GENERAL IRON, BLUE COLLAR JOBS, ALDERMAN SADLOWSKI GARZA, THE RUNGS OF THE ECONOMIC LADDER, AND TALES FROM ST. IGNATIUS

5/30/20

The Chicago papers reported yesterday that Alderman Susan Sadlowski Garcia will join the community organizers and the environmentalists from both inside and outsider her 10^th Ward and oppose the plans of General Iron Corp. to move its metal-shredding operation from the toney 43^rd Ward to the grittier, working class bailiwick of Alderman Garcia.

Given the environmental implications of the metal shredding process, one can understand the reluctance of any neighborhood to welcome with open arms such an operation.   But before signing wholeheartedly onto the environmentalist agenda of people who are not similarly economically situated, the residents of the 10^th Ward might want to consider the economic consequences of saying “No, thanks” to an operation like General Iron.   Given the inherent good sense of people who engage in manual labor for a living, one suspects that many 10^th Ward denizens are not as opposed to General Iron as the activists would have us believe.   These residents, though never having heard yours truly’s lecture on the topic, are doubtless aware of the principle of the first rung of the economic ladder.

As most of you know, one of my jobs is teaching finance and economics.    Since I am very adept at working the “first rung of the economic ladder” lecture into all my classes, all my econ students, and most of my finance students, are, or once were, familiar with the principle, which I learned not in the classroom but in, for lack of a better term, life.

As many of you know, I went to St. Ignatius High School (I still refuse to call it “St. Ignatius College Prep,” even though it had attained that still chichi moniker a few years before I showed up at 1076, the school’s numerical address and the moniker those of us of sound mind would prefer to use for our alma mater.), which was quite a different place back then than it is now.   Ignatius at the time was at least as academically elite as it is now but it was not as, for lack of a better term, sociologically elite as it is today.  It was the place where a working-class kid was sent by his immigrant or African-American parents because he (The school didn’t become co-ed until five years after I graduated.) showed academic prowess and would be challenged to or beyond his ability and consequently could, if he worked hard and did well, do things that his parents never dreamed of for themselves.   That is not to say that the entire student body was composed of such students.   I, for instance, am second generation American on one side and third on the other and, because I lived on the outskirts of Beverly and my dad was a partner in a successful small business, was considered one of the “rich” kids at Ignatius at the time.   Now the “rich” kids at Ignatius come from the Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, and even the North shore and places like Hinsdale; they really are rich, but things change and I digress.

A typical Ignatian at the time was a kid with an unpronounceable last name and a father who worked in the steel mills, in a meat packing plant, on the railroad, or at some non-descript industrial facility bordering one of the expressways.   His mom stayed home, raised the kids, volunteered at church, and made sure the kids did their homework and stayed out of trouble.   The family lived in a neighborhood that was surrounded by factories, warehouses, meat packing plants, or the like that emitted noises and odors that did not enhance the aesthetics of the area.  They lived there not because it was bucolic and aromatic but because that’s where work was. The family’s first language was Polish, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, or Italian; I had several friends who didn’t speak English until they got to first grade.   The kids were sent to Ignatius so that they could get into, and get a decent scholarship from, a place like IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology) or UIC (University of Illinois at Chicago) and get a degree in engineering.   Why engineering?   Because the only college educated guy that their dads saw at “the plant” was an engineer of some sort.   So, in their minds, an engineering degree was what one got in college if one wanted to move up in life, and the kid was really good in math and science, so why not?

The progress continued as the guys I went to school with and who became engineers or the like moved out of the old neighborhood to the suburbs or one of the neighborhoods on the geographic fringes of the city, like “out by the airport,” which could be either airport (These guys didn’t move to Lincoln Park; they had, for the most part, had enough of the city and moved out of the old neighborhood as soon as they could put a down payment on a house in some place like Lemont or Naperville.  The ironic, and in some ways sad, part of the story is that the homes their parents eventually sold for a pittance are now being featured on Windy City Rehab or House Hunters as 7 figure monuments to their potential new owners, but, again, I digress.), married women they had met in the old neighborhood or at UIC, and had sons and daughters, whom they, in turn, sent to the U of I (University of Illinois in Champaign) or to one of the many U of Is of the east (Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, MIT, or the like) so that they could become doctors, lawyers, software engineers, or investment bankers and move to the Gold Coast, the North Shore, the upper west side of Manhattan, northern California, or perhaps to their grandparents’ old place at a 100 fold premium to what their grandparents paid in what has suddenly become a fashionable neighborhood.

