Restructuring of work in rural America

Manufacturing

Urban Restructuring: Euphemism for Selling Out America's Manufacturing Econonomy

The recurrent theme of our course content is the decline in stock of America's labor corps, which for a century in the wake of the Industrial Revolution had become a lynchpin of America's economy as a whole. As we have rotated through various cycles of prosperity and recession, those who have engaged the difficult production labor, factory work and plant operation in order to power our economy have also most often been those very same individuals who have first bore the brunt of sagging financial times in America. This is well captured by the research which is strung through our notes and class readings, which delivers with exhaustive consistency the revelation that America's economic system uses, exploits and abandons its laborers with the utmost of inhumane recklessness. To be sure, we can find stark and consistent evidence, also strung throughout our research, that myriad geo-economic motives are causing manufacturers and corporations to disregard the efforts of their laborers. With forces such as globalization, free trade, technological advancement and the related downward shift in production costs, many companies feel a great pressure to abandon American labor in favor of something more cost-competitive.

Nonetheless, there is a clear pattern by which America's great industrialists have become wealthy to the point of vulgarity on the backs of laborers whom they will soon dismiss in favor of a more profitable labor alternative. And were it simply the ethical and human costs that are so deeply apparent, we might at least find it difficult to rationalize the admonishment that America's manufacturers must remain loyal to America's laborers. This is especially true given the pressures incumbent upon so many manufacturers based on the cheap labor and lower consumer prices which less ethically inclined competitors might offer to the public. A useful example comes from our readings, where in Chapter Five, the literature relays the story of a knitting mill closing which impacted hundreds of lifetime employees. Here, the pattern of closing very much follows that which defined our times both at that moment in history, toward the end of the 1980s, and like that which defines our current times as well. Particularly, after the seemingly spontaneous -- from the perspective of the laborer -- closure of the plant, employees responded with a paired sense of outrage and fear.

As the text describes, "as the reality of pink slips and "last day" bore down on workers, their pain and panic was translated into anger at the company. And as they began the job search in the start of summer 1989, they suddenly realized that the job situation outside the plant was not very good. The county's major manufacturing employer, located in the county seat, was definitely not hiring." (Ch. 5, 3) Indeed, as stated before, if this was simply an ethical issue, there would be little response to be had to those who had acknowledged the need to remain in a cost competitive position within their respective production fields. Certainly, the experience of the workers who lost their jobs here is indicative of the deeply unfair dispensability which is attributed to unskilled laborers, which translates into both the capacity to lose a job and the incapacity to locate or obtain a new one.

And it is this latter point that helps us to recognize this as something which is far more problematic than its ethical implications suggest. Instead, the pattern which is demonstrated in the plant discussed above, and which is an increasingly prevalent part of what is today officially recognized and a recession economy, is demonstrative of the behavior which is dismantling America's economy as a whole. By simultaneously eliminating its force and value as a production or manufacturing economy -- a selected responsibility and role in the world community which for the prior century had helped to define America's importance to the global scheme -- and by eliminating countless jobs which would never be returned to the American market, the manufacturers which had helped for so many generations to grow our economy have now left it in the lurch.

Companies such as General Motors are an ideal historical example of an organization which has literally created and sustained towns in order to power its manufacturing operations, such as the notorious center of production which once was Flynt, Michigan. With the closure of its major plants in the 1980s, as per the pattern whereby such nations moved operations to cheaper markets, Flynt and towns just like it have descended into despair, poverty, crime and an outright sense of having been birthed, fostered and subsequently abandoned to a place with no capacity to reinvent itself. As a microcosm of America, this helps to underscore what our reading has been largely about. Namely, the ethical imperatives of this questions are deeply relegated by more practical questions about the maintenance of the American economy as a whole. Situations like Flynt and the knitting mill are indicative of a corporate callousness and a humanitarian disregard that has spread throughout the dying manufacturing culture of America, and have shown a total ignorance or disinterest for the economic requirements of the America which has been created.

For individual corporations, no such patriotism exists, nor does any rational assumption about the dependencies of such companies on the economic fortitude of the American buying public.

As Chapter 5 denotes, the interest in cheaper labor opening up in Mexico had driven all manner of manufacturing operation out of the country and into the waiting wings of a desperately cheaper labor context. Thus, then as today, we find that economic recession is being stimulated by the closing and relocation of perfectly healthy and flourishing manufacturing operations. In the cases noted above, the resentment and fear felt by workers would be given foundation by a firm awareness that plant closings during this time of urban restructuring were not motivated by need but by greed.