close
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20100814154025/http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com:80/

Is the Community College Still the Best Bet for Working-Class Students?

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Sherry Linkon

Recently, a friend asked me whether I’d encourage my own children (if I had them) to attend a community college, the system where I teach sociology. I said “yes” immediately, but I know what thoughts lay behind her question. She was alluding to my grumbling about research that I’d been reading that suggests working-class institutions such as community colleges may not be the best place for working-class students. Though I initially said “yes” to my friend’s question, the more honest answer is “maybe.” I feel guilty saying this, but I feel ambivalent. I am a proud community college graduate, and teaching at a community college is wonderful, but the community college does have problems that make me wonder whether we are doing right by working-class students and upholding our mission to create pathways to success.

The research around student success suggests that community colleges do not challenge students and have low expectations. In the status hierarchy of higher ed, this means community college classes are perceived as “easier,” or less academically rigorous. Moreover, research shows that students who transfer from community colleges have frighteningly low graduation rates from four-year schools — an average of just 36% complete a four-year degree within 6 years. The analysis implies that the low graduation rate might be because community colleges do not foster cultures of achievement and that students do not feel motivated to succeed.

I cannot argue with the facts, much as they frustrate me, but there are other things going on. For example, many of these schools, like mine, have limited funds available to cover the costs of their expanding enrollments, even though, the California State University system has raised their fees and limited their enrollment for the next semester…again. That creates problems with class size, among other things. In my little notch of the world, increasing enrollment means that I will allow more students than I should to add my classes.

For about the past three years, community college faculty in California have received an email at the beginning of every semester about managing the increasing number of students in our classrooms. We’re encouraged to “hang in there” and understand that the system does not have additional funds to support these extra students. Lack of funding also means we are offering fewer sections of courses and less variety of courses, even as we enroll more students.

There will be heavy competition for seats the first week of school, which makes me worry that working-class students trying to add classes at the last minute but who can’t pay their tuition immediately might lose seats to someone who can pay that day. Whatever their reason for being there—to prepare to transfer to a four-year for a degree or for workforce development—the majority of students trying to get in need my class because their class schedules must be just so, to fit in between work and family responsibilities. Schedules that “fit” are important.

I worry about options for working-class students. I am concerned about low graduation rates, large class sizes, and rising fees, but I disagree with much of the research about the quality of community college education. First, it is a myth that classes at a community college are easier and that teachers have lower expectations then at a four-year university. I teach the same intro sociology course at the community college and the local four-year university, and students’ grades are similar in both groups.

Because community colleges serve a more diverse body of students, from those who want to transfer to a four-year school to students who want to learn to read better or gain job skills, people assume that we must have lower standards. We serve all levels of preparedness, but we are seen as less academic than our university neighbors are. The reality is that community colleges offer several levels of rigor, from honors courses to developmental reading and math. Students with lopsided skill sets–for example, proficient in math but not English–catch up in one area while taking more challenging courses in another.

Second, community college instructors focus on teaching instead of research, which is part of why we are not defined as “scholars” in the eyes of the system. For the academically vulnerable working-class student, however, this means more one-on-one time and an emphasis on the student-teacher relationship, which research suggests may have more of an effect on long-term student success than anything else we teachers do. Many students have written me after transferring to say how much they miss their relationships with their community college instructors not because four-year profs are “mean,” but because they have different responsibilities that leave less time for chatting about personal lives and asking about family.

Finally, the community college costs considerably less than a four-year school, which makes it easier for students to access education. Our slogan could be, “We’re ready when you are,” but that is not academic enough. Still, for working-class students, the community college is a valued cost saving option, students can graduate or transfer after two years with very little or no student loan debt. Yes, some students graduate/transfer from a two-year without debt, they piece together money from work, a grant or scholarship, and do a lot of financial juggling, but they do it and are proud to say so. When my colleagues from the four-year school wonder why their working-class students are “so stressed” all the time or miss school because they cannot miss work I think, “They don’t get it, but we do.”

In spite of my ambivalence, I say “yes,” I would encourage my hypothetical child to attend a community college and my main reason is simple: we get it. We teach students the same material but the education costs less and the teachers want to build relationships with our students. For the working class, community college is a first step, a pathway to improving one’s position; a practical choice in the midst of record high unemployment rates and ever-decreasing labor options for high school graduates. The success of working-class students is influenced by the academic culture and the kind of connections they make. Despite the community colleges’ institutional woes, those of us that teach there know that it is in the day-to-day interactions, calling students by name and lingering for after class conversations, that we create pathways to success.

Julie Garza-Withers

Julie Garza-Withers teaches Sociology at Butte Community College

→ 5 Comments

Posted in Class and Education, Contributors, Guest Bloggers, Issues

Tagged , ,

In Defense of the Mullet

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Sherry Linkon

The banning of mullet hairstyles in Iran as “decadent” has spawned a surprisingly fast-moving discussion about the hairstyle in the United States. Across the country, people have been busily, and often colorfully, reflecting upon not just Iran’s cultural politics but the short-in-the-front, long-in-the-back hairstyle itself in every from of media you can think of.  Americans have been talking mullet in newspapers and blogs, on television and radio, via twitter and discussion boards.

It’s always true that our perceptions of style and fashion, and the ways in which we choose to talk about them, serve as expressions of our feelings about the group of people for whom that style matters, from the zoot suit on Mexican Americans in the 1940s to long hair on hippies in the 1960s to baggy jeans on African American youth in the present. The current mullet frenzy is no exception. As filmmaker Jennifer Arnold has shown in her excellent 2001 documentary American Mullet, the three groups of people who wear mullets in large numbers are working-class Southern men, lesbians, and Mexican Americans.

