4 - Contested Loyalty at the Workplace

Summary

When Betty Piontkowsky refined lard at Armour and Company, Bernice Novak wired telephone switchboards at the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric, Phillip Janik pumped coke at Wisconsin Steel, and Moses Parker made parts for the latest model of McCormick reapers, they worried about more than completing the manual tasks laid out before them. In innumerable ways every day at work, industrial workers like these four struggled with choices that exposed their deepest loyalties. Should they play up to the foreman in hopes of an easier or better-paying work assignment? Should they produce beyond the required quota to earn more money, even if it “ruined the job” for fellow workers who performed more slowly? Should they save through the company's thrift plan, not at the local ethnic bank, and sign up for the employer's group life insurance policy, letting their old mutual benefit association membership lapse? Should they spend leisure time participating in company sports teams, dances, and picnics or stick to their neighborhood friends? Was it worth complaining about – even quitting over – conditions at work or, more risky, joining with other workers in organized protest? Chicago's industrial workers had been soundly defeated in the labor battles after World War I. Nonetheless, in more subtle ways, the factory remained the site of employer and employee contests in the 1920s.