Now, almost forty years later I can still feel the sting of that reversal. I was making almost 12 dollars an hour at Scovill when that plant closed. It was hard, dangerous, dirty work but it paid well enough and I had a sense of pride in what I did. I was good at setting up pin machines and I was one of the few people around who was. People who have never worked a production job like that have no idea how hard it can be. It was hot in the pin room all the time, usually 80 degrees or so even at night. You were constantly coated with grease, lubricating oil, and the ever present rock dust from the sharpening wheels. At least once a week I managed to run a pin deeply into my hand or finger trying to unjam a machine. It wasn't unusual to run one of the stainless plastic head pins all the way through your hand and the puncture wounds they left always got infected from the oil and grease on the pins. I still have numerous scars on my hands from losing parts of knuckles working the heavy die holders in and out around the sharp edged of the slides they were mounted in.
A lot of the senior people at Scovill never found another job. The markets was terrible at the time and nobody really wanted to hire people who had been mixed up in a union dispute. I soon found that everyone who had worked at Scovill was suspected of being a union organizer, even though at least half the plant had voted against a union. It pretty much ruled out your ability to go to work in any of the other plants in town. The air conditioning plant had steadily weeded out most of its union population and they weren't going to take a chance on hiring someone who might help reverse that situation. The wire manufacturer simply never hired anyone with the faintest tinge of union about them.
I wound up having to sell most of what I owned at a loss and move back in with my parents for a while when I ran so low of money that I couldn't afford a weekly motel bill. Still, my troubles were nothing compared to most. Reed never found another job of any support at all. He worked for the county running heavy equipment at the dump part time for a while but he was simply physically unable to crawl up in a bulldozer cab after a short while. His wind was always terrible at Scovill as he could hardly catch his breath after walking upstairs to the lunch room.
He died less than two years later, just before the bank foreclosed on his home that he had built with his own two hands some twenty years before. Someone told me that he wife died shortly afterwards in the county run home for the elderly. It was the last hurrah for the UAW in Fayetteville. I don't remember even hearing of them trying to organize any of the small plants that rotated through there for the next 30 years.
I harrassed an electrical contractor until he hired me as an electrician's helper a few weeks after the plant closed. He paid me 3.50 an hour to start and put me to work cleaning the fall-in dirt out of a 10 foot deep primary ditch in the middle of August for 2 days to see if I would quit or not. The ditch was bad, but it was nothing compared to that first night in the pin room. At least I knew what I was supposed to be doing in the ditch.
In a strange way, I owe my career since Scovill to the UAW. I don't know what would have happened if Scovill hadn't shut down when it did. I was going to tech school for electronics but I would have had to take a considerable pay cut to go to work for an electronics firm as well, and I simply couldn't afford to do that without swallowing my pride and starting over. Unfortunately, a lot of people who worked there weren't able to start over. I doubt they see anything at all in the way of a positive result of their attempt to organize Scovill.
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Sometimes.... Liars do Win
The ex CEO of McDonalds, Ed Rensi, was just exulting today about the fact that McDonalds is introducing Kiosks to replace some of their workers. He was patting himself on the back for predicting that this would be the result of efforts to raise the minimum wage to 15.00 an hour. In Mr. Rensi’s world the efforts of McDonalds employees to receive a living wage is steeped in ignorance, ignorance of the basic fact that McDonalds owners are barely scraping by as it is.
This is the kind of fatuous nonsense that is becoming commonplace in the US media. Rensi is probably no worse than most large corporate CEO’s. Unfortunately most US corporate CEO’s live in a world that has nothing to do with the reality that the rest of us face. Last year, the current CEO of McDonalds took a 368% pay raise, up to 7.91 million dollars a year. While I am sure that has put his family in dire straights financially, let’s hope that he can manage to pull himself out of the poorhouse at some point in the future; I am sure the Kiosks will help.
Leaving all that aside for a moment, let’s look at what the franchise owners of McDonalds make on average. The average McDonalds franchise in this country brings in $1,782,000 per year. After paying salaries and expenses this figure is whittled down to $761,400. Here is where the kicker comes in, the rent and fees paid directly back to McDonalds corporate office are $391,500 on average. In other words, out of the net income for the franchise owner, well over half goes directly back to McDonalds corporate office. This explains two things; why the current CEO was able to take a 368% pay raise this year and why Rensi is brutally dishonest when he claims that McDonalds can’t afford to give its employees a living wage. This makes him both a despicable liar and a human parasite living off of the honest hard work of a lot of people scraping by on sub poverty wages.
The average franchise owner makes a net profit of $153,900 dollars off of each McDonalds restaurant they run. Obviously, there is a lot of work involved in running such an operation, not to mention that initial expense of purchasing a franchise. Most McDonalds franchises wind up costing close to a million dollars each to purchase so it takes several years for an prospective owner to make his investment back. Again… this initial fee goes directly back to the McDonalds corporate office to inflate Mr. Rensi’s and many other corporate officers bottom line directly. It’s a hard life for Mr. Rensi and his ilk so I am sure you can understand his exultation when explaining why it is simply ridiculous to suggest that McDonalds employees should actually make a living wage.
A Purdue School of Hospitality study found that McDonalds could raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for all McDonalds employees by raising the price of a Big Mac by $0.17. Of course if people had to pay $4.16 instead of $3.99 for their Big Mac Mr. Rensi might have to cut back on the number of summer homes he has or limit his raises to a paltry 300% per annum. It would be beyond our ability to contemplate the suffering this would entail for him and his family.
Perhaps there is another way to increase the pay of the workers at McDonalds without introducing such grotesque torture to the corporate officers of McDonalds. I neglected to mention that the average franchise owner of McDonalds happens to own six franchises. Therefore, the $153,900 per restaurant actually adds up to an average income of $923,400 per owner. While this may seem like a decent salary it actually chump change compared to the $7,910,000 that the CEO made. We couldn’t possibly cut into the $923,400 the average owner makes to give their own workers a living wage. After all, our income tax system is currently set up so that most McDonalds workers get an earned income tax credit now that allows them to avoid paying any federal income tax at all. In case you might be wondering who pays for that privilege just look at your next check stub under the heading Federal Income Tax and you will see where it comes from. That’s right….. earned income tax credit is a convenient way of letting US payroll taxpayers subsidize corporations like McDonalds. Add in the food stamp and other federal assistance programs that McDonalds encourages their employees to apply for so that they can afford to eat and pay basic substinence bills and you begin to see why corporate and franchise owners make such a good living.
As you can plainly see, both the corporate officers of McDonalds and the franchise owners are already barely getting by. We obviously must come up with another way to finance a living wage for McDonalds workers if such a thing is to actually become a real possibility. The average worker at McDonalds makes somewhere between $8.49 and $10.29 an hour depending on if he is a crew worker or a shift manager. If they were able to work 40 hours a week (which none of them do because then they would become eligible for health care benefits) they would make between $17,243 and $21,403 a year working full time. Of course, most conservatives would have us believe that most McDonalds employees are just kids making pocket change even though the real numbers tell us that over 70% of these employees are actually “full time” employees working 28-32 hours a week.
Let’s forget the $15 an hour thing for a moment and think big; really big. What if I told you that I could double the salary of every employee working at McDonalds without adversely affecting either the poor CEO barely scraping by on his $7.91 million a year OR the wretched average six franchise owner trying to subsist on $923,400 a year. How would I do that you ask? It’s really not that complicated.
The average crew payroll for a McDonalds franchise is $540,000 a year. In order to double everyone’s salary who works there I would have to come up with an extra $540,000 per year in net sales for each McDonalds. Since the average net sales figure is $2,700,000 this would actually mean we would need to see a 20% increase in net sales. Just for the sake of simplicity, this would require a 20% increase in prices across the board. This would mean a Big Mac Meal would go from $5.99 to $7.18. Two cheeseburgers would go from $2.00 to $2.20. I don’t know about you but I think I could live with that the next time I go to McDonalds. Let’s take a look at what this would actually do for everyone, not just the employees at McDonalds.
There are currently 14,259 McDonalds in the US. Each one has approximately 27 employees that would, under my plan, see an immediate doubling of their salary. If we do a mean average and say that the average employee earns $19,323 now and would under my plan make twice that ($38,646) we would simultaneously put most of them above the poverty line AND make them a taxpayer again as this would put them above the earned income level that currently pays no taxes.
In other words 384,993 people would suddenly have $19,243 a year extra to spend. This means that $743,922,000,000,000 would be available as expendable income next year for McDonalds employees if we are willing to pay $7.18 for a Big Mac Meal AND Mr. Rensi would be able to keep his private jet fueled up for those European vacations he has come to expect. Of course, he would probably just prefer to keep paying dirt wages to his employees AND replace most of them with automation technologies while he blames all those greedy employees making $17,000 a year for demanding something approaching a real living wage.
The truth is that $7,910,000 per year just isn’t enough for the Rensi’s of the world; not when they can see replacing their $17,000 dollar employees with machines that they don’t have to pay anything after they are initially purchased. Imagine how many more franchises they can sell if they can manage to double the average franchise owners salary by eliminating employees in favor of automated machines.
This is the kind of fatuous nonsense that is becoming commonplace in the US media. Rensi is probably no worse than most large corporate CEO’s. Unfortunately most US corporate CEO’s live in a world that has nothing to do with the reality that the rest of us face. Last year, the current CEO of McDonalds took a 368% pay raise, up to 7.91 million dollars a year. While I am sure that has put his family in dire straights financially, let’s hope that he can manage to pull himself out of the poorhouse at some point in the future; I am sure the Kiosks will help.
Leaving all that aside for a moment, let’s look at what the franchise owners of McDonalds make on average. The average McDonalds franchise in this country brings in $1,782,000 per year. After paying salaries and expenses this figure is whittled down to $761,400. Here is where the kicker comes in, the rent and fees paid directly back to McDonalds corporate office are $391,500 on average. In other words, out of the net income for the franchise owner, well over half goes directly back to McDonalds corporate office. This explains two things; why the current CEO was able to take a 368% pay raise this year and why Rensi is brutally dishonest when he claims that McDonalds can’t afford to give its employees a living wage. This makes him both a despicable liar and a human parasite living off of the honest hard work of a lot of people scraping by on sub poverty wages.
The average franchise owner makes a net profit of $153,900 dollars off of each McDonalds restaurant they run. Obviously, there is a lot of work involved in running such an operation, not to mention that initial expense of purchasing a franchise. Most McDonalds franchises wind up costing close to a million dollars each to purchase so it takes several years for an prospective owner to make his investment back. Again… this initial fee goes directly back to the McDonalds corporate office to inflate Mr. Rensi’s and many other corporate officers bottom line directly. It’s a hard life for Mr. Rensi and his ilk so I am sure you can understand his exultation when explaining why it is simply ridiculous to suggest that McDonalds employees should actually make a living wage.
A Purdue School of Hospitality study found that McDonalds could raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for all McDonalds employees by raising the price of a Big Mac by $0.17. Of course if people had to pay $4.16 instead of $3.99 for their Big Mac Mr. Rensi might have to cut back on the number of summer homes he has or limit his raises to a paltry 300% per annum. It would be beyond our ability to contemplate the suffering this would entail for him and his family.
Perhaps there is another way to increase the pay of the workers at McDonalds without introducing such grotesque torture to the corporate officers of McDonalds. I neglected to mention that the average franchise owner of McDonalds happens to own six franchises. Therefore, the $153,900 per restaurant actually adds up to an average income of $923,400 per owner. While this may seem like a decent salary it actually chump change compared to the $7,910,000 that the CEO made. We couldn’t possibly cut into the $923,400 the average owner makes to give their own workers a living wage. After all, our income tax system is currently set up so that most McDonalds workers get an earned income tax credit now that allows them to avoid paying any federal income tax at all. In case you might be wondering who pays for that privilege just look at your next check stub under the heading Federal Income Tax and you will see where it comes from. That’s right….. earned income tax credit is a convenient way of letting US payroll taxpayers subsidize corporations like McDonalds. Add in the food stamp and other federal assistance programs that McDonalds encourages their employees to apply for so that they can afford to eat and pay basic substinence bills and you begin to see why corporate and franchise owners make such a good living.
As you can plainly see, both the corporate officers of McDonalds and the franchise owners are already barely getting by. We obviously must come up with another way to finance a living wage for McDonalds workers if such a thing is to actually become a real possibility. The average worker at McDonalds makes somewhere between $8.49 and $10.29 an hour depending on if he is a crew worker or a shift manager. If they were able to work 40 hours a week (which none of them do because then they would become eligible for health care benefits) they would make between $17,243 and $21,403 a year working full time. Of course, most conservatives would have us believe that most McDonalds employees are just kids making pocket change even though the real numbers tell us that over 70% of these employees are actually “full time” employees working 28-32 hours a week.
