No Pride in this Dust
Kremen, Bennett
On a Greyhound speeding through a dark, icy night toward Chicago, I return to old memories of packing lunch bags and pulling on greasy overalls each morning before rushing desperately to...
...Though he didn't speak of affluence and alienation, of levels of aspiration and the breakdown of traditional motivations, that old-timer summarized much of what I'd heard for almost a month from union officials, economists, and worried business executives all over Detroit: a mood of quiet despair descends in those executive offices when they lay out the statistics on their absenteeism problem and speculate on its long-range effects...
...28 BENNETT KREMEN...
...You find some guys upstairs talking that way— but not many my age...
...Charlie hissed up at him...
...Though this lecture is inappropriate for the beefy, red-headed fellow next to me droning on about fringe benefits and buying a house with a paneled basement, I'm sure that the man in front of us isn't simply wasting his breath on ominous predictions...
...A few...
...Then for the first time, we'll see black power with real muscle behind it," I tell him...
...All we can do is wait and stare...
...Come on Ben Whore—let's get away from here...
...Lis, continues now, but in a gentler voice: "Yeah fellows—you won't get ahead you know, if you do this AWOL stuff...
...But I'd already heard young workers in Detroit barrooms and bowling alleys groaning about having to face another day of tedium on the assembly line and boasting about how often they'd gone AWOL...
...Why don't they just turn it all into a frisbee field...
...If you can't make it, you gotta at least call in and let them know...
...So you try to watch those absences, huh...
...On a Greyhound speeding through a dark, icy night toward Chicago, I return to old memories of packing lunch bags and pulling on greasy overalls each morning before rushing desperately to beat the factory time clock—months and months of this drudgery my reward for temporarily dropping out of a Chicago high school during the mid-1950s...
...The sudden tough talk comes from Stanley, the smaller of the two foremen whose unpronouncible Polish last name is tagged to his helmet...
...Laughter travels through the bus, and a flurry of conversation continues all the way into Chicago's Loop...
...And that's all...
...The laughter is heavy, though only the driver and a few new workers are left in the bus—Little Joe among them...
...Don't you care at all about getting the work done, Charlie...
...Any niggers working in your unit...
...I just don't think it'd be healthy...
...Yet I quickly hear bitter voices behind me as we reach the flame-tinted skies over Gary: "Wow—look at that mess...
...Forget it Tommy—it's just a stupid idea...
...Get your coat mister...
...The number must have leaped, I was sure, but to hear just how much stuns me: ". . that's right, 3,400 disciplines in 1970—for coming late, for not coming at all, for swearing, arguing, drinking...
...I guess so—but believe me, nobody's praying for it...
...They often take one or even two days off every week...
...These kids have a different outlook on life...
...NO PRIDE IN THIS DUST "This is #2 Electric Furnace—only a half-hour walking time to the gate...
...And I'd hate to see too many of this breed out on the streets without jobs...
...I'll tell you something, a lot of those black guys won't take any crap from the company...
...and finally to Marti and Joe's at the mill gate where, this time, polkas from Cracow or Warsaw blast from the juke box...
...NO PRIDE IN THIS DUST "Yeah," I tell Stash, one of the few older Polish guys still coming in here since the young blacks arrived...
...For a moment he eyes me warily before responding: "Will it bother you, man...
...And though I've heard similar exchanges countless times, I couldn't help being impressed again by such intense expressions of "alienation from the tools of production" by these fortunate people, even if it's only fashionable prattle...
...And though he speaks now about not keeping valuables in our lockers 'cause dudes searching for marijuana or money will wrench them right open, he expresses far more concern in another plea for us "to get in here every day...
...You gotta be jivin' man—you mean from now on we gotta hoof it...
...The hours trickle away in this increasingly crowded room without a word said to most of us...
...One thing's sure—it ain't gonna be the way it used to be...
...More than 35 percent of [Ford's 1968 work force...
...Uh-huh...
...No—why should they...
...Their answer is a feeble shrug...
...I follow Yanagan, the burner, who lights up his torch and starts cutting up scrap, but only until Biz passes out of sight...
