NALL Working Paper #38-2001
The storage and transmission of men's non-formal skills in working class
communities:
a working paper
Dorothy E. Smith
Introduction
This paper comes midway out of a study that proposes to explore the
relationships between the great working-class communities and the industries
they both sustained and were sustained by in terms of the production, storage
and transmission of skills. Among men, so-called manual skills were learned in
part experientially, on-the-job, but they were also learned intergenerationally
both in the community and in the workplace. My interest is in exploring the
social organization and relationships that stored and transmitted skills as men
learned them as they were elaborated and refined experientially, as they
responded to technological changes. The individuated formulations of skill as it
is recognized in personnel files or as qualifications is a barrier to learning
more about the social organization within which skills have been learned and
transmitted within the working class. I want to locate forms of organizing
the storage and transmission of skills-defined as nonformal because they have
not been 'recognized' by formal educational processes resulting in definite
qualifications under state regulation-that have been integrated in the localized
organization of working class communities and have intersected community and
workplace.
This paper represents a preliminary exploration of ethnographic studies of
workplace and working-class community that give clues to the character of
relations that reproduced skills among working class men across
generations. It has been written as a working paper in preparation for further
research. Its aim has been to isolate in a preliminary way the aspects of the
social organization of the working class in both the workplace and the community
and to learn as much as possible about the largely hidden history of an aspect
of the social organization of the working class in the North America that was.
My interest is in prying open a moment in the past when access to workplace
skills among men was largely controlled by working-class men. I am interested in
the former dependence of industrial production on systems of storing and
transmitting skills that were buried in the relations between stable working
class communities and large-scale industrial enterprises. These systems of
storing and transmitting informal skills have been disrupted and virtually wiped
out in processes of technological and managerial restructuring which have
radically reduced the numbers of workforce in a given industry and hence its
ability to sustain a stable working class community over several generations.1
Part of what I want to do is to see the dislocation of formerly effective and
productive modes in which skills were produced and reproduced within the working
class, whether in the community or in the workplace, as integrated in a process
of class struggle in which the managerial organization of large-scale
corporations that has aimed at reducing not just labour costs but the dependence
on capital on resources possessed and independently reproduced within the
working class. I am interested in bringing into focus the social relations of
skill storage and transmission at a particular historical juncture in a long
struggle between capital and labour over control of skills, or, using Marx's
formulation, of the 'knowledge, judgment and will" of the
'producers'. In 1974 Harry Braverman's (1974) study of Labor and Monopoly
Capital was published. It initiated a major debates focused on his thesis of the
progressive degradation of labour as a consequence of forms of 'scientific'
management, coupled with technological change. One side of the debate
foregrounded the technological changes that were represented as giving workers
greater control over their work situation, freeing them from the constraints and
stress of automated work processes (Blauner 1964; Hirschhorn 1984; Zuboff 1988).
Rather than degradation, these writers saw technological change as contributing
to an upgrading of workers' skills, particularly their conceptual skills. In
contention with them are those who emphasized the 'deskilling' effects of the
new forms of automation and new managerial strategies resulting together in an
increasingly effective subordination of workers to the changing regime of
accumulation. (Thompson 1989; Wood 1989; Vallas and Beck 1996)
The contingent destruction of the worker-controlled system of storing and
transmitting skills
Restructuring and the working class community
When the issue of loss of control over skills and of the degradation of
labour is examined in terms of the intersecting social relations, I suggest that
what comes into view is the progressive destruction of a 'system' of storing,
producing, and reproducing the skills of hand, eye, and brain which was lodged
in the intersection of industrial enterprise and working class community, was
largely organized and reproduced by working class men outside the formal
educational processes instituted by the state, and on which the great industrial
engine of capitalism that we know as 'Fordism' depended. I do not view this line
of argument and investigation as conflicting with the emphasis on skills as they
are operative in the workplace and on the changing nature of controls in the
workplace (Burawoy 1983). Rather, I am concerned to examine the storage and
transmission of skills as a social organization internal to the working class
cross-cutting workplace and community. I write of this social organization as in
the past because I want to suggest that a contingent effect of the restructuring
and deindustrialization hot has largely destroyed the great working class
communities sustained by manufacturing industries employing thousands, even
hundreds of thousands of men, has been the destruction of the system through
which non-formal skills were reproduced among men informally both in the
community and in the workplace, and hence the destruction of the social
relations sustaining working class control over the production, storage, and
transmission of skills.