Let’s forget the $15 an hour thing for a moment and think big; really big. What if I told you that I could double the salary of every employee working at McDonalds without adversely affecting either the poor CEO barely scraping by on his $7.91 million a year OR the wretched average six franchise owner trying to subsist on $923,400 a year. How would I do that you ask? It’s really not that complicated.
The average crew payroll for a McDonalds franchise is $540,000 a year. In order to double everyone’s salary who works there I would have to come up with an extra $540,000 per year in net sales for each McDonalds. Since the average net sales figure is $2,700,000 this would actually mean we would need to see a 20% increase in net sales. Just for the sake of simplicity, this would require a 20% increase in prices across the board. This would mean a Big Mac Meal would go from $5.99 to $7.18. Two cheeseburgers would go from $2.00 to $2.20. I don’t know about you but I think I could live with that the next time I go to McDonalds. Let’s take a look at what this would actually do for everyone, not just the employees at McDonalds.
There are currently 14,259 McDonalds in the US. Each one has approximately 27 employees that would, under my plan, see an immediate doubling of their salary. If we do a mean average and say that the average employee earns $19,323 now and would under my plan make twice that ($38,646) we would simultaneously put most of them above the poverty line AND make them a taxpayer again as this would put them above the earned income level that currently pays no taxes.
In other words 384,993 people would suddenly have $19,243 a year extra to spend. This means that $743,922,000,000,000 would be available as expendable income next year for McDonalds employees if we are willing to pay $7.18 for a Big Mac Meal AND Mr. Rensi would be able to keep his private jet fueled up for those European vacations he has come to expect. Of course, he would probably just prefer to keep paying dirt wages to his employees AND replace most of them with automation technologies while he blames all those greedy employees making $17,000 a year for demanding something approaching a real living wage.
The truth is that $7,910,000 per year just isn’t enough for the Rensi’s of the world; not when they can see replacing their $17,000 dollar employees with machines that they don’t have to pay anything after they are initially purchased. Imagine how many more franchises they can sell if they can manage to double the average franchise owners salary by eliminating employees in favor of automated machines.
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
Unions in the South; a Personal View from the Bottom Part V
It took me a few nights in the pin room to get to the point where I wasn't completely overwhelmed. It took me several months to get to where I could keep a row of machines running and make the minor adjustments necessary to produce acceptable pins. It was mentally as well as physically exhausting. You were always doing one thing and keeping a close eye on two more. From the time I clocked it at night until I left it was an endless rush and constant pressure situation to keep things running. One little oversight or wrong adjustment and you were looking at literally hours of setup time to get back in operation. The operators were the lowest paid people on the floor and had the most demanding job. By the time I learned to be a good Operator I was also a pretty good Jobsetter.
The Jobsetter's job was to set the machines up and repair them when they broke down. The pin machines were ancient pieces of equipment. They had been invented in the early 1900's at the dawn of the industrial age with very little improvement or refinement since. Many of them still had foot trestles on them that had originally been the source of power needed to make them work. A foot trestle with a gearbox and a huge flywheel had been the original means of powering the machines. At some point, the foot trestles had been replaced by an electric motor that ran a belt system to turn the main flywheel and all the associated cams. This was also the source of most of our problems in the pin room.
Turning the huge flywheel by hand was how you set the machine up and adjusted the dies after replacing any of the main drive parts. This made everything function at a leisurely pace and the machines worked very well at a slow RPM. However, when you hit the start button on the electric motor it almost instantly spun up to a speed where the main dies were opening and closing so fast that you couldn't see them. Instead of a pinhead being pressed on the end of the wire every second it was pressing 10 or 15 a second depending on the type of pin and wire. Small imperfections in the wire straightening system or a tiny amount of wear on the back side of the dies that were slamming together with great force would make for large problems. The trick was to constantly make tiny adjustments to make up for wear, but until one understood how the whole process worked, it was very hard to know what or how much to adjust something.
This was all well before the age of variable speed drives and DC motors were expensive to run and to buy. Scovill had at some point opted to run the machines as fast as physics would allow and then rebuild them instead of trying to find an optimal speed that would produce pins without destroying the machine. The overwhelming emphasis on maximum production that management pushed, led to all manner of patchwork machining with shims, brass bushings, and jury rigged parts to keep things running and we were never able to completely rebuild a machine. Everything was based on getting things back running as quick as possible instead of any appreciation of long term efficiency.
Reed was something of a mechanical genius and it was his modifications to the original designs that kept the machines running at all. He was also one of the best people I ever worked for. He was completely and totally honest, had no arrogance that I could detect and was also endlessly patient with people. If you put forth effort, Reed would support you completely. I liked him immediately. It wasn't too long before I was able to understand his hand signal teaching very well. In some ways Reed could communicate more completely in the din of the pin room than he could elsewhere. I remember trying to drag information out of him at dinner and he would always be very slow to respond; whereas any hand signal question in the pin room was met with an immediate and emphatic response. It was as if he had spent so much time with the machines in the pin room that he thought better with that deafening noise all around him.
The pin room always had a huge turnover of people. Before long, I got a chance to move to first shift as a jobsetter as I was by then one of the better jobsetters on night shift. I didn't last long on day shift as the lead man was something of a prima-donna character and not very knowledgeable to boot. Within a week, I asked for a transfer back to nights to work with Reed and I stayed there the whole time I worked at Scovill. Whenever I think of Scovill today, I think of Reed patiently showing me how to grind a set of dies or adjust a grinding wheel just right to get the chamfer correct on a pin. I can almost smell the Bull of the Woods chew he always had in his mouth as he worked and see the dexterior genius of his meaty fingers delicately adjusting a shimmed die. He had such an exquisite touch with minor adjustments and miniscule fitting of unmatched parts that it was almost magical to watch him set up a machine. I became a very good jobsetter but was never in the same class as Reed and I knew it.
One of the first things I learned from working with Reed was that I didn't want to wind up a jobsetter in Scovill's pin room 25 years down the road. His health was fading from breathing the constant coating of rock dust that came from the sharpening system and ingesting solvents used in the parts cleaning process. In the 2 years I worked there, I watched him steadily go downhill with his health. Six months into my job as Scovill I enrolled in tech school taking electronics. I wanted to take electrical studies and be an electrician but the registrars at the school assured me there was a better future in electronics.
My normal routine during that time was to get up at 6 AM in order to drive the forty miles to tech school and get there by 8. I took classes until 1 in the afternoon and then drove the 35 miles north to Scovill. My shift soon turned into a 2-12 shift so that I was working 10 hours a day as I need the overtime to pay for my school. After work I drove 20 miles to my small trailer I was making payments on and dived into a couple of hours of homework from school. I seldom made it to bed before 230 or 300 in the morning. By Friday I was hanging my head out the window of my truck to stay awake driving from school to work and back home. The weekends were for catching up on sleep and I seldom did much of anything else except occasionally help my dad with work around their farm. It was a hard life, but one that I had created when I got married two days out of high school and went into debt for vehicles, property, and a trailer. I learned a lot of lessons very quickly about credit and the dedication it takes to pull yourself out of a financial hole compared to the relative ease of getting into one.
It was about this time that my first personal experience with a union occurred. One of the plating room guys told me at dinner one night that they were having an employee's meeting the next afternoon right before work at one of the pool halls downtown. When I asked what kind of meeting he just looked around kind of furtively and suggested that I should come if I was interested in improving things at the plant. I asked Reed about it soon after and he told me to be careful about who I hung around with from work. Something about the way he said it let me know it was union talk.
I had heard it before during my time there. There was always talk of improving benefits and pay and several unions were mentioned as being interested in organizing the plant employees. I also knew that the management at the plant was dead set against any kind of union and had been known to have sudden cutbacks in force whenever such talk came up. These cutbacks always included the people most heavily involved in the union talk and they were seldom called back later when the cutback ended. I simply couldn't afford to lose my job there as I was already stretched as thin as possible in several different ways.
I didn't go to that meeting or any other meetings with the union organizers. I did meet one of the UAW representatives one night after work when he was handing out literature outside the gate at the plant. He was promising big raises, better working conditions, and better benefits all at the same time. I thought that was a lot to promise from someone who actually had no official involvement in the company to start with but just listened without comment to his little speech.
A couple of weeks after the big push to organize the plant was underway the plant manager called a meeting of the whole plant right after dinner one night. This had never happened before and everyone knew what it was about; the union organizers were publicly outside the gates handing out literature and making speeches every day when we came in and every night when we left. I was of the opinion at the time that my working conditions and my wages were a matter of agreement between me and the people I worked for at Scovill. I didn't see where anyone else had any business being involved in that process. It was that simple and direct in my mind at the time. I didn't consider that we didn't really have much of a voice in working conditions or wages, that wages were held where they were because there was more labor available than demand for it. I just felt like I had the choice to work there for that wage or not. The alternative was bankruptcy and worse than that; failure. I was very determined to make it on my own and had been since I left my father's house at 18.
The plant manager didn't talk for long. He had been a worker in the plant at one time who had worked his way up to plant manager and he was a straight talker. He told us that the reason Scovill had moved to Tennessee was to get away from unions in Connecticut. He explained that our production numbers weren't as high as the company wanted and that if we voted a union in they would simply close the plant and move somewhere else. There weren't any questions after this little speech but there was a lot of grumbling about it in the days that followed.
The union supporters told everyone that it was illegal for Scovill to close the plant over a union vote. The UAW people had told them that the UAW would hire lawyers and fight such a move in court; that it was strictly illegal to close a plant under such conditions. This didn't seem logical to me but I was by no means an expert on law, whether having anything to do with unions or otherwise. I was simply a young jobsetter making a pretty decent wage and trying to improve my education at the same time.
I had already decided not to vote for the union before the plant manager's speech. I made that decision more based upon the people I knew pushing for the union vs those that were not in favor of it. I liked and respected more people that were not for the union than those who were. Reed was not for a union and that was really enough for me. He didn't trust some of the people within the plant who were working the hardest for the union to come in. I honestly don't think he or I or anyone else who voted against the union did so on much of any type of merit beside that basic judgment. We didn't know what the union could or would do but we knew how it had turned out at Amana and we knew some people we didn't trust were pushing for it from within.
When the vote was held, we all voted at the plant after dinner that night. Between the three shifts working at that time there were almost 350 people employed at Scovill in Fayetteville, Tennessee. We voted the union down by six votes. It was much closer than I would have suspected from talking to people within the plant. I later found out that most of the packaging/shipping department was for the union. They were amazed that anyone voted against it.
When the public announcement that the vote had failed was posted on the bulletin board next to the timeclock the next night I breathed a sigh of relief. I was more worried about the plant closing than anything else but I also knew how tight a spot it would put me in if it did. Talk around the plant that night was mixed between those glad it was over and those who were angry about the way it turned out. I was a little surprised how angry and certain some people were that something had been rigged in the voting system. I thought they were just being sore losers about it.
A couple of days later there was a new announcement on the bulletin board. Someone within the US Department of Labor had determined that there was enough evidence available to suggest that there might have been a problem with the way the vote was conducted to justify having another mandatory vote. This time, the Department of Labor and the UAW would be allowed to have observers at the election itself. A lot of people in the plant were very happy that night. I felt like there seemed to be something not quite above board going on, but couldn't determine which side was not playing by the rules. The whole thing made me uneasy again and all my fears about the plant closing began to come back to the surface.
The next night when I went in to work there was another notice on the bulletin board. Several people were quietly reading it as I clocked in and I thought it must be important judging by the complete lack of chatter between them. It was a notice from Scovill's Corporate office in Connecticut. It said that due to dropping production at our plant and market situations out of their control they had determined to close the plant in Fayetteville effective 3 weeks from that date. There was a schedule of amounts of severence pay per year of service that would be enclosed in our last check and a referral to the Tennessee Department of Unemployment also attached. It was all very matter of fact and final. No mention was made of a union vote.
There was a lot of talk around the plant that night about lawsuits, judges, and injunctions that the UAW was going to put in place to stop the plant from closing. As it turned out, it was just a lot of talk. The UAW organizers left town the next day and some 350 people lost their jobs during a downturn where every other major employer in the county was in the process of cutting back as well. Scovill's closing crashed the whole local economy for quite some time afterwards. The domino effect of losing that many jobs that paid a good wage permeated every industry in town in the next 6 months to a year.
