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Conclusion: An Exit Path From Capitalism to Workplace Democracy

With strong, confident voices American workers - blue and white collar in ever greater numbers - have been discovering the merits of solidarity and learning the ways of workplace democracy in their own workplaces and unions. In the process they have challenged, once and for all, the cover stories that mask the harsh realities of the "new economy" of state capitalism.

Above all, the ideologues of the market declare, workers exist only as a collection of atomized, isolated individuals subject to the logic of the "free" market. If they fall by the wayside in the scramble to join the top 20% of society who have prospered in the recent economic boom, they will find themselves among the broad majority of Americans for whom living and working conditions have gone from worse to worse. There is no place for losers in the cut-throat world of neo-liberalism. In the words of Margaret Thatcher, "There is no such thing as society." We exist for the globalizers and managerialists not as citizens or communities, but only as consumers.

In the privatized, high tech world of the new economy, workers may be connected by their computers, but they're still just isolated objects waiting to be bought and sold at the whims of that all powerful abstraction, the "market." In place of cooperation we have connectedness; in place of solidarity, the dog eat dog world of predatory competition and downsizing. These are the harsh realities faced, and overcome, by workers in the struggle for workplace democracy.

The purpose of this study is not only to expose the distortions and falsehoods that prevent workers worldwide from breaking out of lives of increasing alienation and insecurity. This book has also sought to offer an alternative: there is now sufficient evidence to map out an alternative economy in the making, in the womb of the old. In their ongoing struggle for workplace democracy, workers have transformed decision making about production, creating a mechanism that contains the core elements of a new economy and society. By transforming the underlying employment relation itself from below, rather than merely altering the hierarchical relations of production from above, this process represents the termination of state capitalism and the creation of its successor. This is what After Capitalism really means.

Through three centuries of capitalism, political means, like lobbying or controlling national governments from above, have been viewed as the only available for getting wider effect from policies preferred by workers and their unions. But as we saw in Part IV, that understanding, which has shaped the policies of workers and their allies, is altered by the far-reaching effects that are embedded in the core worker decision process, changes that have profound consequences for the rest of the economy.

The end of the Cold War, a half-century nightmare of militarized state-capitalism, relieved an array of conservative pressures in the U.S. that surrounded the Washington-Moscow contest. But America's state/corporate managers did not put aside their drive to accumulate unlimited profits and power. Therefore, they used their Cold War victory to open a campaign for world hegemony, called "globalism." Those ambitions for unlimited power, however, generate economic deteriorations (as we saw in Part II, above) that frustrate many ordinary human expectations. As workers seek relief from the unacceptable penalties and alienations imposed by state/corporate managers, they demand changes in their working conditions that go to the heart of managerialism itself – the employment relation.

Cover Stories That Conceal

An array of cover stories, endlessly repeated, conceal the characteristics of the employment relation. Textbooks, news reports, opinions of print and other media journalists treat economic events as though part of the story-book of market-competition. That is why so much of the argument and information in this book may come as a disconcerting surprise to some readers.

The social costs of state capitalism, especially deindustrialization and infrastructure decay, are unmentionable in polite society. Military sales by the huge state/corporate marketing and military training apparatus are rarely mentioned. Neither is the role of the government spelled out (of the Pentagon, Treasury, or State Department team). In the face of this dominant version of the world, endlessly propagated and recycled by the media, how can non-specialists manage informed judgments about these performances? Instead, the populace is treated to a scattering of small wars that show off American military high tech.

These state/corporate agendas are concealed from the workers who finally pay the bill. That concealment is the great service provided for the state/ corporate managers by the cover stories about their rule, so endlessly repeated: money is wealth; economic growth equals the sum of money-valued goods and services (including nuclear overkill, the prison industrial complex, gambling); exchange relations (a.k.a. The Market) govern production; top managers are merely the executors of market-based decisions; people are paid according to the (money) value that they produce; state managers are elected and hence implement the people's will; only through unhindered "globalism" can the processes of foreign capital investment and trade make the blessings of our market economy available to others.

All of these cover stories can be summed up in the doctrines of neoliberalism: a major condensation of managerial, market economy and capitalist values. In that view, maximum individual freedom for all can be ensured by minimizing the functions, powers and resources of community - and finally, of the state –, while leaving all residual capability to the individual. This is a core dogma of neoliberalism. Yet, as we saw in Part II, the single largest function of government, the military department, has been singularly exempted from the minimalist critiques of "big" government. Neoliberalism also assigns responsibility for the vital functions of medical care, nutrition, education of children, and housing to the individual. When individual resources are insufficient, then neighbors, churches, and the surrounding community should take charge. But what if the whole neighborhood suffers from a lack of resources - human and other - to cope with human breakdown? That, in the neo-conservative view, is the price of individual liberty - well worth paying.

But the individual of neoliberalism does not stand alone. He/she relates to others by the most efficient mechanism and rules: The Market. Free from state controls, the Market decides on production and allocates goods with infallible efficiency - in accordance, as we have seen, with theories that have little connection with the real world. Nevertheless, widespread allegiance to the dogmas of neoliberalism has produced unrelenting resistance to worker decision-making and, when successful, results in a "trained incapacity" for participating in the struggle for solidarity and mutual trust. Indeed, "the ultimate trump card for the defenders of neoliberalism... is that there is no alternative." Drawing upon the data and logic of this book, my judgment is: not any more. Workplace democracy is a name for the new society that follows capitalism.

The Struggle for Disalienation Changes the Employment Relation

During three centuries of capitalism, the employment relation has been the main structure of relations between managers and workers, between the employer who decides and workers who perform as directed. That hierarchical design facilitated the vast enlargement of production, productivity and exploitation processes for accumulation of capital and power. These achievements have spurred great alterations within both sides of the employment relation, notably during the second half of the 20th century.

Against the mystifications and omissions of the cover stories, we can now summarize the crucial changes in the last half century of state capitalism in the relations between workers and their employers.

On the Employer's Side, we have seen an unprecedented series of alienations unleashed by the drive for unlimited profits and power:
The corporate employer joined with government managers to effect a partnership, a state capitalism in which the powers over people and resources by government are wielded to control state-capitalist finance capital and every kind of productive resource in magnitudes hitherto unknown.

The state/corporate partnership has given the corporate partners effective immunity from the ordinary hazards of business investment.

Accumulations of power by predatory competition for the state/corporate partners proceed by the same profit-accumulation rule of growth without limit.

Managerial power accumulation guides industrial decisions aimed at weakening (alienating) the actual or potential power of workers. With this end-in-view, corporate and government managers have unleashed the deindustrialization of the U.S., above all in the capital goods and highly unionized consumer industries. Whole communities are destroyed by this ongoing deindustrialization.

The militarization of government budgets, which have been developed to serve as the most alienating (power weakening) instruments over domestic and foreign communities, accounts for the massive absence of capital resources required for every sort of infrastructure maintenance and investment. Accumulations of military power have extended to extremely costly and irrational accumulations of weaponry, as in nuclear overkill.

The sustained drive for profit/power accumulation has caused an unprecedented enlargement of management staffs, a dramatic alteration of the occupation structure within industrial firms and in the economy as a whole.

Yet, on the workers' side, each successive wave of alienation has produced concerted moves toward disalienation and workplace democracy:
Workers have responded to employer alienation by self-organization and by agreeing to preferred rules about their own production work that pertain to: worker group, work time, deployment, performance, and compensation (as formulated by Lawrence B. Cohen, see Chapter 9).

The workers' decision-making activity is further governed by their own internal codes of behavior, which emphasize democratic procedures governing allocations of responsibility and authority.

The scope of the workers' decision rules is constantly expanding. Rules first developed to cope with production integration have been elaborated to connect workers' inputs from and outputs to the wider economy.

Though workplace democracy was once limited primarily to blue-collar workers, the last decade of the 20th century saw the enlargement of worker organizations to include major white collar productional occupations.

Worker unions, weakened by corporate/state offensives during the Cold War, have not been able to halt the employers' alienation operations undertaken to support the deindustrialization of the U.S. and accompanying capital and power accumulation outside the U.S. - "globalism."

The potential of U.S. unions to lead reindustrialization in the U.S. has only been partly explored. Thus possible economy-wide applications of labor sponsored investment funds to the U.S. scene has still to be defined.

The Future of Workplace Democracy

Despite the relentless deindustrialization unleashed by the state/corporate managers, the scope of the workers' decision process will continue to expand as white collar occupations identify with the workers. Most importantly, though obscured by conventional wisdom about worker limitations, the scope of the workers' decision process is becoming increasingly interconnected with the rest of economy. Thus, the effort of workers to set standards (i.e. rules) for their own production work causes attention to the needed inputs (tools, machines, power, materials) whose timely availability at desired quantity and quality is essential for production operations. But attention to the needed inputs automatically results in reaching out to other parts of economy.

These aspects of the worker decision-making process will expand with the inclusion of ever more white collar occupations within the framework of workplace democracy decision process and organization. We can confidently predict that these changes in the employment relation of workers to both corporate and state managers will only accelerate in future decades.

In such an environment many workers may want to review their long-standing reliance for livelihood on Pentagon orders, with the accompanying pressures for loyalty to state/corporate policies. Despite the rhetoric of a "post-industrial" or "information" society, the United States, like any economy, still needs production. Necessary prospects for alternative production work and markets include the whole array of capital and "heavy" consumer goods like railroads and light-rail vehicles. These are in ever greater demand in the U.S. while there are, at most, only a handful of American facilities, engineers, or production workers trained for parts of this work. Meanwhile the state/corporate managers' deindustrialization campaign relentlessly proceeds.