I have been proposing that the great working-class communities of the past
were engines reproducing manual skills both those that created a generalized
level of manual accomplishment in the male working class popular, knowledge of
the use of tools including increasingly manual tools of considerable
technological sophistication as these were developed for home use, a culture
according respect to men who excelled in skills and knowledge, both those
relevant to non-workplace activities, home renovation and repair , automotive
repair and reconstructions, and so on, and those produced and reproduced in the
workplace relying to considerable extent on an experiential process of learning
often over considerable periods of time. The former, I am suggesting, were
foundational to the latter and created a reservoir of human capital that was
certainly deployed in the interests of working class communities and
individuals, but were also surely of direct and indirect, though always
invisible benefit to capital. In the last twenty or thirty years we can identify
two major developments that have radically undermined the engine of skills
storage and transmissions that had been vested in a social organization among
working class men intersecting workplace and community. This paper is no more,
at present, than background to the direct investigation of the presence of these
social relations and organization in the steel industry in Hamilton, Ontario, as
it was before the 1980s when technological and managerial restructuring made
deep inroads into the workforce and hence into the economic foundation of the
working class community that had sustained and been sustained by the industry
since the nineteenth century.
That technological innovations and other forms of restructuring aim are
reducing labour costs is scarcely news. It is succinctly stated in Corman, et
al.
The overall result of corporate "downsizing' is not jobs moving offshore
so much as industrial employment disappearing for good... these trends are not
new but are a further extension of a persistent tendency towards
capital-intensive, labour-displacing forms of technological change, as
productivity gains are achieved by cutting payroll costs to the bone.
The virtual elimination of the working-class community storing and
transmitting skills from generation, as well as the distinctive working-class
versions of masculinity (including endurance and acceptance of physical danger-
Willis 1979), implies as a contingent effect the destruction of the social
organization reproducing skills and masculine values across generations.
In Hamilton, as elsewhere, the new jobs in the 1980s were being furnished by
small firms operating mostly in the service sector. The steel industry, while
still central to the city's economy, had ceased to be a source of employment for
working-class male youths graduating from the city"s high schools, whose
fathers, in many cases, were steelworkers. . . [i]ncreasingly, steelworkers were
older men nearing retirement age: the average employee at Hilton Works has now
worked for Stelco for more than twenty-five years. 'Global restructuring: has
produced a deep generational split in the working class. (Corman et al. 10).
Technologies of managerial expropriation of skills and control of the
internal corporate labour market
At the same time, we can find the systematic development and deployment of
managerial technologies by both capital and state, that take over and displace
the skills training functions formerly internal to intergenerational and peer
relationships among working-class men. For example, in the early 1980s, the
government of Ontario in conjunction with the representatives of the plastics
processing industry were making use of a procedure that involved working with a
group of workers in the industry to construct detailed explications of the steps
involved in the performance of given tasks. These explications could then be
used as the training objectives of formally designed training programs. The
program was instituted because the expanding industry was experiencing a
shortage of skilled/experienced operatives (the plastic industry locked the
continuities of traditional working-class skills available to other industries.)
The then Ministry of Skills Development was called on to develop a
systematically formulated modules specifying in detail the tasks making up the
skills required for a given job or position and within each task, the steps
needed to complete it. The procedure was one that brought together a group of
experienced workers and, under the guidance of a community college instructor
experienced in the technique, have them put together their own knowledge into
the formalized descriptions required by the DACUM method. What we were observing
was a transfer of the nonformal knowledges stored and transmitted among workers
on the shopfloor of plastics processing companies into a system that was
controlled by government educational institutions and/or directly or indirectly
by corporations in the business of plastics processing. In the ongoing efforts
of capital to reduce the labour- cost component of production, the problem of
production's dependence on skills reproduced outside the formal educational and
training system and controlled by workers themselves has had two solutions: the
technological transformations which reduce radically the dependence of the
production process on workers' non-formal skills (Vallas and Beck); and the
generally less well understood, development of 'technologies' enabling the
extraction of non-formal skills and knowledge-bases in the working class and
their incorporation into formalized training processes.
Some twenty years ago I was witness (on the union side) of the hearing of a
grievance brought by Mine Mill against Falconbridge Mines. The issue was control
of access to the position of Repair Crew Helper. According to the contract
access to this position was through bidding on the basis of seniority.
Informally, we learned, it had been a position where older men who were no
longer up to the physical demands of drilling and shiftwork could take advantage
of their extensive experientially based knowledge of the mine, its people, and
its workings, in a position that worked only the day shift. The issue being
arbitrated at the hearing was the company's introduction of a test as a
condition of access. A miner (actually French-speaking) had bid for the job, but
had been turned down because he failed the test. He was, incidentally,
French-speaking, and the language of the test was English (this was made an
issue at the hearings).
