"Middle-Class" Workers and the New Politics
Sexton, Brendan
A veteran American trade unionist since the founding of industrial unionism, Brendan Sexton is now Director of Education Activities for the United Auto mobile Workers. MUCH OF MY LIFE...
...In the UA W alone, more than 200,000 members have retired and received pension benefits of over p1.5 billion...
...What the consequences of the fragmentation will be only Nixon and Agnew may know...
...Unions need to make a new beginning, paying more attention to the needs of the young...
...At the other end of the scale, retail workers averaged just slightly less than $71 per week during 1967...
...In all cases, I have used the most recent annual reports available...
...Department of Labor said that an income of $9,191 would enable a city family of four to maintain "a moderate standard of living...
...They dislike Wallace, but not the men who are voting for him...
...Yet it is possible that Wallace's exposed bigotry finally did him in among Northern workers...
...for two adults and two children...
...When "opinion-makers" bothered to talk with workers, they found to their surprise that not all were racists...
...Later in the campaign, and in the Senate leadership fight, the warts on that handsome liberal facade grew larger...
...No one ever taught them Negro History, but they grew up with blacks...
...but they started from very far back, and they are still very far from the millennium...
...Workers and their unions have many problems and they need lots of help...
...But in 1967, manufacturing workers (most of whom are organized) with three dependents averaged only $101.26 in take-home pay...
...The dramatic rise in the rate of rank-and-file rejection of union contract settlements is a clear signal of distress among workers...
...lectuals of principle are also capable of compromise, though their evaluation of issues may differfrom the trade unionists or even the black mil itants...
...Children of workers are overrepresented in the mass of those excluded from college...
...Where affluence begins and ends no one knows, but it must be above the levels cited...
...A turning point in the Presidential campaign may have come when Hubert Humphrey began to see something Wallace always understood: that while many "experts" said the "old issues" were dead, millions of American workers angrily disagreed and wanted a better life...
...They are, it is assumed, wellfed, well cared for, up to their hips in "things," and all-around partners in an open and affluent society...
...In real life the typical worker has lived on a treadmill, except where union contracts have protected him from rises in the cost of BRENDAN SEXTON living...
...In this respect, interestingly, some black militants seem to be taking a rather active interest in labor studies...
...For a blue-collar worker, this is really "making it...
...Now workers come sharply to their view only when they threaten to make life inconvenient or dangerous...
...When subway and sanitation workers in New York strike for a modest $3.50 or so an hour (to perform some of the most disagreeable jobs known to man), many middle-class liberals complain bitterly, without also noting that New York's affluent can afford to pay men BRENDAN SEXTON decent wages to do hard, often dangerous, always unpleasant work...
...Among all American families with incomes of $10,000, the multiincomes are twice as numerous as the single income...
...Perhaps less than a quarter of all high school graduates who are children of factory workers enter college...
...Industrial workers generally have closer relations with Negroes than any other class, and the big factories in steel, auto, rubber, glass, etc., are probably the most integrated work places in the society...
...When children come, the wife of the young worker will probably drop out of the labor market leaving him as sole support for perhaps 15 or 20 years...
...A similar interest in unions has not come to the campus, thanks to the myth of the middle-class worker and other academic folklore...
...I come from a union that has split from the AFL over some of these issues, including foreign policy, interest in the poor and minorities, and general militancy...
...They often draft political platforms and write candidates' speeches...
...Relative to most other workers, they have...
...Yet I continue to believe, in my old-fashioned, radical-populist way, that a broad alliance between these two groups at their center remains the best hope for reconstructing our society along democratic-humanist lines...
...This is the extreme example...
...Many of these opinion-makers are men of my generation or near it...
...Young workers outnumber all college students, and there are perhaps 15 or 20 of them for every one disaffected youth upon whom various advocates of a New Politics are counting...
...They don't dislike blacks, they just feel black men shouldn't be given a bigger break than anyone else...