In Part V of this book, I ventured some estimates of the further course of changes in production relations and some prospective consequences for the organizing of society. Unions are central to the future of workplace democracy worldwide. American unions have indeed made important beginnings toward revising their automatic support for state and managerial policies into which they were trained during the half century of Cold War. But there is still much work to be done.

New organizing departures are likely to strengthen the AFL-CIO structure: a focus on organizing the lowest paid workers – especially in "service" occupations and agribusiness; and on the surge of white collar organizing, including public school teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers, university instructors and professors, technologists and engineers.

Unionism among the lowest paid (often immigrant and minority workers) is crucial, especially in "boom" times: it relieves a pressure that holds down worker wages across the board even while formally measured unemployment is low. The white collar recruits to the workers' community should, in turn, be able to take a lead in debunking the cover stories that shield the corporate/state alienation-accumulation operations.

The surge of unionism among white collar occupations also builds self-confidence across the board. The victory of the newly unionized Boeing engineers opened 2000. They marshaled their colleagues for a display of unpredicted solidarity and drew great confidence from rallying around their March 2000 banner that proclaimed: No Nerds, No Birds (as we saw in Chapter 11, above). For the larger engineering community the message was: if the Boeing engineers can do it, why can't we.

The proposed merger of the machinists, steel and auto unions would also open up larger prospects for reversing the state/corporate deindustrialization drive of the Cold War. The strength of such a combination could encourage attention to initiatives to support reindustrialization in the U.S.: like technology training programs in community colleges; fresh German-style apprenticeship training at high school level; attention to training high-caliber production engineers in American colleges; and the launching of an American version of the highly successful labor-sponsored investment funds of Canada (see Chapter 10, above).

Workers in every industry and service will increasingly formulate proposals for investment to counter alienation-by- deindustrialization and act to modernize and improve their work and their products. For the disalienation of their working lives will encourage such attention, just as doctors and teachers have emphasized their interest and concern with improving the quality and effectiveness of their respective practices and institutions.

Investment capital for financing enterprises will also become increasingly available from worker-controlled investment funds, and from governments less obsessed with irrational accumulation. The agendas of production foregone because of irrational accumulation and a permanent war economy (Chapter 5) will be translatable into capital investment programs that improve the quality of life. All this is a direct counter to the corporate/state campaign for deindustrialization.

None of these organized worker initiatives depend on transformations of the top corporate managers or their organizations. Neither do worker initiatives depend on the federal government's managers or legislators undergoing a transformation: withdrawing from their partnership with business. The workers' initiatives are based upon disalienation at the workplace, combined with solidaristic initiatives for organizing production outside of the managerial alienation-accumulation routines that are dedicated to furthering deindustrialization.

The Core Values of Worker Decision-Making

What is the prospect for the types of actions discussed in this book?

In the preceding chapters, I have tried to outline the linkages that bind the struggle by both white collar and blue collar workers for a voice in deciding the conditions of their working lives: to the rules of such worker efforts; and in turn, to the ways workers support workplace democracy. Four main elements are involved:

Disalienated decision-making means that whoever finally decides that something be done is also the person (or persons) who does the work. This contrasts with the managerialist mode of decision-making which separates decision from implementation, and automatically installs and elaborates hierarchy.

Solidarity among workers includes: having common social goals and values; having mutually agreed procedures for decision-making, and for resolving disputes; while sharing mutual trust. All this in contrast to predatory competition for accumulation without limit.

What exactly is mutual trust? Mutual trust among workers refers to a shared belief (or confidence) in the honesty, integrity, reliability and justness of the men and women with whom decision-making is shared.

Lastly, worker decision-making promotes equality. Here, equality refers to the impartiality of rules and procedures that govern decision-making relations among workers.

Make no mistake. These characteristics are not to be confused with sainthood. They are practical and feasible ways of behaving among workers of diverse industries and callings. But it does take some learning: the lessons of workplace democracy are probably most effectively learned by engaging in some part of the worker decision process. It takes time - and some patience - not only to arrive at consensus among members of a worker group, but also to do some unlearning. The unlearning may well include all too familiar behaviors taught (and followed) in the name of "success" within a management hierarchy, and in a wider society that has taught its people that the election of candidates to government posts is the main way to affect government policies at all levels.

Actually, Americans are quite skeptical about the feasibility of getting things done by national electoral (and party) politics. By 1996 only 49.0 percent of the voting population cast votes in the election for President, and only 45.8 percent voted for U.S. Representatives to Congress. Many Americans are less inclined than ever to rely on the electoral process. In stark contrast to this apathy about electoral politics is the widespread interest in unionization revealed by a 1999 survey of American workers. Despite the perceived decline in union memberships, Richard B. Freeman and Joel Rogers discovered a very different picture:

Despite the widely publicized flaws of unions and the unease that many members feel about the role of unions on the national scene, 44 percent of private-sector American workers would like to be represented by a union, more than three times the 14 percent share of our sample who reported union membership.... As far as our evidence goes, the main reason these workers are not unionized is that the managements of their firms does not want them to be represented by a union [sic].

Readers will be all too familiar with the habits of mind to be unlearned on the route to workplace democracy: the insistence on self-identification as an "individual" rather than as part of a congenial group; holding on to the predatory competition rule that assumes that one's gain is real only when accompanied by another's loss; insistence that ability should be recognized in the form of hierarchical rights; and the widespread suspicion of the idea of uniformly graded compensation. Most of all, the prospective member of a worker decision group must learn ways of mutual trust, an indispensable part of the solidarity that is at the core of worker empowerment.

The design of technologies for production will begin to take on new characteristics under a disalienated worker decision process. Fresh attention will be given to comfort and safety in the industrial workplace. Such considerations have been given attention elsewhere, notably in Sweden. High tech tools, machines for producing consumer and other goods, will be designed with priority to the well-being of the workers who use them, as well as serving the productivity of the wider community. Similarly, vital community functions like the education of children will be reshaped to be consistent with core values of workplace democracy - to foster the values of community after capitalism.

What is in prospect?

The struggle for disalienation in manufacturing and service occupations of every sort will continue. The word gets out, everywhere. If industrial workers, doctors, psychologists, clinical social workers, engineers, school teachers, and professors can do it, why can't we? No productive branch of economy will be exempt from movements to empower the people doing the work. Who is eligible? Every occupation that contributes to production, transportation, communication.

Furthermore, as the disalienating moves spread, they will focus attention on a fairer distribution of the fruits now used up by the vast array of decision process activities. This will encourage moves to deflate the military-based processes of power accumulation. Workplace democracy can only really thrive in a demilitarized economy.

Economic conversion of industries and occupations currently locked into the military economy will become an increasingly important process. Conversion will accomplish two linked objectives: retraining people toward productive work; and redesigning entire enterprises so that they can design and produce consumption goods and services. Such conversions of occupations and industries will be well within the scope of their worker groups. For they will be able to draw upon the willing cooperation of other industrial workers, as well as the talents of their own engineers, scientists and cooperating academic specialists.

What will happen to big government after state capitalism? As we have seen, currently the largest part of the federal government is dedicated to military priorities. Half of the vast federal budget is swallowed up by the military. Thus economic conversion will not only release the resources needed to fix up the distressed parts of the U.S. economy and society; it will also deflate the military economy, that gigantic instrument of alienation for the state/corporate managers.

Income standards will also be reconsidered, as will hours of work, the work year and the length of the working life. Starting from presently agreed compensation, there will be the open prospect for upward compression. By boosting the prevailing minimum (poverty) wage to robust living wages, upward compression of compensation would also yield a near-future feasible top level cutoff of, say, about four times a base income. A schedule of income changes will have to take into account not only social values but also the availability of large fixed-cost products (like housing, schools, or health care).

What will happen, readers will ask, to the great array of stores and firms that produce all manner of consumer goods and services? The main shops, stores, services, malls, banks, hotels, communication and transportation systems will continue, even as they are modified by the rule of workplace democracy within each enterprise. Some institutions, like the financial securities industry centered in Wall Street, will suffer from disuse. For the personal income anxieties fostered by state capitalism, and its conspicuously costly irrational accumulation processes, will decline. Shops and services whose style caters to the super-rich will suffer contraction and will require modification as part of their traditional clientele uses up their surplus cash.

These processes of disalienation will slow, and then reverse, the concentration of capital accumulation, often labeled "personal income," by and for the top percentiles of the population. Personal use of money or property can stand, like everything else that is part of consumption, however elaborate: they will not disappear, though the vast inequalities that I have discussed will be addressed. The key issue here is that within capitalism the property right with respect to money is a social relation which, especially in the case of vast fortunes, can be readily used for capital investing. This ability to control the means of production is further enabled by the managerial employment relation which separates the decision making and producing occupations. Such vast concentrations of capital and decision power make it much easier for the very rich to accumulate further profits and power.

But the decision process of workplace democracy takes the crucial step of linking worker decision making with production. Under these new rules (outlined in Chapter 9, above) the pressure of money alone does not allow individuals, even the fabulously wealthy, to control the decisions of their employees. For offers of payment in return for creating the means of production – which the individual investor seeks to control under the alienating rules of managerialism – are invalid within the rules of workplace democracy. However much money or capital they can wield, the money owners are still "outside the loop" of a democratic process that connects worker decision making with production.

Readers may recall that during the sit-down strikes of the 1930s in the key plants of the automobile industry, the auto workers refused to accept management's offer of money in return for going back to work. Why? Because the managers' offer to each worker lay outside the loop of the workers' decision process. Production began again only after management formally recognized the representatives of the workers, and proceeded to bargain with the union on their terms of employment, thereby "closing the loop" between worker decision making and production.

