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This description of day labor in
Uptown in the 1960s is from a book written by two student activists who came
to Uptown to create a grassroots movement with the poor. They interviewed
Uptown residents and recorded their accounts over a period of about a
year. Rather than
“correcting” his language for the written page, the authors chose
to reproduce it as closely as possible in order to keep Mr. Dawson’s
voice as alive and accurate as possible. |
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Photo:
Amelia D’Entrone John
Dawson on what southern migrants found when they came to John
Dawson on how it is hard not to get discouraged John
Dawson on unequal pay for similar work John
Dawson on doing “dirty work” John
Dawson on why he decided to fight with JOIN and demand jobs & income for
the people of Uptown |
John Dawson on Day Labor in
Uptown Circa 1964 Some a these labor
companies thinks your’re a dog a some kind, just think you’re a
straight dog workin’.
They’ll say, “Good God, you can work for that price out
here and look at the money you’re makin me, and I’ll just put all
this dirty work on you.” I
mean some a them jobs you’re doin work that the regular employees won’t
even think about doin. They will
work these people at a dollar-twenty-five an hour, they’re getting
union scale from these plants. Say for instance that you
go on a job and you’re gettin a dollar and a quarter and the cheapest
they’re workin you is for two dollars. They’ve made seventy-five cents
on each hour’s work that you work every day. That’s pretty good interest,
settin on your settin down place all day long. Say these jobs are payin
two and a half or three dollars an hour, they’re makin a killin. The people should get their decent
wage out of it. That’s the
way I feel about that, about somebody settin down there and drawin it. Why should we work for those offices
that are makin that money and takin our money away from our families and then
they holler poverty and poverty and poverty---what the hell do they expect
the people to be on? Poverty,
that’s what they’re gonna get. They’re the ones smoking the
cigars and drinkin all the good moonshine whiskey. We’re the men doin the
work. They’s a poor class
of people that come to Chicago and come to different cities like Detroit,
Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and places like this that they thought that
when they got there that they could just walk in and get a job of work that
would pay em big money, but places like these slave labor markets hurt a lot
of those people tryin to make a decent living for their families. There’s a lot of people that
comes here with a family and they find out they can’t get a job where
they can make a livin and don’t have enough money to pay for
theirselves. All right, they hop
over here and they think, “Well, I can make a living in this place
here,” and they don’t know that the place is only paying
one-twenty-five, one-thirty an hour till they get out there. Well, in fact they wind up with about
a dollar an hour when they get off their job. They cain’t feed their
family. Well, they get the
attitude, the hell with it, and that the cause of a lot of people from the
South that just don’t give a damn. There ain’t no
better guy in the world than Leon Teel, no better, freer-hearted guy, do
anything in the world for anyone, but when he goes out and works a couple of
them days and knows he can’t get a good job, he gets dishearted about
working all day and then not getting nothing for it. Especially go out on one of these jobs
and you’re doin the job right along with this guy, the guy’gettin
say three dollars an hour and you’re gettin one-twenty-five,
one-thirty. Well, you say, the
devil, you work out there two days and you got ten dollars and look what that
damn guy’s got!
You’re doin the same
work or maybe even doin more work than he’s doin. He’ll come in, say, “The
hell with it, I ain’t going back tomorrow.” Disgusted with it. And he won’t go back,
he’ll get drunk and won’t go back… It wasn’t like it is
back home. Most of the class back
home, you walk in a plant whether they know you or not and if they give you a
job you can explain to the personnel manager that you had to have some money
at the end of the week or had to have some money the next day after you work.
Well, he would make arrangements for you to get money to live on till you
drawed a payday. Well, these
plants here won’t do that, for they’ve got this cutthroat with
these slave-labor markets here, they get their labor to them much cheaper. There’s none of
these slave-labor market offices, daily-labor offices, will pay you
time-and-a-half time or overtime unless you work forty hours at the same
plant. They’ll work you a
couple of days at one plant, then they’ll transfer you over to another
plant, so that’s to keep you from payin’ it. The business people is so
stupid, I don’t know what’s the matter with em. If I was runnin a place a business, I
wouldn’t even allow one to send me a man. I’d go out on the street and
hire me a man, say, “Come over in here, buddy, I got a full day’s
wages fer you.” I would pay
union scales on that job. That’s
robbin from the poor.
They’re robbin from the poor. I’ll say they have to be a
kickback through their personnel offices. Don’t tell me that these
personnel offices, a-payin Jobs Unlimited full scale, that they’re not
getting a kickback through Jobs Unlimited toget that. Or either they’d be willin to hire
you or me or whoever it is comes up ‘ere and pay them when they get off
from work, full scale. …There’s
another thing about them. Say you
go out on a job and the damn job ain’t fit for you to be on, some dog
pen, and you come back in up there, and because you didn’t do the job,
or you wasn’t a kind of a dog to just do his dog work for him,
he’ll tell you to not come back in his office no more, for he
ain’t got more work for that kind of people. One time he told me it was
a clean job and we got out there and you know what we was a-handlin? Cowhides. Another time they sent me up to a
place in I said, “Well,
I’ll tell you what.”
I said, “You get somebody else to do your work over
here.” I said, “I
ain’t foolin where the ink’s flyin all over this
floor.” I said, “Look
at all these people here in these coverhalls, they look like they’s a
blue wall a some kind.” “Well I cain’t
help you.” And I said, “Well
that’s good, thank you.”
I said “You can take your job and go to hell.” I said, “I ain’t workin
here like that, I ain’t got to work for a dollar twenty five an
hour.” Now Leon and I came back
in and told em, told old Bob up there at Work for Men, and he wanted to know
why we didn’t work the job, and we told him, and he said,
“Well,” he said, “You’ll accept any kind of job I
have in here.” So I told him, I said, “I’ll tell you what,
you can go straight to hell. I
ain’t got to work for you or no other sonofabitch like you.” I said, “You do your own jobs up
there, somebody else do it.”
I said, “I
ain’t goin up there and ruin a pair of pants that I spent about seven
dollars fer.” I said,
“No sir, gimme my four hours’ pay.” I am just plain with anybody like
that. …And I’ll be
a-fightin’ these slave markets as long as I stay in They keep hollerin povery,
poverty, poverty that’s all you hear every day in the papers. Until
they do away with slavery, they’ll never get shut of poverty. Excepted
from: Uptown: Poor Whites in |