Conveniently—and, I would argue, dangerously— concealing the mullet’s class associations underneath its role as “just fashion,” commentators have used this piece of international news as permission to take part in the all-too-familiar stigmatizing of the U.S. working class (with more than a dash of homophobia and/or racism thrown in for good measure in some cases)— in this case through the also all-too-familiar marshaling of that slippery and pernicious category called “taste.” The result is an unspoken argument that, in the words of journalist Annalee Newitz, “class becomes a choice—just like a haircut.”

Here in New England, the mullet fantasy involves the symbolic denigration of poor U.S. Southerners. The local newspaper, the Boston Globe, has jumped on this bandwagon with both feet, running an editorial opining that the hairstyle “deserves to be banned” (“Iran: Ahmadinejad’s Fashion Police”) and a snarky feature article called, “Why Do We Loathe the Mullet?”

The derisive and elitist tone of these articles (and the numerous others like them) makes it clear that presenting the mullet as somehow humorous is operating here as permission to engage in out-and-out class-based mockery and dehumanization of the poor. For instance, “Why Do We Loathe the Mullet?” approvingly quotes an “expert,” Professor Tom Connolly of Suffolk University (a private university in downtown Boston). Connolly makes this banal but disgusting regionalism and elitism unusually explicit, “gleefully” imagining a mullet-wearer crawling out from under his trailer home in order to “grin at you through gray teeth.”

Connolly efficiently hits on two of the most iconic images of the supposed degeneracy of working-class and poor people: bad teeth and a trailer home. (Plastic versions of these “bad teeth” are sold every Halloween under names such as “hillbilly teeth,” and the term “trailer trash” is so significant as a term of class-based ridicule that it has its own wikipedia page, turns up millions of google hits, and a supports whole genus of supposed humor, from greeting cards to stand-up routines to facebook applications.) We’d all do well to remember that if you make fun of someone for having bad teeth—especially someone living in a trailer—what you are really saying is, “Isn’t it hilarious—that person doesn’t have access to health care! And I do!” As an experiment, I would like to suggest to Professor Connolly that the next time he wishes to make a contemptuous comment about people living in trailers, he stick the word “FEMA” in front of the word “trailer” and see if he still wants to utter the sentence. I’m afraid he still would, though: the suffering in New Orleans after Katrina has only served to amplify class-based mockery of its residents from some quarters; Connolly, here—and by extension the Globe—has placed himself on the far end of this particular spectrum of ridicule by imagining his mullet-wearer crawling out from under his trailer—what the hell would he be doing under there?—which casts him as something inhuman, like a lizard.

The article’s glib use of “we” in the title—in which it is far from alone—is revelatory as well. When my students use that word, I always ask them if they can tell me exactly who “we” is—and who is the implied “they.” “We” cannot hate the mullet unless “they” are wearing it. This establishing of the working class as permanent and inferior “other” has practical implications, the most important of which is, of course, how much easier it becomes to justify their continued economic exploitation.

The class-based ridicule of mullet-wearers has regional particularity that is further divisive. In Boston, the focus may be on working-class Southerners, but in California, a number of satirical blogs and columns have men of Mexican ancestry in their sights. For instance, the author of the blog “Weird Fresno” writes:

Apparently they are banning several hairstyles and one of those is the ever-popular mullet. Now normally I’m for freedom of expression…but the fact that they are banning the mullet is probably the best thing that country has done in a long, long while… Maybe others will take note and follow the example that Iran had started. Imagine if Chowchilla banned the mullet?

Since Chowchilla is a city in the San Joaquin valley, one of California’s most important centers of Mexican and Mexican American life since World War II, when Mexican workers were brought to the region to provide cheap farm labor through the government’s bracero program, it is plain here how “mullet” is operating as a code—if barely.

I should disclose my personal stake in this. My brother in Raleigh sometimes wears a mullet. He hasn’t really had one since 2006, though, when he cut off his long-in-the-back hair so he could join his pre-teen daughter in donating to Locks of Love. He’s like that. In his honor, I invite readers to take the small but emphatic step of singing this petition to call the Boston Globe, at least, to account.

Rachel Rubin

Rachel Rubin is a professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of Immigration and American Popular Culture (with Jeffrey Melnick).

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Class and the Media, Contributors, Guest Bloggers, Issues, Understanding Class

Tagged , , ,

Beyond “White Anxiety”: Class, Race, and College Admissions

Posted on July 26, 2010 by Sherry Linkon

When I hear pundits and politicos pitting “the working class” against people of color (which usually in American popular discourse means either African-Americans or Mexican immigrants), my response is predictable: I want to remind the commentator that a) most people of color are working class and b) despite the popular mythology, racism is neither unique to nor primarily perpetuated by the white working class.  That response kicked in back in the 2008 election when journalists kept asking me whether Youngstown’s white working class could possibly support a black presidential candidate, and again in the past year, as some commentators have suggested that the success of the Tea Party is primary due to white working-class fears about losing their political power and social privilege.

So you can imagine my gut response when I read Ross Douthat’s commentary last week on a recent report on selective college admissions, “The Roots of White Anxiety.” Douthat suggests that the study supports Pat Buchanan’s claim that Harvard discriminates against “white Christians.”  I immediately started muttering my usual line: “it’s more complicated than that.”

