BLUE-COLLAR SCHOLAR
Evans, Larry
Blue-Collar Scholar A former steelworker hits the books BY LARRY EVANS The first time I heard the curious term "labor intellectual," it burned in my cranium. "No!" I protested. "Don't call me...
...We'll make our products better and better...
...Both the Mill Hunk (which is still around, though dormant at the moment) and Brookwood provided refuge and expression for dissident workers flushed out of the mainstream labor movement...
...Not much room for intellectual growth anymore...
...Blacks and women could be found among the students, and workers from the My shrinking crowd of labor activists had gone through a long decade of struggle and slide, and here I was abandoning ship for a sand-castle profession.' needle and coal industries also attended...
...Besides, now LMPTs are running the union...
...That's the way it is," my friend explained, "except one more disturbing thing: Since all this overtime, guys—none of us young men, mind you, not a soul under thirty works there any more—are averaging sixteen hours a day, six, seven days a week...
...All I got to do is everybody else's job and never leave the fucking place...
...The AFL withdrew its support because of its pro-CIO, pro-Soviet, and antireligious slant...
...At Rutgers the next day, Professor Sue Cobble, several years my junior, unveiled an assignment: choose a famous labor leader and show how this person's life and decisions interact with your own...
...I can take hard times, but I intensely dislike punching myself repeatedly in the face...
...Clint saw the need to educate working people, so he helped found two labor colleges in the 1920s, the Philadelphia Labor College and Brookwood...
...Golden found himself in the middle of many faculty disputes...
...The trendy intellectuals peddling their wares to management about LMPTs and "eliminating the need for people" sure don't help the labor movement any...
...We held worker-writer workshops for 200 new faces...
...He served on the national Worker's Education Board until the AFL took it over because it offered the labor movement too much self-criticism...
...I can hardly remember my kids' names...
...Rutgers has one of the few remaining independent labor-studies programs in the country, and it is increasingly isolated on campus...
...You will be surprised...
...The organization of the workers has not made any corresponding change...
...With those who did respond, we had a great time, just as Clint Golden did at Brookwood...
...Here's one gem I overheard a management trainer utter: "Management's goal in all of this new technology is to upgrade process control, but the covert motive is to centralize all the controls from a monitoring standpoint, tie all the modules into one data system, and manage the entire mill from one central location, eliminating the need for people as much as possible...
...I gave up on going to any union meetings after we voted concessions three times," he said...
...As Clint would say, and as any blast furnace would surely understand, "It's better to wear out than to rust out...
...many of Brookwood's finest went on to lead the CIO...
...It's the most hopeful spot in the American Labor World today...
...All of the dissension took its toll...
...Best labor program in the whole damn country...
...The only major cleanup done in recent memory was when some downtowner—it was David Roderick himself [chairman of USX] that asshole—announced an open house...
...I asked...
...Founded in 1979 by a group of steelworkers, this cross-union paper was designed to give voice to the working people of Pittsburgh...
...During careers day, the big-biz booth brimmed over, while labor's card table got paid a visit by a single campus radical angry about the AFL-CIO's role in Central America...
...we had hoped that a progressive image on the boob tube might turn the wolf away from our door...
...Hey, Mon Valley, you're here to stay...
...Between November 1, 1919, and April 26, 1920, 3,000 immigrants were arrested...
...she asked...
...I know one guy who missed only one day last month...
...Quality products is the name of the game...
...Only running has kept me sane...
...She challenged me to take this relatively obscure early union organizer and draw out some lessons about my own experience...
...I sped on up Route 1, pondering my research project at Rutgers for the upcoming year—to make a video of local labor campaigns and record oral histories of retired New Jersey workers...
...The Mill Hunk Funks and the Herald Angels were the only teams in the known universe that voted for their starting line-ups...
...I asked...
...Larry Evans is a graduate assistant in Labor Studies at Rutgers University and the editor of the Mill Hunk Herald in Pittsburgh...
...Last week, one guy fell off a pouring platform in the bop shop [the basic oxygen furnace...
...Not missing a beat, he shot back, "Great school, Rutgers, great school...
...Yeah, I remember it word for word...
...And at an Ivy League college...
...We had worked on the Ed Sadlowski reform campaign together in the 1970s, and he is one of the lonely few still humping the hard eight at the very mill where I used to work, USX's Edgar Thompson Works...
...I smiled weakly and said, "I'm sure it is but I'm going to Rutgers...
...And, finally, we went to TV...
...And he's got the most responsible job in the mill...
...And as I said goodbye to my friend, my thoughts wrestled again with the role of the labor intellectual...
...Nope," I replied...
...The Mill Hunk and Brookwood were two small efforts at helping workers restore democratic ideals and overcome the cynicism that accompanies hard times...
...Brookwood closed its doors in 1937...
...Anyway, you can fucking forget about safety...
...You mean the Labor Management Participation Teams...
...But it was Brookwood that took most of Clint's time and energy...
...We conducted a Community Video Workshop for forty new producers, and we dominated the community channels with series entitled, "Steelworkers Speak Out," "Our Own Show," "Her Show," and "Steel Valley Stories...
