The shaping of American working class consciousness cannot be attributable to one aspect of social division of labor while holding out carrots of possible future mobility based on hard work and perserverence. At each step of the occupational hierarchy, there are different economic rewards, degrees of power, and variations of consciousness.
In thinking about my own upbringing, I recall one message that was made clear to me as soon as I was able to understand it. I was expected to do well in school, go on to college, and be able to choose a career that would make me happy. My father reminded me all too often of how hard and long he worked for so little. As a typical parent raising children in the 1950’s, he tried to give me what he could but always stressed that I had to do better, that life would be easier with an education. Fortunately for me and my parents, I liked school, worked hard and was put into “higher track” classes, making it easier to go to a “good” private girl’s school and then on to college. In this sense, the school systems and I succeeded. But what of the failures? Stanley Aronowitz views the high schools as an attempt to replicate the factory: tracking students into academic, vocational and general classes, all with their own career expectations. The various labels attached to the student through testing or tracking all impress upon the student that his or her failure to do well in school is a function of his or her lack of intelligence or efforts. The distinctions between “bright” and “slow” or “bad” children teach children very early that to cooperate, to be obedient and to work hard will bring reward and pleasure.
The importance of play for children and leisure time for adults is that it is seen as their only self-controlled time. It is the escape from domination from adults or school or from a dehumanizing job. For working class women, “rap” groups become the means for sharing frustrations of work or homelife domination. Men play games, go to bars or join various organizations in their attempts to achieve the status of equal to other persons in contrast to their subordination at work.
The message from the family and the school is to go to school to learn what is necessary to become productive laborers. To have a job in America is to be a citizen. An advertisement on the radio recently said “Buy an American car; keep Americans working.”
The advertisement is revealing on yet another count for in the past 30 years, another force has been working against the formation of an independent working class culture. Mass culture reflects the effort of capitalism to give relationships between people the sense of relationships between things. Through mass-communications workers learn that they must produce to consume. Television watching has become the favorite pasttime of both children and adults in our society. As in spectator sports, the T.V. watcher is passive and thus is dominated.
The most popular family show on television is “All in the Fami1y.” Its main theme is the generation gap, especially as it pertains to Archie and his son-in-law Mike. Archie, confused and annoyed by the new world, constantly loses battles with his liberal, college educated son-in-law, but retains authority because he pays the bills and takes care of the family. Many Americans accept the values that preserve the traditional working class society. Television teaches Americans that the factory worker is a failure, without a rich life, accepting a system of beliefs which are not intelligent. How many programs even show the factory workplace?
Television and current films have many messages about women, violence and the changing world. Acting as a kind of safety valve, mass communications attempts to absorb tensions arising out of every day life and relieve frustrations (especially the tensions generated by the contradictions between what workers can actually afford to buy and the amount of gratification they can get from their work). The attempt of the media to scapegoat by using certain groups or reinforcing the necessity of law and order through the typical crime drama both tend to present a degraded view of life today.
The overwhelming majority of American workers are dissatisfied with the quality of their working lives today. The present generation of workers is different from any coming before it. Not prepared to perform mindless repetitive tasks day after day, not motivated by the opportunity to buy a split-level house in the suburbs and have two cars in the garage and an endless barrage of electrical gadgets, many young workers have begun to change work patterns. Although unions have brought about real achievements, young workers are skeptical of what unions can do now. The transformation of the worker from an active producer to a spectator of his own work has made work meaningless to many workers. As soon as he or she leaves work, he or she tries to forget it. While there, he or she thinks of something else to get through the day.
During the last 30 years, American workers have begun to become aware of their power through collective action. Production for profit rather than use has taken its toll on the environment and the health of too many workers. The resulting alienation of humans from nature and from their work has produced a crisis that people are no longer willing to endure. Unless workers are willing to go beyond being manipulated they can never control their own destiny.
A number of changes would have to take place before American workers could effectively create a conscious culture. Workers organizations would have to be organized at the shop level, within industries and nationally. These groups would have to broaden the scope of their interests to include larger social demands having to do with the environment in the workplace and the community. They would have to get involved politically, opposing U.S. involvement in wars, corporate efforts to freeze wages and federal actions that limit workers freedom to act on their own.
There would have to be a massive reeducation to help workers learn how they have been dominated, an effort which would mean a total restructuring of the major institutions of school, church, and family and a separation of popular culture from mass culture. For the working class public to realize its own necessities and how to obtain them without sacrificing the quality of life is a massive undertaking.
Workers Speak Out
Studs Terkel’s
Working
begins to address the question of massive re-education and provides us with a kind of sampling of the changing consciousness of American workers. Interviewing over 135 people who represent tremendous diversity in occupations, Terkel reveals an amazing uniform feeling that workers express about their jobs: they have to feel good about what they do for work because it is central to their lives. The remainder of this essay represents my attempt to summarize the feelings expressed by these workers in an organized way. I have chosen several categories or themes which were repeatedly mentioned by workers.
