America the Featherbedded
Lessard, Suzannah
America the Featherbedded Suzannah Lessard Although defense work by no means monopolizes employment in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, providing roughly 60,000 of 150,000 jobs in industry, it...
...What angers Bose is the degradation implicit in being corporate fat, aggravated by the knowledge that it's impossible to speak out without forfeiting your security-since the work is useless, you are easily dispensed with, and since there is a surplus of workers, you are easily replaced...
...relieved only by the pleasures of split-level materialism . . . . A great majority of the actual skills required of the middle-class wage earner could be acquired in a few weeks or months of training...
...The tendency will be that they won't even question this loss of control, but even if they do, they won't have the bargaining power to challenge it...
...So far most of them have reacted to unemployment in catatonic privacy...
...He feels used, duped, bewildered, and retreats into a schizoid silence...
...At some point in our careers we became conscious that we had no profession at all, and we hungered for a secret jargon to protect us, as hippies devise secret words...
...It's sad that people don't let the rebellion surface until they are out of the ball game, but it's there, unformed, nevertheless...
...Architects, accountants, and delivery boys-even a priest -have been registered among the jobless by the Nassau Employment Task Force, Few small businesses have not felt the chill...
...of being an expendable pawn...
...In the history of civilization, America has now added a new facet-the throw-away, pop-top culture...
...He knows only dependence--how to go to work every day, sit at a desk, and come home with a check, all under the protective aegis of a big company...
...Bose on profession: "Professional life for us, particularly in the military-industrial empires, became an exercise in trivia...
...The layoffs have precipitated a collision of myth and reality which has left the victims speechless...
...The engineer is likely to see himself as a person who has striven hard and succeeded in the classical American style, and he believes that anyone with gumption could do the same...
...It's questionable, too, whether people who have spent their whole lives in service to a myth would be capable of change...
...It's not good for them, and it makes them unhappy...
...The drive, if any, has been towards covering up...
...Now the institutions for whom he has sacrificed so much of his individuality have discarded him with ease, and his virtues and accomplishments are unsaleable elsewhere...
...Almost no one...
...Among billions of tons of non-returnable bottles and saddening hulks of automobiles, we have now added the middle-class worker...
...The defense industry is notorious for padded staffs and superfluous activity, but it is hardly alone...
...The challenge is not to create a vacuous picture of prosperity...
...Some people, as though finally unmuzzled by rejection, are singing out right from the middle of white-collar Middle America, like prophets in a wilderness calling the bluff...
...The larger theorem behind this corollary was that in America, if you get an education-a white collar-and are reasonably industrious, there will always be a place for you...
...America the Featherbedded Suzannah Lessard Although defense work by no means monopolizes employment in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, providing roughly 60,000 of 150,000 jobs in industry, it is the foundation on which the Long Island boom was launched, and the repercussions of massive layoffs by the defense-oriented companies have reached all areas of economic life...
...There is a creeping sensation of futility which follows the white-collar worker to his job these days...
...No one wants to talk about it...
...Others, in a desperate effort to preserve the status quo, break their necks taking jobs as cabbies and waiters, just so they can go on living in the $50,000 house, wearing new clothes, and paying for the '73 Pontiac...
...Yet silence is the order of the day...
...Many families go on as if nothing has happened, go on building the swimming pool, coasting on unemployment benefits and savings...
...Grumman lays off 3,000," report the newspapers, almost routinely, and the 3,000 disperse, eyes downcast, to their little houses on Longbow Drive and Crossbow Lane...
...His basic thesis is that he and his compatriots have been cast aside so easily because they weren't doing anything of real value all along and hence have nothing to bargain with...
...Local officials are mum, the Defense Contract Administration acknowledges no crisis, much less responsibility, and the people themselves, the unemployed and those threatened with unemployment, are withdrawn and secretive...
...The cruelest consequence is his helplessness...
...If the habit of thinking about work that way superceded the habit of responding to titles and monetary rewards, if education instead of gearing people up to getting a passport to high-paying, important-sounding niches developed an aversion to triviality as an affront to dignity, if the people in power looked at the working force as energy and talent to be applied to what needs to be done, it would become immediately apparent how wastefully fatuous the present system and projected policies are...