The Jobsetter's job was to set the machines up and repair them when they broke down. The pin machines were ancient pieces of equipment. They had been invented in the early 1900's at the dawn of the industrial age with very little improvement or refinement since. Many of them still had foot trestles on them that had originally been the source of power needed to make them work. A foot trestle with a gearbox and a huge flywheel had been the original means of powering the machines. At some point, the foot trestles had been replaced by an electric motor that ran a belt system to turn the main flywheel and all the associated cams. This was also the source of most of our problems in the pin room.
Turning the huge flywheel by hand was how you set the machine up and adjusted the dies after replacing any of the main drive parts. This made everything function at a leisurely pace and the machines worked very well at a slow RPM. However, when you hit the start button on the electric motor it almost instantly spun up to a speed where the main dies were opening and closing so fast that you couldn't see them. Instead of a pinhead being pressed on the end of the wire every second it was pressing 10 or 15 a second depending on the type of pin and wire. Small imperfections in the wire straightening system or a tiny amount of wear on the back side of the dies that were slamming together with great force would make for large problems. The trick was to constantly make tiny adjustments to make up for wear, but until one understood how the whole process worked, it was very hard to know what or how much to adjust something.
This was all well before the age of variable speed drives and DC motors were expensive to run and to buy. Scovill had at some point opted to run the machines as fast as physics would allow and then rebuild them instead of trying to find an optimal speed that would produce pins without destroying the machine. The overwhelming emphasis on maximum production that management pushed, led to all manner of patchwork machining with shims, brass bushings, and jury rigged parts to keep things running and we were never able to completely rebuild a machine. Everything was based on getting things back running as quick as possible instead of any appreciation of long term efficiency.
Reed was something of a mechanical genius and it was his modifications to the original designs that kept the machines running at all. He was also one of the best people I ever worked for. He was completely and totally honest, had no arrogance that I could detect and was also endlessly patient with people. If you put forth effort, Reed would support you completely. I liked him immediately. It wasn't too long before I was able to understand his hand signal teaching very well. In some ways Reed could communicate more completely in the din of the pin room than he could elsewhere. I remember trying to drag information out of him at dinner and he would always be very slow to respond; whereas any hand signal question in the pin room was met with an immediate and emphatic response. It was as if he had spent so much time with the machines in the pin room that he thought better with that deafening noise all around him.
The pin room always had a huge turnover of people. Before long, I got a chance to move to first shift as a jobsetter as I was by then one of the better jobsetters on night shift. I didn't last long on day shift as the lead man was something of a prima-donna character and not very knowledgeable to boot. Within a week, I asked for a transfer back to nights to work with Reed and I stayed there the whole time I worked at Scovill. Whenever I think of Scovill today, I think of Reed patiently showing me how to grind a set of dies or adjust a grinding wheel just right to get the chamfer correct on a pin. I can almost smell the Bull of the Woods chew he always had in his mouth as he worked and see the dexterior genius of his meaty fingers delicately adjusting a shimmed die. He had such an exquisite touch with minor adjustments and miniscule fitting of unmatched parts that it was almost magical to watch him set up a machine. I became a very good jobsetter but was never in the same class as Reed and I knew it.
One of the first things I learned from working with Reed was that I didn't want to wind up a jobsetter in Scovill's pin room 25 years down the road. His health was fading from breathing the constant coating of rock dust that came from the sharpening system and ingesting solvents used in the parts cleaning process. In the 2 years I worked there, I watched him steadily go downhill with his health. Six months into my job as Scovill I enrolled in tech school taking electronics. I wanted to take electrical studies and be an electrician but the registrars at the school assured me there was a better future in electronics.
My normal routine during that time was to get up at 6 AM in order to drive the forty miles to tech school and get there by 8. I took classes until 1 in the afternoon and then drove the 35 miles north to Scovill. My shift soon turned into a 2-12 shift so that I was working 10 hours a day as I need the overtime to pay for my school. After work I drove 20 miles to my small trailer I was making payments on and dived into a couple of hours of homework from school. I seldom made it to bed before 230 or 300 in the morning. By Friday I was hanging my head out the window of my truck to stay awake driving from school to work and back home. The weekends were for catching up on sleep and I seldom did much of anything else except occasionally help my dad with work around their farm. It was a hard life, but one that I had created when I got married two days out of high school and went into debt for vehicles, property, and a trailer. I learned a lot of lessons very quickly about credit and the dedication it takes to pull yourself out of a financial hole compared to the relative ease of getting into one.
It was about this time that my first personal experience with a union occurred. One of the plating room guys told me at dinner one night that they were having an employee's meeting the next afternoon right before work at one of the pool halls downtown. When I asked what kind of meeting he just looked around kind of furtively and suggested that I should come if I was interested in improving things at the plant. I asked Reed about it soon after and he told me to be careful about who I hung around with from work. Something about the way he said it let me know it was union talk.
I had heard it before during my time there. There was always talk of improving benefits and pay and several unions were mentioned as being interested in organizing the plant employees. I also knew that the management at the plant was dead set against any kind of union and had been known to have sudden cutbacks in force whenever such talk came up. These cutbacks always included the people most heavily involved in the union talk and they were seldom called back later when the cutback ended. I simply couldn't afford to lose my job there as I was already stretched as thin as possible in several different ways.
I didn't go to that meeting or any other meetings with the union organizers. I did meet one of the UAW representatives one night after work when he was handing out literature outside the gate at the plant. He was promising big raises, better working conditions, and better benefits all at the same time. I thought that was a lot to promise from someone who actually had no official involvement in the company to start with but just listened without comment to his little speech.
A couple of weeks after the big push to organize the plant was underway the plant manager called a meeting of the whole plant right after dinner one night. This had never happened before and everyone knew what it was about; the union organizers were publicly outside the gates handing out literature and making speeches every day when we came in and every night when we left. I was of the opinion at the time that my working conditions and my wages were a matter of agreement between me and the people I worked for at Scovill. I didn't see where anyone else had any business being involved in that process. It was that simple and direct in my mind at the time. I didn't consider that we didn't really have much of a voice in working conditions or wages, that wages were held where they were because there was more labor available than demand for it. I just felt like I had the choice to work there for that wage or not. The alternative was bankruptcy and worse than that; failure. I was very determined to make it on my own and had been since I left my father's house at 18.
The plant manager didn't talk for long. He had been a worker in the plant at one time who had worked his way up to plant manager and he was a straight talker. He told us that the reason Scovill had moved to Tennessee was to get away from unions in Connecticut. He explained that our production numbers weren't as high as the company wanted and that if we voted a union in they would simply close the plant and move somewhere else. There weren't any questions after this little speech but there was a lot of grumbling about it in the days that followed.
The union supporters told everyone that it was illegal for Scovill to close the plant over a union vote. The UAW people had told them that the UAW would hire lawyers and fight such a move in court; that it was strictly illegal to close a plant under such conditions. This didn't seem logical to me but I was by no means an expert on law, whether having anything to do with unions or otherwise. I was simply a young jobsetter making a pretty decent wage and trying to improve my education at the same time.
I had already decided not to vote for the union before the plant manager's speech. I made that decision more based upon the people I knew pushing for the union vs those that were not in favor of it. I liked and respected more people that were not for the union than those who were. Reed was not for a union and that was really enough for me. He didn't trust some of the people within the plant who were working the hardest for the union to come in. I honestly don't think he or I or anyone else who voted against the union did so on much of any type of merit beside that basic judgment. We didn't know what the union could or would do but we knew how it had turned out at Amana and we knew some people we didn't trust were pushing for it from within.
When the vote was held, we all voted at the plant after dinner that night. Between the three shifts working at that time there were almost 350 people employed at Scovill in Fayetteville, Tennessee. We voted the union down by six votes. It was much closer than I would have suspected from talking to people within the plant. I later found out that most of the packaging/shipping department was for the union. They were amazed that anyone voted against it.
When the public announcement that the vote had failed was posted on the bulletin board next to the timeclock the next night I breathed a sigh of relief. I was more worried about the plant closing than anything else but I also knew how tight a spot it would put me in if it did. Talk around the plant that night was mixed between those glad it was over and those who were angry about the way it turned out. I was a little surprised how angry and certain some people were that something had been rigged in the voting system. I thought they were just being sore losers about it.
A couple of days later there was a new announcement on the bulletin board. Someone within the US Department of Labor had determined that there was enough evidence available to suggest that there might have been a problem with the way the vote was conducted to justify having another mandatory vote. This time, the Department of Labor and the UAW would be allowed to have observers at the election itself. A lot of people in the plant were very happy that night. I felt like there seemed to be something not quite above board going on, but couldn't determine which side was not playing by the rules. The whole thing made me uneasy again and all my fears about the plant closing began to come back to the surface.
The next night when I went in to work there was another notice on the bulletin board. Several people were quietly reading it as I clocked in and I thought it must be important judging by the complete lack of chatter between them. It was a notice from Scovill's Corporate office in Connecticut. It said that due to dropping production at our plant and market situations out of their control they had determined to close the plant in Fayetteville effective 3 weeks from that date. There was a schedule of amounts of severence pay per year of service that would be enclosed in our last check and a referral to the Tennessee Department of Unemployment also attached. It was all very matter of fact and final. No mention was made of a union vote.
There was a lot of talk around the plant that night about lawsuits, judges, and injunctions that the UAW was going to put in place to stop the plant from closing. As it turned out, it was just a lot of talk. The UAW organizers left town the next day and some 350 people lost their jobs during a downturn where every other major employer in the county was in the process of cutting back as well. Scovill's closing crashed the whole local economy for quite some time afterwards. The domino effect of losing that many jobs that paid a good wage permeated every industry in town in the next 6 months to a year.
Monday, November 28, 2016
Unions in the South; a Personal View from the Bottom Part IV
The strike at the air conditioner plant lasted for quite some time. It was eventually settled for a dollar amount wage increase very close to the original offer the company put forth. The plant was able to stay in production the whole time the strike was going on. Upon settlement of the strike many of the workers who had been involved in problems outside the gate were immediately and permanently terminated from their job. The union hung on in the plant, but just barely. I doubt that there is a 30% participation in the plant with the exception of the skilled trades that do the maintenance at the plant. As far as I know, they have never had another strike.
Shortly after the strike was settled, I went to work in the sewing notions plant that was just down the road from the air conditioning plant. This plant was Scovill Manufacturing. Scovill was originally from Waterbury, Connecticut. They had been in the area longer than either of the other two plants and had a pretty decent reputation for how they treated their people that worked there. There were two basic divisions within the plant, manufacturing and packaging/shipping. As I briefly touched on before, Scovill made sewing notions, basically anything that could be made from a piece of wire. We made straight pins, safety pins, bra hooks, and plastic head pins from rolls of wire. There was also a plating department which plated the pins and safety pins but it was relatively small with only a few people working in it.
I want to work at the plant for 5.80 an hour, which was 1.30 an hour more than I had been making working retail in a department store. I had worked at the department store since I was a sophomore in high school and was offered a management training program but I didn't really want to work retail to begin with; even though it was good experience and I learned a lot from my time there. Besides.... I needed all the money I could get as I was newly married and just learning the struggle of paying bills and trying to stay afloat without a good skillset or a degree.
My first job at the plant, was as an operator on a pin line. The pin lines were rows of machines that took a reel of wire and converted it at high speed into a pin. Wire went in one end of the machine and pins came out the other and that was the extent of my knowledge of the process that first night (I was working second shift 2-10 PM). My first night was quite possibly the worst job experience I ever had. Two hours in, I seriously considered walking out; it was that bad. I was, for the first time in my life, completely unable to keep up. I was used to excelling at whatever I took up but I couldn't even keep up with everything I was supposed to do. I went from fearing that they would soon fire me to hoping that they would in just a couple of hours.
The "Pin Room" where I worked was a very large floor space consisting of 12 rows of pin machines. The walls were covered with soundproofing board that was strangely covered in what looked like wire "arrows" shot into it. The inside of the walls were literally covered in these projections, looking like the coat of a huge porcupine turned inside out. The "arrows" were roughly 4-6 inches long and were brass, copper, and steel. They were actually "cutoffs" which was what the last row of machines produced. A "cutoff" was a straightened piece of wire with a very sharp point on one end. They were the raw material which was later bent and shaped into a safety pin. The first step in that process was a wire straightening and cutoff machine that cut them all to a specified length and then ran them through a grinding wheel that sharpened the end. The cutoff machines, like everything else there, ran at an extremely high rate of speed. They were literally a blur of motion pulling the wire in, cutting it to length and sharpening it before spitting it into a wooden box of just the right length. A cutoff machine could produce approximately 50 pounds of cutoffs in an hour.
