Philip Berroll

By P.H.I.Berroll

Around 7:30 a.m., the men gather in the chilling December air at the corner of South 5^th Street and Bedford Avenue, next to the Williamsburg Bridge overpass, as they do every morning.  There are about 30 of them, ranging in age from twentysomething to early fifties.  Some stand alone; others cluster in small groups, chatting, making jokes.  But everyone keeps an eye on the street, watching the cars, vans, and pickup trucks that pass by — and waiting for the occasional vehicle that slows down.

The men are part of a sad tradition in American labor — the shape-up crew.  For generations, the unemployed have clustered on particular street corners in American cities, hoping to get a day-labor job for a couple of hours or even better, several days.  Because most of them do not possess a special craft or skill, they are of little interest to unions or conventional employment agencies, and so are left to their own devices.

At the height of the Depression, most shape-up crews were made up of native-born Americans.  Today, the crews are almost entirely composed of immigrants, legal and otherwise.  Mexican-dominated crews have long been common to Southern California.  Here in Greenpoint, two of the men waiting by the bridge are African-American and several are Latino, but most have emigrated from Poland or the former Soviet Union.

Zygmunt “Zygi” Lemond, a stocky, friendly man of 43, came from Poland — he is vague about the exact year, but it was some time after the fall of the country’s Communist regime in 1989.  Drawn to Greenpoint by its large Polish community, Zygi has lived for almost a year in a homeless shelter on Bedford and Atlantic Avenues, about half a mile south.

Wearing a patterned jacket, hightop sneakers and a painter’s cap, he is dressed a bit more colorfully than the others.  (Even more bizarre is a younger man who looks like a college student, wearing a backpack, a Walkman — and rollerblades.)  Zygi’s background is also unconventional.  Trained as a musician, he left Poland when he realized that work would be harder to come by in a capitalist society — “How many dance bands do you need?” he asks rhetorically.

But Zygi felt that the American music business, while equally competitive, offered more opportunity.  And he does on occasion play bass guitar with a band, working New Jersey towns such as Linden, Garfield, or Passaic, which have large Polish neighborhoods.  He plays both nightclubs and social events — weddings, christenings, baby showers.

But it’s not enough to make a living.  So every morning, he is out on the corner, looking for construction or warehouse jobs or “painting, sometimes.”  The pay isn’t great, but it’s better than minimum-wage — at least $6 an hour, and as much as $10 for more strenuous construction or demolition work.

The real problem is the length and frequency of the jobs.  When asked if he gets much work, Zygi makes a face and says only, “It’s not regular.”  Some of his jobs have been as short as two to three hours, but none have been longer than two days.  “Yesterday,” he says, “I worked nine hours, in a warehouse.”  He usually stays on the corner until noon before giving up for the day.

At one point, a station wagon pulls up, with two men in the front seat.  Everyone clusters around, gesticulating, talking in two or three languages, as those with better English translate for their friends.  Zygi joins in for a few minutes, then walks away.  Eventually, no one else decides to get in the car, and the men drive off.

Zygi explains that the men offered to pay $6 an hour for extensive wiring and carpentry work on a building that they were renovating — but were honest enough to mention that the building was unheated.  “For a job like that,” he says, “it’s got to be at least $10.”

Not everyone can afford to be so choosy.  Down the block, on the other side of the overpass, another group of East Europeans have staked out their own patch of turf.  One of them, Sasha, a Ukrainian immigrant who has been in the U.S. for three months, says with a laugh that he does “everything.”  Another in the group, Tibor, who comes from Bulgaria, lists his skills as “welder, electrician… and I put down tiles.”  They are less easily discouraged than Zygi — they usually stay on the street until 2 or 3 p.m.

At his end of the block, Zygi sniffs that there are “too many Russians out here” — some days, in fact, they outnumber the Poles.  Is he voicing ancient resentments, given the history of relations between Russia and Poland?   More likely, it’s a matter of numbers.  The more men on the block competing for jobs, the less chance any of them has of getting one.

Occasionally, Zygi says, the competition gets ugly.  When an employer announces two openings and four (or more) men are gathered around his car, push can literally come to shove.  But the disputes are generally forgotten, or at least set aside, by the following day.  The men have to face each other every morning, and holding grudges is a waste of energy.

