Was the death of the blue collar class a good thing?

I suppose that Foxfyre considers your question answered with this statement pathetic as it was. This is a debating tactic known as the deflective horseapple.

Then after laying that horseapple, along comes the typical switch to attack the poster with this horseapple sprinkled with rose petals, as if that would make it smell better.

Well I'll just leave you to fence with somebody who's style is more to your liking, Mesquite

foxfyre

There are a couple of rattle-trap ideas knocking about inside your cranium. That'd be fine, except that now and again (are you tilting your head a bit to one side, like Cheney does?) they tumble noisely out onto these pages.

The first of these (I put it first because, in a democracy, it is just about the nuttiest single idea to which anyone might subscribe) is that during a time of serious turmoil and disagreement, citizens ought to allow personal conscience to be subsumed by loyalty to a leader (or a party). Setanta's quote from Teddy Roosevelt puts the proper face on an idea more emollient to fascism than to freedom. Sure, that leader might think it a great idea, and he may even proclaim such sheepness to be the ideal and proper measure of citizenship. But it is THAT SPECIES OF CLAIM ("you must join my mandated consensus") which presents the real danger to freedom, not the voicing of individual conscience and viewpoint.
"You are all individuals!"
(in unision) "We are all individuals"
(single voice) "I'm not"

The second bit of shoddy ideation that tumbles cacophonously out onto these pages is that folks here disagree with this administration's actions, values, or policies because...they hate George Bush! Or they hate Republicans period. Which is a bit like saying that a bruise is the consequence of pain.

It's a handy idea, for those forwarding a propaganda illogic (anyone who despises Bush is irrational, therefore their viewpoints/protests are tainted and worthless) but completely transparent in its illogic.

reading

I can't help but think that when an entire social class is eliminated that society becomes less dynamic. There are no safety valves. I am also convinced that a greater percentage of the population exists below the poverty level since the 1980s and the increased exportation of jobs and the promotion of the service economy.

I understand your concerns plainoldme, but I think the facts do not support your thesis here. The middle class/blue collar class is alive and well and thriving nicely. Things are tough in some places, I know, and are terrific in others. I don't believe the statistics support that more people than ever live below the poverty line, but I'm not positive about that as I haven't researched it lately. I do know that personal income across the board is up and more people are working in the USA than ever before.

Jobs are being outsourced yes partly because it is more cost efficient to utilize cheaper labor and less restrictive regulations overseas. The tax structure seems to be less an issue as there is little tax advantage in the places where we outsource most of the jobs. But for every job outsourced, products are returned to the U.S. that have to be transported, warehoused, marketed, stocked, sold, maintained, etc. and that results in jobs albeit different jobs from the manufacturing jobs that left.

I hate seeing manufacturing jobs outsourced, too, as I like the idea of made in America products. But if businesses en masse closed up shop because they can no longer make a profit, that would result in lost jobs that are not replaced by anything else. And that would create a whole new underclass. Outsourcing is by far the better solution.

I think we can be optimistic about America and Americans. These temporary transitional periods are a little bumpy sometimes, but we always get through them in good shape.

Sounds kinda like when Bill Gates walked into a bar with nine other patrons. The average wealth of the bar patrons just went up by 4 billion dollars.

The problem here is that we become net consumers, importing more than we export. Our national debt then becomes owed to other nations.
QUOTE]I think we can be optimistic about America and Americans. These temporary transitional periods are a little bumpy sometimes, but we always get through them in good shape.[/quote]
I hope you are right, but rather than pure faith I would like to see some leadership in this area.

The leadership is there Mesquite for those who are willing to see it. Imports do not always translate into additional national debt....remember it is American companies who are outsourcing the labor and then bringing back the manufactured products; not quite the same thing as importing from foreign companies. The booming American economy right now proves something is being done right here.

The blue collar class is not alive and well in Massachusetts where the median price of a house is $400,000.

But you can buy the same house for less than $100,000 in Kansas City or Little Rock AR

Saying that you can buy the same house for less in Little Rock is not a rational answer. What happens if people move to Little Rock to afford a house? Why should people in Massachusetts be unable to buy houses?

When college educated people work as retail store managers, there is no blue collar class anymore.

And since 16% of all workers with children earn below the poverty level, it seems that poverty is more pervasive than it has been in the past.

So I guess your point is that we should all move to Littlerock? I didn't know you were such a Clinton fan.

Now you've done it...

Subject: Remember when we loved our jobs?
Ref: Abstract of a column in THE PALM BEACH POST (June19, 1991) by Clinton C. Glen, reprinted from THE BALTIMORE SUN


You have no doubt heard of the term VALUE ADDED. Well, this is about VALUE LOST, not of a product or service but to the workplace. The old work ethic is gone, the deeply rooted one that almost everybody, at some level, would like to believe still exists, the simple equation: "Let's make a deal. I will give you an honest day's work. I will be loyal, dependable, dedicated and true to the company, in return for which I will ask you to give me a measure of security, occasional promotions, incremental raises and eventually a retirement dinner and a watch."

That ethic has run deep in the American work culture. It will not be quickly erased or easily forgotten, but as a force it is gone.

