The Paradox of Labor in Reality TV

While hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost their jobs and are looking for work due to the recession, the one place that full employment still exists is on reality TV. Whether reality performers are running a beauty salon in Jerseylicious, or cutting trees in the Pacific Northwest in Ax Men, there is such a diversity of workplaces depicted on reality television it would be easy to think that the working class, instead of being invisible, has become the class that everyone aspires to join.

In addition, the labor process itself is often the star of the show. As Heather Hendershot has observed labor is very often the subject of reality television , whether contestants are designing and making dresses in Project Runway, or coming up with business strategies on Donald Trump’s The Apprentice.  And, as Nick Couldry has argued, these reality shows normalize a system in which citizens “submit to surveillance and external direction” while at the same time accepting “the fragility and impermanence of the opportunities it provides.” The irony of labor becoming spectacle at a time when workers struggle daily to remain employed would be almost comic if it were not for the insidious way that these shows obscure real power relations under the guise of entertainment.

While many reality shows feature some kind of labor, the shows that are most explicitly about the white, male working class are the shows produced by one man: Thom Beers. He has built an empire of reality shows about dangerous, dirty, and adrenaline pumping workplaces, including Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, and Coal.  Thom Beer productions include more than a dozen programs on nine different networks, all with an audience of a prime demographic: young men ages 18-24. According to The New York Times  “[Beers] is the unchallenged king of reality television variously known as ‘macho TV’ or ‘testoster-reality’ that has swept across cable channels like a ratings-driven wildfire.” And according to Beers, he is successful because viewers are tired of customary reality programming fare: “Audiences are asking for something that’s real. They want to watch real people, having real life experiences, facing true challenges. . . . And that’s what we give them: real heroes from real life.”

Though the subject of nearly everything Beers produces is hard labor, the camera always highlights the workers’ individual heroic efforts rather than suggesting any need for collective action—despite the depiction of harsh working conditions, long hours, and abusive bosses.  Nonetheless, some cultural critics like Pepi Leistyna see a positive side to some of this work-centric programming. Shows like The Deadliest Catch and American Chopper seem to break with stereotypes and show workers doing dangerous but fulfilling jobs. But Leistyna also points out that these shows miss many opportunities to talk about survival within current labor conditions, flat incomes, and the loss of job security.

To take a more specific case, last year Thom Beers brought a new series, Coal, to Spike TV, almost a year to the date after the disaster at the Upper Branch mine killed 29 miners and raised awareness of the serious safety issues at the Massey Energy owned mine. Despite the Upper Branch mine tragedy, Spike TV’s programming department rushed the production of the series because of its perceived appeal to young male viewers. And though the show is not advertainment in the way that many series are with corporate logos strategically placed on props and decorations, it has brought notoriety to the Canadian-owned Cobalt mine. Like the CBS reality series Undercover Boss, even when corporate management is shown to be out of touch with the lives and problems of their workers, companies still profit by the exposure generated by a reality series. Cobalt’s website advertises the show and uses it to encourage people to apply for jobs with the company.

Coal is misleading in its representation of mining. An increasingly small percentage of coal mining is actually done with the pillar and drill method that is depicted.  Instead, the majority of coal mining now involves the environmentally destructive mountain top mining seen in the recent documentary Coal Country.  In addition, as Good Magazine has shown, from 1985 to 2009 underground mining lost 50,000 jobs while coal production has increased by 20%. The miners in Coal are almost a nostalgic reminder of a kind of labor that may soon be extinct.

Part of the paradox of labor in reality TV is the unfair working conditions that are experienced by people who stage, shoot, and edit the shows created by Original Productions. While Thom Beers takes pride in the fact that in order to shoot in the mine, ten videographers trained for 80 hours and were certified as apprentice coal miners, he should also be concerned about the recent protest by International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) outside his Burbank offices for the exploitation of workers on another show, 1000 Ways to Die.  Earlier this spring, when twenty-five workers decided to sign cards to join the union, they were promptly fired and production was shut down on that series for more than a week.

This protests highlights the irony that in order to offer a well-produced version of reality, Beers and his ilk need dozens of workers who are able to produce the shoots, record and edit the footage, and do the myriad of other jobs needed to produce the “manipulated authenticity” that we expect from reality television. The television industry once had one of the highest percentages of unionized workers, who had the power to bring production to a halt during negotiations. But this strength had diminished with the increase of “runaway productions”—shows produced in Canada and elsewhere—as well as from other changes in the industry.

IATSE has made more inroads on shows that are produced on a lot or fixed location (such as recent agreements with Fremantle with regard to American Idol), but the adventuresome shooting crews on the high seas off Alaska or coal mines of West Virginia are harder to organize. Perhaps the ultimate paradox of labor in reality TV is that the workers are producing shows that normalize and legitimize their own lack of power over their working conditions.

Susan Ryan

Susan Ryan is Associate professor of Communication at The College of New Jersey. She recently completed work as a consulting producer on a documentary about the Teamsters for HBO.

