It’s probably not as uncommon as I’d like to think it is to read a book and feel that at certain points the book is referring to you directly, and it’s probably even less uncommon to have that happen while reading a nonfiction book specifically about your hometown. So when I say that reading Marko Maunula’s book Guten Tag Y’all: Globalization and the South Carolina Piedmont was, at certain turns, a deeply personal experience, it’s not nearly as remarkable as it sounds. Even so, Maunula’s book—part labor history and part economic case study—definitely made an impression.
Maunula will be speaking at the downtown library tomorrow night and though his book’s title would lead you to believe that it’s about globalization in the Upstate, it actually centers its focus almost entirely around Spartanburg County.
The book deals largely with Spartanburg as a center of foreign investment, examining why Spartanburg had such a large growth in investment, particularly from European countries, during the period mentioned in the title. What interested me most though, was that in the process of describing how this investment came to Spartanburg, Maunula goes a long way in explaining why those businesses were attracted here in the first place, albeit with a cool sense of academic detachment.
The biggest reason, as Maunula points out in numerous places throughout the book is that “Spartanburg’s workers were relatively skilled, not prone to unionization, and inexpensive.”
That fact, coupled with an aggressive sales campaign and a business community organized around the idea of paternalistic control over “their” workers as well as the business environment at large, seems to be what drove the supposed Spartanburg economic juggernaut that so many Reganites and economic libertarians wrote about back in the 80′s.
Maunula calls what happened here a “classic revolution from above”, and though he doesn’t say as much, the rest of his book goes a long way towards pointing out that it was a revolution not just from above, but for those above as well. Maunula writes extensively about the fascinating role prominent figures like Roger Milliken and former Spartanburg Chamber of Commerce Director Dick Tukey played in luring businesses into the area, but he also gives equal weight to industry groups like the Spartanburg Development Association whose anti-union actions are absolutely legendary among locals.
Speaking as the child of a factory worker who grew up in Spartanburg in the 80′s, if there was an economic juggernaut here we sure as hell didn’t know about it.
Reading Maunula’s take on the SDA reminded me of when I was a kid, and how my Papa told me that all the bosses in Spartanburg had a group where they decided what everybody was going to be paid, and worked together to blackball anybody who “made trouble” in their workplaces. I didn’t know it at the time, but I found out later that the group Papa was talking about was the SDA. As I got older I started to appreciate the irony of a group of industrialists organizing together primarily to prevent their employees from doing the same.
Because of the work of Spartanburg’s elite to tightly control all aspects of the area’s industrial culture, wages in the area remained much lower than the national average, even up till today. Perhaps most cynically of all, those elites who held control over Spartanburg’s workers with an iron fist, were always the first to talk about the importance of community. I often wonder if anybody ever thought to ask any of those elites why they felt it was important for the health of the community that the working people of Spartanburg unquestioningly accept their benevolent paternalism rather than seize a seat at the economic table for themselves.
Regardless of what that answer would be, the fact remains that Spartanburg, for the better part of it’s existence, has organized itself around a sort of business feudalism, a closed society where even certain businesses that don’t meet with the approval of the group are not allowed in.
One of Maunula’s more stunning finds in the book is a quote from an official with the SDA on why the group had worked to prevent a unionized Mazda plant from coming to the county: “It is our considered view that the Mazda plant would have a long-term chilling effect on Spartanburg’s orderly industrial growth. An auto plant, employing over 3,000 card-carrying, hymn-singing members of the UAW would, in our opinion, bring to an abrupt halt future desirable industrial growth.”
Hard to imagine it stated more clearly than that. The SDA and other groups like them are all for the free market, as long as they get to pick who’s in the market and how much they pay their employees.
In all honesty, there’s not a ton of new information on Spartanburg’s industrial culture in Guten Tag Y’all for anybody whose ear has been on the ground locally for a while, but what is there is confirmation. What came to me throughout my life mostly as conjecture, rumor and personal experience now sits here in black and white, thoroughly researched and footnoted. As I absorbed that fact, another question occurred to me: what happens now?
It’s pretty easy to see that foreign industrial investment in Spartanburg has seen its apex come and go, and while many of our leaders seem to be waiting for the next BMW to swoop in and save us, the policy of selling our cheap, docile labor force to the world isn’t going to gain new traction anytime soon. In our globalized society, labor flows to the lowest cost regions in the world as surely as water from Lawson’s Fork flows to the Atlantic.
Spartanburg’s labor is cheap compared with other places in the United States, but not compared with the slave-wages companies can get away with paying in the Far East and the developing world.
So as they so often do these days, my thoughts wander to Spartanburg’s blue-collar workers. What happens to them as this house of cards built on a corrupt bargain crumbles? What will happen to those people who tossed their lot with the industrialists, and now are watching as their hopes for an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work disappear? Nobody I’ve asked seems to know.
There’s talk of a post-industrial creative-class driven future for Spartanburg, and that seems just fine except that there’s not much a 20-year veteran of the manufacturing sector can expect to gain from that idea. Education is the key for the next generation, but even then, after presumably all the turmoil has passed, the setup is there for a teeming underclass resigned to serving coffee to the creatives and taking out their garbage.
I don’t have an answer to the question of what comes next for the mass of people who have had the industrialists’ promise of economic stability broken. As the manufacturing sector continues to decline, I don’t know what will ultimately happen to them after this globalization revolution has taken its course, but I intend to keep asking the question.
I intend to ask it tomorrow night, when I go see Mr. Maunula speak. As I walk up the steps of our downtown library—a building designed partly as an homage to the old brick textile mills—my mind will surely be swimming in a sea of questions without any real answers.
Are the crumbling mill villages that dot Spartanburg County a harbinger of what’s to come for our modern working class? I hope against hope that it won’t turn out that way, that I’m wrong about our modern manufacturing plants going the way of the old mills. Those jobs, even though they don’t pay nearly what they should or would in other parts of the country, are better than the nothing that looks poised to replace them.
Christopher George
