To Carter, the nation’s economic woes were symptomatic of a more fundamental flaw in the nation’s soul. In a heralded
This unused Pittsburgh steel mill was demolished in 1982.
Television speech he complained that “a moral and spiritual crisis” had sapped people’s energies and undermined civic pride: “We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” Critics responded that the nation needed a president rather than a preacher, and that sermons on the emptiness of consumption rang hollow to those who had lost their jobs.
The economic downturn, though triggered by the energy shortage, had more fundamental causes. In the prosperous postwar decades, many companies had grown too big and complacent, more attuned to the demands of the corporate bureaucracy than the needs of customers. Workers’ boredom lowered productivity. Absenteeism at General Motors and Ford had doubled during the 1960s. On an average day in 1970, 5 percent of GM’s workforce was missing without explanation, and on Mondays and Fridays 10 percent failed to show up. That year Lee lacocca, the president of Ford, was unnerved by employee attitudes during his visit to a plant at Wixcom, Indiana: “I see some young guy who’s going full-time to school at Wayne State, his mind is elsewhere, and he doesn’t give a shit what he builds, he doesn’t care and he isn’t involved in his job.
We can’t change a man like that anymore.” Incapable of eliminating slipshod work in Ford plants, Iacocca recommended that dealers improve their repair shops.
Two years later simmering discontents among young workers boiled over at the GM assembly division at Lordstown, Ohio. GM had installed robotic welding machines, streamlined the workforce, and accelerated the assembly line: 100 cars passed through the line each hour—40 more than under the previous system. Without authorization from the national UAW, younger workers refused to work at the faster pace, allowing many chassis to pass through untouched and throwing the factory into chaos. “Significant numbers of American workers,” the U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare concluded, had grown dissatisfied with the “dull, repetitive, seemingly meaningless tasks” of the postwar workplace.
Younger workers were growing impatient too with aging union leaders and a system that welded salary increases to seniority. Increasingly the young rejected the postwar accord in which organized labor essentially ceded control of the workplace in return for cost-of-living increases and job security.
Union membership slipped badly from the high point of the mid-1950s, when over one in three nonagricultural workers belonged to unions; by 1978, the proportion had declined to one in four, and by 1990, one in six. During the 1940s and 1950s, most workers voted to join a union, pay dues, and have the organization bargain for them. By 1978, however, union organizers were losing three-fourths of their campaigns to represent workers; and many workers who belonged to unions were opting to get out. Every year, 800 more union shops voted to rescind their affiliation.
•••-[Read the Document Carter, Crisis of Confidence (1979) at Www. myhistorylab. com
World History