...Today, there is no business like education...
...Noticing my "Mill Hunk" funk, Professor Cobble offered me an alternative to pounding out the ten-thousandth regurgitation on the life and eyebrows of John L. Lewis...
...Are we still fighting that cause...
...I have been in the Labor Movement for thirty years," a disconsolate Clint said on his way to starting a farm...
...I think it depends on what kind...
...Well, there's been a jump in alcoholism...
...It's a big place, a live place...
...When 350,000 steelworkers participated in the great 1919 strike, they were brutally repressed by a beefed-up legion of company police and industrial spies...
...Come on, gang, let's pull together...
...In the 1980s, the same kind of strategy was used: The carrot took the form of Quality Circles and team leaders, the stick was concessions, shutdowns, and union busting...
...As a thirty-year-old Philadelphia machinist and member of a militant union that had elected a "socialist" as president in 1911, Clint was active in fighting the Immigration Act of 1918 and the Palmer Raids that followed...
...The paper was "not owned by anyone," wasn't "operated from the top down," and wasn't "ass kissing," the masthead proclaimed...
...Daily, I encounter legions of MBA suit-and-tie-ers...
...Best of all, we'll all tally the giant profits from the Mon Valley...
...Just as dangerous as ever...
...I edited the paper, sometimes while working a midnight to 8:00 a.m...
...We need to catch up fast...
...Muste became chairman of the faculty, and its visiting lecturers included Norman Thomas, Sinclair Lewis, Roger Baldwin, and James Maurer...
...You know those bastards have us humping as much steel as we put out in '82 with half the guys...
...When we put out the first issue of the Mill Hunk, we laid out the following tidbit in our opening editorial: "There are three kinds of people in the world: Those that make things happen...
...The forced labor peace of Hoover's American Plan cowed workers, and unionism was on the decline...
...LMPT means Less Men Per Turn...
...The communists accused Brookwood of "class collaboration" and being "social-democratic...
...Recalling the protest, I felt guilty about going to graduate school, but I hoped my Labor Video Project would help document grass-roots activism and educate fifteen student interns along the way...
...Make sure you take a minor in something you can use in case there ain't no labor movement left when you get back...
...But to me, its editor of sorts, it was a blueprint for how all grass-roots and union publications could run...
...It became a cultural movement-creating community, using the once-derogatory "Mill Hunk" label as a rallying symbol for workers who wouldn't give up...
...They seemed remote to me after my stint as a Pittsburgh steelworker radical in the inglorious era of Deindustrialization...
...Grunts in the assembly lines of America's Ford and Japan's Mazda factories had better start calling each other "brother" and "sister" before a Ford-Mazda merger is inked...
...It's not 'red.' It's not reactionary...
...Getting things done the LMPT way...
...What about health and safety...
...I was on mid-term leave, attending a solidarity celebration in behalf of "Labor's Corner"—working people's only consistent presence on Pittsburgh's educational TV...
...That night, I drove straight past Breezewood, Harrisburg, and Philly...
...Yes, from this ditty, I'm sure you'll see, that LMPT is the golden key to the future of you and me...
...Our first task is to expand the concept of "us" to include every single worker on the planet...
...Like what...
...I had just left the ranks of low-wage delivery truck drivers to enlist in graduate school for labor studies at Rutgers...
...To a traditional editor, the Mill Hunk's editorial process, in which every subscriber was welcome to editorial meetings to vote on manuscripts, sounded chaotic and unworkable...
...He shot me a serious deadpan...
...I'm too frazzled to deal with anything else...
...those that watch things happen...
...The college churned out radio shows and published Labor Age, a lodestone for liberals and radicals with an interest in the working class...
...You should have seen it...
...Suddenly, I felt my elbow snatched by a friendly senior labor educator...
...Because the Mill Hunk was so outrageously open, it became more than a magazine...
...I replayed some of the scenes of this past Labor Day's parade in New York City...
...So she handed me a book entitled, Clint: A Biography of a Labor Intellectual...
...Can the labor movement harbor intellectuals...
...I had the longest track record as an industrial worker in the class, but was mired in the most cynical outlook about labor's direction...
...Too many pull-aways with the gas...
...Labor intellectual," my Teamster pal repeated with a mock sneer as he guzzled a third boilermaker...
...He sought to bring the best brains together to sort out the collapse of labor during the "Terrible Twenties...
...What everybody in this room desperately needs, including you, Mr...
...Ever hear of Clint Golden...
...With this thought and the orders we fill, we'll make Mon Valley the king of the hill...
...I was forced to smile and asked him, "How's work...
...There was that term again...
...Clint sought "visionaries with a practical bent...
...I pulled in over 800 hours of OT in 1988, and I'm on a record-breaking pace for '89...
...You've been to any union meetings lately...
...Yes, LMPT is your newest edition...
...Once more I got collared by my Teamster friend...
...From 1925 to 1930, Clint toured labor-activity centers all over the country, pushing unions to develop scholarships for their own most dedicated members...
