Mollie's Job

A Story of Life and Work on the Global Assembly Line

William M. Adler

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780743219129
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Following the flight of one woman's factory job from the United States to Mexico, this compelling work offers a provocative and fresh perspective on the global economy -- at a time when downsizing is unraveling the American Dream for many working families.
Mollie's Job is an absorbing and affecting narrative history that traces the postwar migration of one factory job as it passes from the cradle of American industry, Paterson, New Jersey, to rural Mississippi during the turmoil of the civil rights movement to the burgeoning border city of Matamoros, Mexico.
This fascinating account follows the intersecting lives and fates of three women -- Mollie James in Paterson, Dorothy Carter in Mississippi, and Balbina Duque in Matamoros, all of whom work the same job as it winds its way south. Mollie's Job is the story of North American labor and capital during the latter half of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first. The story of these women, their company, and their communities provides an ideal prism through which William Adler explores the larger issues at the heart of the book: the decline of unions and the middle class, the growing gap between rich and poor, public policy that rewards companies for transferring U.S. jobs abroad, the ways in which "free trade" undermines stable businesses and communities, and how the global economy exploits workers on both sides of the border.
At once a social and industrial history; a moving, personal narrative; and a powerful indictment of free trade at any cost, Mollie's Job puts a human face on the political and market forces shaping the world at the dawn of the new millennium and skillfully frames the current debate raging over future trade agreements.
By combining a deft historian's touch with first-rate reporting, Mollie's Job is an unprecedented and revealing look at the flesh-and-blood consequences of globalization.

Part I

Paterson

ONE

Dimples Takes a Ride

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, NOVEMBER 1950. Rolling into Broad Street Station on the daily northbound run, the conductor of the Silver Meteor does not bother to stop the train. Richmond is not a principal destination for the Meteor, the queen of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad’s Florida to New York whistle-stoppers, and so the depot merits the train’s slowing only enough for passengers to disembark and for new passengers to hop on.

At a few minutes before two on a cold, pitch-black morning, a father and his nineteen-year-old daughter wait anxiously on the platform of the ornate World War I-era station. The young woman is Mollie Brown, “Dimples” to the folks back home in Cartersville, in Cumberland County, forty-five miles west of Richmond in the rolling farmland of central Virginia. Mollie is headed to Penn Station in Newark, New Jersey, to meet her fiancé, who would take her home, to Paterson, to her new life. She is dressed in her finest: a new navy blue suit, new shoes, new hairdo. She carries nearly everything she owns in a half-dozen sky blue suitcases her father has given her for the trip.

Mollie is traveling alone, but the “colored” train cars of the Silver Meteor, and indeed those of the other great northbound coaches—the Champion, the Florida Sunbeam, the Silver Comet—are full of Mollie Browns: black Southerners crossing the Mason-Dixon Line, heading for the promised land.

World War II was over, and the Great Migration to the urban centers of the North was in full swing. Southern blacks no sooner graduated from high school than they packed their bags for the inevitable ride on the “Chickenbone Special.” The name appeared on no timetable; it was coined, apparently, by the passengers. They were disinclined or disinvited to patronize the Jim Crow dining cars, and so they sustained themselves during the long trip with box lunches, which nearly always included the staple from which the trains derived their nickname: fried chicken.

This was not Mollie’s first trip north; two summers earlier she went to Brooklyn to stay with her aunt Lucille, her mother’s only sister. She had had a terrific time, riding the subway, seeing movies, even saving some money. “At home I made only about six dollars a week babysitting,” she recalls. “In New York I could make sixteen or eighteen dollars a week.”

It wasn’t only the wages she found so appealing. Jackie Robinson had broken into the major leagues with the Brooklyn Dodgers the previous season, and Mollie well recalls the pride and excitement it generated in places such as the restaurant in Harlem owned by the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. “I couldn’t believe he had his own place,” she says, “that was just amazing to me. And everyone there just slapping each other when Jackie got a hit.”

And it was not just at black-owned businesses that the teen-age Mollie was made to feel welcome. “Wherever I went in New York, I could go in for a cup of tea and a doughnut, and I could sit anywhere. You were not told to sit in a certain area. And when we shopped! The department stores were not segregated. Sears, Macy’s, Gimbels—everybody tried on clothes in the same area.” It wasn’t like that at home. “In Farmville [the commercial center of Cumberland County] the stores had separate dressing rooms. And I heard a lot of blacks complain that the stores wouldn’t allow them to try on hats. My mother always did, though. If they told her she couldn’t try one on, she told them she couldn’t buy it. That’s the way my mother was.”

