<Remember this guy? What he's doing today --
or not -- may surprise you
(see East Village Magazine link below)>
<i.>
From rock stars to rapscallions, researchers, and everything in between, I can safely say that I've done many fascinating interviews over my decades-long career. Some of the most interesting ones, though, have happened locally, especially when some aspect of the encounter can tie in with the present.
About a decade ago or so, I interviewed Robert, one of our longtime city commissioners, who recalled how he'd started out. Having served about 30 years on the commission, Robert was regarded as its unofficial dean, since he's sat on other local boards, as well. He's not currently on the commission, but I believe he's serving as the chairman of the Housing Commission.
Like most Black men of his era, Robert went straight from high school to the foundry floor, where he became a union representative, serving on the bargaining committe, and eventually, president of his local union. Over time, he developed a parallel career as an organizer, which took him nationwide to other foundries and forges, where he advised new or existing unions about their issues.
That wasn't the hook for the story, which focused on his personal resilience -- as someone who raised about a dozen children between two marriages, including a couple who weren't his own biologically, but accepted into his family. But I couldn't resist asking Robert -- retired after 45 or so years, at several foundries -- what he thought about the decline of manufacturing, once it accelerated during the '80s.
"Man, are you kidding me?" Robert just let out a booming laugh, and shook his head. "When I started, they told us, "You'll all be out of here in two years. This plant will be gone!" That's because the foundry bought castings from Mexico, among other parts -- even in the 1950s, he noted.
When I asked how the union addressed those things, Robert shrugged. "I just took it as a challenge. We worked with the plant, they worked with us. Not everybody got what they wanted, but it was a give and take. That's how the system worked, and everybody accepted it."
As Robert pointed out, he felt fortunate to spend his whole life working in one job -- enough to provide a good pension, care successfully for so many children, and buy the small house where our interview took place, and sufficient time to serve his community. "I don't have any regrets," Robert said. "I've done the best I could, with whatever I've had."
<Found on Threads: The pitch
that's already launching a thousand jokes...>
<ii.>
Presumably, it's the Roberts of the world that President Trump's self-dealing Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, seemed to be invoking when he recently called on Americans to stand shoulder to the wheel, as it were, in gritting through his boss's on-again, off-again tariffs, cloaked and crafted in the name of reviving American manufacturing:
"You go to the community colleges, and you train people! It's time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. You know, this is the new model, where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here."
You can find any number of variations on this pitch, such as Lutnick's sitdown on CBS's Sunday morning show, "Face The Nation" in April, where he said: "The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones—that kind of thing will come back...it's going to be automated...the tradecraft of America, is going to fix them, is going to work on them."
Got that? This is the Trumpian vision of Domestic Manifest Destiny, apparently -- no higher calling, it seems, than a lifetime spent making T-shirts and socks. Of all the goofy visions floating around Trumpworld, Lutnick's upbeat imagery of "screwing in little screws to make iPhones" ranks among the goofiest.
It's especially goofy, when you start with the obvious -- the politicos who lionize the factory floor the loudest just happen to have never spent any time there. Certainly not Trump, nor his fellow plutocratic bros like Lutnick, whose estimated net worth is $1.5 billion. Thanks to his ownership -- and subsequent sell-off -- of the financial services firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, it's safe to say he won't be making anybody's T-shirts and socks any time soon.
<The documentary that revived a genre,
and launched a million others:
Front and back DVD covers
(DVD Exotica Blog)
<iii.>
There's a simple reason why such an inward-looking, retro-driven regime is peddling all this Rust Belt Chic, as Reason magazine's piece (see link below) suggests: "Some of the 'bring back the Rust Belt' sentiment surely has to do with a misplaced nostalgia for Main Street and all it represents more than an actual preference for work on factory floors..."
Nor are politicians the only ones who've caught that Rust Belt Nostalgia bug. Rockers like Big Country, Bob Seger, Billy Joel, John Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen are some of the more obvious examples of artists who spent significant chunks of time chronicling the working man's anxieties and miseries, alongside a host of lesser-knowns (Joe Ely, Henry Lee Summer, The Iron City Houserockers, The Michael Stanley Band). Still other bands nod to the subject, without overtly commenting on it -- whether it's Devo's yellow-suited industrial look, or peers like the Rubber City Rebels, whose name plays on the rubber industry's prominence in their hometown (Akron, OH).