On pasties, poshness and petrol: The new language of class in the UK

On both sides of the Atlantic we have become used to the deployment of proxies for class in political language, but in the UK just recently this has taken a new turn with the political scandal that is ‘Pastygate.’ Now this isn’t a scandal to rival the break-in at the Watergate building, nor is it one to bring down the UK government. Pastygate refers to decision taken by the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne to impose Value Added Tax (VAT) on Cornish Pasties when they are heated above ambient room temperature. I know what you are thinking: Sherry has uploaded the wrong blog this week.  But bear with me.

The uproar around Pastygate centred on the fact that this was widely seen as another attack on the working class, insofar as it is they who tend to buy the humble warmed pasty. With VAT running at 20% this was an inflation-busting rise on a working-class fast food staple.  Politicians of left and right have been falling over themselves to be seen eating pasties in the last month, or struggling to remember when they last consumed one, in order to demonstrate their common touch.

At the same time, the budget also saw a widely criticised cut in the top rate of income tax. The Treasury viewed this measure as simply tidying up tax anomalies, but many have read it as part of a bigger narrative of a government of the elite out of touch with ordinary people. Taken together the two tax moves have been woven in to an emerging story that has at its heart class, which we will pick up later.

But first, petrol! British petrol tanker truck drivers have balloted for industrial action over their conditions of service, health and safety fears, and concern over a race to the bottom in terms of wages.  The big oil companies have outsourced the delivery of fuel to gas stations, and the competitive market has seen a wide deterioration in working conditions. Government ministers, while condemning the looming strikes, urged motorists to fill up their tanks while they had the chance, and one even suggested filling up jerry cans to store in the garage.  Roundly condemned by the fire service and the media, the minister involved was portrayed as elitist and out of touch, in part because of the assumption that everyone in Britain would have a garage. The advice caused a fuel shortage as the pumps ran dry as well as a run on jerry cans.

The cumulative effect of these and other stories – apart from the humorous relief it has given to people struggling through a double dip recession and dire unemployment figures – has been a sense that this is a government run by an out of touch elite. Indeed, one of Prime Minister David Cameron’s own party rounded on him and the Chancellor just last week. Maverick Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Nadine Dorries described both Cameron and Chancellor Osborne as “Two arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of a pint of milk” with “no remorse, no contrition and no passion to want to understand the lives of others, and that is their real crime.”

George Gideon Oliver Osborne used to be just Gideon Oliver.  He describes his decision to change his name to George at age 13 as “his one act of rebellion.”  Osborne is the son of a baronet and Felicity Alexandra Loxton-Peacock. A multimillionaire, Osborne, like Cameron, enjoyed an elite education at private school followed by Oxford University, where both enrolled in the Bullingdon Club, an elite university dining club founded over 200 years ago. Membership elections are held twice a year. Successful new members are visited in their rooms and expected to consume the contents of an entire tin of Colman’s powdered English Mustard.  The rooms are then “trashed” as a symbol of their election. Club members dress in sky blue and ivory colored tailcoats, the whole ensemble costing in excess of $5700. A now infamous picture shows Cameron and other members of the club posing on the steps of a grand building at Oxford.  This image reemerges from time to time and has haunted “Dave” as an unwelcome reminder of his far from ordinary background.

At the beginning of his premiership, Cameron notably said that “we were all in this together,” referring to the collective struggle to endure the greatest peacetime recession in living memory. Deliberately invoking the spirit of the Blitz, he attempted to conjure up a society suffering in equal measure – one with a degree of classlessness. In contrast, the furor over pasties, petrol, and poshness has popularized an image of a group of wealthy elites waging a class war on those below them. The effect, I think, has been – like 1 percent versus the 99 percent slogan of the Occupy Movement in the U.S. — to separate off the elite from an admittedly very diverse mass  – the middle and working class and the unemployed who perhaps share little in common apart from not being part of this uber-elite. And despite Cameron’s effort to invoke classlessness, the language of class has re-emerged in popular discourse, whether it refers to the upper class or to the working and middle classes who perhaps see themselves as having more in common than has been assumed for decade or more.

This new class discourse is driven by the cumulative effect of cuts in government spending, which are causing a huge retrenchment in all kinds of state services provided by central and local government.  While the impact has already been profound, conservative estimates suggest that so far we have experienced just 10% of the full cuts, meaning many more jobs in the public sector as well as numerous services are still to be lost over the next few years. Crucially, this impact is being felt by working and middle class families – either directly in terms of  lost jobs or in the form of public services once assumed to be safe.

At the same time, because of the economic situation, being working class is no longer a pariah state. Equally important, serious questions are being raised about growing and profound income inequality in the UK. In the local elections held at the beginning of May the Conservatives did very badly and commentators in part explained this through the government being viewed as out of touch by the electorate. While pasties aren’t on the menu of the Bullingdon club it seems we are (almost) all pasty eaters now!

Tim Strangleman

Tim Strangleman is a Sociologist at the University of Kent and co-author of the  textbook, Work and Society: Sociological Approaches, Themes and Methods.