After capitalism there is indeed bound to be some attention paid to the splashy accumulation of homes, yachts by single persons or families. (How many cars can you ride in at once? how many shoes can you wear?) In addition, the well-advertized presence of a growing number of billionaires in the U.S. will likely provoke proposals for a one-time tax on assets which could yield a tidy sum, yet cause no personal hardship among the billionaire community. Local governments will surely confront situations requiring some infringement on hitherto private property rights in order to carry out important actions for a wider community, like sequestering land in order to provide clean water. As we saw in chapter 10, there is precedent for such purposes in the law on the power of eminent domain.

None of this is to say that this process of transformation to a significantly less alienated, less exploitative economy and society will proceed without friction or pain. But the gains from increasingly democratic, and less alienated, working and living are likely to outweigh by far - for the greatest number of people - the friction or hardships that may be entailed.

The advance of workplace democracy will slow, then reverse, the alienation processes that are described in Part II, bringing he deindustrialization operations of the state/corporate managers to an end. As the values of workplace democracy permeate people's livelihood and surrounding community, the tidal wave of alienation will recede and the quality of life will begin to transform in ways appropriate for a self-governing productive community.

Redesigning Work, Rebuilding Community

Progress in workplace democracy will open ways for altering the occupations not only of production workers and engineers, but also of managers themselves. To be sure, when workers make decisions about their work preferences (work time job deployment, or work performance), they are thereby making decisions on production. For production is the result of their working time. Thus, it is conceivable that production workers be deployed to use part of their time in productionally necessary administrative work, including "external" tasks, like marketing.

Similarly, the jobs of administrators can be modified to include a quota of time on production tasks, say for one day of each week. These tasks could range from work in direct manufacturing production to tasks like maintaining machines in heavy use for office operations. There is a prospective gain here for both production and for administrative workers. They each have a part in a range of necessary work, thereby reducing the alienating habits of hierarchy that include assigning a lower status to work that is, nevertheless, productionally necessary.

It is worth emphasizing that the coercive quality of hierarchy will be altered as administrative posts and production tasks are rotated and intermixed. All such changes are in the direction of lessening hierarchy.

These new prospects for intermixing technical, administrative and production worker occupations can yield very practical, even profitable, results. Among sophisticated Japanese industrial firms, regular direct (and indirect) production assignments are normal for engineers. Their presence on the factory floor where computer-controlled FMS (Flexible Manufacturing System) equipment is at work has been a major contribution to stable operation and to quality control. These very same results spell optimum productivity for both labor and capital.

In the course of all this a discovery will be made. Despite their long training in predatory competition, many people will seize the opportunity to contribute knowledge and time to what they can see is part of the common good. For experience with mutual trust will be found to be a great healer of the scars of predatory competition. The workers participating in joint actions for disalienation will experience, over and over again, a kind of happiness that Hannah Arendt described as "Public Happiness." Expanding Arendt's ideas, C. Douglas Lummis writes:

[w]hen political action succeeds in generating real power, the participants experience a kind of happiness different from the kinds of happinesses one finds in private life....

Public happiness is not isolating but shared. It is the happiness of being free among other free people, of having one's public faith redeemed and returned, of seeing public hope becoming public power, becoming reality itself. It is the happiness of experiencing the moment when history is no longer an alien force by which one is squeezed and buffeted about, but is what one is doing now....

The experience of public happiness is an exceptional one in the politics of our time, but not such a rare exception. It has been known in many countries in this century, on every continent, in societies of every kind of political, economic, and cultural configuration. It has been felt, if sometimes only momentarily, everywhere, and therefore it is possible everywhere.

Such a prospect contains a major promise: A reward of great human worth will be produced over and over again in the very process of acting for workplace democracy. That result – public happiness – will be there to be shared by all who participate.

The cover stories of neo-liberalism make such a prospect seem remote. But at the close of his pioneering investigation of worker decision-making (which we discussed in Chapter 9), Lawrence B. Cohen assessed the longer term possibilities for disalienation in the United States.

The notion of a noncoercive, nonalienating decision system is extremely attractive to people. An unending succession of Utopias have been constructed on this theme. It accords moreover with deep-felt elements of American culture, especially with the belief in democratizing as much of social life as possible. Apart from organizational difficulties and opposition, one factor has already made the notion visionary and unreal: it lacked practicality or even a clear method by which it might be realized in the complex modern production system....

Now, directly within the system, the notion is turning into a reality, however limited at present. What was once visionary, Utopian, unoperational and unrealistic is being given explicit and precise definition and is being put into practice. This fact alone possesses the potential of posing a new option to people - an option of profound historical consequence. The new option is workplace democracy, which offers the alternative to managerialism and alienation: an ongoing process with an ever widening reach.

How much support is there for workplace democracy in the social attitudes of Americans? Three sociologists did a sophisticated 1984 analysis to discover "The Social Bases of Support for Workplace Democracy." Attitudes toward workplace democracy took into account age, gender, occupation, union, income, stock ownership and political party. They found that "being a blue-collar worker or professional/technical worker – regardless of all else leads one to be... more in favor of workplace democracy than managers." These analysts found that ... by far, the bulk of the blue-collar effect persists in spite of controlling for affluence (and other variables), affluence does not appear to greatly reduce the support of blue-collar workers for increased democracy at work. Similarly... for professional/technical and clerical/ sales groups... They concluded that their ... results indicate that most workers are not rendered so passive and powerless as not to want radically to change their situations and assume more power. The results of situations in which work has been democratized also are encouraging. In almost every case, productivity and/or job satisfaction has increased...

A 1991 national attitude survey on "Social Inequality and the Politics of Production" was analyzed by Ed Collum relating in a further effort to identity potential supporters of economic democracy. Ed Collum concluded from his analyses of prospective support for workplace democracy that ... overall, labor is strengthened through workplace democracy as issues of wages and benefits are superseded and the nature of work itself is brought into question. Transformations of the relations in production offer the most to those who are most subjugated under contemporary capitalism. While all workers will be empowered, women and people of color will gain the most. This investigation found further that ... in the class location analysis, 82% of respondents (1119/1367) are in the supportive coalition. Hence, a workplace democracy movement is more likely to appeal to large portions of the American population.

When we combine these findings with the discovery that, as we saw above, 44% of American workers are strongly interested in unionization, despite the overt resistance of their employers, it is clear that workplace democracy not only could happen here, it is underway already.

It is impossible, of course, to forecast either a timetable or a precise sequence of actions that would contribute to a phasing in of an economy based on workplace democracy in the United States. But the data and analyses given here tell us that two main lines of future development are to be expected during the 21st century.

Firstly, as we saw in Parts I and II, many deficiencies in ordinary living will be understood as caused by the normal operation of state capitalism with its drive for profits and power. No exit from a spiral of further alienation and successive crises is visible within the unchallenged dominance of the current state/corporate regime.

At the same time, as we saw in Part IV, the institutions and practices of worker decision-making and cooperative organizations of various sorts will continue to function and expand. Based upon their performance in varied firms and industries, we can expect that all people whose work is a "service to production" of necessary goods and services will tend to become "part of the workers' group" – in the words of British shop stewards.

When this is formalized within unions, then transforming the employment relation toward workplace democracy – even in the largest firms – is more readily done. For such developments will encompass all the productionally useful work while omitting only the top managers and their staffs, who are remote from production and are preoccupied with the politics of accumulating profits and power without limit.

Alienation and accumulation can only spur the struggle for further disalienation.

With the repeated crises that stem from managers' competitive power-wielding, like wars without end in the state capitalist drive for worldwide hegemony, people will more readily understand that a big part of the state and corporate managers' power stems from the readiness of workers to do their bidding.

Envisioning each of the myriad aspects of an exit from capitalism is not an essential part of the exiting process. The essential point is that in every workplace a democratic, disalienated decision making process can, and will, be installed. Every workplace is eligible. Trying to do that is made the more difficult by widespread allegiance to all or part of the cover stories of state capitalism, which are no help at all for understanding recurring crises in the economy. Everything that is needed to change the system can be found in workers' ongoing efforts to transform they way they make decisions over production.

It should be no surprise that even as changes in the decision process go forward, familiar economic and cultural landmarks will be retained, just as vestiges of feudal culture (like the House of Lords, however modified) are retained for centuries within capitalist society.

All each of us need do is understand what's really going on and join in the ongoing movement toward workplace democracy. Yes, the process is indeed in motion, but people must seize this opportunity to help speed the exit from state capitalism.

What Can We Do?

The good news is that despite the cover stories, there is a definite alternative out there. This book has sought to demonstrate just that.

But in order to see workplace democracy in action it is first necessary to scrape away the cobwebs. Readers interested in joining the ongoing movement for disalienation should make it their business to challenge the managerialist cover stories wherever and whenever they can. They should look out for evidence of workers' initiatives and share them in every way possible: the new technologies provide extraordinary possibilities for pooling and sharing information, but there is no substitute for joining n the efforts of groups in the community or the workplace. It is by understanding and participating in the process of disalienation in each of working lives that we can best challenge the relentless alienation of state capitalism.

How do you recognize workplace democracy when you see it? This book has aimed to equip its readers with the necessary maps of this new terrain.

Anywhere that workers are seeking to gain more control over the 5 key categories of the employment relation, we can see the struggle for disalienation in action. These(discussed in Chapter 1 and Part IV, above) involve making decisions about: worker group; work time; deployment; performance and compensation. This is exactly the movement underway in the efforts of doctors, nurses, and other health-care workers, of part time professors and teaching assistants, of temp workers, and of Boeing engineers to win union recognition. It also underlies the extraordinary coalition of environmental groups, and students and activists mobilized against sweatshop labor, who have joined unionized workers to protest neoliberalism in the shape of the World Trade Organization or the International Monetary Fund.