Before we get to the troubling heart of this matter, some background.  Douthat’s column was based on an article by conservative political scientist Russell K. Nieli, which appeared on Minding the Campus.  Nieli’s piece was, in turn, based on a recently-published study by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, which shows that working-class and poverty-class white students were significantly less likely to be admitted to private universities than wealthier whites with similar test scores.  The opposite was true for students of color: poorer students were more likely to be accepted than those from better-off families.  This finding is especially striking given the much-touted recent efforts by elite schools like Harvard, Princeton, and several others to increase their socioeconomic diversity by offering generous financial aid packages – in some cases eliminating the family’s tuition responsibility entirely — for low-income students.

For both Nieli and Douthat, the study proves that admissions programs that consider diversity are so problematic that they should be eliminated.  Nieli suggests that “elite colleges should get out of the diversity business altogether and focus on enrolling students who are the most academically talented and the most eager to learn. These students should make up the bulk of their entering classes.”  Does he really believe that the majority of students entering elite schools have been admitted because of diversity policies?  A 2006 report shows that fewer than 10% of students at most of the nation’s elite schools are black – those are the students whom Nieli suggests have most benefited from diversity admissions.  I guess 90% doesn’t equal “the bulk” of a college class?

Nieli also notes that Espenshade and Radford identified patterns of discrimination against “red state,” Midwestern students and against those who participated in ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America.  For Douthat, that translates into discrimination against Christians.  He implies that Christians must be a small minority on college campuses, though a 2004 Harvard study found that 35% of college students define themselves as “born again,” and the majority of college students who claim any religious affiliation – that is, the majority of a whopping 88% — identify as Christian.

Douthat also expresses concern that this study will “breed paranoia” and feed the “alienation from the American meritocracy” that he suggests explains working-class acceptance of “racially tinged conspiracy theories.”  Working-class people have many reasons to be suspicious of those with power and wealth.  They don’t need a report like this to convince them that they have been excluded from the equal opportunity that lies at the heart of the American myth.  Sadly, that’s old news for the working class.

Which is not to say that we shouldn’t be upset about the findings of this study. While other reports, such as William G. Bowen and Derek Bok’s 2005 book The Shape of the River, reach slightly less dismal conclusions, we should be concerned that policies designed to increase access might, even inadvertently, lead to an either/or competition between students of color and white working-class students – no matter which side wins such a competition.

Neither the scholars who have been studying this issue, nor conservative commentators who cry that it proves the existence of reverse racism are alone in thinking about these issues.  A number of critics on the left have suggested that the problem with admissions standards that seek to create a diverse student body is not that they lead to reverse discrimination but that they are too limited.  That is, as Richard D. Kahlenberg has been arguing for more than a decade, such programs should focus on socioeconomic status – on class – rather than solely on race.  The Chronicle of Higher Education started a new discussion of the concept in December, with a diverse group of academic and political leaders weighing in, mostly supporting the idea of bringing class into the admissions equation.  The goal of class-based affirmative action isn’t to give preference to white working-class students over working-class students of color, but to expand our understanding of “diversity” to include economic status.

Kahlenberg and his supporters are right, for several reasons.  Douthat actually suggests one: such policies may help to perpetuate classism by limiting the opportunities of more privileged students to interact with peers from lower classes, making it easier for them to accept stereotypes and exaggerations about the working class: “the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland.”  Kahlenberg dismisses this concern, and I agree that the effects on privileged students should not be our primary concern.  Still, I have to wonder whether some of those who have lately been describing the unemployed as lazy and undeserving of extended benefits might not have limited experience interacting with the people they’re denigrating.

For Kahlenberg, the primary issue is fairness.  In an almost immediate response to Douthat, he argues that “High-achieving, low-income students deserve to have a seat at the table because they’ve worked hard and done well, despite what research suggests are very formidable obstacles.”  Discriminatory admissions policies both reflect classism and contribute to the class divide, just as excluding African-American, Latino, and other “minority” students reflects racism and exacerbates racial and religious divides.  Simply put, they perpetuate inequality.

Indeed, the injustice of discriminatory college admissions does not just occur at the point of entry.  Because the status of the institution from which a student earns a degree influences his or her opportunities after graduation, this kind of discrimination has a long-term effect.  If we limit working-class students’ access to selective colleges, we also limit their access to the best jobs and to social networks that have significant power in American politics and business.

America has never fully lived up to the ideal of equal opportunity.  Truly equal opportunity may not be possible, but we can make things a little more equal for poor and working-class students, regardless of race, by improving their access to higher education.  That means encouraging more schools to develop programs to make college affordable, in whatever ways possible, and developing admissions policies that recognize that both class and race matter.

Sherry Linkon, Center for Working-Class Studies

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Class and Education, Contributors, Issues, Sherry Linkon

Tagged , , , , ,

Evangelicals and Working-Class Politics

Posted on July 12, 2010 by Sherry Linkon

According to the popular stereotype, evangelical Christians want little to do with working-class politics.  Instead, we tend to imagine evangelicals as people who are either uninterested in politics or focused entirely on fighting the culture wars, rather than as people who care about issues like unemployment, inequality, and poverty.  If the stereotype were accurate, that would be bad news for people hoping for policy changes that would benefit working-class Americans.  Such changes only come about when the public puts pressure on governmental leaders, and evangelicals make up about one-third of the American public.

There are, however, good reasons to believe that this stereotype oversimplifies what is in fact a complicated topic.  I’d like to review a few of those reasons here, including a survey of evangelical clergy that I conducted last year in Stark County, Ohio.  Stark County, which is located near Cleveland, Akron, and Youngstown in Northeastern Ohio, is home to about 380,000 people who are spread across a diverse collection of cities, suburbs, and rural hamlets.  For the better part of the 20th century, the three principal cities of Stark County—Canton, Massillon, and Alliance—were important manufacturing centers, particularly in steel and related heavy industries.  Over the course of the past several decades, however, Stark County has conformed to the postindustrial storyline of manufacturing job loss and deepening economic insecurity for the working class.  By 2008, 27.9 percent of families in Canton were living below the poverty line, a rate that is nearly three times the national average and also the highest among Ohio’s big cities.  In March of 2009, the Stark County job market drew national and even international attention when a whopping 835 people applied to fill a vacant custodial position at the Edison Junior High School in Perry Township.