...Since this local is a large one in one of the largest steel-producing regions in the country, that's probably quite important, I tell him...
...But you don't settle things by hittin' 'em up side the head...
...They are," I assure him...
...A lot of 'em moved away though and never want to come back around here anymore...
...In 1965—get this!—only a few hundred disciplines were issued to the guys in the Southworks...
...I rather have the time than the money...
...For decades legend has always designated the Southworks, the huge mills next door in East Chicago, and the industrial wilds of Gary below it as a land flowing with kolbassi and boilermakers...
...This haste, however, is only a wasted effort...
...I recommend they spend a few 26 days in a labor shack getting it all straight...
...Don't they bother you...
...it's happening in the Army—" Louie Streho, an old salt running the Detroit branch of the seamen's union, told me...
...How determined Yanagan, Tommy Thumbs, Charlie Chan, and even Jose are with that soap and water, for there's no pride in this dust, nor joy in the frigid walk along the lake to the gate where we hand in our cards to a guard and pass into the outside world...
...They don't care about me—whether I'm BENNETT KREMEN livin' or dying...
...And that really hurts inside those plants...
...Of course there are changes coming," he says as he tours me now through the Bush, the neighborhood around the mill where the skies blaze every night and the barrooms are seldom empty...
...We keep on talking, trying to beat the boredom of this incessant waiting...
...You want to know somethin'—they don't even know how to take the crap we took...
...I ain't seen 'em do it yet...
...Man, I don't know why guys don't even call in...
...You gotta be—or this company'll fuck you up good...
...Yanagan leads me through a dark corner of the shop now, his eyes cast cautiously at the overhead cranes scooping up scrap for the insatiable furnaces upstairs...
...Already men in their twenties comprise a third of organized labor's entire membership...
...Some of the younger guys can't stand them either—but I don't think we're so steamed up about them...
...I just don't stand for that shit, or for you comin' in late either...
...But the final bitter reward for playing the early bird is having to queue up now in the frost outside the gate, waiting for the seven o'clock shift to start...
...Remember that type...
...Guess how many the company gave out last year...
...Well, I don't give a damn either...
...Why not...
...Only seven others, mostly students picked up in a college town, share the heavy darkness inside the bus...
...Eddie takes me for a shot and a beer to a bar with music from Durango or Huahuaca blaring from its juke box, an establishment run by a brother of his friend and colleague from Local 65, Johnny Chico...
...When the gate finally opens, he rushes into the employment office like the rest of us and quickly fills out cards passed out by a guard...
...And soon the flying sparks, the hot steel, the raging, exploding furnaces above us seem like frivolities on a carnival night...
...Why?—'cause they're jive-ass bigots...
...But I'll tell you, they've made gentlemen out of a lot of those company guys—not the big shots, I mean the company guys right here in the plants...
...Maybe we'll get lucky...
...He asks if they'd like to see things changing in the mill...
...In the mill now, as I lean leisurely on one of the brooms Stanley had thrust upon us, I begin to wonder about all this unexpected time I seem to have just to muse about things like Louie's bit of wisdom...
...that's it —Ben Whore...
...What about those who grunt the most...
...but a lot are gettin' hip...
...No sir—that's not my job...
...Watching these men filing one by one into the interviewing section, their loose ghetto walk declaring the assertiveness of the mean streets of the city, makes me wonder if the steel industry has produced a confidential document similar to the gloomy one put out in Detroit in 1969 by Malcolm Denise, Ford Motor Company's top labor-relations man...
...Yeah, they're even burning up the clouds...
...Fuck you Jack...
...All around me are young people, many fresh out of high school and the Army— or off the streets of the South Side...
...But aren't you mad at the kids too...
...Hey," I say to Tommy Thumbs while we're standing in the street waiting for a bus, "should they turn this whole damn mill into a frisbee field...
...He was only 23 then: today he's Bob Hatch's strongest supporter and, at 32, has his eye on the leadership of the entire Chicago–Gary–Milwaukee–Joliet district— a crucial one in the 1.2 million-man United Steelworkers of America...