...Even the most militant Negro workers I talked to didn't feel there was large-scale prejudice in the Union...
...They think of themselves as open-minded and sensitive, and sometimes they are...
...Most of these people [Kennedy said of Wallace supporters] are not motivated by racial hostility or prejudice...
...Here is fertile soil for the growth of resentment...
...Someyoung Americans may owe him their lives...
...Their focus on such goals has had some negative side effects...
...Unionists have learned a hard lesson after almost a century of fierce blood-letting on the picket line: that combat is the last, not the first, resort...
...Others found many Wallace supporters who would have preferred Robert Kennedy, and some even Eugene McCarthy...
...These too came out of the total package, leaving less for wages...
...Young workers seem to be tougher and to have more staying power than students...
...The mythology that obscures the realities of working-class life derives in large part from the success story of unions and what various observers have made of that story...
...Many issues need clarifying if we are to halt a national move to the Right...
...I wish to explore only one here: the assumption that blue-collar workers are "middle-class" and sitting pretty...
...they will be salaried rather than hourly workers...
...He belongs to a generation with rapidly rising expectations...
...On the other side, the middle-class Left may find itself isolated if it accepts the standard mythology about workers...
...The retail worker, if he worked a full year, earned a gross income high enough to lift him barely above the "poverty line" of $3,000, but low enough to leave him with less than half the national family median income...
...To the dismay of at least one early supporter—me--McCarthy urged in that endorsement that the rights of honest draft dissenters be protected but said nothing about the draft's discrimination against Negroes, the poor, and the working class, and made no significant comments about other social and economic issues...
...So far as I know—outside the narrow limits of laborand-industrial programs—it is the only such course taught in the country...
...Senator McCarthy, like some who supported him, had to subdue his conscience before endorsing Hubert Humphrey, yet he has always seemed comfortable with Senator William Fulbright, a man whose record on civil rights almost duplicates George Wallace's except for greater gentility of expression.* (A friend explained to me that he * I don't wish to downgrade Senator Fulbright's obvious courage...
...They feel the established system has not been sympathetic to them in their problems of everyday life and in a large measure they are right...
...Being far wiser than we think, they knew this was not the fault of blacks...
...What members and their unions try to do, at best, is not class struggle in any classic sense...
...Usually, veteran unionists report, the increased rejections result from organized opposition among young workers...
...THE "NEW ISSUES"—the war on poverty and bureaucracy, the struggles for racial justice and world peace—can be lost unless "MIDDLE-CLASS" WORKERS AND THE NEW POLITICS they are paralleled by campaigns on issues that are important to those millions who are often ignored except by demagogues...
...Not since the early and dramatic days of the CIO have liberals and intellectuals (with some honorable exceptions) shown much sympathetic interest in workers or unions...
...I'd also like to suggest some of the political consequences of both the assumption and the reality of workers' lives...
...This is most obviously true of the state sales taxes...
...Fringe benefits mean more to older than to younger workers—and it is the young who are drawn to men like George Wallace...
...But too often their politics are introspective— concentrated only on issues that touch them, plus a now fashionable interest in the poor...
...The myth that something like half of all young Americans go to college is very nearly unshatterable...
...Their political attitudes are sometimes expressed in the kind of thin-lipped and vinegary liberalism that found its ultimate expression in Senator McCarthy's endorsement of Hubert Humphrey...
...In this simplified pseudo-Marxian schema, organized workers are seen as part of the richer half, along with bankers, businessmen, professionals...
...Only in Michigan, among all continental states, where the weekly gross was $145.78, could an average manufacturing worker come close to the national family median (about $8,000) with a full year of work...
...but he will offer no clues as to how else the hospital worker can win a measure of justice...
...In general, the rate of taxation declines as income rises...
...It is almost as true of the federal income tax, under which, in the most extreme cases, some individuals and corporations pay little or no tax at all, though their incomes may exceed $5 million annually...