The "arrows'' were cutoffs that the operator used to check for straightness. The operator would catch five or so in his hand and roll them between the fingers to see if they "wobbled". He would then look at the points with a magnifying eye loop, checking them for sharpness and shape of the point. Different pins had different chamfers on the point so he had to make sure the rapidly spinning grinding wheels were adjusted correctly. After inspection, he would dump the cutoffs back in the box; or.... he would simply launch them by bending the point back and flipping them at the soundproof walls at high speed where they would bury up in the soundproofing board. These were the porcupine projections all around the pin room.
Shortly after the strike was settled, I went to work in the sewing notions plant that was just down the road from the air conditioning plant. This plant was Scovill Manufacturing. Scovill was originally from Waterbury, Connecticut. They had been in the area longer than either of the other two plants and had a pretty decent reputation for how they treated their people that worked there. There were two basic divisions within the plant, manufacturing and packaging/shipping. As I briefly touched on before, Scovill made sewing notions, basically anything that could be made from a piece of wire. We made straight pins, safety pins, bra hooks, and plastic head pins from rolls of wire. There was also a plating department which plated the pins and safety pins but it was relatively small with only a few people working in it.
I want to work at the plant for 5.80 an hour, which was 1.30 an hour more than I had been making working retail in a department store. I had worked at the department store since I was a sophomore in high school and was offered a management training program but I didn't really want to work retail to begin with; even though it was good experience and I learned a lot from my time there. Besides.... I needed all the money I could get as I was newly married and just learning the struggle of paying bills and trying to stay afloat without a good skillset or a degree.
My first job at the plant, was as an operator on a pin line. The pin lines were rows of machines that took a reel of wire and converted it at high speed into a pin. Wire went in one end of the machine and pins came out the other and that was the extent of my knowledge of the process that first night (I was working second shift 2-10 PM). My first night was quite possibly the worst job experience I ever had. Two hours in, I seriously considered walking out; it was that bad. I was, for the first time in my life, completely unable to keep up. I was used to excelling at whatever I took up but I couldn't even keep up with everything I was supposed to do. I went from fearing that they would soon fire me to hoping that they would in just a couple of hours.
The "Pin Room" where I worked was a very large floor space consisting of 12 rows of pin machines. The walls were covered with soundproofing board that was strangely covered in what looked like wire "arrows" shot into it. The inside of the walls were literally covered in these projections, looking like the coat of a huge porcupine turned inside out. The "arrows" were roughly 4-6 inches long and were brass, copper, and steel. They were actually "cutoffs" which was what the last row of machines produced. A "cutoff" was a straightened piece of wire with a very sharp point on one end. They were the raw material which was later bent and shaped into a safety pin. The first step in that process was a wire straightening and cutoff machine that cut them all to a specified length and then ran them through a grinding wheel that sharpened the end. The cutoff machines, like everything else there, ran at an extremely high rate of speed. They were literally a blur of motion pulling the wire in, cutting it to length and sharpening it before spitting it into a wooden box of just the right length. A cutoff machine could produce approximately 50 pounds of cutoffs in an hour.
The "arrows'' were cutoffs that the operator used to check for straightness. The operator would catch five or so in his hand and roll them between the fingers to see if they "wobbled". He would then look at the points with a magnifying eye loop, checking them for sharpness and shape of the point. Different pins had different chamfers on the point so he had to make sure the rapidly spinning grinding wheels were adjusted correctly. After inspection, he would dump the cutoffs back in the box; or.... he would simply launch them by bending the point back and flipping them at the soundproof walls at high speed where they would bury up in the soundproofing board. These were the porcupine projections all around the pin room.
Sunday, November 27, 2016
Unions in the South; a Personal View from the Bottom Part III
I was 18 when this incident occurred. I knew people on both sides of the issue who worked at the plant. It spilled over into fights, arguments, and family squabbles that lasted for a whole generation. Some families still don't speak to each other today over things that happened during the strike. After the burning of the car, the local law enforcement was on site permanently for the duration of the strike. There were no more violent incidents at the plant but they did crop up other places where the union members and the non-union members ran into each other. There were numerous fights in local nightclubs, pool halls, and even a couple on the public square. It was not unusual to hear people yelling "SCAB" at cars driving by in any part of town. Two people had their barns burned and numerous incidents of cars being defaced and tires slashed occurred.
The violence occurred on both sides, as no self respecting southerner tends to allow other people to degrade them personally. I think this is largely the reason why unions failed to find a foothold in the south. As manufacturers moved south the unions seemed to think they could just follow along behind them organizing plants in the same manner they had in the north in the beginnings of the labor movement there. The part they didn't really understand was the southern psyche.
In the south there is a very fine line between criticism of any kind and a personal insult. Constructive criticism is acceptable under most conditions; personal insults must be met with a defense of personal honor. It is largely the same code that fostered dueling over personal insults. It is also the same code that led southerners to attempt to secede in 1860 over an issue that most of them had no personal stake in to begin with.
I was reading a sociology book recently in which the author participated in a study during his college years on people's reaction to perceived personal threat. The participants in the study didn't know what the intent of the study actually happened to be. They were simply asked to come in for an interview. Immediately previous to the interview they were asked to fill out forms which asked their place of birth, where they went to school, and where their family was from previous to their birth. When they were actually called back for the interview, they were called down a narrow hallway. In this hallway a very large, very fit man would purposefully stride down the middle of the hallway directly at them, brusquely forcing his way past them.
The purpose of the study was to study their reaction to this incident. Most people simply turned aside and let the person pass with little or no notice. Rudeness is not especially deserving of notice of comment in today's world by many people. A small percentage of the people reacted with obvious anger, usually not saying anything but showing body language of confrontation. Angry looks, tensing of shoulders and arms, and sometimes actual clenching of the fists. After the interview, everyone was sent back down the same hallway where the same large, rude man approached them from the other direction. Almost all the people who had initially ignored his rudeness and stepped aside did the same thing on the return trip. Most of those who had physically reacted the first time repeated their reaction. Some of them actually physically bumped into the man and more than one called him out on his rudeness.
When researchers began looking for a pattern as to who reacted with anger, they were amazed to learn that all of those who reacted with anger in both instances were either born in the south or raised in the south. The researchers took a while to make that connection but it seemed to be the only thing these people had in common. They were from different races, different social classes, and different backgrounds of financial wealth. What they all had in common was the fact that they had spent many of their formative years in the south.
Personal honor is a major consideration in the south even today amongst people who are raised here. It extends to what can seem ridiculous measures to people not familiar with it but make no mistake; it is a strong and constant presence in every facet of interaction in the south. There are many unspoken rules associated with this system and some people not familiar with this concept never grasp what is going on before they find themselves violently confronted with someone they have managed to cross this line with. It manifested itself very quickly in the confrontation at the plant that day and it spilled over into a cycle of violence that permeated every part of the small community I grew up in.
I don't think union organizers ever understood this basic reality. All requests, demands, orders, or suggestions put forward to keep the strikers from reacting with violence at the plant went out the window immediately as soon as someone was personally insulted. When that spilled over into actual force both with the driver of the car and those attempting to stop it from entering into the plant what happened afterwards became inevitable as it was no longer just about a job or economics, but something much more closely held; personal honor. I have seen the same thing happen several times since that day in similar situations. People often become the worst enemy of their cause when they are provoked to respond to personal insult anywhere, but in the south this is especially prevalent.
Add to that the fact that southerners also tie their own innate sense of self sufficiency to their personal honor that overrides everything except familial tendencies and the prospect of organizing a union becomes even harder. It is not acceptable on many levels to have anyone outside of family take up negotiating for your own personal interests. It is a sign of weakness to many. Anyone who can't fight their own battles (which is how this is perceived) is also without personal honor. It is also why southerners will usually react against anyone trying to force them to do something with resistance. This can include joining a union when taking on a new job. The relative merits of joining the union pale in comparison with the perception that they are not being allowed to make their own choice.
Local plant management understands this system. Union organizers from other parts of the country seldom do; so they are immediately at a distinct disadvantage in the struggle for support. It is why questions about unions and "rights to work" are put forward in the way they are by those opposing unions and it is why they are effective in doing so. To this day unions struggle in to get a foothold in the south and employers take advantage accordingly. I expect this will not change until conditions get much worse but I also suspect we will by that time have lost all major industrial jobs to cheaper labor elsewhere in the world.
The violence occurred on both sides, as no self respecting southerner tends to allow other people to degrade them personally. I think this is largely the reason why unions failed to find a foothold in the south. As manufacturers moved south the unions seemed to think they could just follow along behind them organizing plants in the same manner they had in the north in the beginnings of the labor movement there. The part they didn't really understand was the southern psyche.
In the south there is a very fine line between criticism of any kind and a personal insult. Constructive criticism is acceptable under most conditions; personal insults must be met with a defense of personal honor. It is largely the same code that fostered dueling over personal insults. It is also the same code that led southerners to attempt to secede in 1860 over an issue that most of them had no personal stake in to begin with.
I was reading a sociology book recently in which the author participated in a study during his college years on people's reaction to perceived personal threat. The participants in the study didn't know what the intent of the study actually happened to be. They were simply asked to come in for an interview. Immediately previous to the interview they were asked to fill out forms which asked their place of birth, where they went to school, and where their family was from previous to their birth. When they were actually called back for the interview, they were called down a narrow hallway. In this hallway a very large, very fit man would purposefully stride down the middle of the hallway directly at them, brusquely forcing his way past them.
The purpose of the study was to study their reaction to this incident. Most people simply turned aside and let the person pass with little or no notice. Rudeness is not especially deserving of notice of comment in today's world by many people. A small percentage of the people reacted with obvious anger, usually not saying anything but showing body language of confrontation. Angry looks, tensing of shoulders and arms, and sometimes actual clenching of the fists. After the interview, everyone was sent back down the same hallway where the same large, rude man approached them from the other direction. Almost all the people who had initially ignored his rudeness and stepped aside did the same thing on the return trip. Most of those who had physically reacted the first time repeated their reaction. Some of them actually physically bumped into the man and more than one called him out on his rudeness.
When researchers began looking for a pattern as to who reacted with anger, they were amazed to learn that all of those who reacted with anger in both instances were either born in the south or raised in the south. The researchers took a while to make that connection but it seemed to be the only thing these people had in common. They were from different races, different social classes, and different backgrounds of financial wealth. What they all had in common was the fact that they had spent many of their formative years in the south.
Personal honor is a major consideration in the south even today amongst people who are raised here. It extends to what can seem ridiculous measures to people not familiar with it but make no mistake; it is a strong and constant presence in every facet of interaction in the south. There are many unspoken rules associated with this system and some people not familiar with this concept never grasp what is going on before they find themselves violently confronted with someone they have managed to cross this line with. It manifested itself very quickly in the confrontation at the plant that day and it spilled over into a cycle of violence that permeated every part of the small community I grew up in.
I don't think union organizers ever understood this basic reality. All requests, demands, orders, or suggestions put forward to keep the strikers from reacting with violence at the plant went out the window immediately as soon as someone was personally insulted. When that spilled over into actual force both with the driver of the car and those attempting to stop it from entering into the plant what happened afterwards became inevitable as it was no longer just about a job or economics, but something much more closely held; personal honor. I have seen the same thing happen several times since that day in similar situations. People often become the worst enemy of their cause when they are provoked to respond to personal insult anywhere, but in the south this is especially prevalent.
Add to that the fact that southerners also tie their own innate sense of self sufficiency to their personal honor that overrides everything except familial tendencies and the prospect of organizing a union becomes even harder. It is not acceptable on many levels to have anyone outside of family take up negotiating for your own personal interests. It is a sign of weakness to many. Anyone who can't fight their own battles (which is how this is perceived) is also without personal honor. It is also why southerners will usually react against anyone trying to force them to do something with resistance. This can include joining a union when taking on a new job. The relative merits of joining the union pale in comparison with the perception that they are not being allowed to make their own choice.
Local plant management understands this system. Union organizers from other parts of the country seldom do; so they are immediately at a distinct disadvantage in the struggle for support. It is why questions about unions and "rights to work" are put forward in the way they are by those opposing unions and it is why they are effective in doing so. To this day unions struggle in to get a foothold in the south and employers take advantage accordingly. I expect this will not change until conditions get much worse but I also suspect we will by that time have lost all major industrial jobs to cheaper labor elsewhere in the world.
