Mollie's Job: A Story of Life and Work on the Global Assembly Line

Abstract

Mollie's Job: A Story of Life on the Global Assembly Line, by William Adler, is reviewed.

Mollie's Job: A Story of Life and Work on the Global Assembly Line. By William Adler. New York: Scribner, 2000. 350 pp. Notes and index. Cloth, $27. 50. ISBN 0-684-83779-X.

Reviewed by Steve Babson

By concentrating on the history of a single company, Universal Manufacturing, and the job of a single employee, Mollie James, author William Adler attempts the most difficult of tasks: projecting the broad sweep of economic history through the narrow prism of lived experience. His biographical sketches of Mollie, her employers, and many other welldrawn characters produce a compelling picture of the historical forces transforming our economy over the last century.

In Part I, "Paterson," Adler describes the context and early history of Universal's founding: from Alexander Hamilton's promotion of Paterson, New Jersey, as an early center of American industry; to the mass immigration of East European peoples that, in 1910, brought Archie Sergy's Lithuanian-Jewish parents to Paterson; to Sergy's hustling, grind-it-out entrepreneurship as he founded Universal and, from the 1940s onward, expanded the company into the manufacturing of parts for fluorescent lighting; to the mass migration of southern blacks that, in the 1950s, brought Mollie northward from Virginia to Universal's Paterson plant, where she became a coil-winder and a union steward.

Part II, "Mississippi," chronicles the opening of Universal's whitesonly, nonunion factories in the South during the 1960s, and the complex process that finally brought unionization and racial integration to these plants. In Part III, "Mexico," the focus shifts further south as Universal, now a division of Magnetek, opens a factory in Matamoros and closes the Paterson plant, forcing Mollie into retirement on Social Security and a Teamster pension of $73 a month. With the closing of Universal's southern plants in the 1990s, Adler's story turns to the Matamoros factory and a workforce that includes Balbina Duque-the woman who fills Mollie's old job at sixty-five cents an hour.

Adler's underlying sympathy with Mollie and Balbina is evident in the occasionally hyperbolic language that, for example, describes managers "goose stepping" through Magnetek's Mexican factory (p. 14). But these lapses are rare, and Adler's critical voice is usually even handed, revealing contradiction and pretense on all sides. Indeed, there are not many heroes in Universal's story. Besides Mollie and Balbina, one of the few is Universal's plant manager in Mississippi, Siegfried Steinberger, who makes peace with the union and defies local racists as he integrates the factory. Archie Sergy's hands-on patriarchal styleworking long hours in the open "bullpen" of the factory office, making emergency loans to troubled employees, and calling all of his production workers by name-draws Adler's sympathetic attention, but this is not an airbrushed portrait. Also chronicled are Sergy's extensive dealings in the black market during World War II, his prison term for selling stolen goods, and his blatant thieving of patents from General Electric. "I'd settle with GE," as Joel Steiger, a Universal lawyer, told Adler. "It made sense [to steal the patents]. . . . We didn't have to spend money on research and development" (p. 94).

Adler uses first-person accounts like Steiger's to good effect, weaving together more than seventy interviews with source materials from court cases, regulatory hearings, government investigations, company and union documents, archival materials, and an ample review of secondary sources. The book is written in a well-modulated journalistic style that avoids an academic feel by relegating source notes to the final pages. Here, in a chapter-by-chapter summary, Adler inventories his sources and provides citations keyed to passages in the text.

The result is a compelling mixture of economic and personal history that reinforces big themes by reciting a series of smaller, related stories. The immigrant saga of the Sergy family anticipates Mollie's migration from Virginia, which in turn anticipates Balbina's painful journey from San Luis Potosi to Matamoros; having established these similarities, Adler underlines the painful irony that each group, once entrenched, often regarded later arrivals as unwelcome competitors. Likewise, by recounting the successive factory migrations radiating outward from Paterson, Adler underlines an important theme in his book. "The perennial enticement of low wages and weak or nonexistent unions," as he summarizes these previous stories, "was why Paterson silk makers opened ancillary plants in Pennsylvania at the dawn of the twentieth century; why Archie Sergy planted the Universal flag in Mississippi sixty years later; and why, just a few years after that, some visionary industrialists were rushing past the rural South, all the way across the Rio Grande" (p. 216).

If free-traders are discomforted by this passage, union-friendly readers will find the warts-on portrait of Teamsters Local 945 equally troubling. Part of the mob-dominated satrapy of New Jersey Teamster Tony Provenzano, Local 945 evidenced every variety of union racketeering, from numbers running to loan sharking to the selling of sweetheart contracts. Paralleling this sorry tale of union corruption is Adler's equally detailed account of how Universal was parceled into a series of leveraged buyouts by Michael Milken-the self-proclaimed "predator" and corporate raider-whose clients stripped Universal of its servicefirst ethos. The parallel rendering of these stories creates an interesting counterpoint when Adler turns to the ways in which Magnetek, Universal's new owner in 1986, threatened to close its Arkansas plant and move to Mexico unless the union agreed to wage cuts. "In reality," Adler concludes, "[it] was a mob-like proposal to union leaders-an offer they could hardly refuse" (p. 254).

Eventually, the plant closed anyway, and production moved to Mexico. Here again, Adler finds that the restless mobility of capital produces, for Mexican workers, the same insecurity he found in Paterson. Noting that Magnetek seems to favor its new Reynosa factory over Balbina Duque's Matamoros plant, he asks Balbina if she would consider moving to Reynosa if the company relocated her job. "And what if they were to move again," Balbina replies. "Maybe to Juarez or Tijuana? What then? Do I chase my job all over the world?" (p. 313).

This question is being asked with growing frequency as globalization comes under fire from labor, environmental, and consumer activists. Adler's book is clearly part of this critical trend, closest in style to John R. MacArthur's The Selling of "Free Trade": NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy (2000). Both follow a particular company's trek southward (in MacArthur's case, the Swingline Corporation), and both raise questions of how unregulated capital mobility is changing the balance of power between workers and employers. MacArthur's book, however, is more narrowly focused on the passage of NAFTA and offers less documentation for its conclusions. In this respect, Adler's book can better serve as either a supplementary text in economic history or simply a "good read" for anyone partial to the dexterous merging of journalism and scholarship.