All He Got Was a Gold Watch: Looking Beyond Our Gilded American Dreams

By Allan Prince / Summer 2020

I. 

I have been curious about how things work since I was very young. As a kid, my dad gave me a portable AM/FM radio that I carried around and listened to all the time. One day it stopped working and I wanted to know why. What made it work in the first place? Curious, I took it apart and saw all the electronic components inside and was baffled over what they were. Maybe if I took out the battery and connected the wires to the wall socket, there would be enough power to get it working again. That didn’t work out so well. Smoke billowed from the radio and I quickly threw it to the ground. Seeing my attempt to fix my burned out radio, my dad bought me an electronic project kit so that I could learn more about electronics.

My interest in science didn’t stop there. My dad had a shelf full of encyclopedias in his office. One of them had pictures taken by the Viking 1 and 2 Mars landers. It was amazing to see those vivid pictures of another planet that looked so much like earth. The pictures of the Viking Lander sitting on the Martian soil fascinated me. It inspired me that there were people smart enough to build the Viking Landers. I would sit and stare at those pictures over and over again. My dad was interested in science too and he always encouraged my interests. When the TV show, Cosmos, came on TV, my dad and I always watched it together. We both liked how the narrator, Carl Sagan, explained what scientists knew about the universe.

Watching the space shuttle take off for the first time is another vivid memory that I have. I’m a big Star Trek fan and in my eyes, the Space Shuttle Enterprise was the most awesome thing I had ever seen in my life. Upon seeing that NASA logo and American Flag painted on the side of the shuttle, I was inspired that our country had the capability to build and launch such a huge powerful spacecraft when no other country on Earth could at the time. Years later, I got to stand next to the Space Shuttle Discovery at the Smithsonian. I was blown away at the awesome size of the spacecraft as I stood there and looked on.

When I was about 12 years old, I overheard my dad talking with my uncle about financial difficulties that the company he worked for was having. They had taken on too much debt and were having difficulty keeping up with expenses. They were losing money and things were getting worse. At that age, I didn’t really understand what it all meant. I was playing with my cousins so the discussions dad and uncle were having were just background noise to me. I heard him talk about this for a couple of years until one day; my dad came home with a gold watch that he had been given by his company. He said his company was sold to another company and he was no longer working there.

In my dad’s day, there was an emphasis on the value of getting a good education, a good job, buying a house and raising a family as there is today. After working hard all your life and reaching retirement age, the expectation was that you could retire comfortably by living on your retirement pension that was provided by the company, supplemented by Social Security. A gold watch was given to valued employees upon retirement. It symbolized a mutual respect and interdependence between the company and the employee. The tradition of the gift of a gold watch was originated by the Pepsi Company in the 1940’s. It signified a concept embraced by Pepsi that “you gave us your time, now we are giving you ours.” Those were the markers of success and the American dream.

My dad was laid off because the new company already had accountants on staff and they didn’t want to take on “redundant” employees. He tried to find another job in his field of expertise. I remember him sitting at his desk typing out resumes for prospective employers. After a year of searching without success, he finally took a job as a security guard. My dad was a college educated accountant with 20 years of experience. Back then, accounting was done largely by hand on paper ledgers. When he was laid off, more advanced computerized tools like Excel had become common. His company didn’t develop his skills and he hadn’t taken the initiative to do it himself. Even if he had, the company wasn’t using computerized accounting tools so the added skill would have been useless to him on the job. For him, the promise of the American dream had been broken.

I was in middle school when my dad lost his job. Around that time, I heard about a vocational electronics program at school. My dad encouraged me to apply and I got in. I liked tinkering and experimenting with electronics since I was pretty young and I was excited to finally be able to learn about it for real. To hone our skills, students learned how to build circuits and fix TV sets, stereos and computers. I looked forward to going to class every day because there was always something new to work on and it took me away from my worries for a while. I knew then that I wanted to get a job working on electronics. 

