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Bob Doty looked as though he had just fallen in a flour bin. Stationed above the pulverizing jaws on the big crusher, he picked out the mud, lost drill heads, and other articles that would destroy the machine if they got caught in the mechanical jaws that converted rock into marketable lime dust. Like many workers in southern Indiana's stone belt, he carried a collapsible aluminum cup into which the water boy could pour relief from the hot and dirty work. On one of the boy's passages, Doty accepted his water ration and began to roll a cigarette for himself. As he put tobacco to paper, however, the overseer barked, "You ain't got time to be rolling cigarettes. Buy hard rolls."
The limited industrial culture, low levels of unionization, and, most important, the destruction of the local economy made Bloomington a dream town for a capitalist in search of workers for labor-intensive electronics production. The local population's desperation for work and deference to anyone who could provide it allowed RCA to establish very strict guidelines for employment. "The people that we hired when we started RCA was this nice person's son and daughter," the employment director recalled. "You know, a rather high level of clientele." Without the constraints of federal- or statemandated hiring rules, "you could refuse to hire a person if you didn't like the way they parted their hair. So you had full rein of being very selective." Applicants "were just wild to get a job, and particularly something in industry .... Jobs had not been available. They needed them." When workers lined up at the Graham Hotel for an interview, a position "would be so important to them, they would be so nervous, they would shake like a leaf in the wind." Workers were not concerned about how much a job paid, what they had to do, or what their hours would be; "they just wanted that job and wanted to hold that job." Boys applying for stock-handling work typically arrived in their Sunday suits, and even prospective employees who were "very minimal in social and education standards" would show up impeccably dressed and groomed when they submitted their applications. "It sounds like a fairy tale," she recalled about the applicants' desperation, "but it was that important to them."
Management's only reservation about the formula they had found in Bloomington was the possible influence of the coal miners in the region and their deep commitment to unionization. "Well, for years," reported the personnel manager, "we did not hire in that area where you would have the coal miner's daughter."
In Bloomington, where work for anybody was scarce, underpaid women workers were in abundance. The top of the pay scale for women in Monroe County was $7 .SO a week. When RCA opened, it paid 17.5 cents to 19.5 cents an hour, or $7.00 to $7.80 for a forty-hour week. This scale placed entry-level pay in competition with some of the very best wages available to women in the area. Moreover, rates of pay quickly rose to 23 cents and 25 cents an hour, a rate that made factory work much more financially appealing than any other job for working-class women. This tactic RCA called paying a "community wage"-a system of offering marginally better pay than other blue-collar jobs in the area in order to attract the finest workers. The "community wage" concept also cut the other way. When the Bloomington workers sought raises to bring their rate of pay up to those of other RCA workers in the country after World War II, the company rejected their request because their pay was deemed "appropriate in terms of community and industry." In sum, while offering very valuable and much-needed work to Bloomington women, RCA reaped the real financial bonanza, as the female operators in Camden started at between 40 and 50 cents an hour-up to double what Bloomington women could expect.
pretty similar to amazon today
Several other electrical industries followed RCA to Bloomington. A former engineer for RCA, Sarkes Tarzian, went into business for himself after the war, manufacturing television tuners to supply to the large receiver producers, and eventually he moved into a variety of consumer electronics products and other components. As his shop grew from 900 employees in 1948 to more than 3,000 workers by the 1960s, again most of them women, organizing Tarzian's operation became a perennial goal for Local 1424 and the IBEW International office. Although they got close on several occasions, the union never won a certification election. Mrs. Tarzian was notorious for her extraordinary efforts at keeping the union out of the factory. She promised to build a swimming pool for the employees if they agreed not to vote for the union, and she was known to sit outside of union organizing meetings in an ineffective disguise to take note of the workers who attended.
like elon musk's froyo thing lol
Arguably, the forced regimentation and rigor of the assembly line had the single most profound effect on the workers' sense of their relation with the company. An RCA worker's every motion on the line had been broken down into its smallest elements by a sophisticated version of Taylorism known as the work factor system, developed at RCA Camden and exported to the other shops. The system, based on extensive research designed "to eliminate human judgment in setting output rates," classified the distance any part of a worker's body needed to move, the body part or parts used, the type and degree of manual control involved in each motion, and the weight or resistance encountered in the operation. Each motion segment had been quantified into a "work factor unit" that equaled 1/10,000 of a minute. Using an intricate formula that compensated for the time required for a worker's body part to change directions, the time necessary to synchronize different motions, the degree of visibility of an operation to the worker, the amount of control and dexterity required, and the amount of "mental process" involved, the manager could "objectively" determine the time required to complete any task from values derived from reams of tables without recourse to a stopwatch. The time required for a given movement could vary with the obstacles or cautions involved. All of the work factor calculations for each movement in the assigned job could then be added up to a single aggregate amount of time, or "work process." The assembly of the entire television set consisted of hundreds of separate processes performed by each operative.