I write all this to encourage attention to the objective of blue and white collar workers everywhere -- to disalienate their occupations and their workplaces: joining producing with decision-making; organizing decision-making on a non-hierarchical, democratic basis; sharing the social product by rules against inequality; human solidarity in place of alienation.

There are many possible paths and time lines for disalienation actions, too many to forecast. The very readiness to consider alternatives to hierarchical rule in every industry and calling, may well be triggered by a repeated question about the top managers, and their staffs, openly stated:

What do we need them for?

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Page 1
Collective Bargaining, Labor Law, and Labor History
Faculty Publications - Collective Bargaining,
Labor Law, and Labor History
Cornell University
Year 2003
The Meanings of Deindustrialization
Jefferson Cowie
∗
Joseph Heathcott
†
∗
Cornell University, jrc32@cornell.edu
†
Saint Louis University,
This paper is posted at DigitalCommons@ILR.
http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cbpubs/33
Page 2
Introduction
The Meanings of Deindustria/ization
JEFFERSON COWIE AND JOSEPH HEATHCOTT
The point of departure for any discussion of deindustrialization must be re-
spect for the despair and betrayal felt by workers as their mines, factories,
and mills were padlocked, abandoned, turned into artsy shopping spaces,
or even dynamited. While economists and business leaders often speak in
neutral, even hopeful, terms such as "restructuring," "downsizing" or "cre-
ative destruction," metaphors of defeat and subjugation are more appro-
priate for the workers who banked on good-paying industrial jobs for the
livelihoods of their families and their communities. In fact, the first public
use of the term "deindustrialization"
identified the Allies' policy toward
Germany just after World War II: an active process of victors stripping a
vanquished nation of its industrial power. Indeed, to many workers who
walked out of the factory gates for the last time in the sunset of America's
golden age of industry, it must have felt exactly like an occupying force had
destroyed their way oflife, driving them not only from their workplaces but
often their homes and communities as well. As "the great mills fell like bro-
ken promises" across the steelmaking region of Ohio and Pennsylvania, Joe
Trotter Sr., a thirty-seven-year veteran of Youngstown's steel industry,
made the connection between the two uses of the term eXplicit. Picking
through the rubble of the dynamited Ohio Works, he remarked about U.S.
Steel, "What Hitler couldn't do, they did it for him."l
Although we have kept in mind the people caught in the cross fire of
industrial change, the purpose of this volume is explicitly to move the terms
of the discussion "beyond the ruins." While the politics and anxiety that ac-
companied the shuttering of the organized, high-wage manufacturing cen-
ters remains a key component of this book, the collective argument these
essays make is that the time is right to widen the scope of the discussion be-
1
-
Page 3
-
2
Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott
yond prototypical plant shutdowns, the immediate politics of employment
policy, the tales of victimization, or the swell of industrial nostalgia. Rather,
our goal is to rethink the chronology, memory, spatial relations, culture,
and politics of what we have come to call "deindustrialization." Emphasiz-
ing a historical approach to the problem, we seek to analyze the complex-
ity and multiple meanings of one of the major transformations of the
twentieth century. Taken together, these thirteen original essays suggest
that deindustrialization is not a story of a single emblematic place, such as
Flint or Youngstown, or a specific time period, such as the 1980s; it was a
much broader, more fundamental, historical transformation. What was la-
beled deindustrialization in the intense political heat of the late 1970s and
early 1980s turned out to be a more socially complicated, historically deep,
geographically diverse, and politically perplexing phenomenon than previ-
ously thought.
Consider, for instance, how these trends played out at Pennsylvania's
Homestead Steel Works, an icon of U.S. industrial history. On the location
that once hosted some of the greatest struggles in U.S. labor history-the
famous 1892 strike and the Great Steel Strike of 1919-and
was home to
the core of Andrew Carnegie's industrial empire, now sits a strip mall fea-
turing the same retail stores that dot the big-box outer rings of most U.S.
towns. Gone are the steelworkers and their union, the United Steel Work-
ers of America; gone are their wages, their product, and the bustling civic
life they supported. On that once world-famous bend in the Monongahela
River are now a Loew's Cineplex; a McDonald's; a Target; a Bed, Bath and
Beyond; and other national chains displaying wares produced in an im-
mense global network of production. They mark the completion of Home-
stead's move from center stage in the drama of labor and business history,
to an industrial ghost town in the 1980s, and finally to "Anytown, USA," at
the dawn of the twenty-first century. While the mill once supported a vi-
brant commercial district as workers poured out of the Homestead Works
gates onto Eighth Avenue, the city itself has since been eclipsed by the faux
main street created within the retail complex to simulate-in
comforting
and safe, if vapid and sterile, ways-the
feel of a traditional old main street.
There is, however, one difference between Homestead's new Water-
front development and other generic shopping complexes around the coun-
try: towering over the cineplex are twelve ghostly smokestacks disembodied
from any other reference to the old steel mill-like
sentries guarding
access to an already forgotten past. (See figure 1.) The strange row of
smokestacks was used as the Waterfront's advertising logo, adding some
place-specific color to the otherwise generic beige landscape of strip mall
development. While an experienced eye might see the smokestacks as mon-
FIGURI
above 2
modifi(
what is
history
umen
and tl
such
t
era tlO
tions
j
nos tal
lands(
Ir
and B
izati01
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indus1
Page 4
{Illent
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some
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;mon-
Introduction
3
FIGURE 1. Lori Delale, Twelve Smokestacks in a Strip Mall, 2001. Smokestacks sit watch
above a Loews Cineplex parking lot. For most visitors these structures serve more as com-
modified nostalgia than history, but to many these postindustrial towers are reminders that
what is now a generic shopping complex was once home to the gritty and turbulent labor
history of the mighty Homestead Works steel mill. Courtesy of Lori Delale.
uments to the many transformations in civil society, social life, economics,
and the power relations of the workplace, for most visitors they serve no
such purpose. The smokestacks are neither commemorations nor full oblit-
erations of the industrial past-they
stand merely as commodified quota-
tions from a distant modern epoch, which do little more than offer a bit of
nostalgia and character to an otherwise nondescript, postmodern retail
landscape.2
In contrast to Homestead's strip mall present, when Barry Bluestone
and Bennett Harrison published their classic 1982 study, The Deindust7ial-
ization ofAmerica, plant closings and capital flight presented an immediate
political crisis. From the vantage of a new century, however, deindustrial-
ization seems both less profound and more so. On the one hand, what we
call deindustrialization
may best be understood with hindsight as one
episode in a long series of transformations within capitalism. Indeed, the
industrial age is alive and well, even if tl1elocations have changed, and even
Page 5
-
4
Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott
if the rules of investment have shifted. Not only has production migrated
with capital to far-flung points of the globe, but many areas hit hard by
"deindustrialization" in the 1980s have recently experienced a renaissance
of manufacturing-though
often on different terms. In many respects, the
idea that we live in a postindustrial age smacks of a certain northern intel-
lectual conceit, and using "postindustrial" to describe our current political
economy and culture obscures more than it reveals.
On the other hand, the aura of permanence that surrounded the in-
dustrial culture of Europe and the United States throughout the twentieth
century has made the experience of deindustrialization seem more like the
end of a historical epoch. The impact on community networks and institu-
tions wrought by plant closings, and the painful realities of job loss, appear
very different on the ground to workers and their families. That we frame
our historical experience of capitalism somewhat misleadingly with refer-
ence to the "industrial era" does not ameliorate the real hardship created by
deindustrialization. The central challenge of this volume, then, is to de-
scribe a temporary, historically bound set of conditions that are experienced
in'terms of permanence by ordinary people in daily life. Like any historical
transformation-for
instance, the industrial revolution itself-the
process
we call deindustrialization was uneven in its causes, timing, and conse-
quences, and the effects rippled through all aspects of society. As opposed
to the changes under industrialization, however, those under deindustrial-
ization were more disorienting than overtly political, tended toward the
elusive rather than the tangible, and marked a confusion of power relations
that had seemed significantly clearer under the old order. The dramatic ev-
idence of industrial change and capital flight that litters our landscapes
does, however, present a basic collective problem: How do we account for
the destruction of an economic order that seemed so rooted and pervasive?
In the end, what may be most troubling about these ruined industrial
landscapes is not that they refer to some once stable era, but rather that they
remind us of the ephemeral quality of the world we take for granted. If Karl
Marx was right in saying "all that is solid melts into air," then the industrial
culture forged in the furnace of fixed capital investment was itself a tempo-
rary condition. What millions of working men and women might have ex-
perienced as solid, dependable, decently waged work really only lasted for
a brief moment in the history of capitalism. Because capital was fixed in gi-
ant machines bolted to the floors of brick-and-mortar factories, the indus-
trial culture that emerged in various places at various moments had an aura
of permanence, durability, and heritage.
The rowhouse, tavern, union hall, civic club, softball field, church, and
synag<
tion 0
the seJ
the ba
worke
tenem
the fo
apart 1
indust
the bt
owneI
the sa
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the gr
V'
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Takin