I was learning so much and I wondered why my dad couldn’t do the same. One day I brought home an electronics book and told my dad he should think about learning something new so he could get a better job. He was unmotivated and didn’t show any interest. Underneath, I was still feeling scared and insecure about what was going to happen to us after he lost his job. I got angry and chastised him for not even being willing to try something new. Now I realize I hadn’t considered what he was going through. Perhaps he felt defeated. I wouldn’t know what that was really like until many years later.

My dad didn’t share his feelings much but I could sense that he wasn’t very happy. Mom had Schizophrenia and couldn’t be a supportive partner in those trying times. He had three kids to take care of and he was too compassionate and responsible to think about divorcing from mom so I think he just suffered in silence. Somehow he always managed to work and put food on the table though.

II.

I went to community college to earn an Associates of Science degree after I graduated high school. With my degree, I was finally able to land a job working on electronic equipment at Cobham Aerospace, a British multinational corporation. I started out as a Lab Technician testing and repairing products. Over time, and by a series of fortunate opportunities, I worked my way up from Lab Technician to Engineering Manager. I had a knack for understanding electronics and I learned how to design electronic products.

At Cobham, I worked with a diverse crew of engineers creating products for helicopters and airplanes. We all enjoyed working together. My favorite part of the job was inventing ideas for new products and building prototypes in the engineering lab. I designed many products that are still flying on aircraft today. I even earned a US Patent. The ideal of the American dream teaches us that if we get a good education, we can get a good job and be successful. I felt like that dream had come true for me.

In 2012, my engineering team and I had been working on a large design project for almost two years. The project was complex but not much more so than work we had done before. My coworkers and I took great pride in tackling tough problems together. But from the start, this project ran into difficulties. Cobham agreed to a customer’s development schedule that required hiring more engineers. Management knew this and then failed to hire the engineers and they did not communicate their reluctance to the customer. My design team had to make do without the extra help.

To stay on schedule, employees were required to work exorbitant amounts of overtime that seemed never ending. Since all were paid on a salary, no additional pay or benefits were required by the employer for the overtime. Human beings cannot maintain a fevered pace for long so the work fell behind schedule. This turned a normally challenging project into a nightmare. Morale suffered as did the quality of the work. The employees got burned out and the customer was unhappy. This outcome was predictable and management was culpable for it. We were relieved when we finally finished the project but the struggle had left everyone demoralized. Management attempted to blame the engineering team but we knew that they had abused us in their attempt to control costs and earn a bigger profit.

As soon as we completed the project, Cobham announced they were going to outsource our jobs to HCL Technologies, one of many multinational IT companies specializing in foreign temporary workers. Cobham notified the employees that we could earn severance pay if we remained in our jobs long enough to train our replacements. I had met managers at Cobham who were indifferent to the wellbeing of workers but now I was experiencing the consequences of this attitude for myself. To Cobham, employees were a disposable resource. They placed the value of profits over that of people.

I didn’t have an engineering degree but I had a knack for understanding how things worked so I was able to teach myself how to design products. Even so, without the degree, I felt insecure in my position and like an imposter. The prospect of being laid off frightened me and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had never been without a job during my working career.

III.

Where, one might ask, did my dad, my coworkers and I go wrong? In order to understand the failure of our American dreams, we must look deeper at forces that are at play, the forces that shaped our dreams and made it hard to attain them. 

Since the industrial period, capitalism has taught us to prize the value of competition. This ideology tells us that competition insures efficiency in production of goods and services and low prices for the consumer. It also prizes a free market and fierce individualism. We’re taught to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. It’s our own responsibility to work to achieve the American dream. Those who fail to reach the ideal, often the poor and disadvantaged; must have squandered opportunities or were too lazy and didn’t work hard enough. Like the legions of homeless today, they’re considered failures and scorned.

