Are we post-Industrialist yet? If we are, is that a bad thing?

  • boonville-factory.jpgHang­ing out in a lit­tle town in cen­tral Mis­souri last week, I saw an old fac­tory. Because of the sem­i­nar I’d just been sit­ting in on, it caught my eye. It was falling apart, prob­a­bly unused and unoc­cu­pied for decades. The sit­u­a­tion in rural Mis­souri is the same as it is all over the coun­try: Man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs are leav­ing the coun­try and they’re not com­ing back. That’s just the way it is, and I can’t find it in my heart to blame NAFTA or Clin­ton or greedy cap­i­tal­ists or who­ever seems like the con­ve­nient scapegoat.

    It’s just the way it is. Amer­ica is becom­ing some­thing no one could’ve fore­seen — post-Industrialist. But is that all bad?

    The sem­i­nar I’d been attend­ing was a talk about how to address the needs of dis­lo­cated fac­tory work­ers. It was part of a two-day event I was cov­er­ing for a client that over­sees work­force issues in this region of Mis­souri. Doing their newslet­ter has been a bit of an edu­ca­tion for me. It’s fas­ci­nat­ing work, if occa­sion­ally depress­ing. The huge wheels that are turn­ing are beyond anyone’s abil­ity to stop, and the dis­rup­tion caused by the reverses of for­tune is dif­fi­cult to conceive.

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    Lit­tle cogs in big machines

    Con­sider the lot of these lit­tle fac­tory towns, for exam­ple. From their early days as steam­boat ports or rail­road depots, they mor­phed into small pop­u­la­tions that could only exist because there was a Stet­son Hat fac­tory in town, or a metal fab­ri­ca­tor or an indus­trial dis­trib­u­tor. The peo­ple who grew up in that town hated the fac­tory, but they also depended on it. The fac­tory rep­re­sented the unre­lent­ing tedium that they would set­tle for just to make a liv­ing wage, but it also rep­re­sented employ­ment. And if they were will­ing to throw in their lot with the fac­tory, they knew they wouldn’t need to fin­ish school or worry about their lack of edu­ca­tion and com­plex skills. The fac­tory wouldn’t want the entire per­son, after all — just the hands it took to move parts from one place to another, or the eyes it took to spot what the machin­ery missed, or the abil­ity to sew the same straight line over and over and over again for 30 or 40 years.

    That’s what life was, and any of their kids who couldn’t take it left. The ones who didn’t leave town took their place at the con­veyor belt and made their peace as best they could. They didn’t leave town because there was no place to go, except to another fac­tory in another fac­tory town. The kids who grew up think­ing that edu­ca­tion and oppor­tu­nity were for other peo­ple were trapped in fac­tory jobs. They hated it but they set­tled for it, and in their turn they taught their kids to do the same.

    And now, here we are. The Stet­son Hat fac­tory laid off peo­ple when it found that the only way it could stay com­pet­i­tive was to “off-shore” the seam­stress jobs to China. Then it laid off more. Then it closed. So did the metal fab­ri­ca­tor and so did the dis­trib­u­tor. All of the labor could be done cheaper in devel­op­ing coun­tries. The labor unions tried to hold the line, but they couldn’t. The local politi­cians (and the national ones) tried to sug­gest that the right result in the next elec­tion would make a dif­fer­ence, but it didn’t. The forces at work were just too big, and the only ones who didn’t know it were the fac­tory work­ers who chose to keep believ­ing that all the other fac­tory lay­offs and clos­ings would never affect them, until they did.

    .
    Vic­tims of progress

    The peo­ple who are con­duct­ing the con­fer­ence I attended are some of the peo­ple on the front lines. They meet these dis­lo­cated work­ers and try to help them over the dif­fi­cult next steps. They try to help them past their dis­be­lief that the fac­tory closed, past their unreal expec­ta­tions that there’s another fac­tory out there look­ing for the peo­ple whose only skill is the abil­ity to set­tle for fac­tory wages and fac­tory tedium. The work­force spe­cial­ists are the peo­ple that start the process of con­vinc­ing them that there’s a new world out there that requires a dif­fer­ent kind of work than any they’ve known. That world doesn’t look as much for the abil­ity to make repet­i­tive ges­tures or sew a straight line as much as it does for spe­cial­ized voca­tional skills, math and sci­ence pro­fi­ciency and problem-solving abilities.

    And here’s the part that I never would’ve known if I hadn’t lis­tened to what those work­force devel­op­ers say: the dis­lo­cated work­ers choose not to believe that. They often opt to park real­ity and just sub­sist on less money than any of us can imag­ine rather than get up and leave the town with the shut­tered fac­tory and the bygone promise of employ­ment. Fac­tory work­ers in their 40′s, 50′s and 60′s don’t leave, and only a frac­tion of them get the train­ing offered by the fed­eral and state gov­ern­ments in order to tran­si­tion into the work­ing world as it is now. They put a lot of resource­ful­ness into try­ing to work the sys­tem so that they can go on col­lect­ing a pit­tance, and they scrape by. They don’t leave the old world — they just stay where they are and pay what­ever price is required.

    To be hon­est, there’s not much hope that that’ll change any­time soon. The older work­ers — the ones that received the factory-worker mind­set at their mother’s or father’s knee — sim­ply can’t change.

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    The good news about the bad news

    The hope is in the chil­dren that are in school now, and it’s because of that hope that I won­der at the end of the day if all the news of off-shoring is bad news. Because if the work­force devel­op­ers, the employ­ers, the edu­ca­tors and the par­ents of these chil­dren can reach them, the world that awaits them on the ash-heap of the town’s fac­tory is a world beyond what any­one could’ve imag­ined when fac­to­ries were in their heyday.

    It’s a world that rewards edu­ca­tion and enter­prise with the one prize that no one can over­look — gain­ful employ­ment. The grunt­work has gone over­seas. But the occu­pa­tions con­nected with engi­neer­ing, tech­nol­ogy, inno­va­tion, the arts, health­care, cus­tomer ser­vice and entre­pre­neur­ship are still here and in greater demand than ever. Chil­dren in this lit­tle fac­tory town in the 60′s dropped out of school because there was no rea­son for them to stay; chil­dren in this town now stay in school because work is finally con­nected with edu­ca­tion again, as it was meant to be.

    Mightn’t it just turn out to be a bet­ter world for those chil­dren than the ones their par­ents and grand­par­ents knew?

    That’s my ques­tion, look­ing at the fac­tory by the river’s edge, shot through with rust and crum­bling slowly into the Mis­souri River. It may be that some new indus­try is erected on its remains that robs its work­ers of as much of their human­ity as all the ones that have come before. Right now, after all, one of the biggest employ­ers in town is the “river­boat casino” where my client’s event is being held — these gam­ing venues that are nei­ther boats nor quite on the river, just gam­bling mega­liths skat­ing through a legal loop­hole in order to bring slot machines and black­jack to an elderly and dis­abled clien­tèle. It may be that all the indus­try and inge­nu­ity of those employed at some new kind of job that doesn’t exist yet will be as ill-spent as they were by those who sewed seams for a liv­ing or checked matches for imper­fec­tions or assem­bled lit­tle pack­ets of nuts and bolts.

    But it’s hard to imag­ine how it could be, and on the other hand, it’s not hard for me to imag­ine that the ashes of this fac­tory may turn out to be the fer­tile ground that can give rise to bet­ter things.

    Maybe that’s just me. But maybe it’s not.


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    October 13th, 2007 | Grace | 1 Comment |

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