...He pays more for furniture and appliances than anyone ever did before...
...and in ways of organizing people for effective action...
...but, notoriously, he often left unsaid what decent liberals and radicals on his staff wrote into those speeches...
...They are mostly mothers of large families living on welfare in big city ghettos...
...Sadly, some of the Wallaceite resentment was, of course, turned against the poor and the black...
...In many places, even the services provided by "Red Feather" agencies seem more closely geared to middle- than working-class needs...
...Fortunately, they were mistaken...
...Reporters often talk about the sweeper who "makes more than a teacher...
...ONE FRIEND TELLS ME, "intellectuals still cling to a hopeful and perhaps incorrect view, idealizing the union members as an instrument of class struggle...
...He misunderstands...
...If such a man puts aside $25 a week for house or rent payments (a modest enough sum), he's left with a little less than $66 a week to pay for food, clothing, medicines, school supplies, etc...
...He's there, alright, but his numbers are grossly exaggerated...
...That comes to roughly $2.37 per day, per person, for a family of four—about the amount a big-city newspaper reporter (or any of us in the real middle class) is likely to spend for lunch...
...When they don't, their readers do...
...But they have learned many other good ways to get on with it...
...Many of his breed are even found among Mike Harring ton's invisible poor...
...The premise of this stereotype is that our class structure is a dualism—rich and poor...
...As a reader of everything in reach, I have followed with great regret the growing schism between organized labor and middle-class liberals during the past decade...
...Most militants, coming from poor families, are interested in the "old issues" (opportunity, jobs, etc...
...THE CHEMISTRY of the Kennedys has been different...
...Those publicists who seek such an apocalypse will not find unionists mounting the barricades with the swiftness and pleasure of student rebels or black militants...
...Many workers were ready, in short, for a campaign resembling Harry Truman's historical effort of 1948, a hell-raising campaign about the "old" economic issues (social justice, more and better jobs, more opportunity, good schools, health care, etc...
...Most workers who were drawn to Wallace because he spoke their economic language must have had problems of conscience about blacks with whom they worked and had friendly relations...
...Now $90.89 take-home is not "middleclass," especially if you are an "average" family head with three dependents...
...BRENDAN SEXTON In New York, the locale of many observers who write so expertly about "middleclass" workers, manufacturing workers averaged a gross income of $114.44...
...While mil lions of workers live in poverty, millions more barely escape it...
...In these years, his financial needs increase with the size of his family, but his paycheck does not respond to need...
...Measured against the previous year, his dollar income rose about $2.34 a week...
...Workers simply oppose changes that benefit or seem to benefit others while increasing their own burdens...
...They lose out because higher education costs so much...
...The house that cost his father $12,000, with a mortgage at 5 percent, now may sell for twice that and be financed at 7 percent...
...Unless the young become partners in the union movement, they may end up wrecking it...
...These economic realities confront work ers with a long list of harrowing problems...
...As Wallace's campaign became more violent in tone, many of them probably grew uneasy and fell away from his camp...
...But once married, his problems multiply...
...My wife and I taught a graduate sociology course at NYU last year in Labor and Society...
...Unions are, however, limited in what they can do for members...
...The myth of the "middle-class" worker is kin to the Negro of folklore who "lives in * Gaps of a year or more sometimes occur in government statistics...
...These figures are distorted a bit by the inclusion of Southern, and largely unorganized, workers...
...I recall that I was 35 years old when I first earned $5,000 a year as president of the nation's second largest local union...
...The young worker is hardest hit and hence most discontented...
...Knowing they're unlikely to escape individually, workers can grow desperate when denied political hope...
...So goes this version of things, especially popular in some college circles...
...Most will never experience the softening effects of well-paid, high-status jobs in the professional, academic, artistic, or business worlds— jobs to which most student rebels are on their way...
...But it was costly...
...but they are still far from well-off...
...He treads water, financially and psychically...
