ICWA@100: Affirmative Actions

Richard Balzer looks at racism and resentment on a Massachusetts factory floor in 1974.

A Western Electric plant in Allentown, Pennsylvania (Wikimedia Commons)

Lawyer, writer and photographer Richard Balzer spent his ICWA fellowship in 1972–1975 exploring the effects of social and economic change on working-class America. A graduate of Cornell University and Yale Law School, Dick became a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. As an attorney and organizational consultant whose clients included British Petroleum, Goldman Sachs and NBC, Dick also represented unions—the United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers, International Machinist Union and Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers—promoting joint labor-management efforts. His books reflect a wide breadth of expertise. Street Time is a portrait of New Haven’s Hill neighborhood. China: Day by Day features photographs from a 1972 trip. Next Door, Down the Road, Around the Corner: A Family Album is a sketch of all 50 states. Peepshows: A Visual History documents the optical toys that predated modern cinema.

As part of his fellowship, Dick spent five months as a worker-observer in a Western Electric factory in North Andover, Massachusetts. In this November 1974 dispatch, he tries to understand how his white coworkers perceive affirmative action—an official commitment of the company. Dick encounters racism and resentment partly caused by the perception that minorities are getting preferential treatment. But beyond the seemingly inherited behavior and prejudices, he also discovers sympathies between white and non-white individual workers. The experience led to his book Clockwork: Life In and Outside an American Factory.

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NORTH ANDOVER, MA (November 1974) — It didn’t take me long to learn that although the company is committed to affirmative action, there is not a very affirmative reaction to the company’s program on the shop floor. In fact, there is, on the shop floor, a great deal of, so far, passive hostility toward the company’s affirmative action policies.

I was surprised at first by the quantity and quality of the racial antagonism I encountered. We may be moving to a time of greater racial understanding, but there remains in the shops a great reservoir of racial hostility. Most white people I met at work didn’t refer to black people as such.

At best they were Negroes, or those coloreds. There were an incredible number of racial stereotypes and jokes about blacks, which were likely to crop up in the most unexpected circumstances.

For example, one afternoon in the midst of what started out as a political discussion about George McGovern, Richard Nixon and Watergate, a defender of Nixon was pointing out that Nixon only lost one state, Massachusetts.

The other person pointed out that he lost Washington, DC, as well. The Nixon supporter started to laugh and said, “What do you expect? Who lives in Washington? Colored people. All those coloreds are on welfare—no wonder they voted against Nixon.” Nixon and Watergate were abandoned as a woman responded to this remark, saying, “You know that’s right. We were down there in our car and a bunch of those colored people started throwing rocks at us.”

Another day, I was talking with a couple of women about the Red Sox. One said she thought Reggie Smith was a good ballplayer, even if he was chocolate. Without pausing, or dropping a beat, the conversation continued.

Spanish-surnamed people didn’t receive much better treatment in most of the conversations I heard. There are approximately a dozen different Spanish-speaking nationalities represented in the workforce at Western, but on the shop floor, they are almost always referred to as those Spanish, Puerto Ricans or spics, regardless of their nationality.

Just as with black people, Spanish-speaking people as a topic were likely to come up from nowhere. One evening while I was working upstairs, we were sitting and having a smoke during a break when an attractive young Spanish woman walked by. As she passed, Pete, the fellow sitting next to me, said, “Boy, I’d like to get in her pants, but if my father even found out he’d kill me.”

Richard Balzer

One morning, we were downstairs talking about baseball and someone mentioned how lazy the Puerto Rican players were. That was all that was needed to start a full-blown discussion of the negative characteristics of Spanish-speaking people. The conversation ended with one of the fellows saying, “These Spanish people, they don’t want to get ahead. They like their sex, they like to have fun, they like to have a good time, and that’s all.” The speaker boasted that he knew what he was talking about because he had worked with them.

The language on the shop floor is often harsh and uncomplimentary. Language, however, can be deceptive because it does not always accurately reflect feelings. People in the shops may not employ the more socially accepted phrases like “black” and “Spanish-speaking” when referring to minority group members. This does not mean, however, that they necessarily harbor more negative or less positive feelings toward minority group members than those people who use more socially acceptable language.

For many of the people I knew at work, the word “colored” was a descriptive term with which they had grown up, and which they often unfortunately persisted in using regardless of their feelings.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that everyone is hostile either in language or action toward individual minority group members. There are some people who, I’m sure, do not harbor deep racial prejudices. There are even larger numbers of people, probably the majority of people in the shops, who although they may not particularly like black or Spanish-speaking people, are not mean, vicious or unfriendly toward specific minority group members.

People also have a way of differentiating between groups and individuals. I don’t know how many times I heard someone say something like, “Oh sure, I like Gladys, everyone does. She’s not like the rest of those coloreds.”

Similarly, a person I knew who had nothing good to say about Spanish-speaking people was very helpful to a Cuban woman who worked near us and was taking company-sponsored English classes. He seemed to genuinely enjoy the experience of helping her practice her English. With all the general racial antagonism that exists, what people I knew seemed to bitterly resent is what they consider the company’s bending over backward for minorities.

Western Electric remains, according to most people who work there, one of the best places to work in the area. So many workers are anxious to get their children, relatives or friends into the plant. A number of people told me that if you aren’t a “minority,” it is becoming increasingly difficult to get a job in the shops.