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The real-life world of the blue collar worker is one of not quite making it, and a keen sense of diminished status. Some of it is portrayed, in crude and exaggerated form, in the much-acclaimed movie Joe. Certainly not all workers are as bigoted as Joe Curran, though his counterpart can be found on any picket line or at the wheel of many a New York City taxi. But his pleasures are real enough—whisky, the bowling alley, a gun collection—and so are his yearnings for a taste of life on the other side of the middle-class line. The blue collar worker wants to take a vacation in some far-off place, but usually cannot. He likes to go out to a restaurant, but seldom does. He spends most of his free time at home, tries to avoid thinking about the job when he is away from it and tends to have a close-knit family life, raising his children according to the strict, old rules. Assistant Labor Secretary Jerome Rosow points out that "the American workingman has lost relative class status with the growth of higher education. All blue collar workers, skilled or not, have been denigrated so badly, so harshly, that their jobs have become a last resort instead of decent, respected careers. Fathers hesitate—and even apologize—for their occupation instead of holding it up as an aspiration for their own sons."
Often the sons have no choice but to follow their fathers into the hated plant. William West, a crane operator in a coil plant at Braddock, Pa., for example, brings home $100 a week, and he sees no way that he can finance a college education for his eight-year-old son. West asks: "What kind of a future does my kid have when you can't even get a job with a high school education?" In some blue collar neighborhoods, the high school dropout rate reaches 30%—the continuation of a cycle that locks the sons into the same working class as their fathers.
Rumbles from the Young
The average age of workers in auto plants has been declining, and often on the less desirable night shifts it is close to 20. The young workers are of the same generation as the students who have turned the universities into battlegrounds. Like college students, they are feisty, ebullient and unwilling to put up with things as they are. As union members, they are an unsettling force, pushing labor leaders to heighten their demands for fear of being voted out of their own jobs. In many instances, young unionists have ousted the old leadership. This year rank-and-file members have rejected a record one out of twelve contracts negotiated by their embarrassed and harassed leaders. In San Francisco last month, the ironworkers won a 30% increase in a one-year contract, a raise of $2.01 an hour. Even so, says their leader Jewel Drake, 56, "the younger leadership is not satisfied. I don't understand what they really want, what it would take to satisfy them."