Page 6
Introduction
5
sTated
lrd by
,sance
ts, the
intel-
)litical
synagogue are all artifacts of a material culture
made
possible by the loca-
tion of particular incarnations of capital in space and time. Mobilized into
the service of value-added, durable-goods production, this capital provided
the basis of a limited but nevertheless expanding industrial prosperity for
workers, foremen, managers, and bosses. But the solidity of factories and
tenements and steeples masked a fundamental impermanence; it obscured
the forces that both created this world through investment and broke it
apart by withdrawing investment. Working people saw in the decline of this
industrial order the dissolution of their society, culture, and way oflife, and
the betrayal of their trust by those whose decisions shaped their fate. But
owners, investors, and corporate officers did not perceive the world in quite
the same terms. For them, the profitability oftheir enterprise, the need to
stay competitive and prosper and thus theoretically serve the greater mar-
ket good, trumped any considerations for the lives of working families on
the ground.
What does this bode for the study of deindustrialization? To begin
with, we must jettison the assumption that fixed capital investment in re-
source extraction, heavy manufacturing, and value-added production de-
fines the stable standard against which all subsequent changes are to be
judged. Rather, we should see this political-economic order and the culture
it engendered as temporary and impermanent developments in space and
time. Secondly, deindustrialization is a critical transformation in U.S. soci-
ety, to be sure, but of what kind, and to what extent? What is new and old
in this latest phase of history? How is it experienced differently by people
in varied places, times, and circumstances? And last, our scholarship must
work as hard to understand the mental and cultural frameworks of dein-
dustrialization as it has to grasp the political, technological, and financial
dimensions. What are the ideas, symbols, and images that shape our con-
ceptions of the "postindustrial" -indeed,
that undergird the very way that
we think about our work lives?
The dominant method of studying deindustrialization is to trace the
death of mills like Homestead and the workers' experiences of that
process-an
approach that has yielded an important body of research, even
some classics in U.S. scholarship.3 This collection builds on that scholar-
ship, but pushes for a broader range of methods, frameworks, views, and
conclusions. In what follows, we move the focus-away from a "body count"
of manufacturing jobs (a very misleading approach, since the absolute fig-
ure of manufacturing employment has actually remained fairly stable in the
postwar era, though dwarfed by the rise in service sector employment).4
Taking a cue from the changes in Homestead, we look at deindustrializa-
he in-
ntieth
ke the
IStItu-
-
lppear
frame
refer-
ted by
to de-
enced
=orical
rocess
:onse-
'posed
strial-
rd the
ations
tIc ev-
scapes
Liltfor
'asive?
ustrial
it they
[f Karl
ustrial
mpo-
ve ex-
:ed for
.mgl-
indus-
n aura
h, and
-
Page 7
-
6
Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott
tion as a process, a historical transformation that marks not just a quantita-
tive and qualitative change in employment, but a fundamental change in the
social fabric on a par with industrialization itself.
None of this can be understood without reference to Barry Bluestone
and Bennett Harrison's politically impassioned benchmark study, from
which the actual term and political concept of "deindustrialization" entered
the popular and scholarly lexicon. These authors constructed their defini-
tion of the problem in the midst of an enormous political and economic cri-
sis two decades ago, but that definition remains the point of departure for
launching a reconsideration of twentieth-century
industrial history. By
"deindustrialization," they wrote, "is meant a widespread, systematic disin-
vestment in the nation's basic productive capacity." At the core of the prob-
lem, they argued, was the way "capital-in
the forms of financial resources
and of real plant and equipment-has
been diverted from productive in-
vestment in our basic national industries into unproductive speculation,
mergers and acquisitions, and foreign investment." They eXplained that all
of this was symptomatic of a very specific historical juncture-the
end of
the postwar boom-at
which the old rules no longer worked and new rules
would be necessary for sustainable development. The old "social contract,"
based on relatively high wages and on respectful working arrangements
with unions formed in the New Deal era, had been abrogated by manage-
ment in the face of the triple squeeze of international competition, high la-
bor rates, and rising safety net costs for workers. The firms' response was
often capital mobility-whether
through the relocation of manufacturing
geographically or through switching to nonproductive forms of invest-
ment-as
a means of disciplining labor, fomenting regional wars for in-
vestment, and lowering the costs of doing business.
Sociologically, at the core of Bluestone and Harrison's study was a fun-
damental, even irreconcilable, tension between the needs of capital and the
needs of communities. Capital needed to control labor costs as the postwar
settlement fell apart and investors were ready and willing to build a new sys-
tem on their own terms-even
if it meant destroying communities in the
process.5 Communities, on the other hand, needed the wage and tax base
provided by fixed capital investment in large-scale manufacturing to sup-
port their households, schools, parks, clubs, hospitals, civic and religious
institutions. The higher the wages, the more robust these dense social net-
works became, until in certain places at certain moments a full-fledged in-
dustrial culture tOok root.
Today the struggle to preserve basic industry that fired Bluestone and
Harrison's project is all but gone, but the legacy of deindustrialization re-
mains. This collection both accepts and departs from the fundamental in-
sights
chron
pushe:
cover
meam
look a
Lansil
into tl
betwe
Mont:
of res!
with r
lyzes 1
by, the
the kil
ties in
how cl
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(
T
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groun
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1954,
Greer
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than"
lenge
Her a
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into tl
1Il an
define:
Page 8
mtita-
inthe
stone
from
l1tered
:iefini-
LICcn-
Ire for
ry. By
disin-
prob-
::mrces
lve lll-
lation,
hat all
end of
v rules
tract, "
ments
mage-
igh la-
se was
turing
nvest-
:or In-
a fun-
nd the
Jstwar
wsys-
in the
x base
0 sup-
ligious
al net-
red in-
,
1e and
on re-
tal in-
Introduction
7
sights set forth in The Deindustrialization of America; it expands on the
chronology, complicates the causation, draws out the complexities, and
pushes the problem into previously unexplored realms. In so doing, we
cover six themes, each organized to challenge our assumptions about the
meanings of deindustrialization. The first part, titled "Rust," takes a new
look at rustbelt cases: a carpet mill in Yonkers, New York; an auto plant in
Lansing, Michigan; and the leisure industry in Atlantic City. We then move
into the second part, "Environment," which draws important connections
between environmental degradation and the industrial past in Anaconda,
Montana, and Love Canal, New York. Part 3, "Plans," examines the range
of responses from local, state, and federal government bodies meant to cope
with hardships caused by industrial change. The next part, "Legacy," ana-
lyzes the ways in which the industrial past is incorporated into, or denied
by, the present in three different settings. Finally, "Memory" brings us to
the kitchen tables of workers and their families in two southern communi-
ties in order to learn how they perceive plant closings and pink slips, and
how they construct notions of citizenship, community, duty, and survival in
their efforts to carry on with their lives.
The book opens with a trilogy of essays that challenge the typical view
of the causes, timing, and effects of deindustrialization in terms that are
grounded in specific firms and communities. Tami]. Friedman adds to the
growing literature that reconsiders the chronology of deindustrialization.
Her study opens with the announcement of the Yonkers mill shutdown in
1954, at the height of the postwar boom, when the employer selected
Greenville, Mississippi, as a new production site. Friedman's competitive
geography of production builds on Bluestone and Harrison's tension be-
tween "capital and community," but she reorients our understanding of the
problem. The mounting evidence suggests that the challenges faced by
places like Yonkers had less to do with the collapse of the postwar boom
than with capital mobility as a constant in U.S. industrial relations-chal-
lenges made more difficult with the globalization of industry decades later.
Her analysis of the carpet company's relocation, as well as Greenville's at-
tempts to lure industry southward, also reminds us that one town's dein-
dustrialization might just be another town's industrialization-though
the
theme of labor discipline remains a constant at both sites.
The chronology in Lisa M. Fine's study of Lansing is less surprising
than that in the Yonkers case, but here causation becomes the main prob-
lem. "Who killed Reo Motors?" is the question that informs her inquiry
into the closing of a major manufacturing plant. Placing the plant shutdown
in an analytic tension between a fundamental structural transformation that
defines an era and a simpler cyclical phenomenon, she combs through mul-
Page 9
-
8
Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott
tiple explanations for the death of Reo Motors. Her approach moves well
beyond the binary of capital versus community by looking at key local fac-
tors, broad issues in the cold war political economy, and the geography of
industry, race, and urban change, all of which underscore the complexity of
a single plant closure. When the story ends with the reincarnation of Reo
just outside of town-operating
under very different circumstances-the
complexity of causation is again brought to the fore. The new industrial
regime, however, makes it seem as though labor relations have been pushed
back in time, as the new firm "re-created the industrial world Ransom E.
Olds began at his first Reo Motor Car Company in Lansing, in 1904." The
historical slate has been wiped clean.
Next, Bryant Simon turns to a city that looks like many old manufac-
turing centers, but was once sustained by a very different industry-public
commercial amusements. His examination of the social life of the collaps-
ing tourist economy in Atlantic City touches on a stinging irony first aired
in the movie Roger and ]\lIe. At the end of Michael Moore's politically
charged film about the deindustrialization of Flint, Michigan, we learn that
the film cannot be shown in Flint for one simple reason: there are not any
