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As wrenching change has overtaken the blue collar worker's neighborhood and home, technology has changed his life on the job—for the worse. The celebrated productivity gains of the 1950s were largely accomplished by the expansion of automation and by breaking down jobs into smaller and smaller functions, enabling the assembly lines to move faster. A great many workers have lost any sense of control over what they are doing and often have to move so fast and steadily on assembly lines or at piecework that there is hardly time even to go to the toilet. The image of Charlie Chaplin, in Modern Times, leaving a plant and turning and twisting an invisible wrench all the way home is less funny than ever. "Do you know what I do?" asks a striker outside G.M.'s assembly plant at Tarrytown, N.Y. "I fix seven bolts. Seven bolts! Day in and day out, the same seven bolts. What do I think about? Raquel Welch."
Often lacking the education to seek better jobs or the money to flee to suburbia, blue collar workers live with nagging fears of muggings, of illness or layoffs at work, and of automation. According to a recent survey by the University of Michigan, one-half of all industrial workers worry continually about their job security, and one-quarter are concerned about their safety; 14,000 were killed in on-the-job accidents last year, more than the number of U.S. servicemen who died in Viet Nam in 1969. Fully 28% have no medical coverage, 38% no life insurance and 39% no pension beyond Social Security.
The affluent society and a rising standard of living are cruel illusions to most blue collar workers. They are incensed by the charge that they have caused inflation; in fact, they are its chief victims. The average weekly wage of factory hands and clerks rose from $95 five years ago to $121 in September. But in real purchasing power, adjusted for inflation, it has actually declined (see chart page 72). Over the last decade, according to the Labor Department, the financial needs of a family with growing children have risen by 61%. In the same years, the average earnings of skilled workers have increased only 41%, compared with 64% for blacks as a group and 61% for executives. "The blue collar worker has seen the smart guy and the poor guy get theirs and has been wondering what was happening to him," says Economist Robert Nathan. "Now he is beginning to catch on." He has learned that those who push and speak up get attention and results.
Blue collar anger has burst out this year in the worst epidemic of strikes since just after World War II, and in the form of hardhat riots in New York City, St. Louis and elsewhere. This year postal employees have gone on strike for the first time in history, city workers have stomped off the job in Cincinnati, and tugboat crewmen and gravediggers have struck in New York. Municipal employees in San Francisco and Atlanta, rubber workers in Akron, and teamsters across the country—all have walked out. In this year's first nine months, the U.S. lost 41.5 million man-days through strikes, up 32% from the equivalent period last year.