In the course of the arbitration hearing, It became clear that the company
was not concerned about the qualifications of this particular candidate for the
position. Rather they had been concerned to substitute formalized tests for
seniority as a criterion for the position. The formalized tests were a means
through which management could control more directly the internal labour market
of the mine in which the foremen had traditionally played a major part. The
insertion of a formally, textual, process into movements into positions meant
bypassing the foreman, and hence bypassing the non- formal reciprocities between
foremen and workers who belonged to, the same local community. Management wanted
selection procedures wholly controlled by management and regulated in ways that
fully accountable within its bureaucratic regime (Burawoy 1983) and system of
accounting. The issue is more than one of management control; it is also one of
the articulation of controls into an overall system of technical managerial
organization. For a period some ten years earlier, Wallace Clement has described
the introduction of similar managerial technologies at lnco.
In 1970 Inco undertook a pilot experiment in "functional [286] modular
training." Called the Instrumentation Training Program, it instructed
forty instrument mechanics in the maintenance of instrument control systems
for use in all its automated plants. First all processes and instrument
equipment had to be surveyed and modules designed to teach the mechanics how
to test and repair the equipment. The fact that this was necessary reflects
the increased use of instrumentation in lnco surface operations. Traditionally
the training for this work was a four-year apprenticeship, but when new
techniques were introduced at the Copper Cliff Nickel Refinery and elsewhere,
a shorter training period had to be devised. According to a senior lnco
official involved in implementing the system, "the increased needs were
imposed by new technology; traditional training couldn't respond." The
use of the modular system shortened the qualification time from four to two
years, obviously an advantage to the company. This modular training program is
a registered trade in Ontario, but it is a non-regulated trade, which means
that the government does not supervise the course content. This is different
from the apprenticeship program, where the government specifies the content
and provides a broader training package. Here was the basis for lnco's
objection to apprenticeships: they contained much training not needed for
specific work at Inco plants. Management wanted something tailormade.
(Clement 1981: 287)
Not only was the time taken to train shortened, it could also be taken out of
the hands of trades, out of the jurisdiction of government, and incorporated
into the corporation's managerial regime.
The significance of the introduction of modular approaches to training and
internal access to jobs may also be a further projection of managerial control
into the control by workers of the shopfloor. Whatever their allegiances,
foremen came up through the ranks and were socially part of the working class.
Foremen were in charge of the internal labour market. In the hardrock mining
context, including the Falconbridge Mine involved in the arbitration hearing I
participated in, men were moved around in the mine on the say-so of foremen.
In 1973 a Task Force on Industrial Training set up by the Manpower Training
Branch of the Ministry of Colleges and Universities reported “modular
training" is recommended as a means of meeting training needs identified by
'industry.'
In the 1950s and early 1960s changing labour market conditions together with
public opinion caused the nature of the industrial manpower training problems
facing Ontario to be altered greatly. During the late fifties public pressure
was placed on government to support training-in-industry in addition to the
traditional regulated apprenticeship. It was felt that apprenticeship did not
adequately meet industry's needs, particularly in manufacturing, and that it
was not appropriate for retaining, upgrading, and skill maintenance programs.
Systems of industrial training less rigid than those typically available under
apprenticeship legislation were required. Concern was focused on the way in
which industrial training had been organized around specific occupations
rather than in relation to actual functions of workers on the job. It was
argued that workers often became locked into specific occupations and were
unable, because of the specialization of their training, to adapt to
differences in skill requirements resulting from technological change.
(Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities 1973: 174)
Specious as much of this argument is, it is clear that the introduction of
modular methods of analyzing skills and training objectives was aimed at
securing managerial control over precisely those processes of skills acquisition
that had been controlled largely by workers on the shopfloor or down the mine.
It was the Canadian Manufacturers Association that was pushing for the
introduction of a modular approach to skills training (Ontario, Report of the
Select Committee on Manpower Training, Hon. J. R. Simonett, Chairman (February,
1963). Modular treatment of skills enables the shopfloor knowledge of
workers to be analysed as detailed sequences that could be produced as units of
training. Course units could be created tailored specifically to the
requirements of the company. The evolution of internal hierarchies among workers
in the plant is bypassed; the 'surplus' of skills and experience embodied in
older workers could be resolved into standardized and reproducible training
units; technological changes could be prepared for by designing appropriate
modules; the internal labour market of plant or corporation could be fully
regulated by using formalized tests and formalized training objectives and
products. In one of the plastics processing plants we visited -- the rump of a
much larger complex, originally manufacturing tires, which had been translated
to the southern United States, the personnel manager complained to us about
senior workers who refused to participate in an effort to draw on their
knowledge in the making of training modules for the parent company with
headquarters in Akron, Ohio. It was clear that the company's interests were not
in controlling the skills resources of this small plant, but in being able to
transfer skills that had been created and reproduced among workers in the larger
manufacturing plant into a form that could be reproduced within the corporation
at large.