Talking with the Press about the Working Class

Over the last three months, I have done interviews with and provided assistance to dozens of national and international reporters about various working-class issues, including the American Dream, manufacturing, education, the recession, displaced workers, local and international trade, and, of course, white working-class voting patterns.  A few weeks ago, George Packer, staff reporter for The New Yorker, was a visiting scholar at the Center for Working-Class Studies, doing research on book project, and he spoke as part of our annual lecture series. So, obviously, I have been thinking a lot about journalists and reporting on the working class.

Packer titled his lecture, Do Journalist Care About the Working Class? His response was basically, “No!” He argued that the American public is more concerned about celebrity and success stories that often reinforce the American Dream.  While job loss affects people of all classes these days, readers seem more interested in stories about hedge fund managers losing half their fortune than in profiles of manufacturing or service workers losing their jobs.  In part, these attitudes reflect the confusion most Americans have about class.   When asked the open-ended question, “what class do you belong to,” most Americans say they are middle class.  But if given four options — lower, working, middle, and upper class — about 45% choose working class, and about the same percentage identify themselves as middle class.

Packer also points out that hard-nosed, urban, ethnic, and street-smart reporters like Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko, or Mike Barnacle, many of whom had working-class roots, have been replaced by metro journalists, most with college degrees, who identify themselves as professionals and spend most of their time with people like themselves. Packer quotes Pulitizer Prize winning columnist, Connie Schultz, who has noted that, especially in big cities, reporters have increasingly become privileged by their professional education, social connections, and access to internships and have become a “self-perpetuating” class. As a result, journalists don’t have contacts among the working class or much sense of working-class life and culture. Add to this unsympathetic editors who are more interested in selling upscale readership to advertisers, and journalists these days have natural hesitancy to pursue working-class stories. Put differently, as I heard as a panelist at a Society of Professional Journalists Conference say, there is a high degree of self-censorship among journalists themselves.

In the end, Packer suggested that the recession and the centrality of white working-class voting in electoral politics have made the working class more interesting to some newspapers. I can attest to that, but if my recent interviews are any indication, reporters are generally confused about who is working class, and they don’t understand the political and economic views of the working class.

Most journalists covering electoral politics define the working class as those without a college education. That definition is widely used, not only by reporters but also by some scholars and political analysts, in part because it’s easy to measure. I caution reporters that if they use this definition, then the working class seems to be shrinking as more people attend college.  While some commentators have suggested that this shift makes the working class less important politically, I argue that this is simply a statistical shift.  These days, many working-class people have at least some college education, and the working class continues to matter in American politics. In part because of that, I try to help journalists understand why class is not just a matter of education.  It also has to do with occupation, income, wealth, and – among the hardest aspects to measure – culture.

At the same time, I remind reporters that class is not the only identity that might affect how people view political candidates and issues.  For example, white working-class men might well view economic and policy issues differently from white working-class women or black working-class men. I also try to help journalists understand that the working-class varies politically by region and state, in part because other issues, like race and types of employment, shape working-class cultures.  When we add religious affiliations and social values, things become even more complicated, but that’s the point.  I want to encourage reporters to get beyond their assumptions and stereotypes when they write about working-class voters and issues.

Journalists often ask me to explain why the working class supports Republicans, a pattern that seems to go against their own economic interests. It’s true that a majority of white working-class voters has only supported a Democrat in a presidential election once in the last 50 years, voting for Johnson in 1964, so this isn’t a new phenomenon.  We can’t even tie it to the so-called “Reagan Democrats” of the 1980s. A number of historians and political scientists have studied this trend, but rather than focus on theories about why the working class votes for Republicans, I point out that the trend is shifting. White working-class support for Republicans has been dropping in the northeast, the Great Lakes region, and the far west, and it will probably drop further  — because of Republican policy formulations.  For example, Republicans want to cut the deficit by slashing entitlements, but many working-class voters believe that such cuts would have a disproportionate impact on them.  While the Republicans put down the Occupy movement, many in the working class, both conservatives and liberals, support its economic and social populism and agree with its claims about injustice, unfairness, and inequality.

Packer is right, both that today’s journalists don’t really understand the working class and that the economy and the election mean that reporters will have to cover the working class anyway.   One of the goals of the Center for Working-Class Studies is to help journalists do a better job of telling working-class stories.  I think we’ve had some influence, largely because we take the time to do more than answer a few questions.  We meet with reporters, help them make contact with other sources, take them around Youngstown, and discuss what they hear from area workers and what the statistics about employment, class identity, and political perspectives really mean.

We all complain about and critique media coverage of class issues.  If we want the media to do a better job, more of us need to be willing to talk with journalists. When the phone rings and reporter asks you to comment on how the recession is affecting the working class, or why white working-class people support certain candidates, or how working-class students will be affected by interest rates on college loans, don’t duck.  Take the time to not only answer the question but also, when necessary, challenge the reporter’s assumptions and help him or her understand the working class more fully.  Think of it as teachable moment.

