolis plant would close, the jobs going to Mexico and Texas; Recently elected Donald Trump tweeted, “Rexnord of Indianapolis is moving to Mexico and rather viciously firing all of its 300 workers.  This is happening all over the country.  No more!”

Did Trump’s tweet save the jobs?  No.  On February 4, 2020, Rexnord announced it was also closing its Milwaukee area plant.

Stockman examines her own challenges and privileges as she enters the factory’s working class world.  Bi-racial, her parents were college educated and she lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe before moving to the New York paper.  Election night 2016 the Times sent her to Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, Wellesley College, to report the victory party.  Instead, the joyous celebration for alum “Madam President” collapsed with Trump’s victory.  In her Cambridge hometown, people were dazed and confused.

People were also dazed and confused in Indianapolis, not because Donald Trump was President, but because their union jobs were going away. 

Stockman deftly weaves an intricate story; counter-balancing the laid-off Steelworkers with the statistical evidence on how deindustrialization destroyed American lives and racism’s subtext.   The book’s power is its deep dive into those three complicated lives.

Feltner had lost factory jobs and a home previously, each door slammed plunging him down another economic ladder rung.  A strong union supporter with Kentucky coal mine roots, Feltner challenged his fellow workers to refuse training their Mexican replacements.  He voted for Donald Trump, seeing a lifeline to decent union jobs.

Although he grew up in a stable family, drug dealing shadowed Hall’s past.  Questioning an elderly dealer, he reminded Hall that dealing “had no pension.”  Hall decided to embrace lower pay but lawful stability in the factory.  A gregarious, large man, his work ethic earned him appointment to a union position, working with both labor and management on productivity.  His great dream was to open his own catering business, “Wally Gator’s Woodfire Barbeque.”

Mulcahy had endured domestic abuse, failed relationships and fought her way past men to higher pay, working the factory’s temperamental, dangerous heat treatment furnace.  She never identified as “feminist” but created her own self-reliant identity, without dependence on a man.  Finally accepted by her factory peers, she enjoyed the workday give and take.  Her off-hours were spent caring for her handicapped granddaughter Carmella.

Shannon Mulcahy never finished high school but could make $60,000 a year nursing that heat treatment furnace.  Wally generously shared with family and friends, always grinning over his barbeque pit, knowing that steady paycheck not only provided family support, but attracted women.  Feltner had lost one too many good jobs – Rexnord meant not just stability but pride.  Rooted in Appalachian poverty, he claimed to not see racial barriers, but opportunity through hard work. Stockman and Feltner sympathetically debated skin color privilege, with her knowledge of racism’s toll, yet her educational achievements opened a world that Feltner would never know

The book’s resounding theme is that a good union job is more than a paycheck.  A job is meaning, purpose, and a workplace community.  As Stockman writes, “Work matters.  Too often, those who champion the working class speak only of social safety nets, not the jobs that anchor a working person’s identity. …Work gives us a reason to get out of bed, a place to be, and a source of self-worth.  It gives us social networks, mentors and unions that amplify our voice.”   Working class camaraderie thrived as people shared meals, smokes, jokes and lived a rough-hewn solidarity.

When the job disappears identity is fragmented.  Stockman shares the statistics and Rexnord stories – broken relationships, divorces, drug addiction, alcoholism, depression, and in some cases, an early death – as the lost job destroys self-esteem.  African-American workers rebound slightly better, used to unkept promises, while whites are lost, betrayed by that American dream they invested their souls in.

Why could a working person vote for Trump?  Because his showmanship promised those jobs would stay.  Rexnord workers resented that their supposed champions, the Democratic Party, had delivered job destruction through NAFTA and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.  In working class eyes, the Democratic Party gave lip-service to workers, worried more about identity politics and Wall Street contributions.

So what happens to John, Wally and Shannon?  Shannon got a few famed moments when Stockman shared her story, invited to New York City and receiving funds and promises from sympathetic financiers.  John found a lower paid, stable hospital maintenance position, lacking that factory floor camaraderie.  And Wally – read the book and learn – Wally Gator’s Woodfired Barbeque never graced a food truck’s side.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that 6.7 million manufacturing jobs were lost between 1979-2019.  College degree professional and financial services gained 17.8 million jobs.  Health care and education increased 17 million also, while hospitality gained 9.9 million new positions.  According to that same federal agency’s statistics, a college degree averaged $1,305 weekly in 2020, versus $781 for a high school graduate.

But college isn’t for everyone.  There are millions of Wallys, Johns and Shannons across this nation who have followed the “American Dream” prescriptions, worked hard, tenaciously faithful until a padlocked and abandoned building proclaimed, “you are not needed anymore.”   To understand not only the economic but also the human costs, read Farah Stockman’s American Made, a judicious blend of real life, personal voyage and the economy’s hollowing out cost.

                                                Reviewed by ILHS VP Mike Matejka

"Radium Girls" film strikes close to home

Imagine ingesting a known carcinogen onto your lips, hundreds of times daily, all part of your work routine.

In central Illinois the “Radium Girls” at the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa is a well-known and tragic story.   Young women were hired to paint radium onto watch and clock faces, so they would be visible at night.

Recently, a new film, Radium Girls, tells the story of the unfolding tragedy and how young working class women finally found a voice to stand up to their bosses.

Ten years before the Ottawa court cases exploded in the news, 100 young women at the U.S. Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, painted the clock faces, paid approximately one and one-half cent for each dial completed.  The plant opened during World War to provide luminous watches for the military. The women used fine camel hair paint brushes and were encouraged to maintain a fine point on the brush by twirling it on their lips.  Chemists and managers avoided the radium and used lead shields but there was no protection for the young female workers. The company did not end the hand painting of clock faces until 1947.

In this semi-fictionalized film, Italian immigrant daughters, Josephine (Abby Quinn) and Bessie (Joey King) Cavallo work at the plant.  An older sister, Mary, who also worked at the plant, had already died.  Josephine is becoming anemic and beginning to lose her teeth, a common malady of the plant workers.  Because they were told the paint was safe, the young women often paint their nails and faces with the toxic poison.  Both girls are wrapped up in a 1920s fad, studying ancient Egypt.  As Josephine sickens, naïve but earnest Bessie starts to ask questions. The workers are photographed by Walt, a young Communist who develops a relationship with Bessie and exposes her to the wider world’s injustices.  Josephine is reclusive and virginal – a company doctor comes to examine her and gives the same diagnosis he labels every sick woman from the factory with – syphilis.

With the help of the Consumers League, the women find a lawyer in 1928.   Bessie is harassed for her efforts and shunned by other women, fearing for their jobs.   The media descends on the courtroom and the women’s affliction gathers favorable media attention. The film ends as the real case ended, an out-of-court settlement for $10,000 each for the five women plaintiffs (about $150,000 in today’s dollars).

As the story in New Jersey unfolded, Ottawa workers were told that the New Jersey had viral infections and the paint was safe.  Ten years later the Ottawa women were in court, ravaged by radium and seeking justice.

The film is worth the watch for two reasons – first, to realize the corporate malfeasance and treachery that is a too common story but also, to see young, isolated working class women find their voice and fight for injustice.  

The film was originally scheduled for theatrical release in 2020 but was delayed because of COVID.  It is available on Amazon for rental for $4.99 at https://amzn.to/2L4CLWL    The film’s executive producers are Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner.

Mike Matejka