...As long as he's single, his first paychecks may give him more money than he's ever seen before...
...BELIEVE THAT LIBERALS and moderate leftists—in whose circle opinion-makers are heavily represented—are out of touch with the reality of American working-class life...
...Inevitably, many workers come to feel they are being dunned and taxed for the benefit of others...
...Yet their efforts have profoundly influenced American life...
...Even when they wear white collars, they can't, at this rate, be factored into the middle class...
...They are limited by the public's willingness to accept strikes...
...The white UAW members as a whole do not believe Wallace is a racist...
...Certainly, the typical production worker is much better off than a Mississippi farm tractor driver or a city mother living on welfare, but he hardly lives opulently...
...Having little contact outside their own circles, and having heard so much about the great gains of unions, they may naturally assume that workers have made it too...
...Estimates of total tax loads indicate that 33 percent of the income of those earning $3,000 to $5,000 goes to taxes, and only 28 percent of those earning $15,000 or more...
...They bear the burden of the unfair system of Selective Service...
...Gains have been made, yes...
...According to this hidden assumption, all or nearly all the poor are black...
...Still, there are more than 8 million workers in retail trade...
...Relatively few colleges, social agencies, schools, or other public institutions mount programs to meet special needs of workers...
...Many of them live at rarified levels where almost everyone's income is at least $15,000 a year...
...UAW contracts have moved toward the guaranteed annual income and retirement with decent security...
...I have been involved in the war on poverty, along with many other unionists —though it is remote from many others...
...Like others, I was stunned to see the old liberal coalition finally fragment during the Presidential election under the separate discontents of workers (out of sight and mind to most observers, but not, alas, to George Wallace) and the middle-class liberal antagonists of LBJ...
...He often holds down the lower paid and more onerous jobs...
...Total UAW membership of that age group may reach 600,000, with perhaps half of these under 25...
...They will not be found burning down their own neighborhoods to prove a point, or otherwise sacrificing their own ranks in unproductive, self-destructive conflict...
...Now when I hear that auto workers gross more than $8,000, I too some times forget the dollar's decline and assume they've got it made...
...How do they shelter them against the draft for four years "MIDDLE-CLASS" WORKERS AND THE NEW POLITICS when the cost of sending a son to the state university now averages nearly $2,000 a year...
...They are the ones who feel most threatened at the security of their jobs, the safety of their families, the value of their property and the burden of their taxes...
...They are generally not organized, but they are workers...
...The auto industry average wage of $3.80 per hour, though the highest in manufacturing, still does not mean affluence...
...Office of Education reports are so unclear here that I suspect the agency of misleading us regarding the accessibility of college opportunities...
...Most are in income brackets between $3,000 and $10,000 (which includes some 56 percent of all American families), with probably more workers near the bottom than the top...
...The rest (except for a few Appalachian whites) are young blacks who can't find jobs because they are school dropouts or because they are excluded from unions by corpulent and corrupt union bosses...
...In few cases do they distinguish workers from union leaders, for some of whom their contempt may be warranted...
...Less than ten percent of the nation's families earn that much...
...Only about one-third of all American families reach that now dated standard...
...Unless unions were to act irresponsibly toward the aging (one of the most impoverished and helpless groups among us), pensions had to be won...
...How, for example, do they provide equal opportunity for their children...
...In fact, however, his actual purchasing power declined by about 60 per week...
...True, a sweeper in an auto plant in Michigan or New Jersey probably earns more than a teacher in a backwoods school in Mississippi, but his pay is hardly a pot of gold...
...He does it "on time...
...Unions sometimes may have overresponded to the older workers, as in seniority and vacation benefits, etc., but one can hardly look at the life of the aging worker and say he has too much...
...He dresses well, owns a new car, and generally lives it up...
...thus, in one industry, workers have almost scaled an important barrier between them and the middle class...
...And unionists have tasted enough of victory so that they generally do not believe in the "final conflict" for which the "prisoners of starvation" must arise...