John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

Calling All Stooges: Slapstick and the Working Class

The Farrelly brothers’ new film version of The Three Stooges opened in theaters 10 days ago to thumps and slaps by the critics. Many of the critics seem to really like the pseudo-violence, the bonky sound effects, and the topical stupidity of The Three Stooges, and they hoped that the movie would deliver satisfying Stoogification to hardcore fans everywhere.

With the return of the Stooges, it is worth revisiting a great, but largely forgotten example of television slapstick.  The ABC series about two slapdash carpenters, I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster, debuted fifty years ago, in September of 1962, and, after a rough start it won its time slot against another very popular show, Route 66. Sadly, it was canceled after one season, but happily, this spring, we can now enjoy the series on a beautifully curated 3-DVD set from Jim Benson, host of the blog and radio show TVTimeMachine.

I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster features two carpenters who are also best friends: a bachelor named Arch Fenster (Marty Ingels), and his married friend, Harry Dickens (John Astin). At least half of the scenes take place at work, where the two friends compete for promotions, run into doors, and fall into vats of concrete. Most of the rest is set at the home of Dickens and his pretty wife Kate (Emmaline Henry), where the duo try to install a garbage disposal, patch holes in the drywall, and fix the kitchen cabinets, usually unsuccessfully.

The home remodeling theme is based on creator and producer Leonard Stern’s experience with his own house, when carpenters accidentally bricked a ladder inside the chimney. Stern was a long-time staff writer for The Jackie Gleason Show and, later, The Honeymooners. He also won an Emmy for writing on The Phil Silvers Show. By 1960 he was ready to strike out on his own.

The show was originally called The Workers, but ABC executives made Stern change it, afraid that if it went into daily syndication it might be called “The Daily Worker.” It is remarkable indeed that Stern was able to get a show featuring working-class characters on television in the 1960s. In the early days of television (1948-1956) there were a handful of working-class families featured in network sitcoms (The Life of Riley, I Remember Mama, The Goldbergs, Life with Luigi, The Honeymooners and Duffy’s Tavern), but by the late 1950s most sitcoms featured suburban families who were decidedly middle class.

Stern’s carpenter comedy earned him the best critical reviews of his career. Life magazine declared it a “surprise success” about “of all people—carpenters.” After one season, though, I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster was just starting to beat out its time slot competition.  The TV critic Harvey Pack loved the show, and campaigned for it to be saved.  In the end it was canceled, but it retained many loyal fans.

It is not news to readers of this blog that workers, and especially working men, almost always look stupid, silly, fat, bumbling, poorly dressed, and unappealing on network television—no matter what era is under discussion. No one has argued this more forcefully than Pepi Leistyna, whose scathing documentary, Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class, shows how cartoonish and buffoonish the representations of working-class TV characters have been, from riveter Chester A. Riley, bus driver Ralph Kramden, sewer worker Ed Norton, dock worker Archie Bunker, to nuclear plant worker Homer Simpson.

Dickens and Fenster fit the pattern. In the pilot episode, Fenster makes some carpentry errors that cause Dickens to run into a door and fall onto his backside. In an episode called “The Joke,” Dickens takes off his safety hat and two heavy items fall on his head. Fenster is also clumsy and hapless. He’s a professional carpenter, but somehow he can’t fix Mrs. Dickens’s garbage disposal or the magnet on her kitchen cupboards.

But the Class Dismissed critique overlooks the fact that many of these working-class shows, came from the slapstick or “burlesque” comedy tradition that has its roots in working-class culture. Burlesque comedy started in seedy strip joints in the 1920s as filler between the strip acts. It was often performed by a comedy team, a “straight man” and a “second banana,” who took turns ridiculing each other and/or the audience. Burlesque humor was full of sexual innuendo, malapropisms, insults, and loads of physical comedy.

When burlesque migrated to television in the 1950s, it continued the tradition of lampooning working-class characters.  Television comedies like Abbott and Costello, Amos n Andy, The Honeymooners, and The Phil Silvers Show featured stock lowbrow characters (gangsters, hoodlums, con-men, spiritualists, gypsies, corrupt landlords, intimidating bosses, pesky in-laws, and corrupt politicians), lowbrow activities (horse racing, boxing, card playing, counterfeiting, contests, insurance schemes, peddling phony medical cures and hypnotism), and lowbrow settings (bars, taverns, pool halls, fraternal lodges, soda shops, pizza joints, urban apartments, diners, and nightclubs). These shows were the polar opposite of those sweet suburban sitcoms where the conflicts were usually resolved when Ward Cleaver doled out a minor punishment to the “Beave.”