...The month is coming to an end, and so are my last hours in the mill...
...I don't mind working with them at all...
...Tommy—you've been out for two days...
...Not all these young men are so bitter, and some even work hard—when they show up...
...Soon Eddie begins talking to him and his drinking partner who works in the same shop...
...31-445 then, is who I am to the pair of foremen in blue hard hats who've just given each of us a bright yellow helmet worn by production workers on labor gangs...
...And listen," he says with sudden urgency, "you just gotta come in every day...
...What if they fire you...
...Yeah—he's all right...
...Others both in Pittsburgh and Detroit reminded me that plenty of the younger workers—indeed many I've met— are diligently paying off mortgages and working hard for a second car, "and when that other type gets older and has a few kids, everything'll probably settle down...
...Are the younger workers the same way...
...Each year since then, the figure rose until it reached 5.8 percent in 1968...
...Why do most of those guys upstairs stay out of the labor shack, Yanni...
...When we enter, the grumbling is over, but a sullen silence remains...
...Steel's 22 raw tonnage is poured...
...It happened in the schools...
...A few clever economists, however, point out that the steel industry has invested more than $10 billion in capital expenditures since 1965, but that the expected soaring increases in productivity associated with such a huge investment hasn't materialized...
...For such a sentiment would be a striking departure from the monolithic hatreds that flourished among the men I worked with in this city less than 15 years ago...
...He is smiling when he says it, but none of us stepping out into the damp cold share his amusement...
...Then let 'em fire me...
...I'm talking to an intense, talkative old laborer who'd been in the mill more than 25 years...
...Listen, I ain't going to lie to you—some of those foremen are nothin' but bigots, and I know that...
...And the company guys are moaning...
...No kidding...
...Sure, bread and butter's important—but maybe we spend too much time just thinking about money...
...Yet when I asked what'll happen until then, I got only a shrug of the shoulders...
...The union has to give more too...
...Three months...
...And as we're being loaded now into a bus to be taken to our assigned locations, I'm almost convinced that what I'm about to experience might have little resemblance to my working days of—well—long ago...
...I don't know man—just different, real different...
...The sun is finally rising over the lake now, and tired men with dirt-streaked faces begin trudging into the locker room...
...Lucky . . .?" He shrugs and looks up at the rows of smoke stacks and blast fur naces, ". . . if you want to call it that...
...Then, after predicting unique labor troubles because of that anticipated flood of young workers into industry, he concluded with this warning: "Another feature of the landscape in which we will be operating [in the '70s] is our increasing dependence on blacks to get our work done...
...Its blunt, plain mahogany and the heavy laughter of the men leaning against it would be home to John Garfield—except for the TV flashing images from outer space and the long-haired young worker next to us in the red-white-and-blue cleatless track shoes...
...Those companies (if they know what's good for them) and the unions too—everybody should be thinking, and soon, about giving people better lives...
...On Mondays and Fridays though, the figure often goes almost to 15 percent...
...What about in East Chicago...
...Oh—that's strictly Mickey Mouse," a young Polish millwright with hair flowing from under his hard hat said to me...
...I inquire suddenly...
...Whatever some may feel about the black issue in general, we are in fact dependent, and will continue to be, on black people to make this company go...
...You got to keep on their ass too...
...A sudden thoughtfulness—or is it distress— hovers in my young friend's eyes...
...Early the next morning, I'm in a room again with about 20 others—most of them young, many of them black—listening to a black personnel man in expensive tweeds playing the lay-it-on-the-line role: "What I'm telling you now is the same for blacks and whites—there ain't no difference, because at least five of you, that's 25 percent," he says, "won't even last out the six-week probationary period—blacks or whites...
...They'd love the union to play copper and get everyone in on time for 'em— sure...
...Most seem remarkably free of that classical, humble, hungry look of the job hunter...
...From 1957 to '61" I was told at Ford, "we averaged 2.6 percent of our production workers off on a given day...
...he seems as disgusted as I am...
...Four of my young friends leap up from their daze and dart out onto the floor away from the crotchety foreman: Stash heads upstairs where the electric furnace is blazing— and the big pay's made...
