Where's the labor section?

[Ian Livingston]

I find it entertaining, Richard, that you regard the labor side of my
response "imaginative." Perhaps you have not held a union job in the
years after 1980. My response is certainly limited to my experience
with the Mineworkers (Wyoming, 1970s) and the Pile drivers
(California, 1980), and the Carpenters (Seattle, '88 - '90). The late
70s and early 80s were the years I couldn't get jobs where I lived in
Wisconsin, where it was necessary to be a union member to apply for
the jobs in which I had experience. It does not trouble me, though,
because it led to my career as a forester and arborist--labor in which
Labor seemed uninterested. That career helped educate me for life off
the grid and far from the madding crowd.

I think Pynchon's takes on labor are mixed. Though his story lines are
solidly founded in history, I do not get the impression he spent much
time around actual workers. His representation of the Traverse clan in
Vineland does not resonate strongly of actual working folk. Maybe I'm
getting that wrong, tying it, as I do, to a lifetime of labor and life
with hard-working, hard-drinking, hardly-making-a-living people in
actual, rather than fictional, life. I think Pynchon's labor types are
idealistic cutouts to offer another shading of the anarchy v.
bureaucracy tension. The change that came over labor in the
politicization of the AFL-CIO during the 50s and 60s, in which Labor
became the bedfellow of the Democratic party, made it just another
vehicle of the Demican/Republicrat single party system in the US, by
which people gained the illusion that they had a voice in government.
I think Vineland is very much about illusions, especially popular ones
(movies, television, rock'n'roll, drugs and drug wars, etc.), among
other things. But, as you say, I apparently am part of a crew that
can't get Vineland right. Perhaps because I disagree with you on some
points?


On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 3:33 PM, Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ian Livingston wrote:
>>
>> > I don't think there are *any* union members on this list.
>>
>> Well, I'm a former one. I had to sign up to keep my job once. Paid
>> dues for a few years and found out the dues got you nothing, but that
>> they helped support the extravagant tastes of the union brass. Lots of
>> gold jewelry on em, in their Cadillacs, and a ditzy dame in every
>> other seat. Was already pretty anti-union because of the jobs I
>> couldn't get until I paid the dues--which I couldn't afford until I
>> got the job. Also watched incompetent slugs rise in the ranks by
>> duration rather than skill.
>
>
> The assertion was made in response to a post by Kai which mentioned the
> intersection of labor and politics in P. Some imaginative responses to my
> assertion were made by Ian, Alice and Rich. Well what do you expect from a
> crew that can't even get Vineland right?
> Here in the US every newspaper has a business section. Where's the labor
> section?
> Ex: Arizona State Carpenters' Union Local 1089.
>
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."