Because Stark County voting patterns have resembled national ones for a long time, Stark has also earned a reputation as “a bellwether county in a bellwether state,” making it a magnet to campaigning politicians, as well as a better-than-average spot to check the pulse of American opinion with a survey.  Two hundred thirty-one clergy from the 553 congregations in Stark County filled out, at least in part, the questionnaire sent to them last year.  Along with conventional questions about theology, membership, and so on, the survey gave respondents an open-ended opportunity to identify what they considered to be “the most serious issue facing residents of Stark County today.”  The responses to that question don’t quite fit the stereotype.

Evangelical ministers are far more concerned with economic issues than prevailing stereotypes suggest.  Ninety of the Protestant churches that answered this final question self-identified as ‘born-again’ congregations—a very good indicator of evangelical belief.  Eighty-two of these churches were predominantly white, while eight were predominantly African-American.  Forty-two of the 90 ‘born-again’ churches listed an economic problem of some sort as the most serious issue facing Stark County residents.  Thirty out of these 42 identified the need for jobs as Stark County’s number one issue.  The remaining 12 churches identified poverty, food security, and child care, among other things.

Only 22 of the 90 born-again churches, however, identified a religious problem such as “absence of faith” or “spiritual complacency” as the most serious issue facing the county.  Six more identified traditional “culture wars” issues such as family breakdown and declining morality.  Together, these 28 answers accounted for only 31 percent of the total, which is far less than what stereotypes about evangelicals would predict.  In contrast, nearly 50 percent of the born-again churches—42 out of 90—placed an economic issue at the top of their list of concerns.  Others identified crime-related issues, such as drugs and violence, or miscellaneous public issues such as racial prejudice and highway repair.  A few responses were too ambiguous to categorize.

Examining these returns even more closely suggests important differences within the broad evangelical community, especially between fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist clergy.  Though both embrace the core evangelical doctrines, fundamentalists tend to be more separatist, literalist, and less tolerant of doctrinal differences, even on secondary issues such as dress codes and alcohol consumption.  Of the 64 clergy that self-identified as ‘born-again’ but not ‘fundamentalist,’ 53 percent identified an economic issue as Stark County’s number one concern.  Meanwhile, only 31 percent of clergy that identified as both ‘born-again’ and ‘fundamentalist’ did so.  It is common for opinion surveys to uncover a divide of this sort between fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist evangelical believers.  This divide is rooted in the complex history of American Protestantism, rather than in the core religious doctrines that all evangelical traditions share.

The Stark County data are illuminating for what they tell us about evangelical clergy, but they may not reflect the views of the ordinary believer in the pew.  For several decades, however, scholars have been tracking the opinions of ordinary evangelicals through surveys and polls.  Although these studies have added a lot to our knowledge of evangelical opinion, they have not demonstrated a clear link between evangelical belief and economic attitudes.  In fact, these studies are often inconsistent with one another.  Many of them—perhaps even a small majority—do indicate that evangelicals tend to be slightly more conservative on economic issues than non-evangelicals.  Others, however, find no significant difference between evangelical and non-evangelical attitudes toward the economy.  Some very good studies even show that evangelicals tend to be more liberal on economic issues than non-evangelical Americans.  And to complicate the picture even more, some studies show that evangelicals in other countries are more liberal than their fellow believers in America.

In any event, data from Stark County and elsewhere indicate that many evangelicals are alive to the importance of economic issues in contemporary America.  This fact is not enough to demonstrate that evangelicals will support specific policy proposals.  What these results do suggest, however, is that support may exist among evangelicals for economic ideas that depart from the conservative to moderately conservative American mainstream.  Making the most of these openings and building support for economic strategies that benefit working-class communities will, however, take political work.  Both evangelical and non-evangelical conservatives undertook this kind of work for more than a generation, and it turned out to be pivotal in delivering electoral victories to Republicans from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush and in driving the Democratic Party to the right.

Today, however, more and more evangelicals are working to convince their fellow believers that struggling on behalf of decent living standards for all people is part of what it means to be a faithful Christian.  They are reinvigorating currents of evangelical protest that were once prominent in American life, as in the early labor movement and during the agrarian populist upsurge.  These evangelicals—many of them young people—have been inspired by prominent believers such as John Perkins, Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, and Tony Campolo, as well as the Scriptures themselves.  Already it is becoming evident that young evangelicals are more liberal on economic issues and less preoccupied with the culture wars than their parents and grandparents.  Because evangelicals account for such a large segment of the public, we should be encouraged by these developments.  They have the potential to affect the course of future economic policy in ways that benefit all working-class Americans, regardless of their religious background.

Mike Boyle

Mike Boyle is a Ph.D. student in Cultural Anthropology at the City University of New York whose research interests include political economy, class, and religion.

→ 17 Comments

Posted in Contributors, Guest Bloggers

Tagged , , ,

How Unequal Should Our Incomes Be?

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Sherry Linkon

I think the top one-tenth of U.S. households should get about one-third of all income.  I may be unduly influenced by living in a household that is part of that top tenth, but here’s my reasoning.

