Strike Exposes a New and Ugly Wrinkle in Our Values

This month’s Let ‘em Eat Cake Award, with palms, goes to a pair of attorneys who drive in every day from exceptionally cool suburbs to their big-league law jobs downtown.

The only ripple in their career week was the office receptionist: She didn’t show up for work Monday because the bus strike left her stranded, and thus inconvenienced those she worked for.

Attorney Jodi Lewis’ suburb is picturesque Calabasas, which is a $66 taxi ride from the office if one happens to find oneself without a car, which Calabasans as a rule do not. She herself actually rode the bus a couple of times as a kid but never because she needed to. “I had rich parents,” she told Times correspondent Gina Piccalo.

Her co-smoker is attorney Elizabeth Lascheid, who recounted her own public transit cavalry: “I took the bus once, and it was awful. I got trapped at a bus stop on La Cienega. It was misery.”

Lascheid’s Mar Vista home is about a $30 cab ride from downtown. She hadn’t bothered with news of the transit strike; “I’ve tried, but I could care less.” Grammar and sympathy seem wanting here: she couldn’t care less, and evidently couldn’t care less, either.

Lewis had followed the bus drivers’ walkout, and its victims, like the receptionist. “It’s very sad, but all of them should have made alternative arrangements. They should have watched the news.”

I’m sure some Southern Californians thought the same this week as they turned the ignition key and switched on the AC and the CD and motored to offices where the coffee lady or the receptionist or the janitor may not have shown up at all: Those people should have watched the news. They should have hitchhiked if they had to. They should have gotten a real job. Being poor--how careless of them.

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A world of workers all but vanished this week in the transit-strike version of rapture.

The economic chain they help to forge is strong, but their own links are fragile: An emergency $20 cab ride gets them to work, but it also means they can’t make the rent.

Something has changed in how the nation regards physical, menial labor and the men and women who do it. The nobility has vanished from sweat, unless it’s earned at the gym.

Ruth Milkman, whose blue-collar surname was bestowed on her grandparents at Ellis Island some 90 years ago, is a UCLA sociology professor who believes that the sinking real wage of the laborer is like a sign around his neck proclaiming how little society thinks of what he does for a living.

In L.A., that is amplified by race and immigration, the “otherness” of color, coupled with the “otherness” of menial work.

“There’s this new legitimacy for inequality that might have been here 200 years ago, but I don’t think so. The whole ethos of this country put a value on work--I think it was related to the frontier, to a new country that had to be built from scratch. Status was attached to labor.”

I wonder how Paul Revere might be regarded nowadays. I mean, after all, the man made pots.

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To this day, it bothers me that I earn more with a computer than my father ever did climbing electric poles in weather far below zero and a hundred degrees above it, among wires that killed and maimed so many of his friends.

In this, Peter Dreier and I understand each other. He is a professor of politics and public policy at Occidental College, and his father was a garment worker. What unsettles us is not what we have achieved--that stuff makes fathers proud--but how our fathers’ work has become diminished.

“It’s a recent phenomenon,” he thinks. “Americans have unrealistic expectations about how much difference education can make. If everybody in America had PhDs, we’d have PhDs driving cabs and waiting on tables.” In a nation full of dot-com tycoons, some tycoons will be more equal than others.

An ironworker on a bridge is engaged in life-or-death work as surely as a heart surgeon, Dreier points out, but “we tend not to reward [such] important jobs in our society because either we think they don’t require a lot of skill, or they’re not tied to having a lot of formal education.”

Americans still like to look into their own mythic mirror and see a classless country where anybody with enough gumption can make it--which must therefore mean that people who don’t make it must have something wrong with them.

You know the kind of people I mean.

People who only have jobs, not careers. People who haven’t got what it takes. People who ride the bus.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com