Thursday July 23, 2020
101 Days until the election on November 3rd
181 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
My first real job was as a factory supervisor at Western Electric’s Baltimore Works. Western Electric was the factory arm of The Bell System, which was a “regulated monopoly” that provided phone service to most of the country. The regulated monopoly concept came about because when phones first came into use there was competition between companies and it got pretty crazy. One company wouldn’t let you call customers of another company. Wires were strung all over the place. There were competing standards. If you think it’s a problem look at the New York subway system that has three standards for track due to the three competing lines that started there.
The government stepped in and regulated the competition. Companies had set areas and they had to submit their pricing to a central government run agency. Manufacturing was centralized in Western Electric. The Baltimore facility had three huge buildings: Cable, Wire, and Apparatus. When the transatlantic cables were laid across the ocean that cable came out of the Baltimore Works. It was run directly out of the factory and into the hold of a specially designed ship.
Somewhere around six or seven thousand people worked there. I was in the Apparatus Shop, which would have been in the top 1,000 companies in the U.S. based on the dollar cost of stuff we shipped every year. We made all the equipment that ran out of the central offices to the home and into the home. Fuse protectors and boxes to break out pairs of copper wire from a big bundle were the kinds of things that shop made. I worked as a supervisor on a job that made wire splice connectors. Two little pieces of plastic that held a U shaped piece of copper with teeth in it. The idea was you could shove two wires in the end of the plastic body, squeeze it shut, and the copper V shaped teeth would slice through the wire coating and touch the copper wire inside thus making a fast and easy connection. No stripping of wires necessary.
I worked there for five years. As a supervisor you were confronted with all kinds of problems. You heard all kinds of stories. The one I want to tell you about today is the story I heard about a fellow who knew the rules governing employees very well. This was a union shop so any problems with an employee were always confronted by the union. If an employee was absent for one hundred days and you wrote them up the union would ask that if the employee “showed improvement” then that would be a good thing. If in the next attendance round the employee was only absent ninety-nine days the union would say, “Hey, they showed improvement! That’s what we agreed to.” Etc.
Working with the unions was important and it was a game, of sorts. The fellow I’m telling you about played the game to the hilt. He would do everything just up to, but within the bounds, of the union contract. He would take an unexcused absence one day outside of being able to be fired. If you spoke to him about something he would declare in a loud voice whatever it was that you were doing as some sort of union agreed upon warning and he’d write it in his little notebook. He was tolerated. I think he’s the guy that was told he could no longer call his supervisor a F*ing AH, and he agreed to that and instead started calling his boss “A Fine American.” It became shop slang for, well a F*ing AH.
I never met the guy, don’t know his name, never had to deal with him; but I knew of him. That was enough.
People at the Baltimore Works made good money. There were three big employers in Baltimore: Western Electric, Bethlehem Steel, The Chevy Plant. All are gone.
I don’t think the people working at those plants got better paying jobs once those jobs went away.
There had been a covenant forged between labor and business, an understanding. To some degree it was a game, but people played within the rules. Yes, there were those who pushed the limits like that fellow I mentioned, but by and large people wanted to do a job, do it well enough to not get in trouble and go home.
Joseph Campbell said that civilization is forged on myth, and if so maybe there was a myth here at the factory. There was a tacit agreement, an understanding. Push too hard and things would break. Everyone by and large understood that.
What happened?
The system frayed, the understandings got pushed to places they had never been before, and the whole thing fell apart. There were reasons, both good and not so good for this happening, but when it did one of the outcomes was the average worker got screwed.
They lost their job, either to foreign competition or automation. The tacit understanding was gone. The covenant, if it ever existed, was no more. Yes, people would bitch and complain, but that was part of the game. So was management trying to supervise this whole thing. Most managers did what they could. There were characters but they all played within a certain set of boundaries. Once, or if, those boundaries got removed, then things fell apart.
When the phone system got deregulated we were supposed to get cheaper phone service. Did we? Who pays $6.50 a month for the family to have a phone in the house? And everyone, anywhere within the jurisdiction of a Bell phone company got a phone. So what if they had to string wires from hell and back? You got a phone and it was $6.50.
There were standards. Strict standards. This allowed during a hurricane or other disaster for technicians to be sent from anywhere in the country to an affected area and the central office looked the same as back home. Now? Not so much.
There were problems. Innovation was stifled. AT&T had accounting systems that allowed them to depreciate equipment over twenty five years and they wanted to take full advantage of that depreciation. The problem was that technology was advancing much faster.
Along with foreign competition for labor at much cheaper prices so also came the idea of “the independent contractor.” This allowed companies to dump their work onto someone else and not have to pay the benefits. This moved those type of jobs into he same category as what economists call “the farm problem.”
The farm problem says that if you have a commodity, say corn, and everyone produces it then what happens to the price? It rises and falls directly with supply. If there is very little corn the price is high, but most farmers don’t have much so yes they make a lot on what they have, but they don’t make a lot of money. In times of abundance, everybody has corn so price cutting goes on. The price of corn drops and the farmer makes no more than when he had little. Where can the farmer cut expenses? Labor.
The farmer can work for nothing or find cheap labor.
By putting manufacturing in countries that pay less or by subcontracting most of your work to independent contractors the cost of labor goes down and the average worker makes less. (e.g. gets screwed.) Maybe they are in a foreign land or maybe they are here, but they end up, like the farmer, working more and making less.
Now we are seeing these principles being applied to government. There had been tacit understandings and covenants. For example: a President would submit certain nominees for Senate approval, or the Senate would look at bills from the House, or The Supreme Court would be appointed by a process that would over time reflect the nation’s values (okay maybe that’s a stretch or maybe I’m hinting at a covenant that’s been broken.)
With this president all that is gone. He’s like the guy in the shop who is pushing the limits of what he can do. If everyone did as that fellow did the others playing the game on the other side would give up; take their ball and go home. How would that look in this case? I’m not sure. I can point to the French Revolution or to what happened to Mussolini in Italy, or Hitler in Germany.
Could it happen here, what ever “it” is? Absolutely.
Meanwhile, we are experiencing the worst pandemic in history and we can look at the rates of death and infection in other countries and we can see that our numbers are terrible. Our government is failing us. They were told. We were told. It was totally predicted and yet, our government is still failing to do the most basic things to get this virus under control.
After careful analysis and thought I have determined why this is. This is totally new and groundbreaking analysis and you won’t here it anywhere else, but here – Donald Trump doesn’t give a shit about you.
There you have it. And, everything else flows from there.
Okay, not everything. The incompetence and mendacity of the Republican Party has been building for a long time. He couldn’t have done it without them! So let me make sure you understand the extension of logic here – Donald Trump is the outcome of a movement and a party that doesn’t give a shit about us.
Okay. Have a nice day.
PS The view from my office. (NOT! Damn. Actually, It’s Long Island*)
*Bahamas, not New York. Come on. Grow Up.
Exactly!