A bright young person came to work in an office recently. She was thrilled with her new job, willing and eager to learn. She is gone now. "I really liked this job. I worked hard. Gave it my all. Look what happened!" She said the executive who laid her off told her, "Don't take it personally; it was a business decision." Was she bitter? No, she was disillusioned. She was experiencing VALUE LOST.

This is not a lament that business decisions negatively affect personal lives. In the normal business dynamic, some people are going to be hurt by decisions that are made. The concern here has more to do with the reality of an increasingly intense, spiritless workplace focused strictly on the bottom line.

This did not happen overnight. There never was a declaration that said, "let's do away with the values that make for an affirming workplace where people feel good about themselves and the things that they do." That ethic more or less leaked and then hemorrhaged out of the work culture, leaving an ethically anemic context within which to work.

People cannot (or will not) give their all if they believe that a "bottom-line force" will come sweeping through their offices today or tomorrow and blow them away with the disclaimer: "Don't take it personally. It is a business decision." People cannot "run scared" all the time with respect to this most important feature of human life.

We once had a relatively simple work ethic or value; at least we believed that we did. We acted as if it was in place, and to a large extent it was. Now we are in the midst of complexity. Nothing is clear. The old work assumptions do not hold. The value is lost, and it is not yet clear what the new value system will be.

There is no new work ethic to present. We have to stay in our state of complexity until some simple, obvious ethic or value begins to emerge. And it will. Something as important for human beings as work, simply must be "felt" as valuable.

mesquite

I really like that piece by Glen (haven't heart of the chap before).

"Work ethic" is an interesting notion. Webster online has a somewhat meager definition... "A set of values based on the moral virtues of hard work and diligence."

That's really of the nature of fatherly advice, "If you put your shoulder to it, my boy, and give it your best, that will always serve you well."

And that is good advice. Yet it is really just half of the equation. It contains within it no sense of directed loyalty, other than to self...no sense of the employer and one's relationship with or responsibility to him/her, and certainly no sense of the employer's reciprocal responsibility.

We have all, if we are of any fair measure of years, had employers for whom we worked very hard indeed, and did so not out of a sudden rush of self-interest, but because the employer DESERVED such effort. And we have surely had the opposite sort of employer too.

To the degree that our employment is valued only temporarily and instrumentally (say, for that employer's self interest) to that degree we won't give much of a poop about whether that employer is served well. Why care about him, he doesn't care about you?

One of the consequences of the growing laissez faire zest for self-interest is, predictably, a loss in sense of community...community as small as an office and community as large as a nation or even, of the community of all humans.

I enjoyed that column.

We have lost a sense of community in the workplace.

But in essence, isn't that a neccesary byproduct of capitalism's look out for number one philosophy?

There was a time when people volunteerly stuck with a company their whole lives.

They may join at a low level position right out of highschool but with hard earnest work and loyalty could reasonably expect to become a regional director by retirement.

That time is gone. People quit jobs to take better ones as often as they get fired.

It's not a simple one. At the same time as things are changing here, they are changing in the third world as well. It's quite arguable that the planet can't afford consumption and waste of the magnitude and of the nature which we in the west have engaged...if everyone else does it too. So it may be that we have to fall a bit in expectations.

Still, I'm more than a little sceptical when this present push for 21st century capitalism is driven by folks who don't expect to personally suffer much from it.

There are companies that maintain a relationship with their employees, whose officers make decisions, not entirely on the bottom line alone. There is a model for this and it works in terms of higher productivity and loyalty of employees.

However, of course, it cannot be argued that a company should continue to employ workers beyond the company's ability to survive. When the economy shrinks, jobs are fewer....it's a fact of life. But there's plenty of room for capitalism to work, the ethic of self interest. If treating employees with respect, if providing them what they need (within the ability of the company to sustain a profit or stay alive and do so) increases worker loyalty, health, motivation and productivity, then providing for the worker is in the company's self interest. If only more people could understand this simple fact.........

I think the same applies to community. Workers have to be able to afford with they need. If what they need exceeds their ability to pay, someone has to help. Could that someone be the government, heaven forbid?

If you noticed the date on that article, it was written in 1991 near the end of the Reagan Bush years. I kept it because it struck a cord to me then.

At that time the company I worked for was going through a transformation and downsizing. It was a time when employees were beginning to be viewed more as liabilities than resources.

It was a time that executive compensation began increasing at four to ten times the pace of the average worker. Executives started getting stock options and made huge fortunes when the stock went up. On the surface this sounds fair, but when companies are gutted, jobs outsourced, assets sold off, no reinvestment for the future, just to pad the stock price then it is bad for the long term.

I think many of our major corporations are mere skeletons of their former selves. So much of our manufacturing and technical know how has gone abroad. I fear that when the time comes again that we need to make and feed for ourselves, we will not know how.

Off the top of my noggin (a fairly foggy place) might I hypothesize freely...

It's not a novel idea to suggest that the national identities which we have come to suppose as a fundamental modern human grouping ideology, has been altered by transnational communications and transnational organizations (as where we give up certain aspects of sovereignty for the sake of an agreement like NAFTA).

If this were so, in some significant ways, then we might expect to see human activity re-grouping under different identities. For example, we might see folks organizing around a religious identity, or a class identity, or a partisan identity, etc.

That sure seems to be the case.