Mollie’s mother, for whom she was named, was fifteen when she married Renza Brown (his formal name was Lorenzo), six years her senior. For seventeen years the couple was childless. The elder Mollie had suffered two miscarriages, and it did not look to the Browns like they would fulfill their dream of becoming parents. And then, during the depths of the Depression, on October 24, 1931, came Mollie, and three years later, another daughter, Anna. “I guess that was one of those mysterious ways the Lord works in,” Mollie says.

Mollie would learn much about the Lord. Her father was a minister, the assistant pastor at New Hope Baptist. “Church was my middle name growing up,” she says. The church was next door to the two-room schoolhouse Mollie first attended, which itself adjoined the Browns’ land. The family bought the land in 1934—after several failed attempts to buy property. It was not that Renza couldn’t afford it; he had money stashed away for a down payment. But while there was a tradition of black landownership in Cumberland, the seat of the county, Cartersville, in the northeast portion of the county, had yet to embrace this radical idea; none of the landowners in town would sell to a black family. Several times Renza had attempted to buy property, and several times he had been rebuffed. Finally, the lumber mill owner for whom Renza worked as a sawyer, a Canadian who had married a local woman, purchased the house and the six acres of surrounding land, in turn selling it to the Browns. “We were the first black family on the road in that area,” Mollie says. “There were families behind us, but not on the road, and the whites wanted to keep it that way.”

It was not until that liberating summer of 1948, when Mollie went away to Brooklyn, that she more fully understood the deprivations of legal segregation at home—and how good freedom tasted. She was not yet sixteen, would not graduate from the all-black Cumberland Training School for two more years, but she already knew she would one day move to the North for good. “That’s when I made up my mind I wasn’t going to stay here, that it was so dark down here,” she recalls years later, driving the winding roads of Cumberland County, through the deep green of rolling hills, tobacco plants, soybean fields, black walnut groves.

Millions of Southern blacks, of course, reached a similar conclusion. The first wave of the Great Migration had begun a generation before Mollie set foot in Brooklyn, during World War I, when European immigrants, who had comprised the bulk of the industrial workforce in America, were denied entrance to the United States. With the flow of European labor virtually evaporated, desperate Northern industrialists beckoned Southern blacks to their workforces. Come they did: A half-million blacks moved North between 1910 and 1920, eight hundred thousand more in the next decade.

Over the next four decades some five million blacks left the fields of the South for the urban life of the North and West. Many followed their elders and relatives. It gave them a place to stay, a possible job contact, a familiar face in a strange place. Those from Mississippi and Alabama and Arkansas commonly headed for Chicago or Detroit; Texans and Louisianans went to California; Georgians, Carolinians, and Virginians usually stayed on the eastern seaboard, migrating to Washington, Philadelphia or New York, or to smaller industrial cities such as Camden, New Jersey, or Newark or Paterson.

It was to Paterson that Mollie Brown’s fiancé, Sam James, had moved. He, too, had grown up in Cumberland County, but he and Mollie did not meet until after he had moved up North. They were introduced on one of his return visits to the family farm, when he accompanied his brother Vivien on an outing with Mollie’s sister, Anna, whom Vivien was dating.

Sam’s family farmed tobacco and corn outside the town of Cumberland, some thirteen miles from Cartersville. He was the fourth of eight children born to Vivien and Florence James, who relied on their brood to help bring in the crops. Even when Sam was enrolled in elementary school, he often missed classes to work in the fields, and his formal education ceased altogether after sixth grade.

Sam was named for an uncle who had moved up North, to New York City, when Sam was young. Uncle Sam had made a name as a cook, and the impressionable youth decided he, too, would leave home for the big city as soon as possible. At first he thought he’d probably head to New York, but when, during the war, his firstborn sister, Mozelle, and her husband, Turner Coleman, left home, they ended up in Paterson, where jobs were plentiful and where they found the small city (the population was 139,000) more manageable. (When their relatives from New York would ready to visit Paterson, they’d say, “We’re comin’ to the country.”)

WHEN THE streamlined diesel-electric engine of the Silver Meteor finally came into sight, when they could hear the familiar blast of the horn, Renza handed Mollie the envelope containing her ticket. The one-way fare was eighteen dollars. Renza hugged his daughter goodbye and good luck, told her he loved her, and waited on the platform until the train pulled away. Mollie found a seat, waved to her father, and settled in for the long morning ride. “You are about to take a trip by train,” the back of the ticket envelope read, “the most dependable, carefree, comfortable form of travel known.”

