By Curtis Price

Posted March 28, 2024

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While in one of the small North Alabama rural towns around Decatur, I stop at its local sit-down restaurant, The Huddle House. The Huddle House, another Southern chain one step above the Waffle House, lies on the strip mall wasteland bisecting the town. Like the Waffle House I’m drawn to the Huddle’s working-class diner atmosphere. Both restaurants are two of the few places where Southern blue-collar workers dominate the atmosphere, sharing their problems and joys.

I don’t go much, but I go often enough that the single waitress starts recognizing me. We make the usual small talk – I say, “You got the whole house by yourself?” and she says, “Yes, but I’m used to it,” smiling with a touch of weariness in her words. She asks if I want ketchup on my fries. I say loudly “I don’t take no blood on my taters!” She laughs and I hear a guffaw from another booth while an older woman across the aisle chirps “I can’t stand ketchup either!”

 This older woman is wiry, high-strung, and super-friendly, and the conversation pings around a couple times before dying in embers of pork chops and gravy. This is the best of the South, where spontaneous conversations break out between strangers in public places, those theatres of everyday life.

As I finish, the server asks if I want some more coffee. And then, I can’t remember what led to our subsequent conversation, but she started talking about her life. A single mother of two, she doesn’t go anywhere except to work and home, unable to “trust anyone” (her words) to watch her children. One child was thrown out of the free daycare because of behavior problems. Because of that, she picks up extra shifts to cover the new daycare costs. Although overweight, she can’t get to the gym like she wants. Most of the time, she’s just too tired.

She wants a better-paying job at a local factory. That, though, would mean losing subsidized housing and daycare, with any extra earnings eaten up by new expenses. “It’s like the system is designed to keep you where you are and you can’t better yourself.”  But she’s looking forward to going to a concert in a few weeks, her first night out in six months. What she likes about this job, even if it doesn’t pay well, is that she can take off for family emergencies. Even in the middle of a shift, a co-worker will cover.

Telling her story, there wasn’t an ounce of self-pity or trying to get sympathy for her situation. She carried herself with the upmost dignity. I wondered what her politics would be, if she had any.  I’d guess she’d identify with the lyrics of an Oliver Anthony song. She’s part of the Dollar General working class.

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Several decades ago, left-wing economists investigated labor market segmentation, also called the “dual labor market.” David Gordon, in particular did a lot of valuable work on this issue that still holds up today.

Labor segmentation theory argues the labor market has a primary layer, workers with guaranteed hours and good benefits, and a secondary labor market made up of workers with little security or upward mobility, low wages, and few benefits. I suppose now – if some economist hasn’t already done so – you could argue there’s a tertiary labor market too, the gig worker lacking even the minimum of security of the secondary sector. What happened since the dual labor market discussion in the mid-1980s is that former primary workers were pushed into the secondary labor market. And the implied threat of falling into that secondary labor market was used to stifle dissent and maintain discipline among the shrinking core of primary sector workers.

But the secondary labor market is divided too, with its own labor aristocracy – because “labor aristocracy” is always relative and fluid, and not a set division, where some absolute line separates one side from the other. Starbucks workers are among the top layer, and perhaps no coincidence it’s in that upper layer where the left has what it little influence it has in the secondary sector. Starbucks workers are younger and disproportionately college students, having better working conditions and wages compared to the Dollar General working class. When in a Starbucks, for instance, have you seen a middle-aged overweight woman, perhaps missing a tooth or two, working? There is covert discrimination against such types, an arrangement both union and management don’t feel any urgency to challenge in the first case or change in the second.

The Dollar General working class doesn’t have formal organizations fighting for its interests, although there are small but growing attempts to unionize or form worker associations such as the Step Up Campaign in Louisiana.

But in other settings, the primary form of collective action is to walk off the job en masse, effectively closing the store. Such a response happened recently in the KFC in Hartselle, another small town near me in North Alabama, where the whole store quit in protest of a failed air conditioning system. A Dollar General store in Wisconsin was shuttered by workers in the same way. Undoubtedly there are many more such examples, buried in local newspapers.

However, the main way these workers resist, in an era of labor shortages, is to quit, often without giving notice, and landing another with better pay and benefits. Without having read a word of sociologist A.O. Hirschman’s famous formulation, they practice the “exit” in Hirschman’s “Exit, Voice, or Loyalty” triad, in which people in organizations pursue their interests by either demonstrating loyalty, speaking up, or leaving.

These personal actions, though seeming individual, have a collective dimension, in the same way that people fleeing an oncoming wildfire don’t coordinate responses. These personal actions are the “weapons of the weak” wielded by people unable to bear the costs of a sustained union drive, especially in the South, which almost inevitably would end in failure.

I will ask that waitress though how she enjoyed her concert the next time I’m around.