I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster followed many of the conventions of lowbrow television comedy, but it also had some important differences that made the show interesting. For one thing, Fenster and Dickens dressed in a way that hinted at a subtle class difference between the two men. Arch Fenster always wore overalls loaded down with tools, while Dickens often wore a jaunty army jacket over a black turtleneck. Dickens was more uptight, and, hence, the straight man. He dressed and acted more “middle class.” Ironically, or, perhaps, pointedly, he was usually the one to buckle under pressure. When he was trying to get the job of foreman, he didn’t have the courage to ask his boss. Fenster had to do it for him. In a later episode, when Dickens was selected to read for a television commercial, he fainted, and Fenster had to take over for him, again. Most of the time, the “middle class” Dickens had to be rescued by the more “working class” Fenster, and, thus it was usually the “middle class” Dickens who was the biggest butt of the jokes.

The truth is that many television shows featuring working-class figures set them against some kind of authority—a boss, a landlord, or a friend with more power and prestige. The humor employed by I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster, and even today in the Farrelly brothers’ updated Three Stooges, has its roots in the American immigrant, turn-of-the-last-century working class. Peter Farrelly called the three stooges “working-class, blue collar, down-on-their-luck guys.” Slapstick humor is working-class humor. As Rob King has argued in his history of the Keystone Film Company, slapstick can reduce “authority to absurdity.”

Of course, in real life the working class today is getting walloped as never before in U.S. history, and it is anything but funny. Easing the pain of the cuts and bruises from the beating the working class is taking in our current culture will be more difficult, to be sure. But if you want to travel back in time to a moment of possibility when the working class could make fun of the middle class, if you want to laugh your tushie off like my eight year old son and I did when we were watching I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster, order the three DVD set. These crazy carpenters and their critique of authority have offered me a few good belly laughs and some genuine relief from the depressing political and economic roller coaster that is our current moment.

Or, as Curly once said: “Is this work in competent hands?” “Coitainly—we’re all incompetent!”

Kathy M. Newman

Work and Taxes

If I earned more than a million dollars a year, I would be for the Buffett Rule – not for the reasons that famous billionaires like Warren Buffett and George Soros are for it: because it’s just fair.  I’d be for it because in the long run it would save me money by distracting the public from seeing the roots of class warfare as it is fought in the U.S. Tax Code.

The Buffett Rule says simply that anyone who earns more than $1 million a year should pay at least 30% of their income in federal income taxes.  Legislation to institute this rule is supposed to be voted on this week in the U.S. Senate, sponsored by Democrats and ballyhooed by the Obama Administration.  It won’t pass the House, of course, so it won’t actually affect anyone’s taxes, but it’s a helluva good campaign talisman for Obama and Democrats to run on.

The point of the Buffett Rule is to avoid the kind of obvious inequity that Warren Buffett pointed to in his August New York Times op-ed:  In 2010 Buffett, the second richest man in the world, paid only about 17% of his income in federal taxes (income and payroll taxes) while the 20 people who work directly for him paid an average of 36% of their much smaller incomes.

The Buffett Rule was not devised by Buffett, but by the Obama Administration.  And the first thing that should be noted is that even at 30%, Buffett and other millionaires will still be paying less than the 20 people who work for Buffett, including his now-famous secretary.  More importantly, however, Buffett was clear about why he and other investors paid lower effective tax rates than most workers: income that you do not work for is taxed at a lower rate than income you do work for.

Why this isn’t a scandal in a country that supposedly prides itself on its “hard-working people” is a mystery to me.  If you get your money by investing in stocks and bonds, your income is taxed at a 15% rate because it is unearned.  What’s more, you pay nothing in payroll taxes (i.e., nothing for Social Security and Medicare) because you’re not on anybody’s payroll.

Buffett himself actually still works and draws a salary, and on that part of his income he pays a top rate of 35% and regular payroll taxes on the first $110,000 of that income. But the vast majority of his income comes from investments – capital gains and dividends – and on that part he pays only 15% and no payroll taxes.  Here’s how Buffett explains it: “If you make money with money . . . your percentage may [even] be a bit lower than mine.  But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine – most likely by a lot.”

Fair shares and percentages aside, the U.S. Tax Code literally says that investors are more valuable than workers, and therefore, should be taxed less. Or it says that investors need more encouragement to invest than workers need to work.  In any case, our tax code fairly screams that only losers and suckers work for a living.

The obvious remedy to this moral abomination is to tax capital gains and dividends (called “unearned income”) the same as wages and salaries (called “earned income”) on the principle that you should not be taxed at a higher rate for earning your income.  That’s how it was after Ronald Reagan signed the 1986 tax reform law, and for most of our history before that.  It was under Presidents Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II that investor privilege was installed in our tax code.  (See the Citizens for Tax Justice’s recent report, “Policy Options to Raise Revenue.”)

Taxing capital and labor income at equal rates would produce much more revenue for the government: $53 billion a year, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, while the Buffett Rule would raise only $17 billion (with other estimates being as low as $5 billion).  You can see why as a greedy, but rational millionaire I’d embrace the so-called Buffett Rule in order to shift the focus away from the basic class bias of our tax code.