movie theaters left to screen it. Simon's Atlantic City likewise lacks a movie
theater today, an even more galling prospect given that the town's economy
had long revolved around leisure pursuits and public amusements. He uses
the movie house as a way of understanding not just the economic transfor-
mations in the tourist industry but, very pointedly, how reactions to deseg-
regation tragically helped to destroy both a city and a service economy. The
success of the earlier, glory days of Atlantic City, argues Simon, rested on
racial segregation, and when court decisions removed racial restrictions
from those public spaces, public life died along with Jim Crow. Like so
many former manufacturing centers across the nation, Atlantic City was on
the skids by the 1970s, only to be resurrected by casino boosterism. Gam-
ing has certainly since brought money into the city, but the death of the old
industry also represents the death of the (white) "public" city, as people
drive in from far away, park in the acres of parking lots, and spend hours
staring alone at video poker machines-a
far cry from the shared, though
segregated, bustling civic and commercial space of the old boardwalk.
The second part of this collection breaks new ground by bringing our
attention to issues that are intimately linked but rarely considered together:
industrial decline and environmental disaster. Here, the authors remind us
of the dual symbolism of "smokestack industries" -part might, power, and
prosperity; part pollution, waste, and toxicity. The two studies in this part,
Kent Curtis's on the former mining center of Anaconda, Montana, and
Richard Newman's on Love Canal enrich the broader debate about the
legacy
ulator
the we
pOlSor
Be
ter, th
nmete
Newn
except
ni ty, 1=
amoUJ
the ar
consc]
workiJ
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ury of
A
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clude
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chapt(
Page 10
swell
al fac-
phy of
xity of
)f Reo
I-the
ustrial
,ushed
om E.
" The
nufac-
public
)llaps-
t aired
tically
onthat
otany
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Gam-
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hours
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k.
ng our
ether:
Lindus
r,and
s part,
a, and
,ut the
Introduction
9
legacy of industry by bringing the key themes of environmental crisis, reg-
ulatory politics, and community activism into the story. At these two sites
the workers and their communities were left not only without jobs but with
poisoned earth as well.
Before "Love Canal" became synonymous with environmental disas-
ter, the site was called "Love's Canal," which some hoped would become a
nineteenth-century
industrial utopia. The failure of this industrial dream,
Newman explains, would scarcely have registered in the historical record
except that Love's ditch, which was to supply hydro power to the commu-
nity, became a hole into which the chemical industry dumped staggering
amounts of toxic waste. The famous local activism that emerged from
the area in the 1970s was shaped not just by the rising environmental
consciousness of the nation, Newman argues, but by the experience of
working-class families faced simultaneously with layoffs and a legacy of in-
dustrial pollution. As more than two hundred firms departed the Buffalo-
Niagara region, they left behind a classic deindustrialized landscape of
poisoned brownfields. Working people, charged with the urgent need to
make their community safe from acute toxins, could scarcely afford the lux-
ury of nostalgia for a bygone industrial age.
A similar set of problems involving development, class divisions,
postindustrial transitions, and environmental catastrophe can be found in
Anaconda, Montana. \Vhen Anaconda Copper's smelters stopped running,
explains Kent Curtis, the city was left not only bereft of employment but
also in the midst of the nation's largest Superfund complex. As the town,
the company, and the Environmental Protection Agency searched for so-
lutions, they came up with the idea of building a golf course atop two hun-
dred acres of smelting waste that they buried under an earthen cap.
Although the sand traps are made of black slag and each of the eighteen
holes is nostalgically named after an old industrial installation, Curtis con-
cludes that the golf course essentially allowed all the parties involved-es-
pecially the company-enough
cover to get out of their predicament. They
were able to escape from, rather than deal with, the industrial past by figu-
ratively and literally burying it. "It is a landscape manufactured not so much
to remedy the errors of the past," he explains, "as to recast them long
enough for capital to be mobilized elsewhere." The conversion of the
brownfield site into a space ofleisure and recreation provides a final, fitting
twist to one of the worst cases of pollution in the history of U.S. industry.
Since, as Curtis explains, contending with deindustrialization is more
complicated than building a golf course, the third part, "Plans," opens up a
discussion of the role of city, regional, and national politics. Here the three
chapters explore a variety of key issues, including suburbanization, white
Page 11
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10
Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott
flight, urban renewal, taxes, investment climate, and the pursuit of high-
technology alternatives. The authors argue that race, space, industry, resi-
dence, and local power are all intimately linked, and that strategies for
reorganizing the city after World War II took hold, often rather ineffectu-
ally, as responses to the shifting industrial and residential terrain. This set
of studies begins with Howard Gillette Jr.'s examination of the municipal
politics of Camden, New Jersey. In perhaps the best and most understated
summary of the problems faced by former industrial communities like
Camden-or
Flint or Gary or East St. Louis-Gillette
writes that "disin-
vestment is not a one-time process. It has cumulative effects." Indeed, plans
to deal with the snowball effect of industrial flight continually met the re-
calcitrant problem of an inadequate property tax base. As more and more
industries fled Camden, the city lapsed into fiscal crisis. With less money
from ratable industry, the city's physical plant and social life deteriorated,
and middle- and upper-income families began to flee, taking their tax dol-
lars with them. The larger the city's debts grew, then, the greater its prob-
lems became, but the greater its problems became, the less able were
municipal institutions to attract and capture business and residence. In the
absence of real support from the state or the federal government, Camden
was forced to tax already poor people and already struggling businesses even
more, leaving each successive generation of politicians to inherit a larger
and more tangled mess from their predecessors.
The "Plans" part then moves to larger geographies of analysis. Robert
O. Self's exploration of San Francisco's East Bay area reveals the tension be-
tween an old urban core and the new suburbs wrought by the flight of in-
dustry and people. The planners of Oakland, California, sought to improve
their city by recruiting industry to peripheral towns, which ironically un-
dermined the industrial growth of Oakland itself. But in the postwar era,
white citizens saw in their residential enclaves a retreat from the noisome,
dirty industries, and a refuge from the black and Latino families that had mi-
grated to the Bay Area during and after the war. Such decentralizing forces
fundamentally altered not simply the industrial landscape, but the political
one as well. A distinct politics of "homeowner populism" emerged in the in-
dustrial suburbs, linking low taxes with growth and high property values
with racial segregation. Given these complicated patterns of residential and
industrial location, Self argues, Bluestone and Harrison's term "deindustri-
alization" obscures more than it illuminates. Self posits that we ought to
think more in terms of the "spatial dynamics of industrial restructuring,"
which frame uneven metropolitan growth and expansion over time.
Such uneven spatial dynamics, argues Gregory S. Wilson, were the pri-
mary reasons behind the federal government's Area Redevelopment Ad-
minisl
sough
emeq
funde
under
pover
backi]
devel(
pover
the A
struct
Socie
urban
Icym
opme
]J
comp
stress
ident
timiz;
as the
Thel
gest,
of jol
of de
powe
age 0
Thus
of id(
have
The
posit
it all(
route
'-
conci
izatic
planr
hard-
Imag
gan t
Page 12
.
high-
y,resI-
ies for
ffectu-
his set
tlicipal
'stated
s like
'disin-
,plans
:he re-
I more
110ney
)rated,
IXdol-
.prob-
were
In the
amden
seven
larger
Robert
on be-
:of in-
aprove
lly un-
ar era,
'Isome,
ladmi-
.
forces
olitical
the in-
values
ial and
dustri -
19ht to
llring,"
he pri-
nt Ad-
......
Introduction
11
ministration (ARA). Created under the Kennedy administration, the ARA
sought to build on the regional planning successes of the New Deal, but
emerged in the throes of the cold war as a weakly structured and thinly
funded attempt at industrial policy. Federal planners and policy makers
understood the important link between regional industrial decline and
poverty, Wilson explains, but they never had the funding or congressional
backing to make a dent in the problem. Moreover, race, rather than uneven
development or industrial decline, became more closely associated with
poverty among U.S. policy makers. The weakness and ultimate failure of
the ARA, then, represents an important point of transition between the
structural liberalism of the New Deal and the racial liberalism of the Great
Society. The emergent political discourse, which favored a racialized and
urbanized explanation of broad economic problems in the 1960s, left pol-
icy makers with few tools to deal with the consequences of uneven devel-
opment, regional transformation, and capital mobility.
In the fourth part, "Legacy," three chapters come to terms with the
complicated meanings of place. As various cities endure the tremendous
stress of industrial decline, they lose not only their industrial work but their
identities as well. John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon show the double vic-
timization of Youngstown-first
as a site of horrendous job loss and then
as the national poster child for deindustrialization and political corruption.
The legacy and public memory of plant shutdowns, Russo and Linkon sug-
gest, can be just as burdensome to the community as the immediate crisis
of job loss itself, reifying the symbolic weight of the city as a national site
of despair. As the community drifted from its status as a shrine to industrial
power to the "murder capital" of the nation, "locals internalize[d] the im-
age of their community as a site of loss, failure, crime, and corruption."
Thus, the problem is not simply that Youngstown as a place suffered a loss
of identity; the larger problem is that, as yet, community members do not