Absolute income equality would be great, but it won’t work.  Per capita income in the U.S. is about $47,000, so if income were shared equally, every person would receive that amount, regardless of their age, whether they worked, and whether they are talented or hard-working.  Thus, a single parent with two children would have $141,000 to live on, while a couple with two children would have $188,000, and an empty-nester married couple like my wife and me would have $94,000.  These are not averages.  Every three-person household, for example, would get exactly the same amount, $141,000 — and that amount happens to be enough for everybody to live pretty well and for the vast majority of people to live much, much better than they do now.  And, as productivity increased and the economy grew, everybody would get more.

Most economists will tell you, however, that the economy would not grow under those conditions because incentives to work and innovate would disappear.  Though I suspect they’re probably right, these economists’ wisdom is based on a speculative assumption about a fixed human nature that a lot of world-class philosophers have contested.  And that would be a great discussion to rekindle if only somebody could figure out a workable, sustainable, and just mechanism for completely equalizing income without giving the government totalitarian powers.  So far as I know, nobody has figured out such a mechanism, and those who were trying to find a way have given up trying.

So, anything like absolute equality of income is impossible – or at least not practical enough to be worth thinking about for now.  Nor is it necessary.  During the period in American history when economic growth was strongest and when real wages, family incomes, and the general standard of living improved the most – from the 1940s into the 1970s – the top ten percent received one-third of all income in the U.S.  Historians refer to this era as “postwar prosperity.”  One-third was our share of the pie when the pie was growing at its best, and almost everybody benefited from that distribution.

Degrees of income inequality matter.  In a recent study, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, two British social scientists have assembled data from nearly two dozen of the richest countries in the world.  The data shows how strongly levels of income inequality correlate with a variety of indicators of social well-being.  As a rule, more unequal societies have more homicides, violent crime, and prisoners; more mental illness (including drug and alcohol addiction), obesity, teenage births, and infant mortality; lower levels of trust, child well-being, children’s educational performance, and social mobility; and lower life expectancies.

The U.S. is by far the most unequal of these societies (with Portugal and the United Kingdom coming in second and third), and Japan, Finland, Norway, and Sweden have the most equal incomes.  In chapter after chapter, with only a few exceptions here and there and some nuances on some of the indicators, the U.S. is Number 1 in negative social indicators, followed by Portugal and the UK, and near the bottom in positive ones (including social mobility!).  Likewise, Japan and the Nordic countries uniformly have the most positive outcomes.

The Spirit Level authors, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, make the argument that we now know “how to make substantial improvements in the quality of life for the vast majority of the population” (p. xi): move toward greater equality of income.  For a variety of sometimes complicated but often simple reasons, greater equality of income improves social well-being across a society – including for the top fourth and probably even for our top tenth (though the data they are working with does not allow a firm conclusion by tenths).

So where does this leave my thesis that the top tenth should get one-third of all income?  It actually strengthens it, because right now we’re getting about half of all adjusted gross income in the United States, with the other 90 percent of people sharing the other half.  Our share used to be about one-third, from the 1940s to the 1970s during the most prosperous period in American history, but it has been increasing pretty steadily since about 1980.

My guess is that most people in the top tenth, like my wife and me, did not intend to grab such an outsized share.  We didn’t even know we were doing that, and we certainly didn’t intend for our share to correlate with increased violence, lower rates of child well-being, and lower life expectancies.  But guilt, like blame, looks back, not ahead.

If we top-tenners got one-third instead of one-half of all income, we’d still be doing very well, and there would be about $1.5 trillion more for the other 90 percent.  That’s a lot of money, and it means that we could live in a society where no one would be poor, especially not the nearly one-half of people who work full time for less than a livable wage.

What’s more, as a society we probably know a lot about how a substantial redistribution of income could be accomplished over time.   We can look at how we did it during the period of postwar prosperity, when there were strong labor, then civil rights, then women’s and other social movements; much more progressive income taxes; a growing social wage; actual enforcement of fair labor standards; and a steadily increasing minimum wage.

How to do that again in very different circumstances, both political and economic, is undoubtedly more difficult than I imagine.  But it is valuable to know just how unequal our incomes have become and how big a price in social well being all of us pay for that, some more than others.  It’s also good to have a clear goal for just how unequal our incomes should be.  I think that goal should be that old-fashioned postwar prosperity share of one-third for the top tenth.

Jack Metzgar

→ 14 Comments

Posted in Contributors, Issues, Jack Metzgar, The Working Class and the Economy

Tagged , ,

Rethinking Work and Non-Work in the Recession

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Sherry Linkon

For over the last 18 months, the Center for Working-Class Studies has been publishing the “De Facto Unemployment Rate” (DFUR).  The DFUR includes all those who are officially unemployed, those looking for work, the underemployed, disabled or in early retirement, and those receiving government work subsides.  It also estimates those who are in prison or have joined the military because they can’t find work in the private sector. The most recent analysis estimates that the DFUR continues to hover around 30%.

At first, the DFUR did not receive much attention, perhaps because it differs from the typically reported unemployment rate.  But in the last six months, it has been featured in the Manufacturing and Technology News and the Wall Street Journal. More important, the idea of understanding unemployment in broader terms has gained more acceptance as the media has begun to use the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s (BLS) alternative measures of labor underutilization.

In terms of actual job growth, the most recent study by the BLS indicates that almost all employment growth in last six months is due to government jobs, specifically jobs with the U.S. Census. While some have argued that the recession may be over, the lack of private sector job growth indicates that we may be on the brink of another jobless recovery. If the U.S. is to avoid falling back into recession, we must continue to extend unemployment benefits and/or craft another stimulus package.

