A Sense of Slipping

...Pat and Brendan Sexton's Blue Collars and Hard Hats is an excellent corrective for such limited views...

...Thus a true give-and-take among equals is possible...

...And then there are the very rich who pay little or no income tax at all...

...While Blue Collars and Hard Hats is concerned chiefly with the working class and the future of American politics, it also touches upon the youth movement, black militancy, and the notion of a "new class"??unfortunately, without nearly as much success...

...The authors wryly note, "Wars are not always avoidable...

...It is not enough to simply cite a poll, as the authors do, showing that workers were more antiwar back in the early '60s than were the intellectuals or the upper middle class...

...Pension funds have also been rifled to fatten corporate profits in the recent wave of conglomerate mergers, and plant closings or permanent cutbacks in the work force frequently result in the loss of lifetime seniority and pension rights...

...Seniority rules, pensions, unemployment benefits and other appurtenances of corporate welfarism have supposedly erased most of the insecurity that has long plagued blue-collar life...

...Even with the added income, a majority of American families earn less than $9,000 a year, well under the Bureau of Labor Statistics' estimate, circa 1969, of $10,077 required by a family of four to maintain a "moderate living standard...

...A one per cent rise in unemployment throws about 800,000 persons out of work...

...Many workers face very real risks on the job as well...

...That may be sufficient to draw the coalition together once the Democrats have decided on a candidate...

...Yet too much of this protection is illusory, as a worker hit by a protracted or unusual illness finds out once he reads the fine print in his health benefit contract...

...At the university," the Sextons write, "SDS members found almost no faculty who were interested in change and industrial democracy...

...And, so, "We are now faced with Weathermen and similar extremists...

...counting their families, it affects roughly 3 million people...

...in 1968, for example, auto workers made $7,280 without layoffs, and in 1967 the median income of all craftsmen was only $7,227...

...But his relative standard??relative to the affluence of others [chiefly the new class of professors and professionals]??is intolerable...

...We give our workers safety glasses because they cost just $3.50...

...But industrial accidents are??almost completely...

...Indeed, if organized labor is mentioned at all, it is considered part of the Establishment, powerful, domineering and, oddly enough, antiworker...

...I fear, however, that some recent divisions are not going to be so easily patched up...

...As useful as that exercise may be, a good book would have been better had they addressed themselves to all the rest...

...To give but one example, the authors contend that by positing "an end of ideology" Daniel Bell and his fellow intellectuals are somehow accountable for the wilder excesses of the New Left...

...Not only does labor have the money and manpower, but "a union is, by its nature, an orderly and organized alternative to individual frustration and violence...

...Although critical of big labor's conservatism on some issues, the authors argue that the unions must be at the core of this coalition if it is to have any chance at the polls...

...The Sextons quote a company executive who told the Wall Street Journal, "When you come right down to it, a lot of our safety decisions are really cost decisions...

...In addition, when the worker leaves the plant, he is apt to drive home in an unsafe-at-any-speed second-hand car...

...Reviewed by Thomas R. Brooks Author, "Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor' Judging by the academic auguries??conferences, foundation grants, research reports, and the like??we are in for a spate of books about the working class...

...This just won't wash...

...heavy on hard-hat racism but light on the workers' most successful institution, the largely integrated trade unions...

...Nor did members of the big and powerful unions do exceptionally well...

...And he knows it, even without articulating it...

...Families with annual incomes of $5,0007,000 pay 33 per cent of their earnings in taxes of all kinds...

...those over $15,000, only 28 per cent...

...The Sextons cite a wide array of statistics showing that affluence is pretty much a myth for most middle Americans, that whatever basis it has in reality rests on overtime and wives' second paychecks...

...To be sure, black and white relations within a union can be just as polarized as those on the outside...

...As the Sextons point out, "The average man's absolute living standard is low enough to warrant dissatisfaction...

...Much of it, already embodied in union convention resolutions, will undoubt-ably be incorporated in the Democrats' 1972 platform...

...The doves and the hawks, for instance, look like they will coninue to punish one another long after the Vietnam war ends...

...These fundamental grievances over social injustices, the Sextons argue, make coalition politics both possible and imperative for the American working class...

...And on the other, the SDS was elitist from the start and not about to take counsel from democratic radicals, though it was willing enough to exploit them for cover and financial aid...

...The current recession, of course, has accentuated the "sense of slipping" that the authors found so prevalent among working people...

...Moreover, for the average worker and his family, real earnings actually declined between 1962-69, a relatively prosperous period...

...Adding injustice to injury, the inequities of our tax laws assure that the working class foots a greater proportion of the bill for welfare, police protection and other government services than do the rich...

...One can scarcely quarrel with the Sextons' brand of populism, a package ranging from comprehensive medical care through tax reform to utilizing the Federal government as the employer of last resort...

...Yet the white worker is rarely burdened with the sense of guilt that is so fashionable in white middle-class circles...

...On the one hand, there were more than enough willing mentors for the fledgling New Left...

...In the end, radical students lost all touch with their professors...

...in constant dollars, weekly wages shrank from $79.03 to $78.77...

...Sexton, a former United Auto Workers' shop steward who is now professor of sociology and education at New York University, and her husband, a long-time union activist who was once Director of Educational Activities for the UAW, write from direct experience...

...Drawing the connections between the economic, political and social conditions of blue-collar life, they have produced a brief for what has come to be called the new populism...

...It may satisfy the youthful New Leftists who are now developing an interest in blue-collar workers, but a broadly based political coalition will need a more fully developed foreign policy than the vague neo-isolationism offered by the Sextons...

...Nonetheless, my own feeling is that such a coalition holds together best on national issues and falls apart on local ones...

...From 1961-69 industrial accidents claimed 126,000 lives, nearly three times the number of Americans killed in Vietnam during the same period...

...Most of the young, after all, are not elitists, but rather the sons and daughters of the very people for whom the Sextons evidence their greatest concern...

...Safety shoes, which they also need, cost $14, so they aren't compulsory and the men have to pay for them themselves...

...And this figure makes no allowance for savings or such crucial protection as major medical insurance...

...Given the way blue-collar workers are made to bear the brunt of the cost of social and economic programs, the wonder is not that they were attracted to Governor George Wallace in the last Presidential election but that so few actually voted for him...

...Apparently, the Sextons set out to win over to populism the minority of youth attracted by the New Left...

...From what I have already heard and read, most of them will be long on ethnicity but short on the economics of blue-collar life...

...in the Sextons' words, "He does not work with blacks because he is sorry for them...

...Forest Hills and Bedford-Stuyvesant are likely to vote Democratic next fall but they are probably not going to agree on the implementation of local housing policies...

...Most significantly, in the integrated union especially, the activist learns the politics of coalition...