...You get the hell home...
...When I asked him what he thought the outcome will be if this continues, I was given a brief lecture on the fall of Rome...
...For $3.19 •an hour then, with a bit extra for late shifts and weekends, we now conclude these sterile preliminaries and don our hard hats, joining tens of thousands of other young workers thus initiated into the lowest ranks of the steel industry...
...A sudden, angry silence falls, and all the men in the shack are staring at me...
...Hey," I whisper to the fellow next to me with the big, blond mustache, "are there always so many spades looking for jobs around here...
...He asks if a lot of other young workers feel that way too...
...Everybody laughs except those still asleep, but they don't remain that way long: "Get up—it's Biz...
...I guess they want a fighter these days—whoever he is...
...And it's haunting the financial wizards of Wall Street and Washington...
...But I think they're hiring here...
...A few weeks later Ed Hojnachi, the treasurer at Local 65 of the Steelworkers union, my local, told me that he first realized things were profoundly changing when Bob Hatch, a black man, was elected president of 65...
...And now, with recent memories of a tough month I've spent in Detroit futilely searching for work in the car plants, I can't help wondering about the boy nearby with the backpack, the longhaired one behind him, the shoeless girls in front of me...
...When you're feeling bad, you take medicine, right...
...Many do...
...They ain't got no spare parts for me, man...
...And now, smack on the shore of the lake, where the wind hits like a razor, the driver calls out his last stop—our stop...
...BENNETT KREMEN At General Motors I was told by a major official that productivity and the quality of cars coming off the line are affected adversely by absenteeism—and that it enhances inflation...
...Plenty of the older guys can't stand them...
...You'd stop shovelin' for a few minutes and they'd say, `What's the matter, you tired?' Now they catch these kids sleepin' on a bench and they don't even say nothin...
...Sure...
...If I want a day off, I take a day off...
...A low, angry grumbling at the thought of this cold, payless walk each day fades only gradually as we follow the driver through this noisy, dirty building to the foreman's office...
...Neither this easy sell nor the shock tactics seem to ruffle the skepticism of my fellow workers, for they must have sensed, as I did, that Lis and Stanley were only going through a feeble ritual that neither of them really believed would prove effective...
...That's it, Little Joe—coming in and going out...
...What if they crack down, Yanni...
...Say Jose—did they really used to fire you after only three discplines...
...The taller one, Mr...
...For just the other day when Biz, that old Yankee workhorse, caught Charlie Chan sleeping in the locker room, he rolled his cigar in his mouth and began barking: "Get to work...
...Into what, man...
...They're still around—the older ones mostly...
...Cause the next guy who comes along is going to do the same thing I am...
...I don't mean just wanting cash—I mean a better life...
...For they aren't wearing the overalls, that drab, humble uniform of the working stiff: their "vines," man, are their own—purple silk shirts with collars hanging halfway to their waists, fur coats, fourcornered velvet hats, and bright, multicolored shoes that mock this somber environment where roughly 9.5 percent of all U.S...
...I hear while half asleep in the labor shack, a tiny room where the men warm up in this freezing, open building...
...Tommy passes a joint to Yanagan who draws the smoke deep, then hands it to me...
...Snow is blowing in through the open doors of the shop and steam rising from a slag pile by the lake turns suddenly eerie as the late-shift moon breaks through the clouds...
...But I keep on talking because after four weeks of digging choking lime from degasser pits, hooking scrap to cranes, and sweeping miles of dust and grime into neat little piles the way they do, I'm entitled to their trust...
...You mean you're still averaging that high even after three years of recession and inflation...
...Shut up, or I'll shove that cigar right down your throat...
...For though they're all dressed as insurgents in a rebellion against technology, they surely know little of the sooty bowels of industry, where millions their own age labor each day...
...He asks why they don't come to union meetings, and they tell him that they're boring...
...I don't know—sometimes we wonder if there's gonna be a mill anymore...
...Another skilled worker, this one with short hair, who averages at least $5 an hour and who moonlights as a cop in the suburbs where he lives, told me: "The job's not bad, but this company stinks...