Yet recent bills to create additional jobs and extend unemployment benefits have met with resistance, and even when such benefits exist, many states make it difficult for those who are out of work to receive any benefits. For example, some states limit benefits for part-timers and those who leave a job for medical reasons or due to the lack of available childcare. A recent study by Economic Policy Institute indicates that less than 67% of the long-term unemployed are receiving benefits.  If unemployment benefits had not been extended, only 35% would have been covered.

The high, persistent unemployment rate suggests a long and very slow economic recovery, and we may, in fact, be entering a “jobless era,” as Don Peck wrote in The Atlantic in March.  But having a job in the current economy doesn’t necessarily protect workers in this recession.  As Jamie Smith Hopkins reported in last week’s Baltimore Sun, 13 percent of employers cut salaries last year, and for many of those workers, their earnings levels may never recover.

But the problems go beyond earnings.  Not only do many workers feel anxiety about keeping their jobs, the quality of work is declining.  The effects of the recession are being exacerbated by changes in the labor market and organization practices based in economic globalization. Trade liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and reduced welfare programs have led to social and economic insecurity, income inequality, weaker unions, reductions in public sector services, and geographical shifts that have resulted in downsizing, restructuring, irregular work hours, electronic monitoring, and the intensification of work.  In turn, these changes have increased job demands, work hours, job insecurity, and control while reducing rewards and social supports making work more precarious.  All of this not only contributes to unemployment in the U.S., it also contributes to work-related stress for those who are still working, as Paul Landsbergis of the Center for Social Epidemiology argued in a recent presentation at the How Class Works Conference.

Increasing levels of job-related stress threaten the health of those who are employed. Landsbergis suggested that while the dramatic deaths and illnesses associated with the “accidents” at the Massy coal mine and BP’s off-shore oil rig get national attention, the insidious influence of job stress increases cardiovascular disease, sickness absence, and acute injuries.  Psychological and musculoskeletal disorders remain under reported, especially among the working class.

Taken together, the DFUR and the impact of economic change on the workplace remind us of the widespread effects of global and national economic trends. We need to think about both the effects of unemployment and the relationship between current economic policies, work practices, individuals, and health in the modern economy. Globalization doesn’t have to cause unemployment or undermine the quality of work.  Government, business, and labor leaders should not wait for an economic recovery to reconsider the impact of globalization on both work and non-work.  Any future economic recovery will be more stable and effective if it not only creates new jobs but also places value on what the International Labor Organization calls decent work for all working people.

John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

→ 5 Comments

Posted in Contributors, Issues, John Russo, The Working Class and the Economy

Tagged , , , , ,

On Poverty, Policy, and Real People

Posted on June 7, 2010 by Sherry Linkon

When the latest report was released last September, the poverty rate in the U.S. stood at 13.2 percent, the highest rate in 11 years.  Given the recession, the increase shouldn’t surprise us, and we’ll probably see higher numbers when the next report is issued in August.  I was surprised that the increase wasn’t more dramatic, but in fact the national poverty rate has hovered between about 10 and 13 percent for most of the past four decades.  While a few percentage points represent a whole lot of people, I was struck by the relative stability of the figures.  Clearly, today’s higher rate of poverty illustrates the effects of the recession.  But if we almost always have more than 10 percent of Americans living in poverty, then it’s clearly a persistent and troublingly-policy-resistant problem.

A conversation with a tour guide and another American tourist on a van in Argentina a few weeks ago got me started thinking about all this.  The tour guide was explaining that her government provides subsidies to families with children, and she was lamenting that some families choose to subsist on those government payments instead of entering the workforce.  The American tourist agreed that this was a problem.  She suggested that the right answer would be to “incentivize” poor people, so they would choose work over idleness.

Underlying the conversation were several assumptions about poverty and the role of government.  The first is that most people are poor because they choose not to work.  I suppose this is true for some, but I’m skeptical that laziness explains most instances of poverty.   According to a 2007 report from the U.S. Census, only 21.5 percent of people in poverty don’t work.  Today, the percentage may be higher, but given the unemployment rate, that’s not surprising, and we can’t read it as evidence of laziness.  Indeed, the New York Times has been running a terrific series on “The New Poor,” presenting stories and analysis of how a complex mix of accident and policies are driving people from the middle and working classes into poverty.  For a good example, read a recent report in the New York Times about how state cuts to child care subsidies are making it impossible for some low-income women to hold on to their jobs.  The women profiled in the story are far from lazy.  They want to work, but they can’t leave their children at home alone and have few options.

Second, we assume that if people are poor, it’s entirely their own fault.  Common wisdom suggests that poor people would be comfortably middle class if only they were smart enough or worked hard enough to take advantage of the opportunities this country offers.  Great myth, but in fact, upward mobility is less common in the U.S. than we’d like to think.  Most Americans remain in the social class in which they grew up.  Poverty is often situational and temporary.  Equally important, as we have noted here previously, the U.S. can expect to see the most job growth over the next few decades in low-income jobs, meaning that increasing numbers of hard-working Americans will also be poor.

A third assumption in that tour van conversation is that government’s role should be to push people to work hard, not support those in need.  Social welfare, the assumption goes, teaches people to depend on the government and thus increases, or at least perpetuates, poverty.  While tracing this correlation can be tricky, a study by Lane Kenworthy, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona (who also writes for the conservative Cato Institute), found that Germany and Sweden, two European countries with the most generous state welfare programs, experienced lower levels of poverty than other nations.  Such programs don’t eliminate poverty, and the results are uneven across Europe and elsewhere, but they do seem to help more than hurt.  Based on his comparative study of the effects of social welfare programs, Kenworthy concludes that “relatively modest increases in benefit levels for programs that assist nonworking individuals and low-income workers might well be sufficient to bring the U.S. into line with at least a few of the other affluent nations in reducing poverty.”

