The Savage Collective
This essay is the first in a series from The Savage Collective, a new publication aiming to promote flourishing lives among working-class Americans by examining and improving the conditions of labor in the Machine Age.
Working-class Americans face numerous practical and existential challenges as they engage the modern world of work. Few cities exemplify these challenges more than our hometown of Pittsburgh. At the height of the post-war industrial economy, the Pittsburgh sky was simultaneously lit and darkened by the fire and smoke of the mills dotting our three rivers. Farther south in cities such as Connellsville were the ovens that produced the coke fueling the steel furnaces. Powerful unions negotiated high wages for working-class men to support their families. Towns along the Monongahela River Valley like Homestead, Clairton, and McKeesport thrived. By 1985, the halcyon days came to a crashing, symbolic end when Homestead Works, the largest and most productive Mill in Pittsburgh, turned off the furnaces. Pittsburgh experienced massive economic collapse, unemployment, and population outmigration.
John Kane, The Monongahela River Valley, Pennsylvania (1931)
It is true that Pittsburgh has experienced a sort of renaissance in the last 40 years. Like many other rust belt cities, our recovery has been fueled by the emergence of the service economy—primarily healthcare, education, and finance. This has significantly impacted the labor market in terms of the types and distributions of jobs. The largest employers in Pittsburgh are now the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, University of Pittsburgh, and PNC Bank. Our recovery has been significant; recently we were named “America’s Most Livable City.” However, our service-industry-based recovery has not been without consequence. In contrast to the manufacturing industries that flourished decades ago, service industries disproportionately reward the types of skills and credentials acquired at college. This has been great for graduates of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon but perhaps not so for those without college degrees. Remaining jobs for those without degrees are often very difficult jobs with extraordinarily low wages. Furthermore, such jobs are often in female-dominated occupations in hospitals and nursing homes. For example, the fastest growing job in America is home health aides which often pays less than $15 per hour and is 91% female. Such a transformation poses significant challenges for working-class labor.
These changing labor market dynamics are similar to those experienced by many communities across the nation and are not the only challenges facing working-class Americans. Americans are fascinated and deeply committed to “progress” and “innovation.” As such, we devalue the types of maintenance and care work that is so common among working-class Americans. Such an environment of simultaneous, rapid, technological advancement and devaluation of care and maintenance is marked by an experience of dissonance. In Pittsburgh, we feel this dissonance every day as we link our laptops to the WiFi on our buses knowing that these same buses fall into sinkholes and plummet into gullies from collapsing bridges. We see the devaluation of such work with the near disappearance of trades and vocational education in American high schools. One of the largest trade schools in our city, which once boasted bricklaying studios and drafting shops, is now a boutique hotel. So goes the nation; wood shops replaced by computer labs.
Many of the conditions within working-class jobs themselves make it exceedingly difficult to construct good and meaningful work. Good jobs are marked by stability and predictability. Factors such as automation render many working-class jobs one machine away from oblivion. Pittsburgh itself has become the epicenter of self-driving car research, attempting to make taxi driving obsolete and ever threatening the trucking industry—some of the most stable jobs available. As more and more working-class jobs are forced into the gig economy, workers feel the precarity even more acutely.
Ford Madox Brown, Work (1865)
In addition, good jobs are ones that individuals can have the autonomy and creativity necessary to achieve and grow as a person. Growing in skill and expertise is an important and often overlooked part of human flourishing. The modern workplace, however, increasingly strips from the worker any ability to exercise agency and develop skill. Think of a worker in an industrial bakery. Their job primarily consists of programming a computer to start a standardized process in which they never touch water, flour, and salt. If industrial baking is much like other industrial work, the “baker” may also be constantly surveilled by algorithmic software and their performance is being tracked. Rarely is our “baker” ever able to show initiative to craft their job to their own interests or skills.
Workers also want to know that their work is meaningful and significant to their customers. Routinization, standardization, consolidation, surveillance, and computerization further separates workers from both the products of their work and the customers they serve. How would someone under such conditions see themselves as anything other than a cog in a big industrial machine?
Given the labor market’s changing dynamics, devaluation of labor, and tenuous and dehumanizing labor conditions, is it any wonder that many working-class Americans are struggling? We know that not completing college (a proxy for “working class”) is arguably the most significant predictor of well-being of Americans. It is often the case that those who have not completed college are poorer and have less wealth. They are less healthy. They are less likely to form families. They are even less happy and report significantly lower levels of life satisfaction. Simply put, many working-class Americans are not flourishing.
Into these waters The Savage Collective wades. We are a fellowship of writers, scholars, and practitioners aiming to promote flourishing lives among working-class Americans by examining and improving the conditions of labor in the Machine Age. We take our name from Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World. Huxley’s prescient novel describes what it is like to live in the Machine. In the midst of Huxley’s entirely jigged, mechanized, and controlled society, the Savage yearns to live a truly human life with all the sorrow and beauty that it entails, stating “I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” Likewise, we will explore the ways in which working-class Americans can move within and beyond the efficiency, predictability, and control of the Machine to live full and meaningful lives marked by the development of true human capacities and agency toward the pursuit of true human good.
Our writers work directly with a “community engaged research board,” striving to focus on topics and issues that are important to working-class Americans. The Savage Collective produces a few basic types of writing and analysis.
Data Briefs: Using publicly available data (e.g., Current Population Survey), The Savage Collective describes emerging relationships and trends impacting labor.
Profiles in Labor: Based on interviews and field observations, The Savage Collective is engaged in assembling an oral history of work faced by laborers in the Machine Age.
Regular essays: The Savage Collective also writes regular analytic essays that describe conditions faced by laborers and how that relates to the flourishing of working-class Americans.
Guest essays: The Savage Collective also welcomes solicited and unsolicited essays as well. If you are interested in publishing with the Savage Collective please email us at: grantmartsolf@protonmail.com
Book Notes The writers at The Savage Collective will occasionally review and recommend books that are especially relevant to the topics covered on the Substack.
We aim to publish 4–5 pieces per month. We also aim to keep our writing accessible by producing short pieces of less than 2,000 words that can be read and digested in a single sitting by a wide range of readers both expert and not. These pieces will be examining question such as:
What industries that working-class Americans work in are most conducive to flourishing?
Are health care jobs good jobs?
What is it like to work in a tire shop and how does it contribute to the good?
What is the impact of consolidation in the automotive maintenance industry?
Why do car parts have such high failure rates?
Why does the food service industry produce such bad jobs?
All of our research and writing projects commence with a series of essays exploring key concepts that guide our thinking and work namely: What is Flourishing? What is good work? What is the Machine Age?
We truly hope that our writing sheds light on the most important issues facing working-class Americans. We encourage any writer, scholar, or practitioner with interest in working-class flourishing to reach out to us at savagecollective@protonmail.com. We would love to hear from you and engage you in the process.
If you are interested in reading some of the books that informed this essay, see the following:
Serrin, William. 1992. Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town. New York: Times Books.
Winant, Gabriel. 2021. The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton.
Vinsel, Lee, and Andrew L. Russell. 2020. The Innovation Delusion: How our Obsession with the New has Disrupted the Work that Matters Most. New York: Currency.
Brandon Daily is a writer, diesel mechanic, and autodidact. He runs a small, family truck repair and breakdown service in Southwestern Pennsylvania. He has a Master's Degree in Religion and tries to read books and drive cars that are much older than he is.
Grant Martsolf is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing. Formerly, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, Grant is a social scientist with particular interest in how the transformation of labor from primarily manufacturing to service (especially health care) has impacted the lives of working-class men.