...But the myth lives on...
...Ironically, many of the people who work in the defense industry went Adapted from an article in the March, 1971, issue of The Washington Monthly...
...Clearly a mass revolt is not on the threshold...
...People can still coast, can still pretend that everything will right itself...
...The majority of the people in this process don't know that's happening to them," said an ex-engineer...
...The challenge is to free the working force from the meshes of trivia and turn it towards the mountains of real work that needs to be done...
...The myth has been out of joint with reality all along: the cautious white-collar, security-bound life in post-war America has little to do with rugged individualism, versatility, or even ambition, the classical traits which in the land of opportunity yield great rewards...
...Despite the fact that the situation is far beyond the defense engineer's control, being out of work signifies that he is lazy or incompetent like the blacks and poor people who are screaming, in such an un-American manner, for free handouts instead of "striving...
...When the recession hit, many strictly commercial companies laid off hundreds of people without hindering production, referring to these people as "corporate fat...
...People don't like being wasted...
...One man felt so ashamed of being laid off that he couldn't tell his wife, and for six months got up in the morning and drove off as though he were going to work...
...Some cryptograms from The New York Times' help-wanted section: Manpower Development Specialist Production Traffic Analyst Quality Assurance Supervisor Logistics Control Engineer Planning Analyst Bose's main theme is the loss of "human bargaining power" in the white-collar empires...
...Consequently, for a believer there is a deep shame implicit in being unemployed...
...Now that he is unemployed-undesirable-he feels ashamed, tainted, and helpless...
...The valiant struggle against adversity for wealth and honor typified by the Horatio Alger figures has become the valiant-struggle for a piece of paper, a passport into the white-collar corporate world where conformity is the mark of respectability-the new honor-and where adversity, kept well at bay by untold buffers, is unmentionable...
...There is no telling what they will do if forced to the wall, whether there will be a lot of disappearing Daddies, or if, in the drastic atmosphere, ideas like Keith Bose's will ignite and either change a small but significant number of people's lives or catch on in a major way and wreak fundamental changes in the nation's mythology...
...To create more frou-frou jobs in an effort to swing the nation back to prosperity is to evade the challenge of the present crisis and only to aggravate the situation...
...Work is effort directed towards the production or accomplishment of something useful...
...It is, in fact, difficult to admit this to yourself without forfeiting whatever fragments of dignity your ephemeral status has lent you...
...The myth mocks him...
...characterized more by jargon than the discipline of honest technology...
...Behind the silence lurks the unacceptable suspicion that a fundamental American myth is finally tearing at the seams...
...No matter what their salary, they don't like being corporate fat, or bureaucratic excrescence, or credential padding...
...neither frugality nor industry will help us escape...
...Everyone is agreed...
...Once they are dispensable they are helpless in the "insecurity within security" strait jacket...
...Apathy, mistrust, the absence of channels of communication and forums for ideas in most middle-class communities, shame, and indifference to others are powerful deterrents...
...They can be paid off, and they will hide their outrage, their disappointment, and disillusionment from themselves as well as the outside world, but that doesn't make the situation any less corrosive...
...Keith Bose, engineer and technical writer with 25 years' experience, is one of the grass-roots iconoclasts...
...He uses the term in a literal economic sense as well as philosophically...
...But then the real crunch hasn't come yet...
...The challenge is to redefine work...
...The two levels are very close: When people are doing inflated, useless work it is very easy to appropriate their powers of self-determination...
...If Black America is crying for recognition," says Bose, "White America is praying that the myth of indispensability will endure . . . . If we appear uninterested in the politics of government, it is because we are consumed by the politics of keeping our job...
...This is a realization that seeds a deep unquenchable rebellion, rebellion against having had to put up with it and against being tossed away with it...
...into their fields not because they were particularly attracted to the work but because they were led to believe that security was one of the sure rewards of those professions-for instance, that a country absorbed in the demanding work of progress would always have a thirst for engineers...
Vol. 4 • February 1973 • No. 12