Of course, we don’t address poverty only through direct supports.  Improvements in education, worker rights, and health care would create better opportunities for people in poverty to achieve economic stability and move toward prosperity, and many people and organizations are working on these issues, here in the U.S. and globally.  Yet such improvements are not only slow to develop, they are also – like most public policy – matters of intense debate.  What does “better education” look like?  What rights should workers have?  Is access to good health care a human right, and if so, how should we pay for it?  As the seemingly endless Congressional and media battles over health care demonstrated, solving the social problems that contribute to poverty is a cumbersome and frustrating process.

Much of the debate comes down to two big questions.  First, does the free market generate good social practices?  In other words, when corporations and business leaders pursue their interests, does that generate sufficient prosperity and opportunity to help the poor and working class?   Second, do we believe that society as a whole has an interest, either moral or economic, in supporting those who are living in poverty? Or do we view economic inequality as either a “natural” condition or a self-inflicted problem that should be left alone, either because we believe we can’t do anything about it or because we believe that those who are poor don’t deserve assistance?

Clearly, neither the American people nor our leaders agree on how to answer these questions, and because those on both sides are passionate and committed to their views, we may never reach consensus.  That means that policy debates will continue to be contested, and most likely, especially given the U.S. system of government (see James Fallows on this), the policies we develop will usually take moderate, often muddled and cautious approaches.

Policy solutions seem elusive, but we should nonetheless think carefully about how we characterize people in poverty.  When we treat them with disdain and suspicion, the result is the sort of demeaning, even dehumanizing legal and bureaucratic practices that Barbara Ehrenreich has been documenting.  Or we can view them as equal human beings, people worthy of not just our sympathy but our assistance and respect.  We can check our judgments and question our assumptions.  And perhaps most important, we can listen to their stories so that we can understand their experiences and perspectives.  When we listen to others, they become human.  They become part of “us,” members of our society whom we cannot so easily brush aside or condemn.

Sherry Linkon, Center for Working-Class Studies

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Contributors, Issues, Sherry Linkon, The Working Class and the Economy

Tagged , , , ,

Robin Hood in the Greenzone

Posted on May 31, 2010 by Sherry Linkon

As of Friday, May 28th, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood had made almost 200 million dollars world wide, which seems like a whole lot of coin, but the earnings don’t yet equal what the film cost to make (estimates range from 155 to 237 million).  At the same time Robin Hood has been roundly trounced by most professional film reviewers.  Entertainment Weekly, which I find to be surprisingly trustworthy, gave the film a C-, and A.O. Scott at The New York Times pronounced the film drearily un-merry.

The film opens with a gnarly battle scene, in which Russell Crowe plays a low-ranked soldier, Robin Longstride, in the post-Crusade army of King Richard the Lionheart.  The English are attacking a French castle, igniting giant sacks of oil to set fire to the castle doors.  In return, the attackers get boiling oil poured down on them through slats in the castle towers.  During this battle Richard the Lionheart is mortally wounded.

The film then veers back and forth between palace intrigue, in which Richard’s little brother, John (who is petty, greedy and vindictive), succeeds his older brother as king, and the story of Robin Longstride, who sets out for Loxley, England, on a quest to return the sword of a slain knight.  In a series of unlikely, yet compelling events, Robin Longstride poses as the slain knight Robert Loxley and pretends to be married to (old) Maid Marion, who is played with considerable verve by Cate Blanchett.  In Loxley, Robin discovers that his own dead father was a talented stone mason who was executed for standing up for the rights of the people of England.  Robin takes on his father’s cause and helps the people of Loxley outwit the government’s marauding tax collectors who are plundering what they cannot legally collect to fill the coffers of King John.

The film is meant to explain the origins of Robin Hood:  where did he come from, and why did he assemble a team of merry men to rob noblemen traveling through the forest in order to distribute their wealth to the less fortunate?  In Ridley’s tale, Robin’s origins are decidedly working class.  He is the son of a stone mason and is poorly paid as a member of the King’s army.  He is class conscious, too, as when he explains to his buddies why they must leave the army after the King’s death:  “If you thought it was hard getting wages from him when he was alive, try getting wages from a dead king.”  Cate Blanchett points out that Robin Hood reflects Ridley’s own working-class background:  “He’s a working-class guy from the North, so he’s always had a healthy disrespect for authority, and he feeds that into this.”

On the other hand, if we are watching Robin Hood from an American perspective, where Presidential authority is embodied by an African-American Democrat, anti-authoritarianism can sound downright conservative.  As A.O. Scott and other reviewers have noted, there is a whiff of Tea Party populism in Robin’s rhetoric.  He crusades against the increased taxes of King John, and he also defends the right to bear arms: “If it’s illegal for a man to fend for himself, how can he be a man of his own right?”  But Robin Hood’s more general cause is that of good old fashioned Libertas: “In tyranny lies only failure. Empower every man and you will gain strength.”

Perhaps the most interesting choice Ridley made was to insert Robin Hood’s origins into the political intrigue of Medieval England.  Richard the Lionheart really did lead crusades in the Holy Land in the late 1100s; as part of this crusade he bore responsibility for an atrocious massacre of Muslims at Acre (pronounced Ak-ko, a beautiful city still standing on what today is Israel’s Mediterranean coast).  His successor, King John, was a petty, tyrannical King, nicknamed “softsword” because of his general lack of prowess in battle.  According to one source, his government’s policies “irrevocably estranged the lower classes.”