Such changes in managerial technologies aim directly at managerial control
over the internal labour market processes (not, perhaps, properly conceptualized
as a 'market'). They also reach as effects into the community. This paper is
written to clarify the research problem. It draws in part on earlier research
done by George Smith and myself in the plastics processing industry and in part
on library research into ethnographic accounts of a variety of workplace
situations and of working class communities. Since so for as Michelle Webber and
I could discover there were no studies that directly addressed the relations
that are to be explored, I have had to rely on those resources, relatively
sparse, which happen to include accounts, generally rather scrappy, of aspects
of non- formal skills learning processes and relations. Characteristically such
resources, with very rare exceptions (Halle; Nash), observe the conventional
boundaries between workplace and community that capital itself has generated.
Hence information about the skills- learning practices characteristic of a given
workplace gives no clue to how these may have spilled over into or been
consequential for or even arisen out of relations within the community or union
local. One of those involved in the arbitration hearing described to me some of
the ways in which the shopfloor hierarchy intersected with that of the local
community. Men in the community would keep in with foremen in the mine where
they were employed by giving them occasional gifts of liquor or game from
hunting expeditions. Though he recognized the implications for the union,
he had mixed feelings about the introduction of tests as a means of accessing
positions since he saw it as breaking the arbitrary powers of foremen. Such an
account of the intersection of status and, in this case, power in the workplace
with status in the working class community represents, I believe, only the tip
of the iceberg. We can find in accounts of workplace skills hierarchies
references here and there to experienced workers protecting the specialized
knowledge they had developed over the years from other workers as well as from
management (Vallas and Beck). What kind of status was accorded such men in the
community? Might familial or friendship relationships originating outside the
workplace have been involved in the willingness of a senior man to take on and
train a younger? And, in respect to the transmission of skills, how were manual
skills (knowhow, uses of tools, knowledge of materials, and so on) transmitted
across generations and among peers? What kinds of associations among men in the
community created opportunities for the discussion of situations in the
workplace? This paper is written in advance of an ethnography of the past,
largely relying on oral historical methods, that is planned for later this year
to learn something about the nonformal interchange between community and
industry that constituted that system of storing and transmitting skills on
which large-scale industry relied.
Skills storage and transmission systems in the workplace
George Smith's and my field studies of skills training in the Ontario
plastics industry in the 1980s provided us with several accounts of
manufacturing plants where skills training was exclusively worker to worker and
on the shopfloor. Plastics was then and still is a relatively new industry. In
many companies, the knowledge stored in the workforce and even in management is
largely a product of experiential learning passed on by precept and example and
learned hands-on. The Compton Company was one such, unusual in that management
as well as supervisors had come up through the shopfloor process of skills
training.
The Compton Company produces a range of standardized products using
automated and computerized machinery. All training at the Compton Company is
hands-on (with the exception of short courses in health and safety.) With the
exception of two people in maintenance who have European training,
supervisors, department heads and the general manager himself have all learned
the business of plastic processing through experience and learning from others
with experience. The replication of its skills-through-experience workforce is
a routine aspect of how the company operates and is integrated into the
supervisory hierarchy. People come into the plant at the labouring level. Not
much training is involved at this level: 'in most cases it’s on-the-job
training for two or three days and after that any other training besides that
would be to move up the ladder'. Hands-on or on-the-job training is integrated
into the production hierarchy.2
On-the-job training is integrated with the internal shopfloor hierarchy
at the Compton Company. Lead hand or foreman trains the 'labour-type people'
as they are hired. Training for production workers is exclusively on-the-job
and by demonstration. “[The foreman] just shows him. In most cases he shows
him. We have internal books with specifications -- our own company
specification for the different products. Some time is spent in that.
Basically most of the training Is done right on the floor where they
actually see what he's talking about.” Training involved in moving up the
ladder is initiated by the foreman of a shift, "A lot of the shifts the
foreman will kind of take somebody in hand and advance them." There is
also a foreman who specializes in training, going from shift to shift working
"with these people that seem to show an eagerness to learn and advance.
He spends most of his time with them, showing them different jobs."
The foremen themselves had been trained--or learned--on the job. They were, in
the view of the personnel manager we interviewed, knowledgeable but, as he
phrased it, they had no 'theoretical' knowledge of plastics processing. Foremen
themselves are recruited internally. “We hire a few people from outside (who
have had previous experience working in plastics].... but most of the rest of
the people we have now are being trained on the premises by ourselves. We
haven't found a place where you can go and hire a foreman that could come in and
work in our plant. [It takes] a lot of development to learn the process. There
just doesn't seem to be any training facility that we're aware of."
Training in and advancement in set-up and quality control departments also drew
on the pool of plant-trained people. The Senior Set-up Man who runs the Set-Up
Department and has "probably been doin' it for twenty years," trained
the others. Most of the people in Quality Control came from production. The
manager we interviewed described the selection procedure: "the Quality
Control people go around and they talk to all these operators that operate the
machine and they see that, "O yeah, this chap knows how to measure the
plate. And he's very interested in quality," and this and that. So suppose
you have a requirement, that's the first place we try.