From time to time, two uniformed policemen in a squad car circle the block, keeping an eye on the group.  But the men are careful to stay on their best behavior.  Until several months ago, the group had been gathering a few blocks away, at the intersection of Wallabout Street and Kent Avenue; they were chased away by the police, after local residents complained that some of the men were drinking in public and throwing bottles and other garbage on the street.  Zygi confirms the charges, although he personally claims innocence.

Now another car pulls over.  Before Zygi takes three steps in his direction, the Latino driver picks the first three men who approach, and drives away.  Zygi shrugs, takes a cigarette from a Marlboro pack, and lights up.

Most of the employers, Zygi says, are Latinos or Orthodox or Hasidic Jews.  The latter, he says, are sometimes a problem because they prefer to pay him in cash, off the books, in order to avoid paying social security taxes.  He would rather get a check.  “If you’re paid cash,” he says, “it could be as low as $3 an hour.  A check, if it’s six, you still keep $3.75 after taxes and Social Security.”

Zygi is familiar with the current American political debate about welfare and unemployment.  He has heard the claims that there are plenty of available jobs for any able-bodied worker who is willing to look hard enough.  (In New York, Gov. George Pataki recently announced plans to cut state welfare rolls by 25 percent.)

But Zygi prefers not to take sides in this argument; he will only speak of his own feelings and experience.  Welfare, he says, is not for him, but he does not judge anyone who takes that route.

What Zygi really wants is the chance to leave the corner for good.  He says he knows of “some people in the summer who go to upstate New York.  They get regular factory jobs and they don’t come back.”  And Zygi himself has an application in at a factory on Java Street, a few blocks north.

For now, though, he remains under the bridge, waiting for another car to pull up to the curb.

“Every day,” he says, “it’s the same situation.”
 

Originally published in Brooklyn-Queens Waterfront Week weekly newspaper, 1995.

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The Inheritance:  How Three Families and America Moved From Roosevelt to Reagan

By Samuel G. Freedman.  Simon & Schuster, 1996.  464 pp.

By P.H.I.Berroll

In a photograph at the front of this book, three fortyish political activists – Frank Trotta, Jr., Leslie Maeby, and Tim Carey – stand together at a restaurant in Peekskill, N.Y.  Peekskill is the home base of conservative Republican George Pataki, who was elected New York’s Governor in 1994 on promises to cut taxes and spending (i.e., social-service programs) and bring back the death penalty.  Both Carey and Maeby worked for Pataki’s campaign, and it’s a safe bet that Trotta, a lifelong Republican, gave him his vote.

A progressive could be forgiven for being repelled by this trio of plump, smug reactionaries – I certainly was.  But it is a measure of Samuel G. Freedman’s achievement in The Inheritance that one finishes the book with a deeper understanding of the three… and a feeling of sadness at losing them to the “enemy” camp.

I say “losing” because Carey, Maeby, and Trotta all came from families – Irish, Polish, and Italian respectively – who had an allegiance to the Democrats that rivaled their love of America itself.  Those families typified the working-class Catholics who formed the bedrock of the party for decades, especially after the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.  But the younger generation is symbolic of the “Reagan Democrats” who helped return the G.O.P. to power almost 50 years later.

In The Inheritance, Freedman, a former New York Times reporter and author of two previous books – Upon This Rock, a portrait of a black church, and Small Victories, about a teacher in an inner-city public school – has put a human face on this phenomenon, using a skillful blend of the “macro” of national trends and statistics and the “micro” minutiae of everyday lives.  I can’t recommend the book strongly enough for Tikkun readers, for it addresses one of the most frequently discussed questions in these pages:  why have millions of voters from blue-collar backgrounds abandoned the Democrats, even though it seemed clearly against their economic interests to do so?  The theme of The Inheritance is that for these voters, it’s not just the economy, stupid – gut issues have competed with pocketbook issues for primacy, and in recent years have frequently won.

Freedman begins his story with one grandparent from each of his three families.  All of them had truly Dickensian childhoods.  Silvio Burigo was raised by relatives after his immigrant father committed suicide; he left school at an early age to become a plumber.  Joseph Obrycki’s father, a leader of the Polish community in Baltimore, was a business failure, and the teenaged Joe became the principal support of his family – as a numbers runner.  Lizzie Sanford (later Garrett) and her widowed Irish mother fled the poverty of Liverpool and settled in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, where things were not much better.