“I thought I was travelin’, brother,” Mollie says, marveling, almost a half-century later, at the wonder of the Meteor. She recalls with clarity the black satin interior of the coach, the plush reclining seats. But certainly the car Mollie rode in wasn’t as “carefree” or “comfortable” as those in which the white passengers sat. “Our cars were filthy and the rest rooms dirty,” Mollie says of the Jim Crow coaches into which blacks were directed.

Mollie arrived around ten A.M. at the Newark station, a magnificent Art Deco nod to the grandeur of train travel. Sam James had managed to leave his metalworking job to pick her up, but he hadn’t had time to change out of his protective clothing. What he wore mattered little to Mollie; what mattered was that as sure as she watched the sun rise from her window seat on the Meteor, she would soon marry, find a decent job, start a family.

Sam drove his bride-to-be home in his new yellow two-door Ford, home to the second-floor one-room apartment he rented for twenty dollars a week above his sister and brother-in-law’s apartment in their two-family house at 520 East Eighteenth Street. Although the accommodations were far from luxurious—Mollie and Sam shared a kitchen and bath with other upstairs tenants—her new life seemed as bright as Sam’s shiny car.

All of them had steady work, Sam in the foundry at American Light Alloy, one of several foundries that provided steady work to black men. Turner was employed at a rock quarry near Montclair, Mozelle at Spotless Laundry. Spotless serviced all the dry cleaners in the area; it was a principal employer of black women in the city. “They were the dirtiest, hottest, hardest jobs,” recalls Arthur Holloway, a native Virginian who arrived in Paterson a few years before Mollie, “but we were still better off here than in the South.”

When Mollie arrived in Paterson precisely at midcentury, she found a vibrant city pulsing with street life. “This was the shopping city then,” says Vincent J. Cortese, president of the Greater Paterson Chamber of Commerce. FOLLOW ME TO DOWNTOWN PATERSON, read the slogan on city buses.

And people did. They flocked to the grand temples of retail, Meyer Bros. and Quackenbush’s, the large department stores; Konner’s Men’s Shop; Charles W. Elbow, the haberdasher. On Thursday evenings, when the stores stayed open late, until nine, motorists circled around town searching for parking spaces. The holiday season and the January white sales, in particular, drew customers from throughout northern New Jersey, as well as from New York City and even Connecticut and western Pennsylvania. Downtown traffic was so choked that Paterson police implemented a plan to handle the sale period. “We put two to three officers at key intersections during and immediately after the holidays,” says William Dolan, the city’s current public safety director. “We needed one guy to direct traffic and two others to hold the pedestrians back on the green.”

Meyer Bros. was the heart of downtown, at the prime corner of Main and Market streets, the city’s main commercial thoroughfares. The store was diagonally across from City Hall, an 1896 neo-Renaissance stone replica of that of Lyons, the silk capital of France. With five stories of merchandise, Meyer’s, as it was known, was the city’s flagship department store. Rebuilt in 1925 after a fire, the store absolutely exuded elegance, from its interior acres of matched walnut and mahogany to the twin vestibules, at both entrances, covered in twentyfour- karat gold. Employees wore a black-and-white uniform to match the checkerboard marble floors. There was a fine restaurant in the basement, where the shopworn could dine on sandwiches or multicourse feasts. And there was an ornate ladies’ room, for which the standard fee was a nickle (no tipping allowed). For an extra nickel, patrons would have access to a private changing room, with sink, toilet, mirrors.

There were also specialty shops: butchers on Washington Street, milliners on Church Street, shoe merchants on lower Main, and three high-end furniture stores on upper Main: Bograd’s, Van Dyke’s (which was also known for its basement gift shop), and Keystone.

It wasn’t only the retailers that lured people downtown.

Hinchcliffe Stadium was the premier venue for sports. There were the Monday night stock-car or motorcycle races; it was the home field for the semipro Paterson Panthers football team and a couple of semipro baseball clubs, House of David and Wonder Bread. And during the summer months, the stadium hosted the Diamond Gloves boxing matches (a sort of minor league to the Golden Gloves fights at Madison Square Garden in New York), as well as traveling spectacles such as the Buster Crabbe water show. And for participants, there were bowling alleys in the basements of the firehouses.