Thus in the Compton Company the entire cycle of learning, including
evaluation of performance (apart from the monitoring of performance through
productivity) was internal to the shop-floor and among workers. The company
relied for the reproduction of skills on the experiential learning of works on
the shopfloor. Foremen have learned experientially and from others before them
the knowhow they deploy in supervision and in training. They selected who to
assign to more senior workers for training; they allocated workers to jobs in
which more advanced skills could be acquired. They selected men to act as
lead-hands. Advancement into jobs requiring more skills and earning more was
entirely through men who had learned the work from others like themselves and
experientially. The processes of transmission and storage of skills was internal
to the shopfloor and management played no direct part in it.
In the plant described by Michael Burawoy (1983), learning the skills of a
turret lathe operator (a good deal more demanding than anything at the plastics
moulding plant referred to above) was also internal to the shopfloor. Skills
were the basis of nonformal hierarchies among workers. Here workers skills
directly differentiated the amount of their workers. This was not so at the
Compton Company where plastics processing was automated and production could not
be accounted in relation to individuals. At the plant described by Burawoy,
training other workers was a cost in lost production to the worker who did the
training. Hence workers who trained others received modest compensation for lost
time on the lathe.
The most frequent arrangement was for operators to break in new employees and
to receive setup-man pay (the highest pay scale) for the period if they did
not make out after adding the new employee's pieces to their own. In other
arrangements, those breaking in were to receive a fixed number of hours, say
four, at setup-man pay. But training is still the subject of bargaining and
negotiation between operator and foreman. Part of the reason for this
lies in the ambiguity of the trainer’s obligations to the trainees As the
shop euphemism puts it, one doesn't have to "show everything" to the
new employee.“ (Burawoy 1983:102)
Though accountable to management, it is clear that management could not exercise
direct control over the process by which skills were transmitted from more
experienced workers to trainees. Experienced workers maintained the value of
their specialized knowledges and upheld the 'natural' monopoly that the course
of learning experientially creates, fending off potential competitors and
consolidating the value of a knowledge appropriated by particular individuals.
Workers' control over production of the shopfloor level has been a problem of
management from early time. The very institution of foremen has its historical
roots in managerial innovations in the late nineteenth century designed to break
the power of the gong bosses who could hold a company to ransom, replacing them
with a supervisory system in which foremen were employees responsibility for the
productivity of the workers they supervised (Montgomery1987). Gangs, of course,
were themselves organizations that stored and reproduced skills, as well as
selling them as labour power to capital. According to David Montgomery, the new
'We of supervision, in one sense, did not represent a radical break with the
past. It was built on both the technical knowledge of skilled workers, which
remained indispensable, and the tradition of promotion within gongs. What had
been eliminated was collective, deliberate control from the workers' end.”
(Montgomery 1987:42) Nonetheless the production and reproduction of skills was
internal to workers in plants or mines. Newer workers learned from more
experienced, as well as, of course from doing the job themselves.
Internal hierarchies among workers were organized to a significant extent
around skills. Skills, knowhow, was 'owned' by the more experienced; it gave
them advantages in competitive situations over other workers; it also gave them
valuable resources that could be shared sparingly in the interests of its
'owner'. Vallas and Beck described the carefully guarded black books of older
workers in the pulp and papers mills they studied, containing notes of what they
had learned over a lifetime of smelling, tasting, watching, testing, the state
of pulp and paper on the roles. Skills were a source of status, whether or not
the worker who possessed them was incorporated into the formalized hierarchy of
lead-hand, foreman, etc. The processes of reproducing skills among workers gave
rise to hierarchies and loyalties among workers that were themselves a barrier
to management's ability to control the workplace. Workers' sense of management
as outsiders, ignorant of how the work really gets done, is manifest in some of
Kusterer's interviews:
Workers had only very vague idea of the various responsibilities of these men
(managers directly responsible for production in their area), and were
generally convinced that [they] didn't do much of anything:
(He) doesn't do nothing. Take it from me, he doesn't know nothing
from nothing about this department... A good thing he doesn't do nothing
because everytime he does come in and do something, it just fucks somebody up.
I don't know what he (other manager) does do in his office. Now that
you mention it, I wonder what he is supposed to be doing when he's not out
with us. Not that he does anything when he's out of his office either. (Kusterer
39-40)
There are indications in such accounts of the skills storage and transmission
processes internal to the workplace of the emergence of loyalties and nonformal
bonds founded skills transmissions, the sharing of experience and knowhow among
skilled workers, reputation, and competition. Here again was an organization
among workers closed off from management which management, over the years and
with advancing managerial technologies, has sought to break through. Montgomery
(1987:41), writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
comments on the systematic deployment of competition between workers as a method
of countering the bases of solidarity residing potentially in the process of
transmitting knowhow from the skilled and experienced to beginners. A century
later, Wallace Clement's (1981) study of hardrock mining records how foremen and
management used competition in attempts to undermine the hierarchies and
loyalties among workers that the miners' monopoly of skills training ability
gave rise to.