In the Gilded Age of the 19th century, wealthy industrialists sought to exploit their work force for profit. There were almost no worker protections in that age. Things like an 8 hour workday, unemployment insurance, worker safety, reasonable pay, and unions were unheard of. Irish women, for example, toiled for 14 hours a day under constant pressure to maintain the highest productivity with no breaks and pay of only $2 an hour minus the added cost of using the machinery.

People were free to compete in the marketplace for jobs and to contract with whatever business they wanted to work for but this was of little benefit to the worker. Wealthy business owners insured that working conditions were the same everywhere. The notion that these conditions constituted freedom hid the fact that workers were totally dependent on meager wages and a constant unrelenting work schedule to survive. Any time off from work or loss of pay meant that families did not eat. Stiff competition for jobs also meant that someone could replace you at any time which kept workers insecure. Workers also had the freedom to do whatever they like during their time off. However, as the PBS story, The Triangle Fire recounts, one Irish woman lamented over how she loved music, books, lectures, wanted to learn things, if only it weren’t for the lack of time. There was no free time. The workers were wage slaves.

Wealthy employers used various methods to control their work forces. For example, when Irish workers refused to work due to poor working conditions, employers hired Chinese workers. When the Chinese took over the jobs, the Irish blamed them and violence ensued. This atomizing of the workers blinded them from realizing their common interests so they didn’t join together to fight the injustice. This meant that wealthy employers didn’t have to address worker complaints and could instead continue to reap profits and increase their wealth at the expense of the workers.

In the 1930’s and 40’s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed the New Deal and the Second Bill of Rights. This led to a series of market reforms that instilled the belief that working hard meant that a person should be entitled to the American dream of owning a decent home, earning enough to provide adequate food, clothing and recreation, freedom from unfair competition, the right to adequate medical care and to achieve and enjoy good health.

My dad started working at his company in the early 1960’s while the benefits of FDR’s reforms were still enjoyed by him and many American workers of the day.

In the 1970’s, American business began an effort to push back against reforms that had been instituted since FDR. A memo “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System” written by Lewis Powell, laid out an anti-New Deal blue print for business interests to retake America. The memo advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses, academic journals, and the news media. Think tanks were established to write conservative pro-business studies and recruit politicians sympathetic to “neoliberal” (favoring free market capitalist) ideology.

Business, with the help of their lobbyists, think tanks, pro-business government representatives, legal apparatus and media, pushed policies of small government, de-regulation, and increased competition among workers. Over time, the gains put in place during FDR’s time were removed one by one.

By the time my dad was laid off in the early 1980’s, FDR’s social safety net had been largely dismantled.

This meant that, except for short term unemployment insurance, the laid off worker was on their own to find a new job. If circumstances prevented them from obtaining employment with similar pay and benefits, they had to accept a lower paying position and lower their standard of living. This occurred while wealthy business owners enjoyed ever increasing profits and wealth at the expense of workers. Some have called this the Gilded Age 2.0.

I started my job at Cobham in 2004. Similar to when my dad was laid off, FDR’s social safety net had been dismantled. Adding to it, Cobham was free to hire temporary foreign workers to replace its employees in order to save on labor costs. Like the Irish of the Gilded Age, my coworkers viewed the foreign temporary workers as job thieves. But the foreign workers were being exploited just as me and my coworkers were by a greedy employer who placed profits over people.

Some of my coworkers at Cobham needed the money and were in no position to reject the offer of severance pay, even if they would have to endure the humiliation of training their replacements. Some found other jobs quickly and left Cobham. I was able to help some others find jobs elsewhere.

Those who needed retraining had few options. They could get student loans and go into debt, but they also had families and needed to put food on the table. For them, the only real option was to take lower paying jobs with fewer benefits and perhaps take some night classes. There was no social safety net to help them restore their lost employment status. My friend and coworker Edward, for example, was one such person. All he could find at the time were temporary positions. I gave him a glowing reference and for a time, he was able to continue working. When those opportunities ran out, I tried to help him improve his training so that he could apply for other more permanent positions but none of those panned out. Worn out from the ordeal, he finally decided to retire and spend time with his family.