There is a theory behind privileging investors by taxing them less.  Namely, investors are “job creators,” and any additional taxes on them will lead to less investment and, thus, slower economic growth, fewer jobs, and even higher unemployment than we have now.  I’ve critiqued this theory before, giving it some credence when it was initially articulated in the 1970s, but showing how it is clearly irrelevant today because investment lags not for lack of money (of which investors have plenty), but for lack of consumer demand that would give investors a reason to invest.  But that’s just me.  I’m not one of the greatest investors of all time.  Here’s what that guy said in his August op-ed:

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher . . . . .   According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.  I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

There are a lot better rules to derive from Buffett’s puckish op-ed than the one the Democrats are using to embarrass Mitt Romney, whose effective tax rate of 14% is even lower than Buffett’s.  Taxing all income at the same graduated rates, for example, would be both simpler and fairer.

While I was writing this post, the Obama-Biden campaign sent me an e-mail asking that I sign a petition supporting the Buffett Rule.  I signed it because Obama’s tax policy is way better than Republicans’ proposed tax cuts for the wealthy.  But the at-least-30%-for-millionaires is a political gimmick without principle, and it leaves in place a tax code that dishonors work and the people who do it.

Jack Metzgar

Chicago Working-Class Studies

“Which Side Are You On?”: The Life and Travels of a Working-Class Song

Why do certain songs get under our skin?  How is it that they seem to express the way we are feeling or speak to the times we are living in?   The old labor anthem “Which Side Are You On?” has been such a song for me.  I’ve been playing it, singing it, and listening for new versions, ever since I first heard Florence Reese perform it in Barbara Kopples’ documentary film Harlan County USA (1976).

According to John Steinbeck, in his introduction to Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People, “The songs of the working people have always been their sharpest statement and the one statement which cannot be destroyed. . . .  You can learn more about people by listening to their songs than in any other way, for into the songs go all the hopes and hurts, the angers, fears, the wants and aspirations.”

Florence Reese, a thirty-year-old miner’s wife in Eastern Kentucky, wrote “Which Side Are You On?” in the midst of the coal wars of the early 1930s.   Sung to the traditional tune of “Lay the Lily Low,” it spoke of the “good news” of the union, the violence of the gun thugs, the hardships for workers and families, and the necessity of deciding “which side are you on.”  Since then the song has traveled, as good struggle songs will, from one place and time to another, picking up new verses as well as different vocal accents and musical styles, while the moral challenge posed in the chorus has remained unchanged.

According to George Ella Lyon’s beautiful picture book Which Side Are You On?  The Story of a Song (2011) Reese’s original verses included:

Come all of you poor workers
Good news to you I’ll tell
Of how that good old union
Has come in here to dwell
Which side are you on?

If you go to Harlan County
There is no neutral there
You’ll either be a union man
Or a thug for J.H. Blair

They say they have to guard us
To educate their child
Their children live in luxury
Our children almost wild

Gentlemen, can you stand it?
Oh, tell me how you can
Will you be a lousy scab
Or will you be a man?

My daddy was a miner
He’s now in the air and sun
He’ll be with you fellow workers
Till every battle’s won

The verse which evokes extreme class division in the image of the children suggests that Reese wrote as a mother as well as a union supporter, while the verse about her father indicates she wrote also as a daughter, within a proud family tradition.  (To be “in the air and sun” implied to be blacklisted and therefore unable to work underground in the mines.)

The story goes that Reese wrote her song on the back of a wall calendar while her husband Sam, an organizer for the National Miners Union (NMU) was on the run from Sheriff Blair’s deputies.  Of her motivation for it, she has said: “Some people say, ‘I don’t take sides—I’m neutral.’ There’s no such thing as neutral.   You have to be on one side or the other.  In Harlan Country there wasn’t no neutral.  If you wasn’t a gun thug, you was a union man.  You had to be.”

With its message of resistance and hope, the song quickly became a picket-line standard.  As Jim Garland, another songwriter-organizer from that 1931-32 strike and lockout in “Bloody Harlan,” explains: “In the course of such fights, songs expressed people’s feelings in a manner that allowed them to stand together. . . .  Rather than walking up to a gun thug and saying, ‘You’re a bastard,’ which might have resulted in a shooting, we could express our anger much more easily in unison with song lyrics.”

“Which Side Are You On?” began its travels out of Kentucky when Garland and his cousin Aunt Molly Jackson took the song to New York City where they held concerts to raise funds for the striking miners and their starving families.   Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie learned it and included it in performances of the Almanac Singers in the early 1940s, singing Reese’s original lyrics.

The first rewriting of the song I have discovered occurred when Pete Seeger adapted it as a recruiting tool for another “NMU,” the National Maritime Union, which was supported in 1947 by the Peoples’ Music collective.   Seeger’s version adds some critical humor to the call for solidarity:

The men who hate our union’
They say we dodged the draft
Not one of those damn liars
Knows his forward from his aft.

Chorus

So all nonunion seamen
Who listen to my song
Unite with us, fight side by side
And make our union strong.