...Skilled workers are the aristocrats of labor, yet the median earnings of male craftsmen who were employed full-time in 1966 was only $6,981.* Of course, a good many of the elite and highly organized urban craftsmen— electricians, typographers, lithographers, etc.—rise to and above $10,000 a year...
...Workers with small families and two or more paychecks coming in each week may be able to make it...
...He was worse off in 1967 than in 1966, and probably even more so in 1968...
...S0 WE HAVE the case of the "invisible" and aggrieved worker...
...They gave increasing taxes to the government, their sons to the army...
...I leave nothing to the imagination of readers, for we are all deeply aware of the shortcomings of unions...
...An aging and sometimes feeble union leadership needs to refresh itself with activists and new leadership recruited among younger generations...
...Some comforts came to them through expanded consumer credit, but the credit exacted high costs in tension, insecurity, and interest rates...
...In late 1966, the U.S...
...Many liberals dismiss as unimportant, if not irrelevant, every claim workers make for their attention and support...
...The sweeper seems to fit a set of hidden assumptions according to which the society is divided, at a magical line, between rich and poor...
...Considering the notorious imbalance of our tax structure, they have a point...
...In fact, about one-third of all heads of impoverished families hold down full-time jobs...
...A veteran American trade unionist since the founding of industrial unionism, Brendan Sexton is now Director of Education Activities for the United Auto mobile Workers...
...Unions have made great gains in wages, working conditions, fringe benefits, politics...
...A subway strike, shutdown at The New York Times, a large vote for Wallace may do the trick—momentarily...
...But in fact about 80 percent of the poor are white, and a startling proportion of them work full-time...
...After talking with Wallace supporters in Flint, Michigan (said to be a hot-bed of Wallace sentiment), Mike Hubbard, a student editor of the University of Michigan Daily, wrote: Certainly these Americans do not identify with red-necked racism...
...U.S...
...MUCH OF MY LIFE has been split be tween two worlds: blue-collar un ions and the intellectual-academic arena—a sort of long-haired working stiff, or at least an uncommon marginal man...
...They are limited by their own willingness and that of their members to go into battle, to strike...
...Still, one observer says, "If the labor movement in this country moves to the Right, it's not least the fault of those, like Sexton, who will not say a word of criticism of its policies...
...If a meaningful New Politics is to work in this country it must be based on the kind of empathy expressed in these words...
...He is somewhat less likely to work overtime at premium rates and more likely to be caught in temporary layoffs, though in some union contracts he is now protected against loss from the latter...
...For a time, it grew like a weed under the cultivation of George Wallace...
...Those who live within it can easily come to think that all Americans, except the poor, are living just about as they and their colleagues and neighbors do...
...Time found many such in its 150 interviews across the country, and Haynes Johnson of the Washington Star reported this comment from a leader of the Wallace movement in Duluth, Minnesota: "The reason I got into this actually was when Robert Kennedy was shot...
...That assassination—plus that of Martin Luther King—pointed up for me just how sick it was in this country, and I decided to do something for my country...
...Actually, 46.3 percent of the 18- and 19-year-olds, but only 19 percent in the age group of 2024 are "in school...
...The big three in auto alone employ about 250,000 workers who are 30 or under...
...If they are to create a New Society, liberals and radicals need to become aware of socially excluded workers and find avenues of communication with them, as well as with Negroes, Latin Americans, and the oppressed poor generally...
...Among organized workers, possibly 5 million are young people under 30...
...but even auto workers still have far to go...
...The contrast is highlighted in Senator Edward Kennedy's appeal to supporters of his two slain brothers to reject the "dark" and "extremist" movement of George Wallace...
...still, they form a mass of between 18 and 20 million people...
...Their stake in social change may turn out to be greater and more compelling...
...The middle-class liberal himself is often offended, sometimes outraged, by strikers...
...These opinion-makers greatly influence what appears in periodicals and dailies, and what is said on TV and radio...