have the power and tools to challenge the images created about their place.
The political project that remains after the mills are gone is to reclaim a
positive civic identity by shunning the version of the town others thrust on
it and developing ways for citizens and workers to lever their own past en
route to a better future.
Similarly, S. Paul O'Hara's analysis of the image and legend of Gary is
concerned with the impact on urban culture and esteem of deindustrial-
ization. He traces several successive images of "Steel City" -a rational,
planned, industrial utopia at the beginning of the century that became a
hard-working, sin-filled, violence-prone, blue-collar town in the popular
imagination. As black workers moved north for employment and jobs be-
gan their agonizing departure, Gary's image changed first to that of a great
Page 13
-
12
Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott
"black metropolis," and then to that of an "urban wasteland." Racial poli-
tics has had a particularly devastating role in shaping the city's national sta-
tus, and the city finally became a poisoned symbol of everything the nation
was trying to avoid-jobless,
black, the other murder capital of the nation.
Finally, as with Atlantic City, Gary found itself forced to embrace the casino
industry as a path toward reshaping the national understanding of a place
in which the words "industrial" and "utopia" were once linked.
Kirk Savage takes a different tack on the problem of imagery, repre-
sentation, and legacy, exploring how the industrial past is commemorated
in a city firmly committed to a postindustrial future. In his explorations of
Pittsburgh, a city that hosts the Steelers football team but does not make
any actual steel, he documents how industry is commemorated in much the
same way war is commemorated, with monuments to generals, soldiers, and
battlefields. This martial imaginary organizes the industrial past into a nar-
rative about a collective war of technological man against the wilderness.
Absent are narratives about the nature of industrial work itself, the experi-
ence of community formed by a manufacturing ethos, or the bloody con-
flicts between workers and bosses in the streets and factories of the city.
Indeed, Savage reports, reigning strategies of commemoration manage to
avoid any of the major issues of the industrial past-or
the postindustrial
present. Searching the landscape, he selects an enormous pile of slag (the
same type of industrial refuse lining Anaconda's new sand traps) as the most
fitting tribute to the industrial legacy. What some see as a worthless indus-
trial dump to be covered over, others see an eco-monument to the indus-
trial past. It is in the "perverse poetry" of industrial trash that Savage finds
"a landscape that asks us to view our industrial legacy not as a heroic episode
from a golden age but as a living challenge in the present."
The fifth and final part of the book, "Memory," moves from how we
think about cities to how people think about themselves by investigating
workers' intimate understandings of plant shutdowns in two southern com-
munities. In the homes of former employees, Joy L. Hart and Tracy E.
K'Meyer listen to workers in Louisville, Kentucky, and Steve May and
Laura Morrison interview people "downsized" in Shelby, North Carolina.
These are not the old industrial lVlidwest cities that we have come to asso-
ciate with deindustrialization. While the large northern cities capture the
lion's share of scholarly attention, the main story may just be in hundreds
of small shutdowns, layoffs, and restructurings around the country. That
the South, a place known to attract migrant capital, faces its own ephemeral
industrial patterns reinforces the themes of the volume. Moreover, only
rarely did workers have the means or drive to take action, as did the
Youngstown workers who stormed the U.S. Steel building in protest of the
mills:
emot:!
faith
j
B
with t
from
gle, b
trayal
(gro\\
Vlewe
AsH:
sets 0
cultu]
work.
tract
(
comn
and
I-
on th
III ter
sense
know
tantl}
Illg t
spom
foune
to COJ
dustr
1
\;
that t
dustr
agem
that t
dedi]
ImagJ
sault
hight
els of
ent it
poorJ
Page 14
al poli-
nal sta-
natIon
natIOn.
caSInO
a place
repre-
lorated
jons of
It make
uch the
rs, and
)
a naI'-
lerness.
expen-
:iy con-
he city.
nage to
dustrial
lag (the
Ie most
; indus-
indus-
se finds
episode
lOW we
Ligating
ncom-
hcy E.
ray and
arolina.
to asso-
:ure the
mdreds
y. That
Iemeral
er, only
did the
;t of the
..-..
Introduction
13
mills shutting down. More typical oflaid-off workers is a conflicted stew of
emotions: betrayal and abandonment, pride and accommodation, hope and
faith in themselves and their community.
Both contributions to the "Memory" part confront the pain that comes
with the severance of the trust, loyalty, and security these workers expected
from their employers. Workers retain their pride and willingness to strug-
gle, but those traits are in danger of being overtaken by alienation and be-
trayaL We find these workers at the end of a manufacturing culture
(growing out of "red neck, smokestack places" in the words of one inter-
viewee), and entering a world of work organization largely alien to them.
As Hart and K'Meyer suggest, "they find themselves navigating divergent
sets of values-between
the nominal solidarity and security of an industrial
culture and the insecure, individualized world of service and high-tech
work." Both case studies uncovered a violation of some sense of social con-
tract or perceived norms in the interrelationships among worker, employer,
community, and, in the case of factories moved abroad, nation. Bluestone
and Harrison's capital-versus-community
tension is developed by workers
on their own, though more in terms of a bootstrap moral philosophy than
in terms of political economy. Interviews with employees reveal a powerful
sense of moral economy that they believe their employers violated; yet they
know they have precious little leverage over their situation. Most impor-
tantly, they do not ever want to portray themselves as simple victims. End-
ing this collection with works about the changing realms of identity
sponsored by industrial loss forces us to grapple with some of the most pro-
found and personal aspects of this historical transformation and requires us
to consider the varied and conflicting stories we tell ourselves about dein-
dustrialization.
Taken together then, what are the "meanings of deindustrialization"?
We can begin by admitting, in historian Nelson Lichtenstein's words,
that the postwar settlement is a "suspect construct."6 The decline of in-
dustry did not mark the end of a much-respected settlement between man-
agement and labor over the terms of industrial governance. It now appears
that the postwar "accord" was an idea created in the face of the continued
decline of organized labor in the 1970s.lt allowed for the creation of a semi-
imaginary historical benchmark against which very real contemporary as-
saults on unions and key industrial sectors could be measured. Clearly,
higher levels of union density, lower rates of capital mobility, and lower lev-
els of global competition in the postwar era suggest that things were differ-
ent in the "golden age," but the industrial culture was so uneven and so
poorly congealed that it hardly lives up to the quasi-corporatist notions tlIat
Page 15
-
14
Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott
a later generation would apply to it. As shown in Friedman's analysis of the
Yonkers mill shutdown, Self's examination of the reshuffling of investment
priorities in the East Bay, the generation of neglect Gillette documents in
Camden, or the efforts of the ARA described by Wilson, the postwar era
can hardly be characterized by stability. In opposition to a simple, unidi-
rectional story of political and economic stability followed by decline, we
deepen an industrial history characterized by unevenness, fits and starts,
and regional variance. This research reveals a history pockmarked with ex-
plosions, relocations, desertions, and competitive struggles.
Second, deindustrialization-or
globalization-cannot
be understood
in the simplistic logic of jobs gained or lost. Other issues, often qualitative,
are at stake. The numbers of jobs created and destroyed in the postwar era
are very large, but the gross numbers of industrial employment are fairly
stable. Quantitatively, manufacturing
employment remained relatively
constant-around
18 million jobs in 1965 and about 18.5 million in 2000.
One person's plant shutdown may well have been another person's plant
opening, whether it was the opening of a plant in Greenville, Mississippi,
instead of Yonkers or one in San Leandro that some believed might have
been better placed in Oakland. Even in Lansing, as Fine shows, the new was
waiting to be born of the old, as new plants succeeded old ones. We must,
however, be cognizant of the nature and quality of those new jobs, and the
way power relations are continually reordered in the creation and destruc-
tion of employment. Although the rumors of manufacturing's demise have
been greatly exaggerated, the unionization of manufacturing has in fact
plummeted-by
40 percent between 1985 and 2000. What may be more
significant than the decline of basic industry then is the realignment of
power relations in the work place.
7
Rather than arguing that simple job cre-
atio or destruction is the key, these contributors show that fundamental
long-term historical trends are very important to understanding seemingly
rapid changes. We have to look at issues such as spatial relations, cultural
politics, labor organization, key transformations in the urban landscape, the
political and social burdens that plague former industrial communities, the
environmental legacy, and changes in social identity.
Finally, as we avoid an obsession with numbers of jobs, we must also
proceed with caution to prevent a creeping industrial nostalgia from dom-
inating the debate. Those manufacturing jobs were not necessarily great
jobs, it is worth remembering, just good-paying jobs. Ruth Milkman has
shown in her book Farewell to the Factory, for instance, that autoworkers
lacked "any desire to restore the old industrial system that is now collaps-
ing around them." Such a perspective, she continues, "highlights a sad fact
that is all too often forgotten in the age of deindustrialization: factory work
-
in the:
right.
dehur
the r<
19805
shoul,
peopl
T
sketd
plain.
factur
of inv
chine]
even 1
broad
mere!
tinual
patter
in the
the en
'"
dustri;
izatior
groun
itics n
The
v'
took tc
mantl<
rums
(
that, d
sense
(
favor
1
and H
democ
do thi
arship:
affecte
and th,
the "nl
a place
dous 0
Page 16
Tsisof the
vestment
Iments III
stwar era
Ie, unidi-
:cline, we
nd starts,
I with ex-
lderstood
lalitative,
stwar era
are fairly
relatively
Iin 2000.
m's plant
. . . .
lSSlSSlppl,
ight have
:new was
Ne must,
;, and the
!destruc-
nise have
IS in fact
be more
1ment of
e job cre-
damental
eemingly
, cultural
;cape, the
lities, the
,
nust also
Dmdom-
rily great
allan has
oworkers
1collaps-
a sad fact
ory work
Introduction
15
in the golden age of mass production was deeply problematic in its own