Examples of this phenomenon abound in other realms, too, such as in the '80s hit sitcom, "Roseanne," Michael Moore's breakout documentary film, Roger & Me (1989), and the writings of his close friend, Ben Hamper -- whose best-selling book, Rivethead: Tales From The Assembly Line (1992), chronicles the follies and foibles of his 11-year stint on the General Motors assembly line, from 1977 through 1988.
All this artistic earnestness has even birthed a perverse sub-genre of "ruin porn," as its detractors call it, one commonly characterized by the exploitation of industrial decay, and lacking any real context. It's a term that's often given to TV shows like VICE's "Abandoned" -- whose baseball cap-wearing, skateboarding host, Rick McCrank, points out that he does interview people, as part of exploring the impacts of his shuttered sites on the locals -- and the YouTube videos of Nick Johnson, who's earned a reputation for parachuting to various cities, their images seemingly chosen -- deliberately or not, you decide -- to fit the Trumpian narrative of decaying blue America.
Still, it's striking to see such a nostalgically-driven administration getting the basic details so consistently, and drastically, wrong. Even on a show like "Happy Days," which offers a sunny portrayal of its '50s-era time period, you never see its star character, the Fonz, urging anyone to join him at the garage where he works so tirelessly on all those cars. Quite the opposite, in fact.
How do we know? Just watch "Graduation," which aired February 8 and 15, 1977. We learn that Fonzie is secretly attending night school, so he can graduate with his longtime circle of friends -- Richie Cunningham, Ralph Malpn, Potsie. The two-parter climaxes in a stirring speech that Fonz gives at the ceremony -- once he's allowed to join -- about the importance of education: "Staying in school is cool!"
Aaayyy! Does that sound like someone resigned to a lifetime on the factory floor? Hardly. In "Live And Learn," which aired during Season Eight (11/18/80), Fonz -- fresh from a trip to Italy -- becomes a shop teacher at Jefferson High, and even flirts with growing a beard! Aaayyyy! Sit on that, Leonardo, you Renaissance nerd!
The same spirit exemplifies the major "Happy Days" spinoff, "Laverne & Shirley." Much of its comedy stems from its blue collar setting (Shotz Brewery, Milwaukee, WI), and characters engaged in various states of occupational denial. It's the type of setting where Carmine, the resident heartthrob, dreams of becoming a singing sensation, and Lenny Squiggy are angling for some kind of wider fame, well, beyond their spit-curled strangeness.
Not to be outdone, Laverne and Shirley attempt various Lucy and Ethel-style schemes to shed themselves of their jobs, too. One minute, they're humiliating themselves on a game show (the aptly-titled, "Be Silly For Dollars"), as they chase after some big cash prize. The next, they're trying to gatecrash some hoity-toity modeling agency without a portfolio, let alone a headshot.
I'm running on the stuff of teenage memory here, but Shirley's response to the snooty agency denizen's question ("Where's your portfolio?") is pure comedy gold. "We lost it," Shirley replies coolly, with all the screw-you-too poise that any seasoned fake-it-to-maker can muster.
It's a moment that any punker, hip-hopper or DIY culture make can appreciate, for obvious reasons. But never do you hear her, or any of the gang from Arnold's Drive-In, ever say, "Wow, Shotz Brewery! What a job. I hope it never ends."
<A man and his motorboard:
Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli
ponders his factory floor-free future
(YouTube capture)>
<iv.>
Needless to say, there's a lot of reasons why Trump's Rust Belt Chic just doesn't add up. But let's start with another obvious point. Has anybody even bothered to ask the groundlings how they feel about this messianic vision of rote manual labor for life?
I took the liberty of doing an online search, fueled by a relevant keyword phrase ("The reality of factory work/Reddit"). Here's an economy tour of what I found, with minor punctuation edits, starting with the this thread ("Why Are Factory/Warehouse Jobs Considered Bad"):
"While I am not an operator and my tasks are not physically demanding, the constant observation from management, the lack of upward movement, more punishments than bonuses or privileges, and doing the same over and over again, are literally frustrating, and kill your drive.
"Some of my seniors literally work every single day (including Saturday and Sunday), 50+ hours weekly, and do the same thing every day. If they mess up or fail to meet the prerequisites from the marketing department, they're the first to be blamed."