...The Senator's failure to ignite fires outside the middle class can easily be understood in the light of that and statement...
...They seemed to get little in return: only conflict, and sometimes mortal combat with the emerging black poor over jobs, neighborhoods, and schools...
...While the college boy steps on an escalator that moves rapidly upward, the worker's son may step on his father's assembly line and into a job without much promise...
...No less than others of his generation, the young worker expects more...
...Pensions cost money, and that money was subtracted from the wage package won at the bargaining table...
...Also, older workers need and make more use of hospitalization, medical and sickness insurance...
...N DECEMBER of 1967 the "average pro-I duction worker" with three dependents took home $90.89 for a full week's work...
...In the primary campaign his speeches (at least in the printed text) were often unexceptionable...
...Its contracts now provide tuition remission plans for members who wish to take classes that may help them escape from dead-end factory jobs...
...I have opposed the Vietnam War, and I think labor should have...
...Working-class kids make their trips abroad as members of the armed forces, while some middle-class youths, student deferments in hand, spend a junior year at European universities...
...I dowish to point out that liberal and radical intel "MIDDLE-CLASS" WORKERS AND THE NEW POLITICS could support Fulbright because the Senator had "style," a matter of overriding merit to many liberals...
...It is not surprising, considering their mentors, that so much of the young New Left seems to despise the working class...
...Forgetting the ravages of inflation, they may think of $6,000 a year as a fairly substantial income...
...In December of 1968, the hourly wage system came close to ending for perhaps a million UAW members...
...While many workers have no doubt been shook up quite a bit by the black revolt, they have been even more shaken by their own failure to get on in life...
...Finally, petulance and spleen seemed to consume this hero of the middleclass liberals when he chose Long over Kennedy...
...the slums but drives a big new Cadillac...
...They feel that their needs and their problems have been passed over by the tide of recent events...
...They may remember maintaining a modest existence on even less...
...I do not dwell on these flaws for another reason: whatever their blemishes, unions have given workers the only support and attention they have had—and they needed a lot...
...The trap almost sprung by Wallace was set by those "opinion-makers" who dismissed all Wallace supporters as red-necked bigots and opponents of Negro aspirations...
...All they know is what he told them, and he never said he hated blacks...
...The young married worker age 25 or 30 will probably carry twice the burden of debt as the worker age 40 or 45...
...Why not...
...Unionists have possibly been too moderate in this respect, for open conflict sometimes is the only way to rally people and get what you want...
...It was humane to help the older worker, and it helped him retire and make way for younger workers...
...He may say, "They're selfish and out for themselves...
...Their conscious antagonists are the employer and the conservative legislator, not the "capitalist system...
...Unions need to do a lot of things, far more than I can mention in this brief piece...
...We are all in his debt...
...Born in a tough Irish working-class neighborhood and reared on Catholicism, Irish rebellion, and later socialism, I fell into the life of an organizer during the great depression and the early days of the CIO...
...Too few liberals realize that millions of workers and voters fit Ted Kennedy's description...
...As against the previous year, they also experienced a slight dip in real income and purchasing power...
...One pollster puts many workers in the "no change" coalition...
...Since our society has been late and miserly in providing social insurance, unions have had to push hard in collective bargaining for benefits that don't show up in pay checks...
...He furnishes a home, perhaps buys it...
...When the desperately poor hospital worker strikes, the liberal will see only the patient as victim...
...Still, millions of families combine two or even three paychecks and yet earn less than $5,000 a year...
...The UAW (like many other unions) has won comprehensive medical protection, including coverage for psychiatric care of a million members...
...For the new college professor, fresh out of graduate school, it's just so-so...
...Everyone else—including the poor and the militant blacks (at least as their image was cast by the media)—seemed to be moving forward, while only they stood still, waiting in a twilight zone somewhere between hunger and plenty...
Vol. 16 • May 1969 • No. 3