...It's actually not Ivy League, but to my class-self-conscious buddy, any school east of Penn State might as well be...
...The greatest way to beat the competition...
...To keep it going during an era of concessions and failing blast furnaces—a "Big Chill" of the working class—we organized massive public benefits, including a Mill Hunk Junk flea market and a Mill Hunk Funk disco...
...You will be thrilled...
...I went jogging with him for a few miles and told him what I was attempting at Rutgers...
...Let's be real here," Joe said...
...Squinting into the hazy sunrise coming up over the New Jersey Turnpike, I stopped for gas...
...I went back home again recently and caught up with a self-educated steelworker friend of mine, who's the closest thing I know to an authentic labor intellectual...
...conditions, not propaganda...
...That's easy...
...Soon workers from all trades and occupations joined in, as the mills began to shut down in the early 1980s...
...Our shrinking crowd of seasoned labor activists had gone through a long decade of struggle (and slide...
...It's up to us—working-class intellectuals with a small i—to make things happen...
...Great school, Cornell, great school...
...He stressed the "factual approach" over hot air...
...They even sang a song...
...And LMPT is your claim to fame...
...Editorial meetings attracted upwards of thirty to forty people...
...Labor Intellectual: brain surgery...
...Busy as shit," he said...
...Students and faculty participated equally in chores and decisionmaking...
...Two hundred thousand workers carried signs saying Boycott Hess, Jobs with Justice, Right to Know, Right to Act, Don't Fly Eastern, and Boycott Grapes...
...The two words can't peacefully co-exist...
...The world is smaller today, thanks to revolutions in communication and transportation...
...I do at least twenty miles a week...
...There it is, folks...
...and those that wonder what happened...
...Among the deportees were 455 communists and 307 members of the Union of Russian Workers...
...My friends in the mills have an intuitive sense of what is needed, but the demands of their jobs and the powers of management blunt their insights...
...I think they got laid off in '81 with you...
...shift...
...in many instances, they have gone backwards...
...Do you remember the words...
...No self-serves," said the bleary-eyed attendant as he grabbed the pump's nozzle from my hand...
...The fight against shutdowns brought mostly obituaries from the media, who hailed Pittsburgh's transformation from "Smoky City" to the nation's "Most Livable City"—thanks to Rand McNally's Yearly Yuppie Guide...
...We organized a Kick in a Can (of food) soccer marathon for steelworker food banks, a Run of the Mill Race for mill-shutdown victims, and a Sister City Sprint and Roberto Clemente Sports Fest for Nicaraguan children...
...A roller in the slab mill was caught with a case of empties all around him...
...It was a time when society was off balance, and workers were told that to strike was un-American...
...In that time, everything in industry has undergone a change...
...Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan come to mind, painfully...
...Dedicated labor intellectuals outside the factory gates do have a role to play, as Clint Golden showed in the 1930s...
...He was three times the legal drunk limit...
...And here I was abandoning ship for a sand-castle profession on the needle-infested Jersey shore somewhere over the Pennsylvania and New Jersey turnpikes...
...My first impulse was to scrap the long list of well-documented leaders offered by the good professor...
...It teaches facts—not theories...
...The place is a lot dirtier...
...But hey, now I'm a super craftsman...
...After the run, we stopped for a beer...
...Just as Brookwood was Clint's baby, the Mill Hunk Herald was mine...
...The LMPT brownnosers got dressed up in fucking straw hats, led tours, peddled hot dogs and cokes...
...At Rutgers, intellectual growth is supposed to be my thing...
...We even took our progressive message to the worker's god—sports—by sponsoring men's and women's softball teams...
...In their limited ways, they tried to bridge the gap between workers and intellectuals...
...Evans, you're going to be the best-educated truck driver in all of western Pennsyltucky...
...You knew me as a lousy motor inspector...
...At community festivals, we operated a Reaganomics Obstacle Course, where streams of people bobbed for Depression apples and raced through emergency eviction exercises...
...Brookwood had its critics, as well...
...To mollify the public, including segments of the working class, slick pro-business political cheerleaders led the nation in the 1920s and the 1980s...
...In the 1920s, workers faced a two-pronged attack: a carrot (in the form of company unionism and the American plan) and a stick (the Palmer raids...
...But today, the needs of the labor movement are different...
...Don't call me that-even in fun...
...If you are discouraged about Labor's future, if you have lost hope, pay a visit to Brookwood Labor College," wrote the editor of the Journal of Electrical Works and Operators in 1926...
...The multinational corporations have achieved this and are profiting quite nicely, thank you...
...We were making serious jest here, hoping our limited audience in the mills and offices of a town brought to its knees might rise up and somehow embrace our radical agenda...
...Jersey Girls" was blasting over the busy island...
...Let's hear it...
...The high marks got published, taking the heat off me by empowering everybody equally...
...He advocated "making knowledge a tool," and his goal was "to educate workers towards the service of their fellow workers rather than away from them...
...They made time for baseball and volleyball games and built a magnificent swimming pool...
Vol. 53 • April 1989 • No. 4
