Abstract
“Even the good jobs are getting worse” (p.149). This is the case that Jeffrey Rothstein makes in his new book, When Good Jobs Go Bad.
Using an extended case study method that follows in the footsteps of Michael Burawoy, Rothstein spent several years in three different automobile plants in North America. His choice of research sites is strategic for comparative analysis, bringing us inside a dying GM automobile plant in Janesville, Wisconsin; a plant whose future hangs precariously in the balance in Arlington, Texas; and a growing new “greenfields” plant in Silao (Guanajuato), Mexico.
His choice of sites is also theoretically informed. His is a study of globalization. Too often, this complex and difficult subject is viewed only through the window of sweat shops, where the results of globalization are predictably ugly: job loss in the formerly industrialized and unionized rust belt and the acquisition of grueling labor under dirty and dangerous conditions in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries. This is, by now, a well-known story. Hence, Rothstein dedicates himself to exploring the unfolding reality of globalization at the much less studied high end of the spectrum: good jobs (especially for workers with few educational credentials) in stable companies with union representation. In short, the auto industry.
Rothstein’s ethnographic work and interviews are complemented by the author’s deep historical knowledge, not only of the individual plants that form his case studies, but of labor history more broadly. He is able to show how, in general, the relationship between labor and capital has traditionally been a highly unequal one. Except for the brief period between the passage of the New Deal’s National Labor Relations Act (1935) and its evisceration by the Taft Hartley Act (1947), the playing field tilts heavily in favor of owners. Labor unions, idealized by some as the source of militant demands for power sharing and economic justice are, more often than not, subject to the logic of productivity, efficiency, and profitability that capitalists insist on. In the case of the management-selected union in the Mexican auto plant, the workers’ organization functions virtually as a social-work agency, helping former farm hands transition to industrial employment (and government benefits).
Rothstein’s ethnographic observations allow us to see just how constrained workers and their unions are in “consenting” (Burawoy 1979) to management demands. “Whip-sawing” is a process used by management to make workers feel constantly threatened. The threat comes from the possibility of closing plants and shipping work to Mexico or even further afield. But the threat is also that, even without job loss in the United States, plants in different regions of the country can be forced into competition with one another—a competition in which productivity and docility are rewarded and labor militancy is penalized (as in the transfer of production from the Janesville plant to another plant in Flint, Michigan in the face of union demands).
Worse still, the tensions thus created even seep into the relations between union representatives and rank and file members. Representatives are caught in a contradictory situation, wishing to champion their workers’ complaints but aware of the pressure from management to enforce their demands. And finally, the competition sours peer relationships as well. When plants close down, union rules allow laid-off workers with a lot of seniority to migrate to other plants, filling vacancies and even “bumping” local workers with less seniority. Thus, in most plants, the “GM gypsies” are feared and disliked.
In addition to whip-sawing, Rothstein shows how management uses the notion of team work and “lean production” as further discipline against workers. Team work, for example, requires job rotation within a working group (a norm resisted in Wisconsin and adhered to in Mexico). Alas, this job rotation is not empowering. Rather than allowing workers to diversify their skills and move up a job ladder, it allows companies to operate with a minimum number of workers, thanks to cross-training, making workers interchangeable. Similarly, Rothstein shows, “lean production” is simply a speed-up dressed in modern jargon.
In examining the oppressive manufacturing of consent, seen in a long historical sweep, Rothstein is making a theoretically important point. What we learn as we watch good jobs get worse is that neoliberalism, conceived as the market working purely from its own logic or hand in hand with new technologies, is not the culprit. Rather, globalization—a process in which markets, states, and supra-state entities like the WTO act as one, often against the public interest—is the driving force that is making good jobs go bad.
There are few questions I would pose to this book. Perhaps the ethnographies are just a little too neat in distinguishing the differing cultures of rust belt Janesville, sunbelt Arlington, and greenfields Silao. Surely reality is a good deal messier than this book shows it to be. Further, having spent years in these three plants, the book could have accommodated more “rich description” of the plants and their workers as, for example, Leslie Salzinger did in comparing the gendered atmosphere of three similar plants in the maquiladora zone of borderland Mexico. Everything in this valuable study makes me want to know more about the men and women, the bars and homes and factories that inform Rothstein’s work.
To conclude, Rothstein’s When Good Jobs Go Bad is an excellent study: strategically designed, executed well, historically grounded, theoretically fruitful, gracefully written, and blessedly free from jargon. It will be of interest to scholars focused on labor under conditions of globalization. Best of all, it furnishes students with a vibrant and contemporary example of C.Wright Mills’ “sociological imagination,” revealing the complex and unhappy intersections of biography and history in the lives of automobile workers.