So the process was three steps, and three generations, from factory worker to mid-level engineer to big time investment banker or software gazillionaire.     The pattern, of course, was not identical.   Some of the guys with whom I went to school (How yours truly wound up in the same classroom with these types of guys is beyond me.) were so smart and dedicated, and had such persistent and insistent parents, that they skipped the second step altogether and went right from their parents’ working class bungalow or apartment to the highest reaches of the medical, legal, engineering, or investment banking professions.   And some progeny of the guys with whom I went to school decided that a vertical move up the ladder wasn’t necessary; they were happy to join their dads as mid-management engineers or to pursue teaching, nursing, ground level politics and attendant government jobs, the trades, or the like and are making great livings, and living wonderful lives, doing so.   And, of course, an Ignatius education was not by any means a necessary part of this story; I only mention Ignatius because it was the place from which I saw these stories play out over the years among my fellow alumni of that justifiably proud institution.   And several of those guys read this blog.

The point of this story is that none of these successful and happy lives, and none of these choices, would have been possible without that first step on the economic ladder.  If these guys’ dads hadn’t gotten the jobs in the factory, which could on no planet be described as pleasant, enriching, fulfilling, or the like, and made the inter-generational compact they silently made with their sons, their sons couldn’t have gone to Ignatius (It was expensive even back then…almost $400 per semester, which was a not insignificant amount of money to a lot of my fellow Ignatians’ families.) and hence couldn’t have gotten the scholarships to IIT that enabled them to get the jobs that provided the income necessary to send their daughters to the big time colleges from which they could become partners in  major Chicago law firms or attending physicians at major University hospitals.

One of the biggest problems our society faces today is that the aforementioned first rung on the economic ladder has been yanked away by the forces of, inter alia, the cult (as opposed to the economic principle) of free trade, the transformation to an “information economy,” the sense of entitlement that inevitably accompanies prosperity, and the like.   The steel plants, the meatpacking operations, many of the railroads, and other factories that could provide a decent livelihood to people without much of an education but with the willingness to work hard at unpleasant tasks are gone.   Now a kid growing up in Chicago without much education and without much inclination toward education is not confronted with a choice between a $30 (in today’s dollars) an hour job on a factory floor or a life of crime and/or indolence; s/he is faced with a choice between a $10 fast food job and a life of crime and/or indolence.    This has obvious ramifications not only for the prospects for these kids and their progeny but also for the economy and society as a whole.  

Many of the changes that kicked the first rung of the economic ladder out from under today’s minority and immigrant working class were made inevitable by technological progress and attendant economic transformation and dislocation.   To put too many obstacles in the way of such developments is not only pointless; it is dangerous.   But given that the destruction of opportunity for those looking to grasp that first rung on the ladder can’t be completely stopped, the last thing we need is for politicians to make such opportunities scarcer by insisting that their neighborhoods be environmentally pristine regardless of the economic consequences for their constituents.   The prior generations sacrificed what we would today call a “green” lifestyle because they knew that with the “browning” of their neighborhoods came opportunities that would enable the next generation to have better, or at least wider, choices regarding where they would work and live.

While Alderman Sadlowski Garza is by no means unique in her obeisance to the more elitist forces who insist that the environment remain pristine regardless of the economic consequences, her enthusiasm for such ideas, manifested by her opposition to General Iron, is especially ironic.   Her story reflects the “rungs of the ladder” story I related above.   Her father, Ed Sadlowski, was a hero of the Chicago Labor Movement, a dissident president of Local 65 of the United Steelworkers at the U.S. Steel mega-plant in the 10^th Ward.   He made the same kind of inter-generational deal that I described above, allowing his daughter Susan to become first a school teacher, then a union activist, like her father, and then a Chicago alderman.   If the type of environmental policy currently espoused by Alderman Sadlowski been in place 60 years ago, when her dad started working, there would have been no U.S. Steel South Works and no first rung on the economic ladder for the Sadlowski family.