WORKERS LOCAL 189 BOOK REVIEW
Blue Collar Blues by Rosalyn McMillan (Warner Books, Inc.: New York) Pp. 359.
By Bill Barry
Dundalk (MD) Community College
National negotiations. Sex. Local supplements. Sex. Runaway shops. Sex. Quarrels about overtime. Lickable cherry body paint. Fighting scabs. Tropical fruit love gelee. Mounted cops smashing strikers. “His naked eyes lusted over her body like lasers until she felt that the heat was unbearable.” Discrimination law suits. Sinful Cinnamon Spanish Fly Aphrodisiac.
If you ever thought of combining an outrageous romantic narrative, soft-core porn and The Great Proletarian Novel, then Blue Collar Blues is your book, baby. It mixes class consciousness with sex, racial consciousness with sex, and the determination of “blue collar workers” to move up to “white collar” with still more sex.
The main figure in this delightful epic is Khan Davis, a black woman with blonde hair, a production worker in the sewing section of the Troy Trim plant of Champion Motors in Detroit, who imagines herself as “a miniature Dorothy Dandridge with attitude.” Following all romance novels, Khan finds happiness by overcoming some obstacles: after reading in The Detroit News (obviously, her union consciousness has some holes) that her long-time boyfriend, R.C. Richardson, a wealthy, sleazy and hyper sexed Champion dealer, has suddenly married a bi-racial woman in Japan, she stitches up her hand in the industrial sewing machine. After being kicked by a cop’s horse while picketing in a local supplement strike, she finds True Love with a new dude named Buddy, who is not only kind, sensitive, gentle, terrific in the sack but--ah, romantic miracles--rich as well.
Khan’s best friend--even though they are not having sex--is Thyme Taylor, another black woman who has pushed herself up from the shop to become the Plant Manager of Troy Trim and who is about to sue Champion Motors for race and sex discrimination before she gets fired. For Rosalyn McMillan, nothing can be this simple: Thyme is married to Cy, a white executive with Champion with some sense of class anger (“The swank interior of the plush building [Champion Motors world headquarters] only underscored the humiliations suffered by the hourly employees working for Champion”) but, of course, he has a long-time affair with a Mexican woman, a supervisor in the runaway plant in Matamoros, and they have two teen-aged children, while he and Thyme are childless. Not only does Cy conceal the girl friend and children from Thyme, but he also neglects to mention to his wife--amidst the drop-all-our-drawers-and-do-it scenes--that the whole factory, including her job, is slated to be moved down to Mexico.
The book jumps back and forth among the factory, the board room and bedrooms around Detroit, with some pretty bizarre moves along the way. Khan’s Uncle Ron, “the union boss” goes from planning a wildcat strike to demonstrating the versatility of his inflatable penile prosthesis with one of his members (no pun), a production sewer named Luella. Luella, who works all the OT she can grab to put her sons through college while her husband drives a long-haul truck, is eventually shot to death in the union office by Ron’s bisexual son. And Thyme Taylor suspects that her executive secretary is also getting in on with Ron, even though Thyme and Ron are consistently able to negotiate various local issues.
Yes, this is one unique novel. However cheap and gloppy the writing, it is still compelling to read a novel about life on the shop floor, where real issues like production delays, bad parts, runaway plants, sex and subcontracting are important issues. The book blurb claims that McMillan worked as “a blue collar worker at Ford Motor Company for twenty years,” and she really tries to describe the world of the industrial worker: the tension over OT and outsourcing, the smells of the shop, mixing exotic perfumes and colognes worn by the sexed-up workers with the smell of oil in the plant and the smell of gasoline in the 10-bay loading dock. It is a violent world as well: a worker kills his estranged wife and her boyfriend in the parking lot while the rest of the workers quarrel over the assignment of overtime, as much as 60-80 hours a week.
The climax (dare I call it this?) of the book shows the union’s desperate strike against Troy Trim to keep the work in in Detroit. The workers are picketing, vans of scabs show up filled with other workers who are just want to feed their families, mounted cops help keep the plant open and Khan is kicked in the head by a horse and sent to the hospital.
Unlike the workers in real life, many of the characters in Blue Collar Blues end up happily heading for better days. Within several weeks (and this is truly the greatest of miracles!) Champion Motors caves into Thyme’s discrimination suit and pays her a settlement of $1,270,000. She dumps Cy and heads to Ghana with her dough to rediscover her roots, which include a position as the Operations Manager for a runaway plastics operation, complete with maid, driver, and “the best cook I could hope for”; even better, at age 40, she is pregnant.
Khan not only finds ecstasy (“His kiss, as they shared one breath, sealed the chamber of her body to her lover, fusing their souls as they continued to drink from the wells of each other’s mouths.”) but her new boy friend just happens to own a little company and just happens to pull down $ 30,000/month.
Cy’s girl friend takes their two children and moves in with a 22-year-old matador and opens a successful chain of soul food restaurants in Mexico.
Uncle Ron hauls his inflatable prothesis back home, marries the girl friend we thought was his wife, and visits his son every day in jail.
Is this a great country--or what?
For all of McMillan’s foolishness, she still gets in good lines about the strike:”It was a wake-up call for all those who tried to play both sides. One couldn’t be new collar and blue collar. One couldn’t be a Democrat and a Republican. One couldn’t be black and white. It was time for those pretending to be both either to acknowledge their actions, to choose a side and be willing to change, or to let the bullet of truth shoot them dead.”
If life is good for the romantic few who recover their lives, unfortunately, the workers get dropped off the edge. But go ahead--put a little “wow” into your worker education classes by reading Blue Collar Blues. Your students will certainly appreciate this novel as one of a kind.