The first category and question that students may ask is “Why work?” It has become increasingly clear that working solely for money is not enough. Yes, people do need to provide themselves with basics, but beyond that, what real purpose does work serve?
Traditionally, work served the purpose for society as a means of producing and distributing goods and services, but today there is more emphasis on the personal meaning of work. For some, work is a place to socialize, to meet people, to talk and form friendships. In another social sense, it determines a status for the worker and his or her family, which may in turn determine the neighborhood where a family lives, schools attended by children, friends associated with, etc.
Over and over again, workers talked about work contributing to or taking away from their self-esteem. Work contributes to self-esteem in two ways. The first is through an awareness of how well a person can do his or her job—and thus acquire a sense of mastery over both himself or herself and his or her environments. The second comes from the sense that what the person does benefits others. To be so removed from the actual finished product of your work as one is on an assembly line cannot give the kind of satisfaction that someone who builds a building has. People often talk of work as being “meaningful”. When it hasn’t added to their self-esteem, they feel like “robots” or machines. People’s identities are shaped by their work: they tend to “become what they do”.
Basic to all work is the desire of workers to impose some order or structure on the world. The more people feel that they come to their goal of having control the more satisfaction they experience. For most individuals the kinds of jobs that they see open to them do little to provide the sense of self-esteem, identity, or mastery that are essential for satisfying work. Most turn to other activities (music, drinking, sports) or other institutions (church, family, community) to find their rewards.
As more and more people look to their “leisure” time for satisfaction, the very “work ethic” comes under attack, especially by the young. High absenteeism (sometimes blamed on poor attendance patterns developed in school), poor or careless craftsmanship, and large numbers of strikes are visible signs. The fact that so many people live communally, that many factories have introduced a four-day week, that retirement is occurring at earlier ages, that welfare caseloads are increasing are other signs that people’s values and aspirations have changed. Quantitatively, the lives of workers has improved tremendously. Salaries are higher, working conditions have improved, standard of living and life expectancy have risen markedly. What they find most oppressive about work are constant supervision and force, lack of variety, monotony, meaningless tasks, and isolation.
If Terkel’s book is any indication of the numbers of people dissatisfied with their work then it is fair to say that roughly 90 percent of Americans are not happy with their jobs. Unlike the workforce of the past, todays workers are now mostly native-born, better educated, affluence-minded, and are challenging traditional values. Many of the new workers do not repress their resentment over job monotony and scale of organization or their inability to control the pace and style of work. The big challenge to industrial society is now to consider both the social needs of workers and the task to be performed. Those workers expressing satisfaction with their jobs were those who experienced the following factors—autonomy, working on a “whole” problem and participation in decision-making.
Yet the contradiction of the American dream is that our economic, political and cultural system has fostered without fulfilling the great notion of independence and autonomy, the self-made Horatio Alger image. The idea persists that if you are really hard-working, you can always make a go of it on your own. As recent data shows, there has been a drastic decline in small business and self-employment in the past 70 years. The trend is toward larger corporations which have organized workers to minimize independence and maximize control. So now the elements of dehumanized and authoritarian work add to the causes for dissatisfying working environments, i.e. alienation. Social scientists identify four ingredients of alienation: 1.) Powerlessness (regarding ownership of the business, general management policies, employment conditions and the immediate work process), 2.) Meaninglessness (with respect to the product worked on as well as the process), 3.) Isolation (the social aspect of work), 4.) Self-estrangement (“depersonalized detachment,” including boredom, which can lead to the absence of “personal growth”). As alienation takes its toll on industry by diminishing productivity there is more pressure to relate the production of goods to other social concerns.
For the majority of workers, the frustrations of life in a mass society are vented and show up in the form of “social problems.” Many workers at all occupational levels feel locked in, their mobility blocked, the opportunity to grow lacking in their jobs, challenge missing from their tasks. Work problems spill over into other activities in life. Either workers take out their frustrations on their families, friends, or sometimes hostility is expressed toward the government.
Whether it’s blue-collar or white-collar, factory or office, dissatisfaction with the job is common. The typical American worker today, the clerk, is faced with higher academic requirements for jobs which have not increased in terms of prestige, status, pay or difficulty. Signs of these dissatisfactions may be found in high turnover rates (30 percent a year) and a nearly 50 percent increase in white-collar union membership. Recent articles in the press indicate tremendous increases in white-collar crimes.