There was a thriving cultural district that included a half-dozen theaters and an opera house, Lazzara’s Music Hall. The theaters included the Regent, the U.S., the Rivoli, the Garden, the Majestic, and the Fabian. Several of the theaters had also showcased touring vaudeville and musical acts in the 1920s and 1930s. The Regent, on Union Street, a twenty-four-hundred-seat auditorium trimmed in gold leaf, hosted many acts who would go on to household-word fame: Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, George Burns and Gracie Allen. They and other well-to-do visitors to the city stayed at the deluxe Alexander Hamilton Hotel, next door to the Fabian on the corner of Church and Market streets.

By the middle 1930s, though, with the widespread availability of a new medium, the Regent could no longer afford such talents. “Radio had a lot to do with our shutting down vaudeville,” Joseph Lefkowitz, the theater’s manager in its heyday, once recalled. “Burns and Allen played the Regent for six hundred and fifty dollars a week, then when they became stars on the radio circuit their asking price leaped to two thousand two hundred and fifty.”

Well into the 1950s, downtown remained the cultural hub. Theaters continued to screen movies long after radio supplanted their live shows. The films were promoted as events, often playing to standing-room- only audiences, who crowded in not only for the feature but for the newsreel, the cartoon, and the coming-attractions trailer.

• • •

Not everyone enjoyed equal access to the big entertainments of the era: The Paterson of the early 1950s was a segregated city. Not in the rigid, codified Southern sense—there were none of the overt symbols of Jim Crow, the “Colored” and “White” signs that pervaded Mollie’s homeland, for instance—but in ways that cut as deeply. At the Fabian, for instance, the city’s premier movie palace, “it was known” that blacks were welcome only in the “peanut galleries”—the balcony and second balcony. Downstairs seating was reserved for whites. The city’s only roller-skating rink, in the Paterson Recreation Center on Market Street, was closed to blacks, as was Circle Pool, a privately owned facility two blocks away. (Rather than yield to black demands to desegregate, the owners sold the swimming pool to the city.) Things were hardly different at the downtown YMCA, which also housed a swimming pool. The Y allowed blacks to swim—for an hour a week on Saturday mornings, and provided that they enter through the back door. The Y’s other facilities, the bowling alley, pool tables, cafeteria, were off-limits to blacks.

Until the late 1940s, there had been one other swimming option for blacks in Paterson. On Garret Mountain Reservation, parkland on rocky heights overlooking Paterson with panoramic views of the city and its landmark buildings, the county maintained a pool and beach known as Barbour’s Pond. Phil Chase, a black Paterson native, was a teen-ager during those years. He recalls the chain-link fence that ran the length of the dock at the pond. The fence divided both the waiting line for the sole diving board and the separate beaches for black and white swimmers. “We all got on the same board,” Chase says, “but when we got up there, we dove left, and the white people dove right. Their beach was over there, and ours was over here.”

Just as blacks in Paterson were herded to separate recreational facilities, so they were steered to low-paying, entry-level jobs: as broom pushers, seamstresses, washroom attendants, domestics, foundry workers. But even those jobs—at seventy-five or ninety cents an hour—paid nearly as much as field hands down South made for a whole day of picking tobacco or chopping cotton. The factory work was hard and dirty and hot and dusty and sometimes dangerous, but it wasn’t nearly as merciless as the conditions to which they were accustomed. Industrial work paid overtime, provided annual wage increases, offered a sense of dignity and the possibility, however slim, for advancement—a concept wholly absent from the plantation culture down home.

And so people kept coming. During the 1940s, even as the city’s overall population shrank slightly, the black population of Paterson more than tripled, from forty-two hundred to almost fourteen thousand. Driving the influx was the availability of defense jobs, especially at Wright Aeronautical Company, Paterson’s largest employer and, during the war, the nation’s largest airplane-engine factory.

In seven plants in and around Paterson, Wright’s, as the company was known, employed some thirty-four thousand workers in round-the-clock shifts. Wright’s bore the name of its founders, the famous pioneering aviation brothers. Their company came to Paterson in 1920, shortly after it incorporated. By the late twenties, with a growing interest in general aviation, fueled, in large part, by the success of Charles Lindbergh’s epic flight, Wright’s expanded in Paterson, adding three wings to its original plant and building a second facility.

As the threat of war engulfed Europe in the late thirties, Wright’s swelled again, moving into three former silk mills and constructing a new plant in East Paterson to handle the orders from the French and British. During the war it would be renowned for producing engines for America’s “giant super fortresses,” the B...