The Depression years found all three with families of their own, struggling to get by.  For Burigo and Garrett, support for the Democrats was a matter of bread-on-the-table survival:  Roosevelt promised economic improvement and a social-welfare safety net.  For Obrycki, now active in Baltimore’s Democratic machine, it was about political loyalty.  But in varying degrees, they all came to establish a deeper emotional connection to the party (class resentment was also a factor – in their eyes, “Republican” meant “rich Protestant”).  And they helped spread the gospel to their relatives, friends, and co-workers.

For more than three decades, more loyal Democratic voters could not be found.  But then cracks in the bedrock began to appear, not among the older generation – though Burigo was angered by the government-ordered integration of his union in the 1960’s – but with their children and grandchildren, who knew not FDR.  For them, liberal-Democratic politics came to be seen not as a source of aid and protection, but as an enemy.  And the fault lines, as Freedman illustrates, were often created by the clash of opposing social values.

As a young military policeman, Sanford’s grandson Tim Carey stood guard at the Pentagon during the massive antiwar protest of October 1967.  It awakened his class consciousness, but in a radically different sense from his grandmother:  he saw himself as being attacked by college kids with draft deferments while he and his buddies were “bearing the burden they shirked.”  (With his reporter’s eye for the telling detail, Freedman depicts Carey “[seeing] the first can fly…Tomato soup, he noted as it lay dented on the ground; he had stocked plenty in his days at Shopwell.”)

Frank Trotta, grandson of Burigo, was also alienated by the antiwar movement’s excesses, and resentful that tenants of the complex where his father worked as a janitor were given low-rent apartments, on which many neglected the upkeep, by the government.  And both he and Carey were angered by the apparent ease with which nonwhite students were given admission and scholarships – for which they had to struggle – to New York’s state university system.

Joe Obrycki’s daughter Vilma, meanwhile, had left Baltimore with her husband, Jack Maeby; they eventually settled in Colonie, N.Y., a suburb of Albany, the state capital.  In their case, liberalism had done its job all too well:  towns like Colonie grew with plenty of help from government programs (e.g., FHA housing loans and the interstate highway system).  Yet local Republicans thrived by attacking Albany’s Democrats for their “bloated payroll” and other financial excesses.  All across the country, suburban, formerly blue-collar voters were buying into a similar ideology.  And it was passed down to their children – including the Maebys’ daughter Leslie, who eventually became finance director for the state Republican party.

It is disheartening to read about Maeby, Tim Carey (a campaign strategist) and Frank Trotta (a lawyer) expending their energies on people like Pataki and Alfonse D’Amato.  And Freedman suggests that this was not inevitable:  he devotes a chapter to Tim’s uncle, Richie Garrett, whose ecological concerns made him a Democratic activist in the late ’60s.  But he also depicts, convincingly, the political incompetence and arrogance that helped drive other such voters from the Democrats.

Indeed, arrogance, and elitism, is a recurring motif in the book.  Freedman doesn’t object to most Left/liberal ideology; but he makes it clear that if it had been presented to these people in a dialogue of equals, instead of with the attitude of we know best, and you must be a racist/fascist/militarist if you disagree, the wholesale defections of the ’80s might have been avoided.  He suggests, for example, that while Silvio Burigo was something of a racist, bigotry alone did not explain his resistance, and that of his fellow plumbers, to integrating their union.  It was more a matter of ethnic solidarity – membership was one of the few things these men could pass on to their sons and nephews – and this attitude, however narrow-minded, could have at least have been addressed by the union’s opponents.

What of the future?  At the end of The Inheritance, Freedman sounds pessimistic:  “When [the older] generation passes, so will the collective memory of the New Deal.”  But while the South, that other one-time bastion of Democratic solidarity, may be irretrievably lost, the rest of the country, judging from the election of 1996, is still up for grabs.  And if there is any hope of winning back the Reagan Democrats and avoiding the creation of new ones, the lessons of this book must be put into practice.

Originally written for Tikkun magazine, 1998.

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