right." Workers, she explains, "mostly yearned to escape its relentless and
dehumanizing rhythms."8 This is not to deny the terror of joblessness or
the reality of former industrial workers tramping the Southwest in the
1980s. It is simply to say that we have to strip industrial work of its broad-
shouldered, social-realist patina and see it for what it was: tough work that
people did because it paid well and it was located in their communities.
Thus "deindustrialization" can mean many varied things, like the brief
sketch of Homestead suggests or Simon's look at Atlantic City helps ex-
plain. Only a small part of these meanings emerges from the loss of manu-
facturing employment. The broader meanings emerge from the de-linking
of investment and place, the deinstitutionalization
of labor relations ma-
chinery, de-urbanization
(and new forms of urbanization), and perhaps
even the loosening of the connection between identity and work. A still
broader view suggests that deindustrialization
and industrialization are
merely two ongoing aspects of the history of capitalism that describe con-
tinual and complicated patterns of investment and disinvestment. These
patterns respond to new politics, technology, and cultural conditions, but
in the end the seeds of deindustrialization were in every instance built into
the engines of industrial growth itself.
Where, then, do we take our revised frameworks for the study of dein-
dustrialization? By framing episodes of industrialization and deindustrial-
ization as two stages of the same process-the
organization of capital on the
ground in the material world-we
can begin to come to terms with the pol-
itics required to bring justice to our shop floors, homes, and communities.
The very set of political rules that created the industrial order that we once
took to be permanent provided the means by which corporations could dis-
mantle that order. As corporate scandal and dot-com failures have created
ruins of a different sort than discussed in this volume, we must remember
that, despite the institutions, networks, and habits of the heart that give us a
sense of permanence in our communities, the rules that structure capitalism
favor growth, volatility, and change. If our goal, in the spirit of Bluestone
and Harrison's original work, is to recast capital in terms of stewardship,
democracy, and prosperity broadly shared, we have to write new rules. To
do this now, we will have to overcome "smokestack nostalgia" in our schol-
arship, complicate the industrial legacy, and assist those communities most
affected by these transformations-both
in the industrialized global North
and the maldeveloped global South. Above all, we should strive to transform
the "new American workplace" that has grown out of the industrial ashes-
a place that is sponsoring spectacularly uneven levels of wealth and tremen-
dous overwork-into
a more humane and responsible place.9
Page 17
306
Notes to Pages xi-5
stuffed into the cramped quarters of missile nose cones was needed to guide international
ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and space rockets. Accordingly, the government paid for the de-
velopment of the first integrated circuits and microprocessors. Software was needed for
the instruction sets for these minicomputers and the government paid for this as well. The
personal computer and all that followed descended directly from these federally sponsored
cold war research projects. Later, it was investment by the Department of Defense in the
ARPANET that led to the modern-day Internet and the World Wide Web. Without these
investments, today's ubiquitous e-commerce would never have come about-or
at least
would have been delayed by decades. Moreover, the money the federal government poured
into science and math education after the launching of Sputnik in 1957 was critical for
preparing a generation of scientists and engineers who developed all the new technology.
14. Council of Economic Advisers, EconomicIndicators, March 1999; and Council of
Economic Advisers, EconomicReport of the President, 1998 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Gov-
ernment Printing Office, 1998).
15. Council of Economic Advisers, EconomicReport of the President, 1996, 297, table
B-15.
16. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, "Real Gross Do-
mestic Product by Industry in Chained (1996) Dollars, 1987
-
2000" (Washington, D. c.:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 2000).
.
17. U.S. Department of Commerce, "Real Gross Domestic Product."
18. Council of Economic Advisers, EconomicReport of the President, 1998; and Coun-
cil of Economic Advisers, EconomicIndicators,January 2003.
Press, 2001)
and closings
4. For
Davis, John
MIT Press,
5. Elm
6. Nel:
ternational L
7. Jack
Labor Forun
8. Mil!
9. We
in work org
American Tt
versity Pres:
Introduction: The Meanings
of
Industrialization
1. Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, Journey toNowhere: The Saga ofthe New
Underclass(1985; reprint, New York: Hyperion 1996), 17, 20.
2. For a fine discussion of Homestead's transformation, see Lori Delale's prize-
winning senior honors thesis, "Twelve Smokestacks in a Strip Mall: Homestead, Pennsyl-
vania and the Rise of the Postindustrial Landscape" (School of Industrial and Labor
Relations, Cornell University, 2002); for the pre-strip mall history, see William S. Serrin,
Homestead: The Glory and the Tragedy of an American Steel70wn (New York: Times Books,
1992).
3. The literature on deindustrialization is immense. By 1985, there were 820 entries
in Plant Closings:A Selected Bibliography (Ithaca: Martin P. Catherwood Library, Cornell
University, 1987). Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison's The Deindustrialization ofAmer-
ica:Plant Closings,Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling ofBasicIndustry (New York:
Basic Books, 1982) remains the touchstone of the discussion for the 1980s; this work can
be rounded out with the many viewpoints in Paul D. Staudohar and Holly E. Brown, eds.,
Deindustrialization and Plant Closure(Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987). A small
selection
of the current
historical
and sociological
understandings
includes: Thomas
J.
Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis:Race and Inequality in POJ.twarDetroit (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), which rethinks race and the timing of the process; Ju-
dith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, EconomicPoli£],and the Decline of Liberal-
ism (Chapel Hill: University ofN orth Carolina Press, 1998), which takes an extended look
at the politics of the problem; Ruth Milkman, Farewell to the Faa01Y:Auto U7arkersin the
Late Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), which questions
the meanings of plant shutdowns; and Jefferson Cowie, Capital iVloves:RC/1's Seventy-Year
Questfor Cheap Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999; reprint, New York: New
1. "01
Greenblatt,
sis, Columb
2. For
Model Clue
Allison, Tht
Harbor Hi!
Yonkers Cha
merce (Wih
see "Dunn]
1950): 5, in
box 4, serie
cited as TV
tion Comrr
after cited:
files (hereaf
3. Jac
Company L
sis, New Yc
City's Larg
4. "0
5. Sm
pet Weave]
163-65).
6. Dc
Sons Carp'
America, C
7. Fo
Yonkers CI
"Factory P
A. Robie,
(
Page 18
national
r the de-
eded for
Tell.The
.onsored
se in the
mt these
.
at least
t poured
ltical for
lmology.
)Uncil of
.S. Gov-
n, table
rossDo-
n,D.C.:
d Coun-
r
the New
's prize-
Pennsyl-
d Labor
:. Serrin,
s Books,
0 entries
Cornell
ofA1Jzer-
ew York:
vork can
wn, eds.,
A small
10mas ].
-inceton:
.cess;Ju-
t"Liberal-
dedlook
ersin the
luestions
mty-lear
rk: New
Notes to
Pages
5-22
307
Press, 20(H), which looks at the timing, causation, and regional variance of plant openings
and closings.
4. For a quantitative explanation of manufacturing employment trends, see Steven].
Davis, John C. Haltiwanger, and Scott Schuh, Job C7'eationand De.rtruction (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1997).
5. Bluestone and Harrison, Deindustrialization ofA1Jzerica,6, 11.
6. Nelson Lichtenstein, "Class Politics and the State during World War Two," 1n-
temational Labor and Working ClassHistory 58 (fall 2000): 270.
7. Jack Metzgar, "Blue-Collar Blues: The Deunionization of Manufacturing," New
Labor Forum (spring/summer 2002): 20-23.
8. Milkman, Farewell to the Factmy, 12.
9. We use the term "new American workplace" broadly to refer to the many changes
in work organization as documented in Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt, The New
American Workplace: 7i'ansfiJ1"mingWork Systems in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1994).
1. "A Trail
of Ghost Towns across Our Land"
1. "Old 'Carpet Shop' Plans Issue," Business U1eek,16 March 1946,66-67;
Sophie
Greenblatt, "The History and Development of the Carpet Industry in Yonkers" (M.A. the-
sis, Columbia University, 1937),29.
2. For the early period of Smith involvement in Yonkers, see "For a Workingman's
Model Club," New Yrn-kTime.r(hereafter cited asNIT), 3April 1896, 8; Rev. Charles Elmer
Allison, The Histm)' of Yonkers, U1estchesterCounty, New York (1896; reprint, Harrison, N.Y.:
Harbor Hill, 1984), 331; and "Academic Choices Plus High Standards of Excellence," in
Yonkers Chamber'of Commerce Centennial Book, 1893-1993, by Yonkers Chamber of Com-
merce (Wilmington, Del.: Suburban Marketing Associates, 1993), 80. For the later period,
see "Dunn Lauded for Community Service," The News (Alexander Smith) 6, no. 5 (19 April
1950): 5, in "Employers File 1943-1952, Alexander-Smith, General (1949-1950)" folder,
box 4, series B, file 4B, MSS 129A, Textile Workers Union of America Records (hereafter
cited as TWUA Records), State Historical Society ofW'isconsin, Madison; and "Promo-
tion Committee Begins Work for Community Chest," Yonkers Herald-Statesman (here-
after cited as H-S), 15 September 1952, in "Community Chest" folder, Yonkers vertical
files (hereafter cited as YVF), Yonkers Public Library, Getty Square Branch, Yonkers, N.Y.
3. Jack A. Tupper, "The Impact of the Relocation of the Alexander Smith Carpet
Company upon the Municipal Government of the City of Yonkers, New York" (M.A. the-
sis, New York University, 1963), 16-17; "New York Central, Raised $3 Million, Becomes
City's Largest Taxpayer," H-S, 1 September 1954, in "Taxation" folder, YVF.
4. "Old 'Carpet Shop' Plans Issue."
5. Susan Levine, '''Honor Each Noble Maid': Women Workers and the Yonkers Car-
pet Weavers' Strike of 1885," New York Histmy 62, no. 2 (April 1981): 153-76 (quotes,
163-65).
6. Donald L. Grant, "A Case in Collective Bargaining: The Alexander Smith and
Sons Carpet Company, Incorporated, and Local 122 of the Textile Workers Union of
America, c.I.a." (senior thesis, Princeton University, 1941),48-50.
7. For employment conditions, see "Smith Carpet Mills Resume Full-Time,"
YonkersChamber of Commerce
Yonker's
Progress(hereafter cited as YP) 4 (May 1929):9;
"Factory Payrolls Rise Here," yP 11 (August 1936): 5; and Richard A. Lester and Edward
A. Robie, Constructive Labm'Relations: Experience in Four Firms (Princeton, N.].: Industrial