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
Unions in the South; a Personal View from the Bottom Part II
After just a couple of years the UAW came to town to try to organize the air conditioner manufacturing plant. It wasn't that hard for them really, the plant management had made it easy by holding pay to a bare minimum and generally treating their employees with disdain at every opportunity. Assembly line work is often tedius and nerve wracking, the smallest problem could lead to the whole line getting backed up. This particular plant's management took the approach of simply doing a lot of yelling at people and pushing them to work through breaks, lunch, and dinner to meet production line quotas.
The UAW organizers promised them better wages, better working conditions, and a sense of self-respect that the company failed to believe was necessary. After a long and painful campaign the workers finally forced the company to hold a vote amongst the employees to see if they wanted to become a union plant. Unsurprisingly, the union won an overwhelming victory and the plant became a voluntarily union plant. The state of Tennessee was a "right to work" state so even though the employees voted to allow the UAW to arbitrate labor disputes with the company on their behalf, no one was forced to join the union.
This led to a situation where some of the workers were members of the union and some were not, which led to more internal conflict amongst the workers. Most of the management within the plant never joined the union but some 80% of the hourly workers on the floor wound up dues-paying members of the UAW. Naturally, the first step after the plant organized was to negotiate wage rates for the employees under a collective bargaining agreement. Meetings with the corporate management and the UAW representatives soon bogged down in angry recriminations back and forth and it wasn't very long before the UAW was threatening a strike.
At some point in the negotiations the newly organized workers took a vote over whether to accept the extremely modest wage increase that the owners were offering. Unsurprisingly, they voted not to accept ownership's offer and voted to go on strike. A strike was something completely new for the workers and the local management of the plant. No one knew quite what to expect as the union representatives explained the new ground rules to the striking workers.
The workers were officially exempted from being on the premises of the plant itself. They could walk a picket line across the road from the plant entrance but they couldn't be on the plant property at any point without facing trespassing charges and the plant managment had made it plain that they meant to strictly enforce this rule. Furthermore, any employees arrested for trespassing would also face immediate termination along with criminal prosecution for trespassing.
It was a stacked deck against the union and the UAW officials knew it. They urged caution and peaceful picketing as they told the workers that the plant owners were looking for any reason to forcibly break the strike. This was all well and good until the plant ownership took out large ads in the local newspaper offering permanent jobs for anyone that would come across the picket lines, regardless if they were employees when the strike started.
There were a couple of uneasy days at the start as the workers angrily eyed the local managment coming in and out of the plant but for the most part all the employees; union and non-union stuck together and respected the picket line. The union members were receiving 1/3 pay directly from the UAW coffers, which took some of the sting out of not being able to work. The non-union members weren't eligible of course as they hadn't paid any dues into the strike fund of the UAW.
This was to be the rock that the strike foundered upon in just a short period. The local management managed to run a skeleton crew of workers to keep producing some product but it wasn't enough to meet their demand and everyone knew it. Within a couple of weeks the non-union member employees began to cross the picket line and go back to work. It was just a trickle of them at first but it wasn't too long before most of the non-union employees were back at work full time. This caused quite a bit of anger amongst the workers. It was a small community to start with so most everyone knew everyone else. Brothers who were in the union were soon in angry confrontations with brothers who were crossing the picket lines. Cousins, Uncles, and Aunts were soon turning on each other in very open, angry unforgiving terms.
Whole families divided into union and non-union branches and more than one family devolved into open violence against each other over this small strike in the middle of nowhere. Simmering anger on all sides soon boiled over as the plant started hiring replacement workers for those that refused to return to work. Finally, one Tuesday morning all the frustration boiled over in a wave of violent anger that turned most of the town into protagonists on one side or the other.
Some of the picketting workers blocked a carload of replacement workers trying to come in the main gate. Angry words were exchanged and the driver of the car bumped into some of the strikers as he tried to force his way through the suddenly furious crowd. Rocks were thrown, the windshield of the car broken out and the unlucky "scabs" were dragged from the car and invited to walk home. Someone managed to show enough sense to avoid a physical mauling of the unlucky strikebreakers but as anger built even higher, the management of the plant announced over a loudspeaker that the whole incident was being filmed and that they were going to press charges against everyone who had stopped the car in the first place.
This announcement served as an accelerant to a runaway fire of anger in the strikers. The building was pelted with rocks from the side of the road and the smashed up car was turned upside down in a ditch across the street and set on fire. It was quite a scene for most of the afternoon with the sheriffs department arresting people who the plant management claimed had attacked and destroyed private property.
It was an ugly scene but it got uglier when plant management produced video to show to local law enforcement who came to try to calm the situation down. Faced with video evidence of the incident, local law enforcement officers were compelled to arrest the ringleaders for trespassing and assault.
The UAW organizers promised them better wages, better working conditions, and a sense of self-respect that the company failed to believe was necessary. After a long and painful campaign the workers finally forced the company to hold a vote amongst the employees to see if they wanted to become a union plant. Unsurprisingly, the union won an overwhelming victory and the plant became a voluntarily union plant. The state of Tennessee was a "right to work" state so even though the employees voted to allow the UAW to arbitrate labor disputes with the company on their behalf, no one was forced to join the union.
This led to a situation where some of the workers were members of the union and some were not, which led to more internal conflict amongst the workers. Most of the management within the plant never joined the union but some 80% of the hourly workers on the floor wound up dues-paying members of the UAW. Naturally, the first step after the plant organized was to negotiate wage rates for the employees under a collective bargaining agreement. Meetings with the corporate management and the UAW representatives soon bogged down in angry recriminations back and forth and it wasn't very long before the UAW was threatening a strike.
At some point in the negotiations the newly organized workers took a vote over whether to accept the extremely modest wage increase that the owners were offering. Unsurprisingly, they voted not to accept ownership's offer and voted to go on strike. A strike was something completely new for the workers and the local management of the plant. No one knew quite what to expect as the union representatives explained the new ground rules to the striking workers.
The workers were officially exempted from being on the premises of the plant itself. They could walk a picket line across the road from the plant entrance but they couldn't be on the plant property at any point without facing trespassing charges and the plant managment had made it plain that they meant to strictly enforce this rule. Furthermore, any employees arrested for trespassing would also face immediate termination along with criminal prosecution for trespassing.
It was a stacked deck against the union and the UAW officials knew it. They urged caution and peaceful picketing as they told the workers that the plant owners were looking for any reason to forcibly break the strike. This was all well and good until the plant ownership took out large ads in the local newspaper offering permanent jobs for anyone that would come across the picket lines, regardless if they were employees when the strike started.
There were a couple of uneasy days at the start as the workers angrily eyed the local managment coming in and out of the plant but for the most part all the employees; union and non-union stuck together and respected the picket line. The union members were receiving 1/3 pay directly from the UAW coffers, which took some of the sting out of not being able to work. The non-union members weren't eligible of course as they hadn't paid any dues into the strike fund of the UAW.
This was to be the rock that the strike foundered upon in just a short period. The local management managed to run a skeleton crew of workers to keep producing some product but it wasn't enough to meet their demand and everyone knew it. Within a couple of weeks the non-union member employees began to cross the picket line and go back to work. It was just a trickle of them at first but it wasn't too long before most of the non-union employees were back at work full time. This caused quite a bit of anger amongst the workers. It was a small community to start with so most everyone knew everyone else. Brothers who were in the union were soon in angry confrontations with brothers who were crossing the picket lines. Cousins, Uncles, and Aunts were soon turning on each other in very open, angry unforgiving terms.
Whole families divided into union and non-union branches and more than one family devolved into open violence against each other over this small strike in the middle of nowhere. Simmering anger on all sides soon boiled over as the plant started hiring replacement workers for those that refused to return to work. Finally, one Tuesday morning all the frustration boiled over in a wave of violent anger that turned most of the town into protagonists on one side or the other.
Some of the picketting workers blocked a carload of replacement workers trying to come in the main gate. Angry words were exchanged and the driver of the car bumped into some of the strikers as he tried to force his way through the suddenly furious crowd. Rocks were thrown, the windshield of the car broken out and the unlucky "scabs" were dragged from the car and invited to walk home. Someone managed to show enough sense to avoid a physical mauling of the unlucky strikebreakers but as anger built even higher, the management of the plant announced over a loudspeaker that the whole incident was being filmed and that they were going to press charges against everyone who had stopped the car in the first place.
This announcement served as an accelerant to a runaway fire of anger in the strikers. The building was pelted with rocks from the side of the road and the smashed up car was turned upside down in a ditch across the street and set on fire. It was quite a scene for most of the afternoon with the sheriffs department arresting people who the plant management claimed had attacked and destroyed private property.
It was an ugly scene but it got uglier when plant management produced video to show to local law enforcement who came to try to calm the situation down. Faced with video evidence of the incident, local law enforcement officers were compelled to arrest the ringleaders for trespassing and assault.
Monday, November 21, 2016
Unions in the South; a Personal View from the Bottom Part I
I have recently been reading several books on the "ruling class" and how that has evolved in this country as opposed to much of the rest of the world. The unique nature of the United States has been a noticeable lack of strict class distinctions; at least class distinctions with barriers that can't be passed over or through. Americans like to think that we don't have a class system, that anyone can make it to the top through hard work and dedication. I think there is some truth to this but it is limited by where you start in life. I have come to believe that it is more limited by this than we want to believe.
One of the things that caught my attention in reading these books is the effect that unions have had on the distribution of wealth. Business owners have historically held the power of wealth and influence that tends to make them able to control politics as well. There are of course ebbs and flows to this control that varies with voters awareness of what is actually going on. As a rule, Americans believe in fair play. It is almost an article of faith in this country that fairness is our right as Americans and we believe very strongly as a people that we will always hew back to that line in our economic system through the power of the vote.
From the very beginnings of our nation there has been a constant give and take between those who own land and capital and those who are aspiring to do so. We are one of the few countries in the world that has evolved with this basic division as a centerpiece of our system. Americans believe in the rags to riches story. It is a part of our DNA as a nation. While it does happen occasionally it is an anomaly of a rare order. The real balancing force in our system has always been our ability to control our own government in such a way that we keep the playing field as level as possible.
In the beginnings of this country's economic development as an industrial nation it was not a level playing field at all. Owners of capital and land were able to dictate wages, working conditions, and basically control the system completely by simply utilizing the workforce as needed and let it go when sales started to trend downwards. The late nineteenth century/early twentieth century saw a huge influx of wealth into our industrial system as demand for products soared alongside our growing ability to produce them. The problem was that all of this wealth found its way to the top of the system, the owners of land and capital and very little of it found its way to the people actually doing the work.
Working conditions were dreadful and dangerous, child labor was rampant, and the natural business cycles of unregulated Capitalism wreaked havoc on much of the population when downturns occurred. With the steady increase of the supply of labor through immigration and all of the wealth and poltical control centered at the very top, there was little or no means for the working class to get their fair share. This was the beginning of the labor movement in this country, the birth of labor unions as a necessary response to a rigged system where the working class had no voice. I won't go into the long struggle to gain acceptance but it was a long and violent struggle to gain the right to negotiate for organized labor. Eventually, our native sense of fair play won out and organized labor became a force to be reckoned with. It is not coincidental that this was also the beginning of a middle class in this country. Before organized labor, there was no such thing outside of strictly agricultural regions of the country, the labor movement created the shift in monetary reward that created the middle class.
If we fast forward to the late 1970's early 1980's we start to see the weakening of the great industrial engine of the US. As world competition began catching up with American Manufacturing and industrial development we began to see other parts of the world make inroads into US dominance in these field. Japan's subsidized industries were the first to make this push but it soon became apparent to US corporate interests that the wage differential between US workers and other parts of the world were both a problem and an opportunity.
The first push came when foreign competition became competitive and US manufacturing interests began looking around for a way to remain competitive in a world economy. The first and easiest step to take was to reduce labor costs. Unfortunately, union agreements already in place made this impossible for corporations to do this in the northern industrial belt. The first and easiest step to take was to start to move these bases into areas where there was no organized labor to contend with. Ironically, the somewhat backwards and non-industrial south's historical weakness for Unions offered at least a partial solution.
This period of time saw an increase in southern manufacturing that is still going on today; although it has weakened considerably with the entry of Indochina, China, and India into these markets. Still, it was a way to keep manufacturing here while at the same time lowering labor costs considerably. At this juncture, I started my working career in the south. There were three relatively new manufacturing interests in the small Tennessee town where I want to high school. One of them made air conditioning units and microwave ovens. The second company made insulated copper wire. The third company made sewing notions; bra hooks, paper clips, straight pins, and safety pins. The first two were relative newcomers to the area when I was in high school, the sewing notions plant had moved down from Connecticut over a labor dispute in the late sixties.