I had made enough income that allowed me to save during prior working years so I decided to quit.

When my boss received my resignation, he met with me and tried to talk me out of it. Apparently, Cobham had a change of heart because their plan to hire temporary workers wasn’t going quite as they had hoped. Still feeling the anger and frustration at having been so devalued by the company, I wanted to lash out and tell my boss how I really felt but instead I held my composure. I needed to restore my dignity and retake my power from those that had tried to take it from me. I told my boss that the goals of the company and my own were no longer aligned. I had plans that I wanted to pursue in my career and I didn’t see any way that Cobham could continue to be a partner in pursuit of my goals. I decided to return to school to earn my engineering degree rather than to allow Cobham to exploit me any further.

 IV.

Today, I’m still pursuing my engineering degree. I am proud to be attending the University of California San Diego, one of the most highly rated institutions in the US. This is not to say that there aren’t problems with the public university education system.

Competition among students at UCSD is intense, especially in STEM fields. I have taken many Computer Science courses where the workload assigned by professors is extreme. CS professors prize students who can write perfect software code very quickly. Efficiency is measured by the number and quality of lines of code that a student can write in a unit of time. Any mistake in the output of the software is graded harshly, sometimes as much as half of total credit can be lost for one mistake on an assignment. Professors want to produce students who are like coding machines because industry demands it.

I cringe when I hear students talk about their desire to work at large companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple. Through my experience at Cobham, I know that these students are likely to find themselves in unsatisfying positions among thousands of other employees where it is all but impossible to have any meaningful impact on the company or the world. That honor is reserved only for the luckiest and best connected of those that manage to rise to exalted positions in the company. The others are compartmentalized in small groups working like coding machines on obscure functions that support the company’s operations, or some small feature of their products, and for what, to make a better social media platform or email application? Humanity’s most pressing problems are much more urgent.

I came to UCSD because I have a genuine interest in science and technology and I want to use that interest to make an impact on the world. Science and technology have been used to destroy our planet and divide its peoples. I want to put it to use to help solve real problems and unite people. Carl Sagan sought throughout his career to expose people to the true nature of the universe that surrounds us. In his soliloquy, Pale Blue Dot, Sagan gives us a view of earth from outside our earthly confines. This gives us the opportunity to realize that all things on earth are interdependent. We have one earth and we need to take care of it. Space exploration is increasing rapidly today. It represents an opportunity that human kind has never had. As people increasingly reach out to inhabit space, our awareness of our place in the universe cannot help but become more acute and definite.

I want to use that intense interest that I had as a kid, as when I watched the Space Shuttle rocket to space with my dad, along with my engineering skill, to contribute to the expansion of human awareness. It may not happen in my lifetime, but I believe when humankind is given a chance to gain a perspective of Earth like Carl Sagan gave us; perhaps they will be more likely to treat the world with care and respect. Perhaps they might even treat each other more equitably.

I also want to use my work experience to help college students become aware of the pitfalls of today’s workplace, and more importantly, to help them become aware of opportunities where they can make a difference in the world. This represents a real opportunity to multiply the number of people working on our problems and make a real impact. Historian Howard Zinn said, “Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” I think he was right.

I was fortunate because my dad encouraged my scientific interests and exposed me to electronics, his encyclopedias, Mars, Carl Sagan and the Space Shuttle. He also taught me to treat people as I want to be treated and this allowed me to have empathy and to try to understand others. My experience at Cobham taught me to look beyond blame and see the economic system for what it is.

If I could go back and talk to my coworkers and my dad, I would tell them that the situation we all experienced was not our fault. We are told that we’re at fault when we fail to reach the American dream but it was not we who failed. The system failed us. It is the system that needs to be corrected so that people can be placed ahead of profits as they should be.