Objectives
Students will be able to:
5.1 Know about and analyze the "great migration" of African-Americans from the south to the north to obtain better employment prospects in the 20th Century;
5.2 Appreciate and know how to analyze the role of immigration and the immigrant experience in 20th Century work in the U.S., using a textbook case as an example.
5.3 Understand and be able to analyze the racial and gender issues of work in the U.S.
Professor's Introduction to Module 5
With this module, we begin reading from a new book: chapters 1-4 (pp. 11-80) of William Adler's book Mollie's Job. This is the story of one American worker, Mollie James, and what happens to her and her job job in the second half of the 20th Century U.S. For this book (just like the last one), I want you to think of the readings as a "window" into American society at the time, particularly the world of work at the time in the U.S. As usual, do the readings critically, making the material the basis for critical reflections on the subject matter and on the reading itself.
The idea of the book is to follow the fate of a factory job from the 1950s up through the 1990s. Doing so allows us to learn a lot about these particular types of jobs in the U.S., as its economy moved from "industrial capitalism" to "financial capitalism" and transformed into a globalized economy. By following the (1) setting for this job, (2) the meaning of the job for someone like Mollie; (3) the movement of the job; and (4) the final destination of the job, we learn a lot about the evolution of work in this country.
In particular, the readings for this module concern the African-American experience with work in the second half of the 20th Century, and also the immigrant experience. Mollie's case exemplifies the experience of many African-Americans during this time. She came out of the south in the era prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The south during this time was a place of "Jim Crow" laws enforcing relatively rigid segregation of the races, lynching and severe punishment for any blacks who dared to assert anything even approaching equality with whites, the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations ruling the political structures of many southern towns and counties, and abject poverty for most African-Americanss caught in a sharecropping system that kept them in perpetual debt peonage.
As you will read, Mollie leaves the south (Virginia) by train in 1950 to go north; she ends up in Paterson, New Jersey. Although her odyssey was from Virginia to New Jersey, many black southern sharecroppers moved from Mississiippi or Alabama to midwestern northern cities like Chicago and Detroit. Please view the video "The Promised Land: Anywhere But Here" along with the reading, to get a fuller picture of what some call "The Great Migration" of southern blacks to northern cities in search of a better (and freer) life. While they found life in the north to be better, there was still massive inequality and less rigid forms of segregation in the north; the "Promised Land" was still a struggle to be sought (and fought) for.
This Great Migration is important, because it is the background to the large urban black populations, much of it working in industrial jobs in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The destruction of the industrial job base as the economy financialized and globalized heavily in the 1980s and 1990s affected this population enormously, and for the worse. Mollie's story is a personal example of this change.
The other "background" issues contained in the reading for this module is the immigrant experience. This is exemplified by the story of Archie Sergy, the man who hired Mollie to her factory job in 1955. Many immigrants also came to America looking for a "Promised Land" of freedom. Archie's parents are good examples: his father was a Lithuanian Jew fleeing poverty, "pogroms" (organizing looting and killing in Jewish communities on the basis of hate), religious discrimination, forced army service, and the like. And, as with Mollie, Archie's parents did not exactly find a pot of gold in the new world: his father became a junk peddler barely scratching out an existence by constant scrambling. The story of Archie's early scramble to the top, including breaking the law on some occasions, is told in our reading.
And the fateful place where Mollie and Archie met was Paterson, New Jersey. By then (1955), Paterson had a strong industrial base, which previously had been based on silk cloth production (with a famous strike in 1913 by the radical union the "Wobblies" or the Industrial Workers of the World - IWW) and more recent production of aircraft and metal product production. In 1955, when Archie hired Mollie, times were good, and the economy was expanding rapidly. As we will see in the next and subsequent modules, however, this did not continue, and Paterson went into decline. Residential patterns of "white flight" (including Archie) emptied the city of upper income whites as blacks like Mollie moved in, and the later demise of American manufacturing eventually put the city in very bad shape.
The reading ends with a discussion of the electric light bulb industry at this time. It shows that Archie was "at the right place in the right time" with his production of ballasts, because this was the period when fluorescent lighting spread rapidly. It also shows the monopolistic predatory behavior of industry giants GE and Westinghouse, who conspired with the utility industry for a time to keep the less energy-consuming fluorescent bulbs off the market, costing consumers millions of dollars.
The Discussion Board for this module will have questions to discuss on the above issues. After doing the reading and viewing the video, participate in the discussion, and do so repeatedly if you have more to say.