...For to the uninitiated, it seems impossible that all these steaming slag piles and ore boats, blast furnaces and cranes that travel on tracks far above us can be managed by 8,200 mere workers, though they labor around the clock in three swing shifts every day of the year...
...Been looking long...
...But jobs are tight, so more of you might stick it out this year than last...
...If they ain't got a lot of machines to do all this goddamn work," I announce in a fool-around tone, "we're all gonna have a sore back...
...Maybe some big doses of economic trouble will shape these kids up," a toughminded company man told me in Pittsburgh...
...Then what can be done to make those changes come about...
...These absences are occurring in every geographical area—and all races and types of people are involved...
...Throughout the morning they stream in like locusts...
...What about the union—you for it...
...Be 24 hind Stanley's bluster and Lis's "sincerity" was a note almost of despair...
...I'm hip—better they use a dynamo than Little Joe...
...Your generation hated that line too," a clever old workingman told me in a bar off Cadillac Square, "but you had a lot of guys proud to work for them big companies in those days...
...Sure they did...
...Hissing at us from behind a half-filled gondola car is Tommy Thumbs, and hud died uncommonly close to him are Little Joe, two vets recently back from Vietnam, and the new Italian kid...
...Even in my heavy laborer's clothes, this frigid journey to the Southworks is an agony, for that mile-long mill owned by the United States Steel Corporation squats on the damp shore of Lake Michigan...
...Memorize it, because that's what you're going to be called around here...
...This isn't only the ordinary consequence of unemployment: crowded into this room are men who were conceived during the baby boom in the 1940s and '50s, now hitting industry as once the country's school systems...
...You know you shouldn't be lying around in here—go on now...
...And quickly I shift away from talk about race, even though he seems too indifferent to really care about it either way—and though that very indifference, if real, intrigues me...
...I soon find out, from a few old mill hands, that these brooms we're pushing around often just keep us busy until enough men are AWOL —and we're really needed...
...Oh, those dudes are workin' all down the lake, even past Gary...
...Don't you miss the bread...
...Will working with all these black guys bother you...
...I ask...
...The smoke striking into my lungs sends my blood leaping...
...Some of you young guys take too many days off...
...Hey, that's some name Stash gave me...
...They would...
...Why should I give a shit about them...
...Awe— and a touch of uneasiness—shows on the young faces of those sharing the bus with me, their feelings surely paralleling my own...
...Men fresh off the second shift with mill dust still in their throats eagerly belly up to the bar...
...OK—each of you have a number on the card they gave you...
...Nothin's gonna stop that...
...Charlie is laughing now as he tells us how mellow it was having the rest of the day off even though he lost the pay, and how he came in ten minutes late the next morning and not a word was said...
...Yanagan, Charlie Chan, Scatterbrain, his brother Nobrain, Measles, Big John—almost everyone in the mills gets a nickname, including me after the second week: "Out late last night, huh...
...It's a downer day, man—let's lift it up...
...Where are the Polish kids who traditionally flock to this mill...
...Now some of these young kids got six, seven, even eight of 'em and they're still around...
...How does that make you older workers feel...
...Not all the mills in the country are quite like this one, I'm told...
...Although this sort of instant Latin scholarship usually makes me impatient, I was impressed by his calm pessimism...
...for it was dramatic as perhaps only an immensely powerful man's pessimism can be when an element of habitual control is suddenly defying his grasp...
...They don't own me, man...
...Well, this place makes ye feel sick, and you got the medicine right in your hand...
...We wrote a petition to get a new union man for this shop, and none of those lilly-asses upstairs would sign it, but those young dudes did...
...Sometimes, especially when you gotta carry the load for 'em...
...But none of us really gives a shit about the union, 'cause no kind of big shot is goin' to make it any different in here...
...Well, it's about time...
...And this pounding on the doors can only intensify as the average age of workers in mills and factories continues to tumble dramatically year by year—as it has since 1968...
...As I look around, unpredictable things are confronting me...
...What do you tell them...
...you just gotta come in on time...
