Page 16 RAIN December 1979 by Vicki Barnett . . , The ironies of the American way of work run deep. Perhaps the most profound one is that our ideas about work have become bound up not just with the amorphous "Protestant work ethic," but with the inner machinery of the entire economy. American workers have always been at the mercy of the national economy; as workplaces become even more centralized, this is truer than ever. Economics laws governing workers and their jobs are accepted as hard truths, as immutable as the laws of gravity and the expanding universe. Workers are led to believe that not much can be done to change their situation or the structures under which they must work. In times of recession and stagflation, jobs are inflationary. So are increased budgets for social services which would ease the financial pressures both for unemployed and employed. Military spending, for some reason, is not inflationary. The resultant frustration among workers has been welldocumented in Stu4s Terkel's book Working. For the most part, the system seems to be able to absorb this frustration fairly easily. It is not so tolerant when workers attempt i:o deal with the situation by changing their role. An example of both the potential for alternative work structures and the resistance they meet from business and governmental leaders can be found in Youngstown, Ohio. In September 1977, Youngstown Sheet and Tube was closed down by its parent conglomerate, the Lykes Corporation. Five thousand workers lost their jobs-; the effects of the closing soon hit the entire co,mmunity. Lykes' expectation was that most of the workers would receive public assistance and eventually relocate. But the Youngstown workers, supported by a coalition of religious leaders, experts from the Institute for Policy Studies, the Exploratory Project on Economic Alternatives and the Ohio Public Interest Campaign, opted for another course. They formed a community corporation which sought to buy the plant from Lykes, and began to explore the possibility of operating a steel plant under wor,ker/ community ownership. After intensive feasibility studies had Changing the American WayofWork Work, as Vicki says, is an essential part not only of most people's lives but of the American Dream itself Small wonder, then, that it is so stoutly defended and so resistant to change. • This article, excerpted from WIN (October 18, 1979), is another in an irregular series that f ocu,ses on the subject of work in the context of appropriate technology, community selfreliance, and worker autonomy. It comes at an interesting point in RAIN 's economic development as an alternative work structure. We are in the enviable position of being economically "self-sufficient" without grants or advertising, yet our picture is not all peaches and cream, as our limited resources po,e numerous problems of their own. Vicki ,raises several issues here that we have found ourselves discussing at RAIN. - MR
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