Chorus

Like Reese, Seeger includes verses that point to a family legacy of work and struggle:

My daddy was a seaman
And I’m a seaman too
But poor old daddy sailed the seas
Without the NMU

Chorus

In days before the union
I heard my daddy say
‘Twas hardtack for your breakfast
And peanuts for your pay.

Chorus

In the 1960s, the song was picked up again and repurposed for the Civil Rights movement.   The Freedom Singers, formed in 1962 by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, rewrote everything but the chorus to address the local struggle in Fulton County, Georgia.   In gospel style, with preacher-like lead vocals and choral responses, they sang:

Oh tell me Mayor Allen
Where is your heart?
We are children of
The same almighty God.

Chorus

Come all you negro people
Lift up your voices and sing
Will you join the Ku Klux Klan
Or Martin Luther King?

Reese herself, now in her 70s, took the song to the Brookside (KY) strike of 1972 – 73, where she was filmed for the first time singing it in Kopples’ award-winning film.  After listening to the multi-voiced versions of the Almanac Singers and Freedom Singers, Reese’s quavering a capella rendering at a hushed union rally is powerful [You Tube link].  Whereas in 1932 — before New Deal legislation secured the right to organize — the miners lost their fight and the union was driven from the coalfields, the Brookside strike ended in a UMWA victory in which local women played a leading role.

Meanwhile, across the pond, Londoner Billy Bragg rewrote the song to address the bitter British Miners’ Strike of the mid-1980s and Margaret Thatcher’s relentless attack on labor rights.   Bragg performed his song at rallies and on picket lines, in punk-folk style with jagged electric guitar accompanying his broad cockney vocals [YouTube link]:

It’s hard to explain to a crying child
Why her Daddy can’t go back
So the family suffer, but it hurts me more
To hear a scab say “Sod you, Jack”

Chorus

I’m bound to follow my conscience
And do whatever I can
But it’ll take much more than the union law
To knock the fight out of a working man

Many other musicians have performed Reese’s original lyrics, reinterpreting them by shifting tonalities and tempos: Jamestown (NY)-raised Natalie Merchant has produced an elegiac soft-folk rendering and Boston’s the Dropkick Murphys an angry post-punk performance, while Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine sings a version with elements of Merchant’s pacing and the Murphys’ intensity.  There’s even a karaoke version by the PPK Band!

The most recent and, to my ears, compelling rewriting of “Which Side Are You On?” comes from Ani DiFranco on her 2012 CD of the same name.  She records a version first performed in 2009 at Pete Seeger’s 90^th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden.   The six-minute track opens with a Seeger banjo solo, but after that homage to the song’s origins, it quickly gathers momentum and instruments, including Occupy-style drumming, as it addresses the current fight-back against corporate greed, political corruption, environmental destruction, and endless war.   If the song lacks the sharp class-consciousness of Reese’s original verses, it certainly gains in breadth of political critique and rousing energy.  And in some verses it re-genders the song, citing a different family legacy:

my mother was a feminist
she taught me to see
that the road to ruin is paved
with patriarchy

so, let the way of the women
guide democracy
from plunder and pollution
let mother earth be free

There is no space here to trace more of the song’s musical and political border-crossings — a friend heard it recently during an NPR report on rallies against the Greek government’s austerity measures.   Most of the versions mentioned above can be heard on iTunes and/or YouTube.  So what is it about the words and tune of “Which Side Are You On?”— written in a Kentucky coal camp at a time of mass poverty and class violence—that allows it to speak in so many different accents and contexts about the key contradictions of our time?

Nick Coles

Nick Coles teaches working-class literature at the University of Pittsburgh.  He is the president of the Working-Class Studies Association.

This American Strife: What Happened To The Working Class In The Mike Daisey Retraction?

On March 18, the popular public-radio program This American Life issued an unprecedented retraction of the now-infamous episode in which performer Mike Daisey recounts his supposedly firsthand experiences of exploitative labor practices at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China that produces Apple products.  The issue was not that Daisey had misrepresented the company’s labor practices.  Instead, the concern was Daisey’s misrepresentation of his interactions with Foxconn workers.  A full explanation of the inconsistencies in Daisey’s story and the subsequent fallout can be found in the retraction itself, in which both Daisey and TAL host Ira Glass suggest that Daisey’s theatrical untruths serve a broader existential truth, namely that Apple conceals from view the kinds of inhumane and unjust employment practices to which Daisey supposedly gives a human face.  The situation raises several issues related to the ethical standards of theater and journalism, particularly how these standards apply to depictions of the working class.

Public radiophiles have been buzzing for weeks with the revelation of these fabrications, but what has gone largely overlooked and uncommented on, despite write-ups from outlets as diverse as Slate, Entertainment Weekly, and The Washington Post, is how Daisey’s own business practices— the concealment of fact, the smoothing over of complexity in order to form a sleek, streamlined narrative— mirror those of the company whose exploitation he claims to have “outed.”  No doubt Apple understands the centrality of narrative to its marketing success more thoroughly and successfully than any other contemporary corporation.  Suppressing the unpleasant reality of its production practices, Apple peddles a lineup of sleek, minimalist products expressive of an existential “truth” for the consumers who buy them.  We buy iPhones, in other words, not because they have the fastest download speed or the largest screen of any phone on the market— in fact the iPhone remains stunningly behind in both of these categories— but because Apple has wrapped the phone, like all its products, in a narrative of which we want to be a part, a narrative of youth, fashionability, and cleanliness.  (It is one of the damning ironies of the company that one of the adjectives most often used to describe its products, assembled by workers who often work 24-hour shifts in dust-choked factories, is “clean.”)