The wire manufacturing concern had a very modern approach to labor relations in that they had formed internal company sponsored labor "unions" that negotiated wages and working conditions within the plant. It worked very well and the plant itself was well known for its good pay and good working conditions. Employees at this plant were very loyal to the company and the company responded by treating them well and offering extremely good pay for that area. They had very little turnover and I never knew of a labor incident at all until they were bought in the last few years in a corporate merger.
The air conditioning manufacturing plant was the largest employer in the area so it soon became a kind of test case for labor unions trying to organize in a hostile environment. This plant was well known for its hard work, harsh working conditions, overbearing management, and low pay. In short, if the corporate entities who ran it had tried, they couldn't have created an environment more rife for labor problems. Even minimal efforts to meet employee concerns would have been met with loyalty and appreciation by the workers in this plant but the management was determined that they wouldn't deal with any employee representation of any kind. It was their view that they had moved south to avoid unions and they were not going to deal with one in the south where unions actually had no political power.
One of the things that caught my attention in reading these books is the effect that unions have had on the distribution of wealth. Business owners have historically held the power of wealth and influence that tends to make them able to control politics as well. There are of course ebbs and flows to this control that varies with voters awareness of what is actually going on. As a rule, Americans believe in fair play. It is almost an article of faith in this country that fairness is our right as Americans and we believe very strongly as a people that we will always hew back to that line in our economic system through the power of the vote.
From the very beginnings of our nation there has been a constant give and take between those who own land and capital and those who are aspiring to do so. We are one of the few countries in the world that has evolved with this basic division as a centerpiece of our system. Americans believe in the rags to riches story. It is a part of our DNA as a nation. While it does happen occasionally it is an anomaly of a rare order. The real balancing force in our system has always been our ability to control our own government in such a way that we keep the playing field as level as possible.
In the beginnings of this country's economic development as an industrial nation it was not a level playing field at all. Owners of capital and land were able to dictate wages, working conditions, and basically control the system completely by simply utilizing the workforce as needed and let it go when sales started to trend downwards. The late nineteenth century/early twentieth century saw a huge influx of wealth into our industrial system as demand for products soared alongside our growing ability to produce them. The problem was that all of this wealth found its way to the top of the system, the owners of land and capital and very little of it found its way to the people actually doing the work.
Working conditions were dreadful and dangerous, child labor was rampant, and the natural business cycles of unregulated Capitalism wreaked havoc on much of the population when downturns occurred. With the steady increase of the supply of labor through immigration and all of the wealth and poltical control centered at the very top, there was little or no means for the working class to get their fair share. This was the beginning of the labor movement in this country, the birth of labor unions as a necessary response to a rigged system where the working class had no voice. I won't go into the long struggle to gain acceptance but it was a long and violent struggle to gain the right to negotiate for organized labor. Eventually, our native sense of fair play won out and organized labor became a force to be reckoned with. It is not coincidental that this was also the beginning of a middle class in this country. Before organized labor, there was no such thing outside of strictly agricultural regions of the country, the labor movement created the shift in monetary reward that created the middle class.
If we fast forward to the late 1970's early 1980's we start to see the weakening of the great industrial engine of the US. As world competition began catching up with American Manufacturing and industrial development we began to see other parts of the world make inroads into US dominance in these field. Japan's subsidized industries were the first to make this push but it soon became apparent to US corporate interests that the wage differential between US workers and other parts of the world were both a problem and an opportunity.
The first push came when foreign competition became competitive and US manufacturing interests began looking around for a way to remain competitive in a world economy. The first and easiest step to take was to reduce labor costs. Unfortunately, union agreements already in place made this impossible for corporations to do this in the northern industrial belt. The first and easiest step to take was to start to move these bases into areas where there was no organized labor to contend with. Ironically, the somewhat backwards and non-industrial south's historical weakness for Unions offered at least a partial solution.
This period of time saw an increase in southern manufacturing that is still going on today; although it has weakened considerably with the entry of Indochina, China, and India into these markets. Still, it was a way to keep manufacturing here while at the same time lowering labor costs considerably. At this juncture, I started my working career in the south. There were three relatively new manufacturing interests in the small Tennessee town where I want to high school. One of them made air conditioning units and microwave ovens. The second company made insulated copper wire. The third company made sewing notions; bra hooks, paper clips, straight pins, and safety pins. The first two were relative newcomers to the area when I was in high school, the sewing notions plant had moved down from Connecticut over a labor dispute in the late sixties.
The wire manufacturing concern had a very modern approach to labor relations in that they had formed internal company sponsored labor "unions" that negotiated wages and working conditions within the plant. It worked very well and the plant itself was well known for its good pay and good working conditions. Employees at this plant were very loyal to the company and the company responded by treating them well and offering extremely good pay for that area. They had very little turnover and I never knew of a labor incident at all until they were bought in the last few years in a corporate merger.
The air conditioning manufacturing plant was the largest employer in the area so it soon became a kind of test case for labor unions trying to organize in a hostile environment. This plant was well known for its hard work, harsh working conditions, overbearing management, and low pay. In short, if the corporate entities who ran it had tried, they couldn't have created an environment more rife for labor problems. Even minimal efforts to meet employee concerns would have been met with loyalty and appreciation by the workers in this plant but the management was determined that they wouldn't deal with any employee representation of any kind. It was their view that they had moved south to avoid unions and they were not going to deal with one in the south where unions actually had no political power.
Saturday, November 19, 2016
The Puzzling Disappearance of Liberal/Progressives
One of the things I have puzzled over in the last few years is how Republicans specifically and conservatives generally managed to take over politics here in the south. A little background is probably in order before I get too far into this. During my youth in this area, the sixties and seventies, Democrats dominated the south. Republicans sometimes ran for office but were not really electable in most cases as the Democratic party primary was actually the deciding factor in most all elections.
There is a lot of literature and discussion about how the Republicans managed to flip this in the south. Most of it has to do with the fact that the Civil Rights movement was a breaking point for both parties. Southern Democrats overwhelmingly favored segregation and militantly opposed the idea that "seperate but equal" was unacceptable. It was an article of faith that Jim Crow was both fair and correct and Southern Democrats or "Dixiecrats" always voted in step with this foundational idea. Interestingly, northern Democrats were often those pushing the hardest for the demise of Jim Crow policies and the Dixiecrats often found themselve supported by and cutting deals with Northern Republicans to protect this policy. There was a kind of quid pro quo where Dixiecrats helped Northern Republicans with corporate friendly legislation in return for supporting Dixiecrats when it came to fighting integration.
This made for a coalition of opposite parties that organized around social and fiscal conservative policies while the more liberal or progressive members of the southern Republicans (what few there were) and Northern Democrats were pushing for more liberal or progressive policies in both areas.
The Civil Rights movement broke these coalitions up when the Dixiecrats found themselves without support from Northern Republicans after Martin Luther King and others managed to shine a light on the injustices being perpetrated against blacks in the south. Jim Crow policies never took hold in the north and I expect a lot of northerners simply willfully ignored it in the south until King and others like him brought the effect of these policies to light. Knowing blacks were treated like second class citizens was one thing, seeing law enforcement in Selma and Birmingham attack peaceful marchers with mounted police swinging clubs and turning police dogs loose to attack them on the evening news was something different altogether.
It was this publicity that finally broke the old coalitions. Dixiecrats lost the battle and the Voting Rights Act and others like it were the proof. Whether Johnson actually realized it or not, signing this act did turn the south over to the Republican party; at least it put that possibility in play in a way that simply hadn't existed before. The Dixiecrats were shocked that their Conservative supporters in the North turned a deaf ear when this was going on. Conservatives in the north were in turn shocked over the actions that the Dixiecrats took in violent response to the marchers.
I can assure you that southerners weren't shocked by these actions. It was a fact of life here for much of the time since the Civil War until 1965. The matter of degree to which southerners were willing to go to maintain this system may have surprised Northern Republicans but southerners understood it all too well.
There are still strains of that same racial bias and double standard in the south. The difference is that it is much less prominent and has much less general support than it used to. Don't make the mistake of assuming it doesn't exist; it just went underground and is not discussed publicly. The other difference is that this type of thinking is no longer carried out under the Democratic banner; the Dixiecrats are long gone. They are now staunch Conservative Republicans. This is not to say that all Conservative Republicans are racists because this is simply not the case. However, all racists in the south whether openly avowed racists or closet racists, are now Conservative Republicans in the south. What there is left of them have switched parties and are now Republicans.
While all of this has been well covered and is demonstrably true it never really satisfied my curiosity of how Republicans had managed to completely rout Democrats in the south. If one were to believe that all southerners have a strain of latent racism in them that keeps this coalition together it would make sense. I happen to know that this is not the case. While there are racists in the south, they are not in the majority and have not been for quite some time. While I know this to be true it doesn't explain how the vast majority of people in the south now vote Republican.
Something else is at work here. Something else changed after the late sixties and seventies that turned politics upside down in the south. I can well remember the liberal/progressive wing of the Democratic party even at the height of the Civil Rights movement. It wasn't just the Kennedy's, there were southern progressive Democrats and Republicans as well.
I think what changed was not a political change but a working class change. For much of this century since the New Deal most of the progressive political clout was centered around unions and the working class. When unions were more synonymous with the working class this was easier to see. Since unions have declined so precipitously since Reagan it isn't any wonder that their political clout has declined as well. However, this begs the question of what happened to the people within this class? If the middle class, the working men and women of the nation, were the base of the liberal/progressive wing of both parties; what happened to these people?
To understand this question one has to understand that it is an economics question; not a political question. The working class liberal/progressives were basically squeezed out of existence by a basic change in our economic system. The Reagan revolution brought about the weakening of organized unions along with a requisite strengthening of corporate influence but it also killed the middle class in a way that was more accidental than intentional.
With the advent of globalization and the international search for ever cheaper labor, we managed to lose most all of the manufacturing jobs that supported the middle class; at least the blue collar middle class. I believe this was mostly an unintended consequence. Business owners and Corporate Interests wanted cheaper labor but they didn't foresee some of the side effects that it would produce when we started chasing it around the world.
We have largely become a service industry based economy because the only jobs that couldn't chase cheaper labor were those that were completely rooted in one place. Hairdressers, hotel employees, retail people, food service employees, and construction personnel have to work here because the work itself is here. We haven't figured out how to do IT haircuts or IT plumbing repairs; at least not yet anyway.
What we have figured out how to do is bring in illegal immigrants to take as many of these jobs as possible. This keeps the profit margin high for business owners while at the same time cutting their labor costs dramatically. That's another story for another day however. The fact remains that the service industry jobs we have left are not jobs that require enough specialized skill and training to be jobs that pay very well.
Therefore, what we have left is a working class made up of ever increasing management level professionals such as engineers, managers, and business degreed professionals who are largely college educated and white collar. This group has never found itself beset by cheaper immigrated labor on a massive scale; at least not so far. They also have little in common with the old blue collar professionals who protected their interests by joining organized labor groups. These are the only jobs left in our economic system that pay well enough to produce a middle class outside of the class of business owners large and small. None of these groups have the same interests in protecting blue collar jobs. Many of them make more money by exporting labor costs to the cheapest areas of the world where they can find labor.
Along with this group there is another group that I like to call the Libertarian middle/upper class that has the same basic interests and requirements. This group is composed of lawyers, doctors, medical professionals, and licensed contractors who own businesses of their own. The basic difference between this group and the management level professionals is that they are doubly protected from foreign competition or replacement by cheaper immigrant replacement by strictly artificial means. This group, who are often the loudest proponents of free markets, isolate themselves from free market effects by means of licensing boards that control who is allowed to compete with them.
Doctors are licensed by boards completely controlled by professional organizations run by doctors. Lawyers are licensed by boards completely controlled by lawyers. Contractors are licensed by boards completely controlled by other contractors. I could go on with this comparison through many different levels of professionals but I think the pattern is by now pretty clear to see. Licensing boards, ostensibly set up to protect the public are in fact a total and complete means of protecting this group from any competition with cheaper labor. They are in fact the direct opposite of a free market; a closed monopoly mutually run for members only benefits.
This is largely the modern base of the Republican party; especially in the south. Add in the very richest large corporation board members and owners and it is a formiddable combination.
It is currently opposed by only three groups, none of which is large AND powerful.
The first is the dying labor union membership. This group has been declining rapidly in the last few years but they still exist on a small scale.
The second is a group of minority voters who are on the bottom of the economic scale. This group is a little larger in number but it seems badly splintered and ineffectively led by leaders who have their own interests at heart rather than the group itself.