The use of existing mining crews to teach novices the necessary
skills--because they certainly do not learn them in one week's class--as a
disruptive effect on the crews themselves. A Thompson miner commented:
"We've got to train these guys. When a new guy gets in the stope you have
to take your time to train him. It costs us money. You train somebody and they
up and leave." Not only is their bonus affected, but people are seldom
allowed to work together for long periods of time. As a Sudbury miner said:
"When a couple of fellows got together and they become pretty well
experienced and good miners, then one would be the leader and the other the
driller. Afterward the bosses would get the other fellow [the driller] to
either bid on a leader’s job or they would appoint him to a leader’s job
anyway, so they could put a couple of new men with these two fellows. As a
rule, if two fellows worked together for two or three years, well, that was
long.” (Clement 1981:284)
Intersections of shopfloor and community organization of skills reproduction
When it comes to the nonformal learning that was among men of working-class
communities, there is little to go on. We can get clues from ethnographies of
working- class communities; we can make guesses. Where workplace and community
intersected was in institutions like taverns. Kusterer, Halle, Dunk, and others
describe the tavern or bar as a place where men talked over the doings in the
workplace in exchanges that enter the system of non-formal knowledge as they
relate back and can be taken up on the shopfloor.
In the community context, I am interested both in institutions (such as the
traditional working-class tavern or bar) that intersected with the shopfloor
storage and transmission system that I've described above, and in what are
generally not recognized as skills in the sense discussed above, namely a
familiarity of certain kinds of tools and their uses (a mitre-box for example),
with particular geographies and patterns of traffic, with what is inside
the walls, underneath the floor, connects the gas cooker to the mains, the
electric light switch to the lights, the spark plugs (in an older car) to the
carburetor, the workings of transmission and clutch, and so on, knowledges that
are prior to and presupposed in the learning of more specialized skills and are
prior to and presupposed in the kind of work that working-class men have
traditionally undertaken and been assigned to in the industrial enterprise. Such
'familiarities' became visible as skills, for example, when women first began to
take vocational courses in preparation for entering trades and found that the
shop course they participated in took for granted extensive prior experience in
the names and uses of a variety of tools and practices associated with them.
There is no formal training. Similarly in the workplace, non-formal knowledges
of the particular local histories and geographies of plants, machines, and
people have been maintained and transmitted in gender specific hierarchies of
learning. This is knowledge this is prior to and taken for granted in knowledge
at more 'visible' levels. Michael Polanyi uses the concept of 'tacit knowledge'
to locate what people known which is not explicit and has not been inculcated
through a formalized process of instruction. He uses as an example the spelling
of the railway station in Wales with the longest known name. It is one thing, he
says, to know how to pronounce this. But to know that it is the name of the
station is presupposed in reading it as such. It is a tacit knowledge on which
other knowledges rely. In an analogous way, being able to do a particular kind
of job depends on tacit knowledges which have, at least in the past, largely
been learned experientially by doing, by watching and being 'shown' by someone
who knows how, and in informal relationships among people, relatives, friends,
peers, or workmates, in workplace or community or household settings. This kind
of learning goes on among people who do not occupy institutionalized positions
designating them as responsible for transmitting formalized systems of knowledge
and skill. It has gone on in working- class communities between kinfolk of
senior generations and their juniors-fathers, grandfathers, and uncles teaching
boys and young men by tacit example, criticism, and occasional instruction or
intervention; aunts, mothers, and grandmothers teaching girls and young women in
similar fashion. We do not know how wide the networks of learning extended or
how young people, and, in this investigation, particularly young men, were
involved.
Studies of the workplace treat it in isolation from the community from which
workers came. The development of mass production is intimately tied to the
corresponding establishment and sustenance of large working class communities
that supplied the labour and reproduced a labour force across generations. Here,
and in the further stages of the study reported here, I want to explore the
intersections of the worker- controlled skills learning on the shopfloor with
non-formal skills learning among males in the community. My notion is that these
relations were intricate and that they are likely to have intersections also
with union organization. In the transmission and storage of skills
among men, across generations, was implicated in and integral to the social
organization and relations of both workplace and community. For this reason, the
phase of the research reported on here, explored studies of working class
communities to see if they would yield resources. The results were,
unfortunately, rather sparse. On the whole, studies whether of workplace or
community tend to observe the boundaries created by capitalism so that workplace
is studied quite separately from the community it sustains or sustained.
For the most part, what I could learn yielded information about informal
associations of workers from a given plant. Taverns or bars were, as might be
expected, quite important, at least up to the 1960 and 1970s. David Halle,
writing in the early 1980s, stresses their importance in working class life.