While Apple conceals its outsourcing of exploitative working conditions in order for its consumers to preserve an image of themselves as socially-conscious global citizens, Daisey conceals actual working conditions in China in order to create the “clean,” streamlined narrative that we, as theatergoers and consumers, want to hear.  Daisey’s stage-performance works not because it peddles an objective glimpse behind the curtain of Apple’s business practices, but because it sells us the story of our lives that we desire, a narrative of ourselves as committed, well-meaning liberals.  Daisey’s story does implicate us in a system of social and economic exploitation, but its ultimate effect is to numb us to this complicity by reassuring us that we somehow transcend this exploitation simply by knowing about and acknowledging it.

In this respect, Daisey’s show is the theater version of the “slacktivism” that so often clutters our News Feeds with links to “KONY 2012” or Mother Jones graphs of American income distribution.  This kind of slacktivism may indeed be consciousness-raising, but it gives us a false sense that we are taking real action toward addressing the root causes of the problems these links point to.  Not only should we acknowledge the limitations of working-class slacktivism, we should also endeavor toward action in the real world of protests, picket lines, and legislation.  It is not enough, in other words, to post links in support of the working class, especially if we’re doing it using products, including the MacBook on which I write this, that undermine the sentiment behind those links; from the beginning, this kind of protest participates in the very practices it condemns.  And this is the genius of Daisey’s show, that it allows us to feel outraged— and self-righteous and angry and indignant and betrayed— but has the added bonus of permitting us to take no real action against the source of our outrage.

This is not to say that conditions at Foxconn, or at any other factory in China, are more pleasant than Daisey makes them out to be.  Workers, to cite an example from Apple’s own supplier standards, are often pressured to work 60-hour weeks on “sped-up” assembly lines at wages low enough to ensure a marginal profit for the corporations that employ them.  Between January and November 2010, a wave of suicides at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen prompted the company to install suicide-prevention netting around its buildings after 14 workers hurled themselves from the factory roofs.  And workers at an Apple factory in Turkey, who sometimes work 30-hour shifts, have been instantly fired for attempting to join a union, even after sustaining workplace injuries that could have been avoided had Apple taken basic safety precautions.  Recently, the Fair Labor Association issued its own critical report on Foxconn labor practices, noting widespread worker dissatisfaction with these kinds of abuses.

At the risk of apologizing for Apple, however, examining the intricacies of these situations— for example that thousands of workers “voluntarily” enroll at these factories, which offer some of the “best” jobs in China, or that Apple is merely one offender among thousands in a globalized system of labor abuse— requires the kind of time and detail that would disrupt the gripping narrative that Daisey constructs.  And in constructing this narrative, he misuses the working class in a manner similar to, though less severe than, Apple’s own mistreatment of its workers.  By fabricating his encounters with the workers of Shenzhen, Daisey transforms human individuals into cogs in the machine of fiction, mere characters designed to plug a hole on the assembly line of rising and falling action.

Even This American Life‘s “retraction” of the Daisey episode ends up oversimplifying, if not ignoring, the working class with which the story began.  In issuing its own quasi-apology for misleading its listeners, TAL wraps itself in the narrative we’ve always wanted to hear from our journalists, the narrative that, despite increasing pressure from a host of complicated factors, journalists continue to hold themselves to a higher standard of truth.  We need only look at the fabrications of a Jayson Blair or a Michael Olesker— or any program on Fox News for that matter— to understand how dangerous this narrative can be.

To its credit, TAL does not defend Apple, but nor does it attempt to interview a single worker at Foxconn or contextualize the experiences of those workers within the bigger picture of the globalized economy.  And while it discredits Daisey in order to prop up its own ethical stance, the show fails to point out that Daisey’s analysis remains an accurate, if mishandled, assessment of the working class both at home and abroad.  Indeed, TAL‘s apologetic hand-wringing conceals how the show utilizes Daisey and the abuses on which he “reports” to paint itself as a bastion of journalistic integrity, while ignoring, like so much American journalism, the broader systemic injustice of which those abuses are a part.  The narratives of both Daisey and Glass employ the working class, like Apple, as a mere tool to bolster each entertainer’s professional reputation.  As consumers of these narratives— and of all popular media in which workers’ voices remain suppressed, mediated, or misrepresented— we should recognize that the true narratives of the working class can only be constructed by workers themselves.

Christopher Kemp

Christopher Kempf is an adjunct faculty member at the Indiana Institute of Technology, and will be a 2012-2014 Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.