Or maybe you should listen to this desperate-sounding person, whose only experience is janitorial or production work ("Factory Work Is Misery"):
"This factory has pretty much given me the worst years of my life, and that's saying a lot, considering I've suffered from near crippling depression for as long as I can remember. It's broke me down both physically and mentally. It gets harder and harder to get out of bed everyday. I know I should look for something else but I live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, it's either, here, construction or retail, and unfortunately, this place pays the best by a significant margin."
And, last but not least, this observation, from a former 14-year manufacturing engineer, who doesn't see his bygone field as the place to be ("CMW: Why Manufacturing Jobs Are Not Good Jobs").
"It is largely dependent on politicians pulling some odd strings to try and recreate jobs that are obviously being replaced by automation and AI and the realities of the global economy, which is outside of any one country's control, so even if you have a job today, your chances of still having that job 5 years from now are drying up REAL fast."
Granted, this is a small sampling of the sentiment out there. But honestly, though, after a couple hours of dedicated keyword searching, beyond the usual neutral-sounding, bet-hedging non-observations -- "Depends what industry, and what plant," that sort of thing -- I have yet to find a ringing endorsement of Lutnick's vision, such as it is.
<"Oh, Jeez, Shirl, we'll never crack
the stadium circuit, looking like this!"
"No worries, Laverne. We're fictional characters,
so it doesn't matter. We're gonna live forever."
One of the Milwaukee duo's many bids for fame...
...doin' that "Supermarket Sweep"!
(YouTube capture)>
<v.>
But let's take the premise behind Trump's tariff blitz at face value. If American manufacturers come home, we can make more goods here, right? And if the goods come home, so will the jobs, and all the economic detox will have been worth it. Right? Wrong, for five major reasons.
First, it's important to remember the realities of reshoring. It's a process that requires major upfront investments in property and people -- which can take one to five or more years, assuming all the ducks are in order. That's one thing to do, when prices are stable -- quite another, amid the current zigzagging on tariff policy. In the end, as experts like Kimberly Clausing tell the New York Times (see below), "I think it will just make a lot more sense to make the entire thing somewhere else, and just pay the tariff once." So much for the purpose of the mission.
Second, the look of manufacturing has changed markedly -- as you'll see in the Reddit threads, and the Reason piece, where the Economist's editor-in-chief notes the overall proportion of manufacturing workers with PhDs has risen by 50 percent since 2016: "Manufacturing is increasingly a high-skill, high-end activity." It's not a prognosis that bodes well for the "poorly educated" that Trump professes to love so dearly.
Third, the continued emphasis on AI and automation -- not only as a driver of boosting corporate profits, but also, the speed and efficiency of routine tasks -- makes any prospects of mass reshorting in the US remote. A factory that needed 500 workers can now run with 10 to 50 workers, depending on the operation. Even if "some jobs" return, that'll never happen in sufficient enough numbers to make up for the losses that happened from 1980 through 2000, when an estimated two million manufacturing jobs evaporated.
Fourth, if we really want "the good jobs" to return, we'll have to find ways of boosting union membership -- which typically drives other employers to pay higher wages. But only six percent of US workers belong to unions, which is a truly meager percentage, even compared to fellow industrialized laggards like France (10.3%), Spain (12.4%), and Australia (12.5%).
Finally, we also need to start having honest conversations about what kind of work people want -- especially once Trump's deportation apparatus cranks to full strength, and starts emptying the construction sites, meat packing plants, orange groves, and other hard, grinding jobs that native workers typically give a pass. With unemployment running at 4.2%, it's hard to imagine diehard MAGA voters lining up to pick fruit in triple-digit temperatures -- or, for that matter, jiggling screws into iPhone plates, as Lutnick envisions:
"But millions of Americans returning to the factory floor, with flip phones in their pockets, doesn't seem like a recipe for widespread fulfillment and economic flourishing to me, nor a viable political strategy for the GOP. My hunch is that people don't like it when their living standards get drastically worse."
That reason, more than any other, is why Trump's Rust Belt Chic doesn't add up, and never will. On the bright side, Robert can still enjoy his retirement, and the Fonz can teach shop in perpetuity -- since reruns can't be offshored, nor do they ever need to be reshored, so it's a win-win all around, right? Aaayyy! --The Reckoner
