Abstract
While reading the opening chapters of David Ranney’s evocative extended reminiscence of his industrial work experiences in Living and Dying on the Factory Floor, I was reminded of one of my own. It was the summer of 1974 or ‘75 when I was part of a labor gang assigned to the bricklayers working on the open-hearth furnaces at the Ohio Works of US Steel in Youngstown, Ohio. I was a political science major at Ohio University and looking for a way to avoid burdening my parents with college tuition. My father worked as a millwright at Republic Steel, and my uncle was employed at the US Steel plant and got me the job.
A furnace needed repair and the bricklayers were dispatched to make the unit operable. My part of the masonry work was to simply carry heavy buckets of cement, which the bricklayers used to maintain the brick that lined the furnaces. Standing within the furnace’s four walls was mind-blowing, and despite the unit being down for a while it was still terribly hot inside. The bricklayers were indifferent to the heat and the job was routinely completed. I was impressed and just glad I did not get in the way. But my relief was short-lived.
Everyone heard a loud “pop” coming from the furnace I had just been standing in. The noise set off bells, lights, and a whole lot of yelling. Apparently some of the repair had given way and a small section of the furnace had fallen apart. It was scary to hear but not nearly as horrifying as what came next. My Italian bricklaying brothers, who had up to this point treated me as one of their old-country, loving family members, decided it must have been something I had done. They proceeded one after another to call out—no spit out—my last name, “Bruno!” modified by a particularly profane adjective, which rhymed with the word “trucker.” It was a symphony of obscenities delivered by a chorus of steelworkers who not only knew the intricacies of their craft but also understood the language of hard labor. My dad was fine with me grunting it out over the summer to help pay for college, but that was as far as he wanted my factory career to go.
Ranney spent 1976 to 1982 working in southeast Chicago factories. On one occasion he takes his son to work with him at Chicago Shortening. His boy “peers into a dark entrance of the plant.” Then asks, “Dad, can I go in there?”“It’s kinda nasty and scary,” Ranney replies. “I want to.” So off father and son go. Ranney then describes the “foul odor,” the slippery floors, and the “dimly lit” passageways. Suddenly his son “jerks at my hand and stops” (p. 45). He’s changed his mind and wants to go back. Dad obliges and the boy never ventures into the plant. I did not need to read any further to understand why.
Despite being a tenured professor at the University of Iowa, Ranney left his academic career behind (temporarily as it turned out) and became a manufacturing worker because he believed that a more just society could only be legitimately formed by a “mass organization at the workplace” (Preface). His “dual status” often left him feeling like an outsider among his workmates. His education, however, also gave him a perspective on capitalism and worker exploitation that when shared on the shop floor made him feel that he was part of the movement looking “out” (p. 132).
In this book, Ranney is largely telling stories about how class-consciousness is shaped. Like any story, the plot lines unfold in a particular time frame. In this case, the author is describing factory work in the late 1970s to early 1980s—the time during which industrial and particularly steel production in the United States went into a death spiral—with a contemporary reflection on manufacturing in the closing chapter. On Monday, September 19, 1977, my hometown’s largest manufacturing firm, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, announced without warning it was shutting down its huge Campbell Works. In a heartbeat other mills followed, including the mills where my father, my uncle, and almost all of my neighbors worked. When the carnage was complete less than a decade later, 40,000 jobs had vanished.
Workers had their nasty, mind-numbing, soul-crushing, and dangerous but life-giving jobs ripped away. These jobs were not, as Ranney astutely notes, “middle class” (the average salary of a steelworker in the late 1970s was $24,772.80), but they did provide a living wage. The Rust Belt was born in Youngstown and would soon spread far and wide, including to southeast Chicago. Upon reflection, Ranney sees deindustrialization as planned: “The decline in manufacturing jobs was a deliberate strategy on the part of corporations around the world” (p. 120).
His tales include white bigotry and privilege, racism between minority workers, as well as worker homophobia and a fair degree of sexism. The factory gave him an education built from a “warm reception from a racist pipe fitter and an equally cold reception from black workers” (p. 123). The accounts he shares feature intoxication, drug use, serious injuries, layoffs, and flat-lining incomes. A host of colorful characters are featured, with nicknames like “Grumpy” who “looks like one of Snow White’s dwarfs—only taller” (p. 85). Not all of them are likeable—some managers are despicable—but most workers are given a sympathetic treatment. Ranney recognizes that the “class/race dynamic” he experienced in the factories is a “system of social control” and despite the intra-class enmities it produced, he values the integrity of his fellow workers (p. 125).
Ranney’s favorites are guys who overcame racial and cultural divides and fought for “justice” instead of “just us.” One fellow, a black man named Charles, left an indelible and searing impression on Ranney. Charles, Ranney writes, “put aside alcohol and drugs and made common cause with everyone on the line—Mexicans, white boys, even a Nazi!” During a strike it was Charles who articulated a “class-based vision and determination in universal terms” that rallied workers: “For us this is about how we are goin’ to feed our babies man. That’s something worth fighting for” (p. 132). Charles was later murdered at the same place of work by a strike scab. The stories also suggest what many observers of the times described as a dissatisfied, frustrated, and pissed-off working class.
Ranney decided to write down his distant memories because promises made by presidential candidates in 2016 about bringing “middle class jobs” back to America annoyed him. Yes, these jobs once provided a living wage but not because corporate executives and politicians willed them so. Union manufacturing jobs took care of working families because of militant labor struggles. The loss of middle class jobs according to Ranney was intentional. It was a “systemic response to a global crisis brought on by workers insisting on living wages and higher health and safety standards” (p. 120). The figures on national strikes give credence to Ranney’s thesis. From the mid-1960s to 1981, workers participated in one of the largest strike waves in US history. But in 1982, Ranney and thousands of other production workers were unemployed.
Ranney’s life as a factory worker does not lead him to put much hope in organized labor re-igniting a class-based movement. Labor once had a fight-back consciousness, but every contact Ranney and his fellow workers had with union officials was abusive. These are first-person memories, of course; nonetheless, they paint an ugly picture. Industrial jobs were disappearing in Chicago and Youngstown, and union responses were meager at best. Labor was once a powerful force for social change, but from Ranney’s perspective it surrendered its militancy for class collaboration after WWII. While the outbreak of rank-and-file opposition in the 1970s scared capital, it also ran counter to the interests of national union leaders who preferred concessionary labor agreements. The failure of labor unions to commit to building a “common class identity” is in Ranney’s thinking “largely responsible for Donald Trump’s presidency” (p. 125).
Despite the sense of loss that suffuses this book, Ranney tells his stories because he believes working for a living gives folks “insights” that can bring a more humane society into being. His most profound insight is “how people can change their outlook—change their very nature—in the course of social struggle” (p. 135). Ranney also declares that fighting together for better working conditions enables workers to overcome racial animus and fears about non-English-speaking immigrants. He offers these observations as a prescription for more equitable workplaces and communities.
Living and Dying on the Factory Floor does not provide a theory or analysis of class struggle. It is not a well-researched history of any group, time period, or events. Very few data are presented and nothing original is argued. Moreover, the book is completely devoid of independent and confirming sources. Yet, I could not wait to read the next story. His tales of living and dying through work itself resonated with me. There’s just something about workers witnessing the living and dying of labor that makes you feel like you are in the presence of an important truth.