ANGER IN THE BLUE-COLLAR TRENCHES

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 28, 2012

I've been writing updates to my books for conversion to Amazon's Kindle.  Responses to these new essays reveal surging anger from blue-collar workers in the trenches.  It is obvious they have not read my books, and don’t consider themselves part of my audience.  This is fair as my efforts have been directed at the new majority, the professionally college trained workers. 

Why this is important to relate is that there is an apparent disconnect between soaring professionals and tailing blue-collar assembly workers.  It suggests a subtle class distinction in terms of syntax, lexicon, language, and conceptual orientation.   It is as if these two groups spoke and thought in different languages.

Beyond that, the two groups have radically different cognitive biases. 

Professionals, despite all the evidence to the contrary, see themselves as owners not renters, as part of the managerial class and wealth creators.  They expect to naturally ascend to positions of power and prestige. 

Blue-collar workers feel they have been taken for granted, exploited, and left out of participating in the wealth created through their efforts.

Professionals have accepted that they are individual contractors and might have as many as five to seven or more employers in the span of a career. 

Blue-collar workers like to lay down firm roots in one place and stay in place for the duration of their employment. 

Professionals are geared to the fickle hand of desultory economics and its implicit ambiguities riding the crest of good times and hankering down philosophically during bad times.  

An engineer may take a position at Home Depot to ride out a recession without protest at a fraction of his normal pay.  The majority of recent college graduates know this only too well.  They wait for the downturn to hit bottom girded by the optimism that an upturn will follow.  They believe their credentials are a ticket to the future no matter how bleak the present.

Blue-collar workers have seen their jobs, benefits and retirement packages shrink.  They don’t blame it on having obsolescent skills, or that plants and equipment in the workplace are obsolete.  Neither do they want to hear that their compensation package is not competitive nor that the cost of doing business is skyrocketing as the economic pie in shrinking.  They want it, as it was.  Yet, it will never be that way again. 

Blue-collar workers are angry and spiteful because they feel betrayed by the company, by the capitalistic system and by consumers who prefer products made by foreign countries, or products made with cheap labor abroad and imported which once were made in the United States.  

Blue-collar workers blame everything and everybody but surprisingly, not their unions, which sold them down the river with pay and benefit packages that couldn’t be sustained at the price of worker control of what they did. 

Blue-collar workers blame the profit motive as the ugliest sin in the books, failing to consider that they wouldn’t have any jobs at all were it not for their employer making a profit. 

Blue-collar workers talk of solidarity and socialism as utopian ideals without apparent interest in the how worker-centered control functions without a profit scheme.   They want because they need, and needs are legitimate.  But when needs are treated as wants, there are no limits with companies spiraling into bankruptcy.  Once individual effort and reward is taken out of the equation the progression is to totalitarian dependence.  Did we learn nothing from the fall of the USSR? 

Most professionals today have risen out of this blue-collar assembly line factory class.  They found the gumption to enter the unknown territory of higher education where words and ideas were painted in an unfamiliar vocabulary that required the use of a dictionary.  They left their comfort zone where routine was as predictable as the rising and setting sun. 

Blue-collar workers who stayed the same were confined to the factory mentality where little stretching was required.  Now, they feel betrayed and handicapped.  They don’t understand, don’t comprehend they are fighting the tide, fighting against their own kin that have escaped the factory floor for the uncertain world of ideas, which are the new machines.

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There is nostalgia for the past when people could come right out of high school and acquire a good paying job without any special training or skill and ride the job to a comfortable retirement.  This progression was treated as a right and not as a privilege.  Since these jobs have disappeared, unions have become paper tigers, no longer capable of covering their backs. 

The government bailed out GM and Chrysler (not Ford) in the automotive industry.  As that industry limps along, one thing is certain.  Jobs will never again be treated as rights. 

Projecting the villain simply as "the corporation" or "the company" or "management" and, or “the profit motive” or “the capitalistic system” won’t resolve anything.  It is time workers assess their strengths (what they do right) and weaknesses (what they do wrong) instead of pointing fingers.

My focus has been on professionals developing assessment tools.  Still, I have failed to stimulate neither passion nor anger among professionals.  They have become social termites retiring into silent and difficult to quantify behaviors of what I call "The Six Silent Killers” (see CRC Press, 1998):

(1)     Passive aggression – coming in late leaving early doing as little necessary to get by;

(2)     Passive responsive – doing only what told to do even if it is wrong;

(3)     Passive defensive – always having an excuse why something isn’t done on time;

(4)     Approach avoidance – accepting an assignment with no intention of completing it;

(5)     Obsessive compulsive – being obsessed with what others have and you don’t;

(6)     Malicious obedience – spreading vicious lies about operations or others.

Blue-collar workers are not immune to these behaviors.  This is however standard operating procedure for contentious professionals.

Chemistry, mathematics and physics are increasingly required of blue-collar workers.  But that is not all.  They are finding out what engineers have been reluctant to acknowledge, which is that is equally important to be able to communicate ideas effectively in words.   This utilizes the “feminine brain,” explaining why women are rising so quickly among the ranks. 

Being limited to the "masculine brain," or linear logic and cognitive comprehension has ill prepared workers for a sick, confused and irrational transitory workplace.   Hard cognitive wiring leads to stay and not stray from consistent experience.  The common complaint then is of being underutilized or under appreciated.  It never occurs that this might be their fault.  They expect their value to be self-evident. 

Finally, blue-collar workers have much in common with the profession of engineering.  It is no accident that a majority of the professional class of engineers today has come from blue-collar working families.  Perhaps this provides a clue as to why the modern world the engineering mind created does not belong to it, but to the ruling class of CEOs, generals, politicians and educators. 

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