Social drinking, and eating, in a range of taverns, bars, and
restaurant-taverns still play an important part in workers' lives, though much
less than during the heyday of the saloon. Many young single men and older
workers who have retired spend several hours a day in the tavern. Married
workers divide about equally into those who spend as much time in the tavern
as when they were single and those who enter only occasionally, preferring to
go straight home after work.
He distinguished between what he calls "occupational bars” close to work
sites and social drinking spots that are more part of the residential
neighbourhoods. In the former:
The social class of the customers reflects the nature
of the work site. For instance, taverns close to factories in older urban
areas are heavily patronized by blue-collar workers and first-line
supervisors.
Within fifty yards of lmperium [the plant Halle
studied] are six such taverns, serving the various factories close by. One of
these occupational taverns, Lesniak’s, is directly opposite lmperium and is
frequented by many of the chemical workers during lunch and before and after
work The union local, composed of lmperium workers, holds a monthly meetings
there, as well as social events, such as parties for workers who are retiring.
(Halle 1984: 35)
Notice that he reports workers and first-line supervisors as frequenting the
same bars, suggesting that hierarchial organization developed on the shopfloor
carried over into relationships outside the plant. Other ethnographers of
working-class communities describe a variety of settings in which workers
associate off the job. In LeMasters’ study, work crews on the job "often
have a few beers together... interpersonal relations are quite significant. They
may not always like their crew buddies but the interaction is rich.“ (21) They
talk about the weather on the job, mistakes made on the building site, arguments
with foremen, accidents, practical jokes, and so on. LeMasters makes no specific
reference to skills talk but surely such talk itself contributes to the
experiential knowledge of members of the work crew as well as displaying and
acknowledging skills hierarchies developed on the worksite.
Halle also describe a variety of activities off the job that the workers at
lmperium are involved in.
It is hard to exaggerate the importance of various kinds of sports in the
lives of most of these chemical workers. More than half are enthusiastic
fishermen and hunters, and this is true regardless of age or marital status.
Some belong to clubs. In the fishing season groups of twenty or thirty men
from such clubs, well supplied with beer and sandwiches, leave on a rented bus
for a weekend in Boston or a day off the south Jersey shore. Hunting clubs
organize weekends in lodges in south Jersey or take bear-hunting trips to
Maine that last several days (plate 24). Some of these fishing and hunting
clubs are run by the taverns, and a few taverns still sponsor football and
softball teams. In the football season busloads of men go to games in cities
like Pittsburgh and Washington. (39)
Other men prefer smaller groups. Six lmperium workers own
fishing boats in which they regularly take groups of three, four, or five
fellow workers or friends (plate 25). Often men rent boats. Many workers who
hunt make trips with a few friends, usually to Maine. Partly because of their
interest in hunting and fishing; some have a tendency to develop a keen
interest in gastronomy, for the culmination of a hunting or fishing trip is
eating the catch. Some workers are accomplished chefs, exchanging recipes for
items like lobster or bluefish. (Halle 1984:39 40)
Neither Halle nor LeMasters identify any cross-over from shopfloor skills
hierarchies to community or neighbourhood reputation or status, other than that
implied in Halle's reference to first-line supervisors visiting the some tavern
as other workers. Dunk however describes reputational patterns associated with
manual skills. We might expect therefore (and want to explore) the character of
skills reputation in the community associated with a given industry or plant.
The negative image of the kind of knowledge exhibited by management also
results from the fact that there is a great respect among workers for anyone
with practical skills. Flattery often takes the form of a statement such as
"Joe there, he's one hell of a nice guy, and a good electrician too."
. . . These practical skills are not, however, embedded in social status
differentiations, although they are an important aspect of an individual's
reputation. The possession of practical skills is a necessary if not sufficient
element in one's popularity. In other words, it is the demonstration of the
actual use value of one's knowledge and one's skills in ways which are readily
evident that counts in the assessment of an individual and of a way of thinking.
The mere possession of formal training of a degree or diploma, is not sufficient
cause of respect. (Dunk 1991: 146-71)
LeMasters suggests an association with the do-it-yourself approach to
household repairs and renovations.: “Whenever possible they avoid the market
place, especially when it comes to constructing homes refinishing interiors,
making car and small equipment repairs, and soon. There is a flourishing
‘informal’ labour exchange between individuals with different skills and
different kinds of equipment.” (Dunk 1991: 146-7)
The gender organization of skills transmission
According to David Halle (35), these leisure activities are strikingly
'sex-segregated," involving many of the married men and most of the single.
LeMasters’ 1975 study of a working class community describes, at least on the
part of some informant, deliberate strategies on the part of men of the senior
generation designed to prevent the 'feminization' of boys and young men.
