Random Update

Danae and I didn't leave for Canada until Tuesday, and late on Tuesday at that. We were both in recovery. I from being sick, she from the stress of a crazy schedule. We arrived in Hamilton after midnight on Wednesday morning. It was a peaceful, quiet ride during which I listened the first chunk of Jim Butcher's "Cold Days," the first fiction I've read in quite a long time. I really enjoyed that. In fact, I think I could probably drive for ten or twelve hours straight without much complaint if you give me a good audio book to motor by.

Things have been equally quite since arrival. We've slept a lot and had wonderful food thanks to Danae's mother. I figured out how to connect Thunderbird to my email accounts and have been slowly getting them under control. Danae put together a spreadsheet with some info on library school programs for me, and I'm starting to think about doing applications for a couple. I'm procrastinating about it a bit because I feel saturated by the process of grad school applications.

I'm wondering again whether a line of work wherein there will literally always be work that I could be productively applying myself too is the best idea. Will I find a way to not be continually stressed by that? I hope so. I was in a mildly down state earlier this evening as I thought about trying to put applications together for a couple of library school deadlines at the end of the month on top of finishing up applications for geography programs at the same time. A part of me really doesn't want to deal with more of this.

Some time spent attaching my thousands of backlogged emails helped me feel a bit more in control of things. Then Danae and I taught her mother how to play Dominion. That was a lot of fun, and I'm feeling in better spirits as I get back to the computer. Tomorrow I'll dig into all the school stuff and see what needs to be done.

We might also go out to the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore, and visit a few thrift stores too. Plans for what we're doing before I leave on the 24th are pretty loose. I kind of want to go photograph the steel mills, but it's so cold out there. Danae's dad took the two of us on a walk along the Chedoke Radial Trail, a rail-to-trail very near her parents house. It was a lovely walk along the Niagara Escarpment with a couple of pretty waterfalls and some infrastructure I found both visually and functionally fascinating, but it was so cold that my fingers got too numb to operate the cameras! Still, I got a few neat pictures, and even a couple of the two of them together. It's those that make me happiest; I never have enough pictures of the people I care about.

Kathryn Marie Dudley's "Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America"

I've been reading The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America by Kathryn Marie Dudley, a professor of anthropology and american studies at Yale University. It's another book I picked up at the recent Friends of the Library book sale at my university. I picked up a few books that focused on post-industrial change in the American rust belt, but finding this one particularly excited me: it's about my own city!

The book is her study of the 1988 closing of the American Motors assembly plant in Kenosha. She examines its effects and causes from an anthropological, ethnographic perspective incorporating historical research and open-ended interviewing into a discussion of the Kenosha's division between the traditional blue-collar culture of the hands and the incoming culture of the mind.

In 1986 and 1988, elections swept the union-affiliated mayor and alderman out of office to be replaced with a majority educated middle-class group who set about transitioning the city from a single-industry manufacturing center into a diversified city focusing on white-collar skilled employment. What I've found most fascinating is Dudley's examination of how this transition was framed in moral terms by the new order. Blue collar workers, according to the white-collar politicians as described by Dudley, deserved what was coming to them. They failed to take advantage of opportunities for education earlier in their lives. They've been overpaid for unskilled work for a very long time, and the system is finally putting them in their place. This is what happens to young people who turn up their noses at education, knowing that they have middle-class wages waiting for them on the line. Those manufacturing jobs should never have been middle-class work in the first place; it lacks the legitimacy of the kinds of skills that can be demonstrated by the acquisition of a degree.

Yet, points out Dudley, skills are a social construct. So-called "unskilled" work, especially work on an assembly line, is never work that requires no skill. Intelligence and worth as legitimized by formal education is not the only form of intelligence and worth. It may be true that the market reorganized itself and priced this kind of labor far below what it had been worth for the past fifty or a hundred years, but the judgments of the market are not moral ones; they are practical ones. People who see the market as the last, best arbiter of status and legitimacy position these judgments, more or less consciously, within a framework of morality. They argue that these assembly workers haven't invested their resources in a way that makes them deserving of a middle-class status and that their upcoming poverty, as they face wages that will be half or less than their previous compensation, is simply the correction of a long-standing error within the system.

Yet was it not the market itself that set the value of this kind of labor? These workers had every reason to expect the system to continue as it had. It's not fair to fault players of a game for finding themselves in a losing position just because someone drastically changed the rules. But making this into a moral issue, argues Dudley, allows the incoming new guard to reshape the city in favor of their new paradigm, one that happens to be very beneficial for middle-class, white-collar entrepreneurs such as those who are coming into power and their social group, while framing that change as a moral triumph of those who had the foresight to invest in education and the future over those who lacked that foresight.

My own reaction to this analysis is to note that assembly workers were, and likely had always, been deeply concerned with investing in their futures. They worked long hours at physically demanding jobs to provide themselves and their families with a good standard of living. They invested in the education of learning the various jobs within the plant, gaining seniority and social capital within the culture of the plant. Some took classes to learn trades to gain better positions. They invested their time toward the acquisition of a pension that would take care of them once they retired. Then, through a change of market forces on a global scale, the framework on which these people were building their futures was shaken at the foundations, leaving it cracked and broken. I would argue that if there was moral failure in all of this, the greater part is not on the part of the plant workers who lost their jobs when Chrysler closed down their Kenosha production line to take advantage of less expensive labor outside of the country. The moral failure here is common to all capitalist systems of production; there is no accounting for anything outside the bottom line.

It's been argued that companies, as entities, are sociopaths. They are purely selfish things, acting to maximize profit for themselves at the expense of all other considerations. This is where morality is missing in action in the capitalist system. This makes me ache for a post-scarcity economy, though as of yet I have no idea of how to get there from here.

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While this book concerns itself with a time-period a couple of decades after the the burial of Pike Creek, it's a book that I'm very glad to have found. It helps me understand the industrial past and the post-industrial present of Kenosha tremendously better than I had before. And to think that not only is it not in our local history collection at the archives, but none of us even knew that it had been written!