...NO PRIDE IN THIS DUST "Yes—and maybe it's about time," I hear echoed from Ed Sadlowski, who nine years ago, in an era when local union power simply wasn't challenged, took the presidency of 65...
...By the end of the decade, 68 percent of the labor force will be below thirty-four, a sharp reversal of the age distributions during the 'S0s and early '60s...
...Had the foremen I'd once worked for displayed such helplessness, I would've been startled...
...But old hands insist they will be, as the older workers retire in the next five years...
...Then you're going to need chronic eco nomic trouble to cut that figure—or a catas trophe...
...And even if the blacks here don't really know it yet, that power probably already exists...
...We bump along past dozens of roads, ore docks, rail lines, and shops, some a block long and hissing and clanging with the sounds of hammers, alarm bells, and deadly molten metal that rears from the furnaces like harsh sunshine...
...He tells me that even the local union president at BENNETT KREMEN the Southworks is a black man...
...That's when they open the employment office, isn't it...
...And you know Ed, a lot of locals in the Auto Workers have been taken by blacks too—with strong support from some young white workers...
...I can get by...
...Yet 70 percent of those here are black—yes, young, black, and beautiful...
...You know—if jobs stay tight, the company'll probably start cracking down hard...
...But neither whites, blacks, skilled workers, laborers, militants nor conservatives—and there are conservatives—are thankful to the company for providing them with jobs...
...This is a serious matter, and we certainly talked about it quite a bit with the union during the 1970 negotiations...
...But that's liable to murder us too...
...They've never been broke the way we were, and they've got a hell-of-a-lot more schoolin...
...Yes...
...The fellow I'm talking to has a huge, blond mustache and is wearing an army jacket with Vietnam markings on it...
...Despite the ceaseless clanging of metal echoing through the shop, the early morning brings a rare calm...
...he confided at a company management conference "were nonwhite, compared to 15 percent in 1960...
...For they're the ones benefiting the most from industry and grunting the least in its service...
...Chasin' whores, huh Ben...
...What about the union...
...These questions must remain hanging, for I'm being called for an interview...
...What's going to happen after you older fellows retire, and it's only younger workers in here...
...Listen," he says, "you got to give more if you want more...
...I answered that I wasn't at all surprised this had happened, "not after what I've been hearing in the mill...
...And we want you to get ahead...
...Sure—'cause those foremen used to be so tough...
...For a moment I hesitate till Little Joe pats me on the shoulder and says: "What you waiting for...
...Uh-uh—some of those white boys are all right—not all of 'em...
...Everybody in the room is laughing—not at me or Yanagan but at the company, that slightly ridiculous Goliath they so easily can thumb their nose at...
...After good-byes to Jose, I join the others at the huge wash basins and, imitating those around me, fiercely scrub the mill from my skin like a guilty man...
...Now I head once more toward that muscular city on the lake, to struggle again with time clocks and lunch bags—this time driven not by necessity but curiosity...
...Psssst...
...Make life better in those mills!' That's what I tell them...
...then through the black section of the Bush where exhausted frame houses hug the edge of the Southworks...
...This company is using me to make money: I use them the same way...
...We laugh...
...Well, not only Local 65 but the whole region, he figures, will probably be mostly black in ten years...
...Right now we're averaging 5.1 percent for the year...
...What's happened to the Polish people who used to work these places...
...The "productivity puzzle" is what this unprecedented mystery, found not only in the steel industry, is being called...
...Why the hell did they ever think it wouldn't happen in the factories...
...How do you want it to be different, Yanni...
...You don't get anything from them without a fight...
...Though only 15 percent of the work force at GM generates most of the late arrivals and absences, he went on, most of these men are concentrated among the newer workers under 35...
...The sun isn't up yet and the "Hawk," Chicago's cruel wind, lashes down on the thousands of workers huddling at bus stops...
...We're laughin' all right...
...Yet some things are ageless, like this ride through the teeming, fenced-in mill past flatcars loaded down with huge, glowing ingots of raw steel that cast their heat like giant radiators...
Vol. 19 • January 1972 • No. 1