On the managerial level, workers complain of job insecurity, and tell stories about people being asked to clear their desks at the end of the day and leave—period. Managers also complain about having no input into decisions on policies they are expected to implement without adequate means. Another fear running rampant among middle-aged managers was obsolescence, as many experience “mid-life” crises.
Young workers, as I have described earlier in this paper, offer the greatest challenge to the system. Out of a workforce of more than 85 million, 22 1/2 million are under the age of 30. Not against work, they reject the traditional work ethic, materialism, and many ideas associated with them. Most want a meaningful career, one which matches the education they are receiving and one in which they have some freedom to make decisions.
But for minority workers, the most immediate need expressed to Terkel was to be able to have a job that paid enough to support a family. Having a meaningful job is seen as a luxury, since one out of three minority workers is unemployed, irregularly employed or has given up looking for a job. Another third earn less than a living-wage in laboring and service jobs. Minority workers are disproportionately unemployed or working at bad jobs. This reflects the systematic discrimination that racial minorities experience not only in work but in education and many other institutions in our society. Untrained black workers in highly competitive work environments worry about security and survival and constantly feel threatened. They have had little control over the institutions that affect their lives and their current work situation reinforces their feelings of discrimination.
Although housekeeping is the main occupation of American women, it is no longer the only occupation or source of identity for most. The Department of Labor studies show that more than half of all women between the ages of 18 and 64 are in the work force and that 9 out of 10 women will work outside the home at some time in their lives.
The job of secretary is perhaps symbolic of the status of female employment in the country. With more than 9 million secretaries composing nearly one-third of the nation’s female workforce, the stereotype is definitely low status and low-paying. Most of the other jobs women do are the worst jobs in the economy and serve to deflate self-images, especially in cases where women have had high expectations about work.
As described earlier in this essay, women have had to overcome some ideological obstacles and myths to even obtain jobs in the past. Statistics on absenteeism have revealed little difference for men and for women who have children. Another barrier to women’s advancement has been the belief that women are not suitable supervisors, although, again surveys on the subject indicate the opposite. Sex-typing is another attitude which has limited the numbers of women entering traditionally “non-feminine” occupations. Ideas on what is “man’s work” and what is “women’s work” tend to be self-perpetuating, although the women’s movement has certainly done much to correct this.
Wage differences between men and women have been quite large in the past and although recent legislation has corrected some of the disparity, there is still a great deal of job segregation or under utilization of women who are qualified to do higher paying jobs.
In the area of disincentives to female employment, the government’s and corporations’ reluctance to provide day care facilities has prevented many women from entering the work force. In addition, Federal policy concerning female unemployment is of great concern to women. Although most of the women who head families work, the unemployment rate, for women in this group was much higher than for married men. The attitude that it is not so serious for women to be unemployed is probably related to the fallacy that most married women who are working are doing so just for “pin-money”. Juanita Kreps has calculated however, that given an average of 40 hours a week spent on housework, the
1960
GNP would have increased by $105 billion, or by over one-sixth if all wives without preschool children had been employed outside the home. Hardly pin money!
Public concern for health in the United States is easily demonstrated today with billions spent each year on medical care, cancer research, proposals for national health insurance, etc. If the physical and mental health costs of jobs were assumed by industry, rather than by individuals and society, there would probably be a drastic decline in the injury, disease, and death rates associated with employment. The statistics speak for themselves: in 1968 over 14,000 people died in industrial accidents; 90,000 suffered permanent damage from industrial accidents; over 2 million suffered temporary disability, while in 1969, exposures to industrial pollutants in the workplace caused one million new cases of occupational disease, including 3,600 dead, 800,000 cases of burns, lung and eye damage, dermatitis and brain damage.
In a 15 year study on aging, the strongest predictor of longevity was work satisfaction, the second being overall “happiness”. Anthropologist Sula Benet’s study of the Abkhasian people of the Soviet Union provide some interesting insights into living longer. Healthy diets and increasing prestige with age were important factors, but a major distinguishing characteristic was lifelong work. Occupational stress was found to be “associate” not only with heart disease (which accounts for about half of all deaths), but with peptic ulcers, arthritis, stroke and gout.
Dull, demeaning work over which a person has little or no control, as well as other poor features of work also contribute to an assortment of mental health problems. Many workers cope with job dissatisfactions, by drinking, taking drugs, or withdrawing from other people. Some intentionally sabbotage their own work.
Ultimately, a major change is going to take a long time as the major policy makers in this country are going to have to commit themselves (business, labor, and government) to the goal of improvement of the quality of working life in America.
For teachers the responsibility of preparing our students for the world “out there” waiting for them becomes an almost impossible task unless we are willing to begin to examine some of our own attitudes and values and really explore the possibility of a new “American dream”, one which emphasizes not how much money a person makes or how many possessions he or she owns, but one which stresses the importance of meaningful work.