The third group is by far the largest group of Americans but completely disorganized and seemingly unaware of why things are the way they are. This group is the employees of these service industry businesses. They are opposed and controlled in large part by the business owners large and small that they work for. Their wages are low because the relative skill sets are usually easily replaced by new employees. The relatively large number of available employees v number of jobs available has been overwhelmingly in favor of the owners for quite a long time now. It is also an industry that is increasingly abused by owners who bring in immigrant labor both legal and illegal to keep wages artificially low.
Add in the clever use of right wing talking points about people who don't work and won't work being the base of the Democratic party and social conservative hot button issues and quite a few members of all three of these groups actually votes against its own interests every election by voting Republican.
It isn't so much that Liberal/Progressives disappeared after Reagan. It is more true that the jobs that supported them in large numbers disappeared and have been replaced by jobs that actually produce more organized conservative Republican leanings. One thing that Trump's recent election touched upon was that a lot of people aren't happy with the direction our country is presently going. The part of this iceberg that people aren't accurately seeing is the part that it still submerged. The constantly growing numbers of service industry workers being squeezed from both ends of the spectrum will at some point become self-aware and react by forming their own coalition. When they do, it will be larger than all the rest put together.
There is a lot of literature and discussion about how the Republicans managed to flip this in the south. Most of it has to do with the fact that the Civil Rights movement was a breaking point for both parties. Southern Democrats overwhelmingly favored segregation and militantly opposed the idea that "seperate but equal" was unacceptable. It was an article of faith that Jim Crow was both fair and correct and Southern Democrats or "Dixiecrats" always voted in step with this foundational idea. Interestingly, northern Democrats were often those pushing the hardest for the demise of Jim Crow policies and the Dixiecrats often found themselve supported by and cutting deals with Northern Republicans to protect this policy. There was a kind of quid pro quo where Dixiecrats helped Northern Republicans with corporate friendly legislation in return for supporting Dixiecrats when it came to fighting integration.
This made for a coalition of opposite parties that organized around social and fiscal conservative policies while the more liberal or progressive members of the southern Republicans (what few there were) and Northern Democrats were pushing for more liberal or progressive policies in both areas.
The Civil Rights movement broke these coalitions up when the Dixiecrats found themselves without support from Northern Republicans after Martin Luther King and others managed to shine a light on the injustices being perpetrated against blacks in the south. Jim Crow policies never took hold in the north and I expect a lot of northerners simply willfully ignored it in the south until King and others like him brought the effect of these policies to light. Knowing blacks were treated like second class citizens was one thing, seeing law enforcement in Selma and Birmingham attack peaceful marchers with mounted police swinging clubs and turning police dogs loose to attack them on the evening news was something different altogether.
It was this publicity that finally broke the old coalitions. Dixiecrats lost the battle and the Voting Rights Act and others like it were the proof. Whether Johnson actually realized it or not, signing this act did turn the south over to the Republican party; at least it put that possibility in play in a way that simply hadn't existed before. The Dixiecrats were shocked that their Conservative supporters in the North turned a deaf ear when this was going on. Conservatives in the north were in turn shocked over the actions that the Dixiecrats took in violent response to the marchers.
I can assure you that southerners weren't shocked by these actions. It was a fact of life here for much of the time since the Civil War until 1965. The matter of degree to which southerners were willing to go to maintain this system may have surprised Northern Republicans but southerners understood it all too well.
There are still strains of that same racial bias and double standard in the south. The difference is that it is much less prominent and has much less general support than it used to. Don't make the mistake of assuming it doesn't exist; it just went underground and is not discussed publicly. The other difference is that this type of thinking is no longer carried out under the Democratic banner; the Dixiecrats are long gone. They are now staunch Conservative Republicans. This is not to say that all Conservative Republicans are racists because this is simply not the case. However, all racists in the south whether openly avowed racists or closet racists, are now Conservative Republicans in the south. What there is left of them have switched parties and are now Republicans.
While all of this has been well covered and is demonstrably true it never really satisfied my curiosity of how Republicans had managed to completely rout Democrats in the south. If one were to believe that all southerners have a strain of latent racism in them that keeps this coalition together it would make sense. I happen to know that this is not the case. While there are racists in the south, they are not in the majority and have not been for quite some time. While I know this to be true it doesn't explain how the vast majority of people in the south now vote Republican.
Something else is at work here. Something else changed after the late sixties and seventies that turned politics upside down in the south. I can well remember the liberal/progressive wing of the Democratic party even at the height of the Civil Rights movement. It wasn't just the Kennedy's, there were southern progressive Democrats and Republicans as well.
I think what changed was not a political change but a working class change. For much of this century since the New Deal most of the progressive political clout was centered around unions and the working class. When unions were more synonymous with the working class this was easier to see. Since unions have declined so precipitously since Reagan it isn't any wonder that their political clout has declined as well. However, this begs the question of what happened to the people within this class? If the middle class, the working men and women of the nation, were the base of the liberal/progressive wing of both parties; what happened to these people?
To understand this question one has to understand that it is an economics question; not a political question. The working class liberal/progressives were basically squeezed out of existence by a basic change in our economic system. The Reagan revolution brought about the weakening of organized unions along with a requisite strengthening of corporate influence but it also killed the middle class in a way that was more accidental than intentional.
With the advent of globalization and the international search for ever cheaper labor, we managed to lose most all of the manufacturing jobs that supported the middle class; at least the blue collar middle class. I believe this was mostly an unintended consequence. Business owners and Corporate Interests wanted cheaper labor but they didn't foresee some of the side effects that it would produce when we started chasing it around the world.
We have largely become a service industry based economy because the only jobs that couldn't chase cheaper labor were those that were completely rooted in one place. Hairdressers, hotel employees, retail people, food service employees, and construction personnel have to work here because the work itself is here. We haven't figured out how to do IT haircuts or IT plumbing repairs; at least not yet anyway.
What we have figured out how to do is bring in illegal immigrants to take as many of these jobs as possible. This keeps the profit margin high for business owners while at the same time cutting their labor costs dramatically. That's another story for another day however. The fact remains that the service industry jobs we have left are not jobs that require enough specialized skill and training to be jobs that pay very well.
Therefore, what we have left is a working class made up of ever increasing management level professionals such as engineers, managers, and business degreed professionals who are largely college educated and white collar. This group has never found itself beset by cheaper immigrated labor on a massive scale; at least not so far. They also have little in common with the old blue collar professionals who protected their interests by joining organized labor groups. These are the only jobs left in our economic system that pay well enough to produce a middle class outside of the class of business owners large and small. None of these groups have the same interests in protecting blue collar jobs. Many of them make more money by exporting labor costs to the cheapest areas of the world where they can find labor.
Along with this group there is another group that I like to call the Libertarian middle/upper class that has the same basic interests and requirements. This group is composed of lawyers, doctors, medical professionals, and licensed contractors who own businesses of their own. The basic difference between this group and the management level professionals is that they are doubly protected from foreign competition or replacement by cheaper immigrant replacement by strictly artificial means. This group, who are often the loudest proponents of free markets, isolate themselves from free market effects by means of licensing boards that control who is allowed to compete with them.
Doctors are licensed by boards completely controlled by professional organizations run by doctors. Lawyers are licensed by boards completely controlled by lawyers. Contractors are licensed by boards completely controlled by other contractors. I could go on with this comparison through many different levels of professionals but I think the pattern is by now pretty clear to see. Licensing boards, ostensibly set up to protect the public are in fact a total and complete means of protecting this group from any competition with cheaper labor. They are in fact the direct opposite of a free market; a closed monopoly mutually run for members only benefits.
This is largely the modern base of the Republican party; especially in the south. Add in the very richest large corporation board members and owners and it is a formiddable combination.
It is currently opposed by only three groups, none of which is large AND powerful.
The first is the dying labor union membership. This group has been declining rapidly in the last few years but they still exist on a small scale.
The second is a group of minority voters who are on the bottom of the economic scale. This group is a little larger in number but it seems badly splintered and ineffectively led by leaders who have their own interests at heart rather than the group itself.
The third group is by far the largest group of Americans but completely disorganized and seemingly unaware of why things are the way they are. This group is the employees of these service industry businesses. They are opposed and controlled in large part by the business owners large and small that they work for. Their wages are low because the relative skill sets are usually easily replaced by new employees. The relatively large number of available employees v number of jobs available has been overwhelmingly in favor of the owners for quite a long time now. It is also an industry that is increasingly abused by owners who bring in immigrant labor both legal and illegal to keep wages artificially low.
Add in the clever use of right wing talking points about people who don't work and won't work being the base of the Democratic party and social conservative hot button issues and quite a few members of all three of these groups actually votes against its own interests every election by voting Republican.
It isn't so much that Liberal/Progressives disappeared after Reagan. It is more true that the jobs that supported them in large numbers disappeared and have been replaced by jobs that actually produce more organized conservative Republican leanings. One thing that Trump's recent election touched upon was that a lot of people aren't happy with the direction our country is presently going. The part of this iceberg that people aren't accurately seeing is the part that it still submerged. The constantly growing numbers of service industry workers being squeezed from both ends of the spectrum will at some point become self-aware and react by forming their own coalition. When they do, it will be larger than all the rest put together.
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
A Different Type of Union
I grew up in a lower middle class household. Hard work was something to be admired as well as a requirement for getting anywhere in my dad's house. My dad believed that you could be anything or do anything you wanted to do as long as you were willing to work hard enough at it. All of the lessons I learned on basketball courts, baseball diamonds, and football fields could be condensed into that one belief. Practice makes perfect. Hard work and teamwork beats talent and natural ability in the long run every time. Every defeat was met with the same advice; "I guess you'll just have to work harder."
He also put this into practice with chores and work around the house. I worked on cars with him, my brother and I cut yards all over the neighborhood. We painted our house, we put shingles on the roof, and when we moved to the farm we added on to the house, built sheds, chicken houses, fences, hog farrowing houses, and worked on every piece of equipment on the place whenever it broke down. I learned early that hard work is one of the differences between success and failure in most every undertaking. It might not be the only difference, but it was often the only difference we could control.
I have had a job to go to every day since I was fifteen years old. Before that I had paper routes, firewood to cut and sell, and hay to haul for other local farmers. Hard work was something to be admired in others and required in my brother and I. By the time I had found my way into working as an electrician's helper I had already worked many different jobs. I strongly believed in the work ethic that says you give someone an honest day's work for an honest day's wage. I enjoyed my work and I was good at it.
I worked my way up from a green helper to a journeyman and then lead man electrician on commercial and industrial job sites in the span of 6 years. Most of the contractors I worked for were willing to let someone take on all the responsibility they were willing to shoulder; as long as they followed through and did good work in a timely manner. I learned by doing for the most part. I asked a lot of questions and I watched every skilled trade on the jobsite. I wanted to learn how everything worked, how all the different trades managed to work together to go from a patch of dirt to a functioning building.
One thing I learned early on was a disdain for unions. In a strange sort of way unions were responsible for me learning a trade but that's a story for another day. In North Alabama, there were a few union jobsites but they were rather rare. Most of them were TVA plants or federal sites on military bases. There were very few commercial or industrial sites outside of the government that were union in this area; there still aren't.
Most of the contractors I worked for flat out refused to hire anyone who had ever been in a union. They believed they learned to be lazy, that they worked to quotas that were inefficient and that they were so specialized as to be useless on smaller sites. There is some truth to all of these things. Later in my career, after I went to work for NASA, I came to realize this is still the case for a lot of union contractors but again.... that's a story for another day.
As a non-union contractor, our wages were significantly lower than union pay scales. The notable exception to this rule was when the non-union contractors managed to win contracts on government facilities or won bids on projects that had Federal funds involved through HUD. On these jobs, we made scale money; which was considerably more than what the going rate for electrical workers outside of these jobs. I was making 11-13 dollars an hour running small commercial and industrial jobs. Scale jobs at the time were paying 17 dollars an hour for journeyman electricians. In other words, the top man on a non-scale job made 4-5 dollars an hour less than every journeyman on a scale job made.
No non-union contractors paid benefits in those days. No insurance, no vacation, no paid holidays, it was just work until the job ended and hope they managed to win a new bid by that time. In truth, they usually tried to keep their best people so when jobs slowed down the first to go was always the hired journeyman without enough initiative to actually run crews or plan work. I didn't think much about any of this in those days; it was just the way things were. I was proud of my skills and proud to be one of the people that contractors depended on to get the job done. I went quite a few years without ever being laid off. It was a point of pride for me; to be valuable enough that contractors didn't want to lay me off.