Even though the work factor system had supposedly eliminated the need for a stopwatch, the minutes of Local 1424's monthly meetings reveal an obsession with ensuring that each shop steward had one to keep the pace of the line from being pushed above "objective" limits. Stewards had to circulate every hour to time the lines to prevent the company from raising the rate. The former business manager Bob Norris recalled, "If you didn't watch the company, they were constantly pushing that lever"-the one that controlled the speed of the line. If a worker managed to find a shortcut that allowed her to perform a task faster than the time-study engineers had calculated, the experts came in to reevaluate the process. "That was one of the problems we'd have with this work factor study," explained a process engineer, "trying to figure out where'd I goof? How come they can beat that rate so much? So you'd go back in and reanalyze and see what you'd done wrong." The dehumanizing aspect of the system frightened even the time-study engineers. Working there "would kill me, those rates-maybe fifty an hour, seventy an hour, hundred an hour," said a plant engineer. "To do the same thing a hundred times an hour for an eight-hour day would drive me nuts, putting the same parts in, and you just keep going and going and going. Ugh!" And the line stopped for nothing.
Despite high expectations, RCA's presence in Memphis started and ended in labor controversies. After trying and failing to block organizing efforts in Camden and Bloomington, RCA immediately conceded the unionization of the Memphis plant in order to make sure the workers would choose the union of RCA's choice, the International Union of Electrical Workers (the union launched as an anticommunist answer to the UE), rather than risk having both the Memphis and Bloomington assembly plants organized by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. In the advent of a strike at one of the plants, the operations in the other would continue unaffected. As the International president of the IBEW explained in a letter to the International president of the IUE, "The cause of our present problem is, of course, the Company's massive effort to separate the Home Instrument Division for bargaining purposes so that in the future they can whipsaw us against one another to their advantage and to the disadvantage of our collective members." Despite such clarity of vision as to management's intentions, each union baited the other into an ugly jurisdictional dispute that gave the company the upper hand.
damn, brilliant
Little more than two months after the slaying of Dr. King, Virgil Grace, IUE Local 730's black president, penned a manifesto that reflected the new militancy. "This Local Union has, for almost a year and a half," he wrote, "explored every avenue searching for evidence to substantiate the theory that the management of RCA Memphis is even remotely interested in the individual employee, his problems or his welfare." Unable to "uncover even a shred" of evidence to substantiate this idea, the local leadership found management to be "masters of deception'' who "have been weaving tangled webs, trying desperately to thwart the responsible efforts of the IUE Local 730 to prevent our members from being raped of their dignity and pride." The membership had ordered him to tell the company that the "day of reckoning is at hand." He took the company to task for violating not just the spirit of the contract but the fundamental rules of human decency as well:
The days of slavery and all its attendant misery was abolished a century ago. We will not allow RCA to institute it all over again. RCA must realize that our foreman is not our lord and master and the Corporation does not own us body and soul. We have stood by too long and watched the grievance machinery choke up with garbage, which should have been settled without a grievance. We have been content with crumbs, when the whole cake was rightfully ours. We are not convinced [that] the no strike clause in our National Agreement prohibits this Local Union from taking action against a Company who would not stop short of anything in their mad dash to attain the almighty production quota and, in many cases, more .... We do not hold to the theory that a Company can, because of a no strike clause, do anything it wishes without regard for contractual obligation, moral obligations or the basic principles by which all members of society are governed.
In contrast to the swift shutdown in Memphis and the rapid exodus of consumer electronics from Camden, however, Bloomington's television production simply drifted slowly away. "I think the first move was to Tennessee in a very small way," said the RCA worker Elizabeth Shelton in 1979, "but the rumors started as long as twelve years ago that eventually RCA in Bloomington would be reduced to just more or less a shipping point or a final assembly [operation]. And it all happened gradually over a ten-twelve-year period." Although marked by occasional large-scale layoffs, the decline in receivermanufacturing jobs took place over the course of a generation as employment reductions combined with the early retirement of workers to eliminate 7,000 positions between the late 1960s and the mid-1990s. Judy Cross explained, "We had eight thousand people working here and all the chassis went .... [Then] we lost our tuners, we lost our pre-amp, we lost our remote control." Even after the television chassis started arriving from Mexico in the mid-1970s, the Bloomington workers at least performed the tasks of attaching equipment to the core of the set, but then the chassis began arriving in Bloomington with all the components already in place. In sum, according to Sandy Anderson, rather than laying everybody off at once, "they just sort of snuck it out one line at a time." The Bloomington workers were actually more fortunate than many U.S. workers in the consumer electronics industry, for RCA kept some production in the country longer than many of its competitors did.
this is kind of funny