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Business leaders complain that the workingman's extravagant wage demands are the real cause of inflation. Unless labor costs can be held down and productivity pushed up, they argue, the basic nature of the economy will be changed; economic growth, profits, exports and the global power of the dollar will dwindle. General Electric Chairman Fred Borch blames the nation's economic ills on "an unbalanced concentration of power in the hands of organized labor." One top industrialist compares the wage raises in the building trades, which have been running at 12% this year, to "a kid in class with a case of measles. You've got to isolate it before they all catch it." Inspired in part by the construction workers' successful militancy, unions in general have wrung out wage-and-benefit increases averaging 10% in major contract settlements so far this year.
The Causes of Anger
From this odd combination of public criticism and political courtship, blue collar workers are gaining a renewed sense of identity, of collective power and class that used to be called solidarity. It often takes a negative form, because workers are the Americans most affected by rapid social disruption and technological change—and least prepared for it. The workingman is angered and bewildered by what he sees happening in the nation. As psychologists and social researchers have confirmed, he believes in God and country—if not necessarily in equality for all and the right of dissent. He is convinced of the virtues of hard work, the necessity of saving and a steady, ordered way of life. He is proud of paying his own way and standing on his own feet. He is respectful toward authority but not subservient, and he still has faith in the future, even though that faith has diminished somewhat of late.
Now he finds his values challenged on every side. He sees young people —sometimes his own children—turning on with drugs or even turning to revolution (or what he considers revolution). His neighborhoods, formerly bastions of familiar order, are often being transformed by the upheaval in the cities. Says Eugene Schafer, a hardhat ironworker and Democratic candidate for the state assembly from Brooklyn: "I think that I'm a forgotten American because my community is falling apart. The streets are caving in, the sanitation's lousy, the sewer system stinks, industry's gone out of the community, welfare's on the rise."
Cruel Illusions