Blue collar

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Part One

/ rtrube54 / 5 Comments

OH Youngstown aA while back I wrote a post titled “What’s Missing in the Diversity Discussion” and I observed that what we often don’t explore, although good work on this has been done, is the area of class differences. I mentioned growing up in working class Youngstown and being in a seminar where as a “get to know you” exercise, we could propose a question we’d like others to ask us about ourselves.  Mine was, “I’d like to be asked what it was like growing up in working class Youngstown.”

In response to that blog, “Steve” actually asked that question. I don’t think I can answer that in a single post but I’d love to give it a start with this post.

The first thing I can say is that, far from being conscious of this being a struggle, my memory of growing up in my neighborhood is generally quite positive. Our home was located on the inner west side of Youngstown, roughly a mile or so from the Briar Hill steel mills. The men who worked in these mills could walk to and from work, and the community was laid out so that almost everything you really needed was within walking distance.

So one thing growing up was that this idea of being driven everywhere was foreign. I walked to school, to the post office, the “Pops” grocery for baseball trading cards, to the Dairy Queen, and Isaly’s for ice cream, to the bank to deposit my paper route earnings, to the library for books, and to Borts Field to go swimming, or meet up with friends for pick up games of baseball, basketball, and football.

What strikes me is that from a fairly early age (say by 8 or 10) I got used to doing much of this on my own, without parents hovering about. There were no parents arbitrating game quarrels. We worked things out, often with the “do over” rule. Yet they were still a significant part of our lives. All of us ate at home nearly every night at a certain time, and often that was between 4 and 6 pm, timed to the end of labor shifts.

I think what made this independence at an early age possible was the combination of this neighborhood web where if you really got out of line your parents heard about it, and those evening meals.  It wasn’t perfect. Sometimes there were dinner table fights. But this sense of early independence combined with a community and family that really was in your life prepared us at an early age to assume our place in that community.

We didn’t know anything about extended adolescence. When you graduated from high school, you either started working (often in the mills or the Lordstown GM plant) or went to college — and often worked in the mills or elsewhere during the summer to pay for it.  Many of our families wanted us to go to college, because work in many factories was hard, dangerous and wore you down physically. They were aware that education afforded the “opportunity for a better life”. Yet there was an ambiguity about this. Education meant becoming part of “management” which was always suspect, or one of those “pointy-headed intellectuals”.

Steve, that’s part one of an answer. Stay tuned for more.

What’s Missing in the Diversity Discussion?

/ rtrube54 / 10 Comments

I came across a blog post the other day, “Blue Tongue, White Collar” that caught my eye. The writer described interviewing for admission to Yale and found herself tripped up by her blue collar origins. And this brought back long suppressed memories of a similar interview, and similar rejection because I, too, betrayed my working class origins. [Ironically, I discovered that this blogger and I both grew up in Youngstown–go figure!].

It’s weird, actually. Technically, I lived in a white-collar home in a blue collar neighborhood. Dad worked a series of lower level management jobs while most of the friends around me had parents working in the mills or in other union jobs connected to steel-making. I think I’ve always felt a bit bi-cultural. I still feel that. I work in a collegiate ministry among graduate students and faculty at a major university. These are really bright people–most of whom have never been near a blast furnace (we used to go on field trips to see them–at least from a safe distance!).

What I think many of them don’t appreciate is that there were really bright and gifted people in the blue collar neighborhood I grew up in. Many were children of immigrants who worked hard to achieve home ownership and took pride in their homes, which they remodeled, added onto and cared for meticulously. They often did dangerous work and were savvy enough to survive.  They fed families through labor strikes. My wife’s father worked in a factory but was a gifted artist. And one of the reasons many worked so hard was to send their kids to college so they could have a different life.

In some ways, this scene is changing, as manufacturing jobs disappear and more and more, many workers are going to be “knowledge workers”. But while I think our definition of “working class” may be changing, the fact that this is a class, that kids grow up in homes of working class parents, and have aspirations to mix with a wider society means that we need to think about what does diversity and inclusion look like for this group of people. Just as organizations often erect tacit barriers (glass ceilings, color lines, etc.) for other groups, so also the lack of perception of the cultural difference of social class leads to barriers for those from working class backgrounds being included and giving their best in our organizations.

One example: several years ago, our organization hosted a conference at a hotel that ran over a weekend. One of our speakers, probably meaning well, proposed that we all clean our own rooms over the weekend so hotel workers could have some time off. Subsequently there was an apology and the acknowledgement that our presence meant overtime as well as tip income that made a substantial difference in the family incomes of these workers.

This shows up in so many ways. Take vacations for example. Growing up, a vacation was a weekend at Niagara Falls, or renting a cabin at a nearby lake. Imagine what it is like to rub shoulders with those whose families routinely took trips to Europe or even more exotic destinations? Take sports. For some of us, it was just pickup games at the local sports field. We didn’t have the opportunity to go to soccer or lacrosse camps.

More than that, it can show up in the attitudes classes have for each other. It is just as easy to belittle the blue collar folks as those who never get all the dirt from under their fingernails, as it is to belittle academics as worthless ivory tower intellectuals. In business settings, it is the suspicions that exist between “management” and “labor”–the fat cats and the little guy.

Most people doing diversity work say it is bad be “color blind”. We should call out and even celebrate our ethnic differences. Yet I would propose that many of our organizations are class blind. We don’t recognize this as difference and so don’t “call out” that difference. And because we don’t call it out, we don’t discover what there might be of value in that difference. Recently in one of these “sharing exercises” people do in seminars, we were asked to answer this question: What would you like someone to ask you about yourself?” I found myself responding, “I’d like them to ask me what it was like growing up in working class Youngstown.” But I wonder if anyone really wants to know…

[Update: This post, meant to be a stand alone, is what led to the “Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown” series, which began in response to “Steve’s” comment below. Along the way, I’ve discovered there are people who want to know, and many others who identify deeply with the answers.]