I was gung ho and a hard driver. I finished jobs on time and I did things right, everything had to be square and true and I took a lot of pride in those jobs. I still do today. I can point out buildings all over this area some 30 years later that I worked on. Eventually, I began to notice things that changed my perspective. I saw two people I worked with get permanently disabled because we were in a big enough hurry that we did unsafe things. One of them fell 25 feet onto a concrete floor and ruined both his legs because someone didn't take time to put all the safety pins in a scaffold and it collapsed. One of them cut the main artery in his wrist when a wrench slipped inside a 3000 amp main we were reconnecting on an emergency basis. We had worked 34 hours straight when that occurred. I had to drag him out of the inside of the main before he passed out as we simply coudn't have gotten him out without cutting the panel apart if he had passed out before I could get him out. He never did manual work again.
As work picked up in the mid-eighties the contractors in this area began to organize. I suppose they were tired of cut-throat bidding each other out of work and stealing each other's men when work was flush. It suddenly became impossible to go from one contractor to another. If you were laid off, another contractor would hire you but they quit competing for hiring each other's help. Wages dropped for all but the very top lead men. I saw this happening but it wasn't affecting me directly as I was never out of work. I had built a good reputation and if I could walk off of one jobsite and onto the next with no problem if I wanted to. I did it several times over people trying to force me to take shortcuts on quality or code violations. I also had a good reputation with all the local inspectors. They trusted my work and knew I didn't do things that were against code so they didn't try to pick my jobs apart. I wasn't going to let a contractor trying to cut corners ruin my reputation and left a couple of jobs accordingly.
I noticed all of this but didn't really pay too much attention until I was hired to work on a scale job and the contractor was falsifying records for the HUD inspectors. According to his records, I was the only journeyman electrician on that job. This was plainly not true but I figured whatever deal he had worked with everyone else about their wages was between them. Everything was fine until the contractor asked me to sign the progress report that listed all the journeyman electricians as laborers. I refused and told him that the HUD people wouldn’t buy it anyway. He insisted he had already worked it out with the HUD inspector but I just couldn’t bring myself to sign something I knew to be false. The whole scheme soon blew up and the contractor wound up paying everyone on the job as a journeyman along with back pay for all work performed so far. I managed to finish the job but it was not a pleasant work environment and I couldn’t wait to move on to a new contractor.
Soon after that job I was told that I needed to get an ABC certification as a journeyman electrician to continue working. ABC stood for Associated Building Contractors. I soon realized why wages were falling as it was in reality a union for people who owned electrical contracting companies in the area. Under the guise of improving the trade, the owners had organized a union just for owners and they were steadily knocking down wages by doing so. The workers who had helped private contractors keep unions off of local job sites suddenly found themselves victimized by a different type of union; a union for owners.
The ABC association soon was all over the state. As more owners joined, they lobbied Congress to lower federal scale wages for construction electricians. When the next wage report came out federal scale wages were down considerably. When I started doing electrical work it was around 17 dollars an hour. Two years after the ABC association appeared on the scene it was down to 10.80 an hour. The only people that were asked about prevailing wages were the owners of the companies so it isn’t too hard to understand how a union for owners can control that information.
I soon found the only contractor left in town who wasn’t a member of the ABC association. Shortly after that I decided to find a job with some health insurance and benefits. This meant a job in maintenance instead of construction but I was skilled enough to make that jump rather easily.
It was almost ten more years after the appearance of the ABC association before scale wages came back up to 17 dollars an hour. By then, federal scale wages were lower than what contractors on the street were having to pay to get people to work for them.
Now…. in this area, you will be hard pressed to find a construction electrician who isn’t an illegal immigrant; at least you won’t find many of them. For that matter you won’t find any skilled trades people in construction besides the top lead men who are not illegal immigrants. The ABC association long ago disappeared. There’s really no need of a union for owners to hold wages down when you can simply hire illegal immigrants for 15 dollars an hour. People who are afraid of being deported also aren’t very likely to ask for a raise or any semblance of benefits either.
I think about all of this when I read an article claiming that young people need to learn a trade; that demand for skilled trades people is climbing. Perhaps if Trump actually does stop illegal immigration this might be true but it isn’t at the moment. Of course, if it does; we can always crank the ABC association or something like it back up.
I recently saw a local post on Facebook suggesting that Trump’s election would introduce the rest of the country to Alabama Economics. Good luck with that……
Sunday, November 6, 2016
The Truth
Truth- that which is in accordance with fact or reality
In the house I was raised in truth was unequivocal. It was not something that there was room to argue about, there was no wiggle room around truth. You either told the truth to my father or paid the consequences. It was one of his hard and fast rules that formed the foundation or our relationship with him. With truth came trust and acceptance in his company, anything else was simply unacceptable. I don't remember my first exposure to this rule of law but I do remember that it was universally applied. If we got in trouble for something he would ask us what we had done. Woe be unto whomever strayed from the truth when this question was asked. I learned very early that his wrath for doing the wrong thing was inconsequential compared with his wrath for not telling the truth about it later. Even though his wrath could be severe, it wasn't so much his wrath that I was afraid of as it was the loss of his respect. Respect was hard earned from my dad but it was also more valuable in his estimation than anything else he gave us and we all realized this at a young age and valued it accordingly.
I have carried that respect for truth throughout my life. I don't mind a good story now and then, and good stories are often flavored with what we want to remember just as much as they are with what actually happened but when it comes to human interaction and the serious business of work, truth is absolutely necessary if we are to achieve anything in this world. We simply can't learn lessons about anything unless we learn to respect the truth first. Everyone makes mistakes and I believe we actually learn more from our mistakes than our successes. However, it becomes impossible to learn anything from our mistakes if we refuse to acknowledge them. We are simply doomed to repeat them endlessly at that point, never advancing beyond them because we don't understand they are mistakes.
The current presidential election has presented us with two candidates who have no respect at all for the truth. Trump is a serial liar of enormous magnitude. He regularly denies saying or doing things that he has been publicly recorded saying and doing. I have known people like Trump before, habitual liars are not a new invention of this political campaign, they have been with us for a long time. Trump seems to be the most obvious of this particular characteristic that we have had run for president but he is not the first liar we have had run for this or any other office. Politicians who say one thing and then do something else are quite common. The artful use of language to give the implication of one intent while doing something completely opposed to this intention seems to be part of holding public office for a lot of people.
Trump takes his dishonesty to levels that we haven't seen in someone running for president. The airwaves are literally full of overlays of him first saying something and then blatantly denying having ever said it. He has a childish tendency to simply deny his own statements endlessly even when confronted with the proof of him saying it. It is quite remarkable to see actually. I am reminded of a conversation I had with one of my sister-in-laws concerning her child's refusal to admit he had done wrong. I told her he must be forced to admit the truth before he would ever become capable of being trustworthy. Evidently, Trump has never been forced to be truthful which leads to the fact that he is bascially unworthy of anyone's trust as the multitude of lawsuits he has been involved in are open testament to.
Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton also seems to have little or no respect for the truth. Her career is full of half truths, tortured attempts at equivocation and twisted logic to justify actions that may have been honest mistakes at the time but now are seen as political baggage and disavowed accordingly. She seems incapable of simply admitting that she made a mistake and moving on. Every change of position, every twisting of statements by others to point them towards meanings that they did not have all add up to someone who has no basic respect for the truth. The truth is that opinions evolve, people change and political positions evolve as well. Unfortunately, very few politicians have the temerity to point this out when their positions evolve.
The Clinton's have a very long history in US politics. It would be impossible for them to hold the same positions they did in 1980 and still be electable in 2016 because the US voting population has evolved dramatically since that time. I would have more respect for Hillary Clinton if she were to point this out and admit that neither she nor her husband are infallible. Unfortunately, as we saw in the Lewinsky case, Bill Clinton has no real respect for the truth either.
I suspect we all know habitual liars. It is a fact of life that we will be confronted with them at work, in our personal lives, and at various social functions. I try to avoid them as much as possible. I simply have no respect or use for them. No one is perfect and we all suffer from various personal weaknesses and flaws but someone who has no respect for the truth has an extremely low value as a human in my estimation for the simple reason that they are permanently frozen in a state of perpetual childish tendencies that they have no hope of advancing past because they have no understanding that they should. Habitual liars never admit or their own mistakes, therefore they never understand them.
It disheartens me to think that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the only two real choices we have running for the highest office in the land this year. One of them is provably a habitual liar of monumental proportions. The other has shown a very haughty and public disdain for the truth on numerous occasions. Quite honestly, neither of them would be a guest I would choose to entertain in my home, much less someone I would choose to run the most powerful nation on earth.
In the house I was raised in truth was unequivocal. It was not something that there was room to argue about, there was no wiggle room around truth. You either told the truth to my father or paid the consequences. It was one of his hard and fast rules that formed the foundation or our relationship with him. With truth came trust and acceptance in his company, anything else was simply unacceptable. I don't remember my first exposure to this rule of law but I do remember that it was universally applied. If we got in trouble for something he would ask us what we had done. Woe be unto whomever strayed from the truth when this question was asked. I learned very early that his wrath for doing the wrong thing was inconsequential compared with his wrath for not telling the truth about it later. Even though his wrath could be severe, it wasn't so much his wrath that I was afraid of as it was the loss of his respect. Respect was hard earned from my dad but it was also more valuable in his estimation than anything else he gave us and we all realized this at a young age and valued it accordingly.
I have carried that respect for truth throughout my life. I don't mind a good story now and then, and good stories are often flavored with what we want to remember just as much as they are with what actually happened but when it comes to human interaction and the serious business of work, truth is absolutely necessary if we are to achieve anything in this world. We simply can't learn lessons about anything unless we learn to respect the truth first. Everyone makes mistakes and I believe we actually learn more from our mistakes than our successes. However, it becomes impossible to learn anything from our mistakes if we refuse to acknowledge them. We are simply doomed to repeat them endlessly at that point, never advancing beyond them because we don't understand they are mistakes.
The current presidential election has presented us with two candidates who have no respect at all for the truth. Trump is a serial liar of enormous magnitude. He regularly denies saying or doing things that he has been publicly recorded saying and doing. I have known people like Trump before, habitual liars are not a new invention of this political campaign, they have been with us for a long time. Trump seems to be the most obvious of this particular characteristic that we have had run for president but he is not the first liar we have had run for this or any other office. Politicians who say one thing and then do something else are quite common. The artful use of language to give the implication of one intent while doing something completely opposed to this intention seems to be part of holding public office for a lot of people.
Trump takes his dishonesty to levels that we haven't seen in someone running for president. The airwaves are literally full of overlays of him first saying something and then blatantly denying having ever said it. He has a childish tendency to simply deny his own statements endlessly even when confronted with the proof of him saying it. It is quite remarkable to see actually. I am reminded of a conversation I had with one of my sister-in-laws concerning her child's refusal to admit he had done wrong. I told her he must be forced to admit the truth before he would ever become capable of being trustworthy. Evidently, Trump has never been forced to be truthful which leads to the fact that he is bascially unworthy of anyone's trust as the multitude of lawsuits he has been involved in are open testament to.
Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton also seems to have little or no respect for the truth. Her career is full of half truths, tortured attempts at equivocation and twisted logic to justify actions that may have been honest mistakes at the time but now are seen as political baggage and disavowed accordingly. She seems incapable of simply admitting that she made a mistake and moving on. Every change of position, every twisting of statements by others to point them towards meanings that they did not have all add up to someone who has no basic respect for the truth. The truth is that opinions evolve, people change and political positions evolve as well. Unfortunately, very few politicians have the temerity to point this out when their positions evolve.
The Clinton's have a very long history in US politics. It would be impossible for them to hold the same positions they did in 1980 and still be electable in 2016 because the US voting population has evolved dramatically since that time. I would have more respect for Hillary Clinton if she were to point this out and admit that neither she nor her husband are infallible. Unfortunately, as we saw in the Lewinsky case, Bill Clinton has no real respect for the truth either.
I suspect we all know habitual liars. It is a fact of life that we will be confronted with them at work, in our personal lives, and at various social functions. I try to avoid them as much as possible. I simply have no respect or use for them. No one is perfect and we all suffer from various personal weaknesses and flaws but someone who has no respect for the truth has an extremely low value as a human in my estimation for the simple reason that they are permanently frozen in a state of perpetual childish tendencies that they have no hope of advancing past because they have no understanding that they should. Habitual liars never admit or their own mistakes, therefore they never understand them.
It disheartens me to think that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the only two real choices we have running for the highest office in the land this year. One of them is provably a habitual liar of monumental proportions. The other has shown a very haughty and public disdain for the truth on numerous occasions. Quite honestly, neither of them would be a guest I would choose to entertain in my home, much less someone I would choose to run the most powerful nation on earth.
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