And thus the real message of this century’s Robin Hood may have as much to do with our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as is does with anti-tax populism or economic redistribution.  The screenplay was written by Brian Helgeland, who also wrote last year’s fast paced anti-war thriller, Greenzone.  This might explain why Robin, in response to a question from King Richard the Lionhart about the righteousness of the Crusades, recounts with considerably sadness how he felt as he looked into the imploring eyes of a Muslim woman before she was killed.

The myth of Robin Hood is one of the most indelible myths in Anglophone culture; ballads that first referenced the famed bandit appeared in Medieval England as early as 1429.  Perhaps Ridley’s film is evidence that Robin Hood is one of the most plastic myths as well.  In one film, Ridley has yoked the Robin Hood legend to a muddled blend of populism, socialism, peace activism, and strident feminism.  Early in the story, for example, Marion tells Robin: “I sleep with a dagger. If you so move to touch me, I will sever your manhood.”  Later she kicks some serious butt on the battlefield.

If Ridley’s version of the story is a bit dreary at times, and outrageously ahistorical at others, I’m OK with that.  Our own moment is a bit dreary as well.  We’re fighting two wars, struggling with how to restore dignity to labor, and fighting against a right-wing populism that is wrongly directed at the dwindling rights of those who have the least.  When Robin Hood tells the people of England to “Rise and Rise Again until the Lambs Become Lions,” I hear strains of that old Civil Rights hymn, “We Shall Overcome.”  And I hope, fervently, that we will.

Kathy M. Newman

Kathy M. Newman is professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University.  She was involved in the effort to unionize Teaching Assistants at Yale University in the 1990s and she is currently finishing a book, Blacklisted and Bluecollared: How Americans Saw Class in the 1950s.

→ 5 Comments

Posted in Class and the Media, Contributors, Guest Bloggers, Issues

“Greening Up” Urban Communities and Displacing the Poor

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Sherry Linkon

The drive up South Halsted Street to the campus of my alma mater, the University of Illinois at Chicago, reveals how much this section of the Near West side of Chicago has changed in the last 10 years.  Once a blighted area of vacant storefronts, ramshackle houses, and trash-strewn lots, the area now called University Village is, today, an upper-middle income neighborhood of luxury condos, $700,000 townhomes, lush lawns, trees, and upscale retail shops.  The neighborhood offers a ten minute drive to downtown Chicago and the Museum Campus, a bike trail, a huge medical district to its south, and easy access to expressways, public transportation, and UIC’s outdoor running track. It took a while but, beginning with the razing of several dilapidated and “notorious” housing projects nearby, the neighborhood has been redeveloped into a cleaner, “greener,” safer community.   The question is, for whom?

Do all groups benefit equally from the “greening up” of urban communities?  What has “greening up” meant for the urban poor and low-income groups in University Village, and in urban communities in other cities? And how might answers to these questions serve to inform the planning and re-development of urban communities in the future?

  • Research finds that lower-income groups are often forced out of a community when higher-income groups move in. When this happens, ”gentrification with displacement” is said to occur.  Property values often increase in gentrified communities, but so do taxes and other expenses.  In what became University Village, many poor and working class residents moved out of the area because they could not afford the increased rent, property taxes, assessment fees, and othercosts.
  • Partly because of the correlation between income, race-ethnicity, and residential patterns, many of the people moving out of gentrified communities in inner-cities are African American or Latino. Confronted with a shortage of affordable housing in the city, minorities and low-income groups may move to areas outside the city, where housing is cheaper. The Brookings Institute reports, in fact, that a majority of all racial and ethnic groups in large metropolitan areas now live in suburbs, and the number of poor people living in suburbs is increasing five times as fast as the number of poor people living in cities.
  • In Chicago, some suburban communities are experiencing problems traditionally associated with inner-city communities (e.g. housing shortages, concentrated poverty, and drugs).  Thus, another potential adverse side-effect of “greening” may be the displacement of urban problems to other communities rather than the resolution of such problems.  If the ultimate goal of “greening up” communities is to improve the quality of life for everyone, including those of future generations, then simply transferring problems elsewhere defeats the purpose of “greening” in the first place, doesn’t it?  And how does transferring poor folk and problems that disproportionately affect them (such as a diminished ability to control where they live) advance “environmental justice?”  It doesn’t.

No one group should have to shoulder more environmental burdens (such as  pollution) than any other group). Group disparity in exposure to environmental hazards is one factor that led to the development of the environmental justice movement.  Most of the 450,000 abandoned waste sites (brownfields) in America are located in or near low- income, working-class, and minority communities.  The poorest of the poor often live within one mile of a brownfield. Most African Americans (71%) live in counties that violate federal air pollution standards. Asthma attacks send African Americans to the emergency room three times as often as whites, and that blacks die twice as often from asthma as do whites.

To work against the potential adverse effects of “greening- up” urban communities, we need to avoid simple, quick, short-term solutions.  Research suggests that urban renewal programs that focus on a single factor (such as tearing down or refurbishing dilapidated housing) simply do not work.  Providing affordable housing does not help much if people lack the income and the education or training that would allow them to maintain a dwelling.  Thus, we must not only increase the availability of affordable housing but also create more jobs at a livable wage, increase access to health care, and fund job training and education at higher levels.  Improving the quality of life for lower-income families is a monumental task, but a more comprehensive approach can ensure that all groups live healthier, longer, and more productive lives.   And it is this promise that gives some sweetness to what might otherwise be an entirely bitter visit to University Village.

Denise Narcisse, Center for Working-Class Studies

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Contributors, Denise Narcisse, Issues, Understanding Class