These men share the belief of the British upper class that boys should never
be reared by their mothers or other women, since they will make a "goddam
sissy" of him. Since these men do not have the English boarding school
system to rear their sons, they have to improvise. In the past, one of their
strategies was to get the boy out of school as early as possible and get him
on the job with other men, but this has become increasingly difficult as the
craft unions have begun to require a high school diploma for entering
apprentice programs.(LeMasters 1975: 112)
His study suggests that the senior generation of that time might have
consciously sought to wean boys from the influence of school, identified with
feminization, stressing the importance of a toughening that would prepare a boy
for what he could expect to confront in the future. Workers favored weaning boys
away from school to get them away from women teachers and he reports a
sheetmetal worker favoring a conscious effort to wean boys away from school.
If you can't get the boy out of the school system and away from the "goddam
women teachers," then the next best bet is to get him into school
athletics, especially football. One man, a sheet metal worker, put it this
way: "I'll say one thing for that football coach up at the high
school--he makes those guys get clown in the mud and go at each other. By God,
that’s what they need to get along in this world. (112)
Glimpses such as this suggest that Paul Willis's focus exclusively on the class
dynamics of the school may miss the dynamics of learning masculinity from a
senior generation consciously concerned to discourage boys from an educational
exposure that would undermine their masculinity. Conceptualized very
differently, Arthur B. Shostak (1969) records very similar patterns of
alienation among those working class youth he labels as “rebels” and
“accommodators” in his 1969 study of “blue-collar life” in the United
States. 'The 'rebel' group is characterized as likely to become involved in
'delinquent' activities, but otherwise they two do not seem markedly
differentiation. Those who accommodate stay in school, usually in a
predominantly working class high school, they are likely to be steered into
vocational courses. Their "youth culture" emphasizes:
fun and adventure; a disdain for scholarly effort; the more or less persistent
involvement in 'tolerated' status offense like drinking, gambling, occasional
truancy, “making out" in the sense of sexual conquest, driving cars
before the appropriate age, smoking, swearing, and staying out late. (Matza
1961: 116, quoted by Shostak 1969: 150)
Here and at other points in this account, a distinctive and traditional
working-class culture of masculinity seems to surface. The lack of interest
displayed by blue-collar youth in this group for continuing on to college even
when they “possess high academic aptitude" (151) suggests that they may
share the kinds of emphasis on manual rather than on 'mental' skills suggested
in the quotation from LeMasters above. The same would seem to surface in
Shostak's account of educational and career decisions made by the group of
blue-collar youth he describes as “the achievers" who successfully make
their way into college. They appear to share values that downgrade non-manual
skills, both in themselves and in relation to the kinds of occupations to which
they can expect to get access. Every now and again, the 'influence' of a senior
generation becomes directly visible, though negatively valued, as when he writes
of the 'uneven and unreliable knowledge" of the labour market transmitted
to blue-collar youth by 'well-meaning parents, friends, and the mass media.' (Shostak
1969: 153).
ln conclusion
At this stage of investigation, this paper has no conclusion. It has done no
more than bring together the uses made of existing literature as well as some
previous research to explore the dimensions of skills storage and transmission
systems as they have been, in the past at least, vested in social organization
among male workers both in the workplace and in the community and in
intersections between them. I have made the following points so far:
- The destruction of the social organization storing and transmitting manual
skills among men in working class communities as a contingent effect of the
restructuring that destroyed the great working-class communities of the
past;
- Within the workplace itself, the development of managerial
technologies expropriating workers tacit skills and seeking to gain
exclusive control over the internal labour market of plant or corporation;
- 1 have described some of the characteristics of skills storage and
transmission as aspects of social organization among workers on the
shopfloor and suggested, drawing on available evidence, the kinds of social
relations the processes were part of;
- Drawing again on ethnographic literature, I have made use of some of the
rather scant descriptions of associations among men that may be at once
contexts in which skills and knowhow are transmitted, and exchanged, and in
which respect and reputation established in the workplace may transfer to
standing in the community;
- Finally I have again drawn on ethnographic materials to identify the
distinctively gendered organization of the system of skills storage and
transmission (I take for granted that an analogous story could be told of
women in working class communities and the transmission of skills across
generations, though I think it would look very different).
Endnotes
1. Moore's movie, ‘Roger and Me’ showing the devastating effects on
Flint, Michigan of the removal of the GM auto production refers to the multiple
personal relationships of family and friends that were disrupted and destroyed.
Along with the destruction of a way of life was, I suggest, a destruction of the
non-formal systems of organizing and controlling the production and transmission
of knowledges on which companies such as General Motors had relied for so many
years.
2. The personnel manager of another company viewed this as a general feature
of the plastics processing industry: it "has that 'promotability' from
inside, from the plant floor, whether you be a material handler or what have
you. And then again to trouble-shoot machines and start learning -- a lot of
that was just the same."
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