Is Education the Answer to Economic Inequality?

One of the most common solutions offered to reverse America’ growing economic inequality is increased access to education.  President Obama may have started the trend with his call for universal, high-quality preschool, but others have joined the fray.  In March, Ronald Brownstein argued in National Journal that “Education remains critical to reversing the erosion in upward mobility that has made it harder for kids born near the bottom to reach the top in the United States than in many European nations.” On The Century Foundation’s website just last week, Benjamin Landy posted a blog entitled “To Battle Income Inequality, Focus on Educational Mobility.”   

According to Brownstein, colleges and  universities are failing to make those opportunities available, because higher education has become too expensive and doesn’t do enough to help lower-income students succeed. In their 2009 study of college completion rates, William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities, showed that lower-income students were less likely to graduate than their wealthier counterparts regardless of where they went to school.

Their study also showed, however, that working-class students did better when they enrolled in more selective colleges, rather than choosing a more accessible public institution, but many working-class students choose less-selective schools.  Many don’t even apply to more elite colleges, for any number of reasons.  In a recent study, Caroline Hoxby and Sarah Turner suggest that working-class students believe, mistakenly, that it will cost less.  In fact, financial aid programs aimed at increasing economic diversity at elite schools often make such schools more affordable than public schools.  That may be increasingly true as state legislatures dramatically cut support for public higher education, making them even more expensive.

How worried should we be about that?  On the basis of justice, we should be outraged.  We should, as Hoxby and Turner suggest, push elite schools to work harder to recruit working-class students.  We should join the thousands of college students who have organized protests against cuts to public education.  And those of us who are educators should heed Mike Rose’s prescription for addressing the needs of working-class students: “If we want more students to succeed in college, then colleges have to turn full attention to teaching.”

Still, the idea that more or better college education will “solve” the problem of economic inequality is just silly.  While a college education still provides economic advantages, increasing lifetime income, achieving that benefit is harder than it used to be.  These days, getting a college degree doesn’t guarantee better middle-class job prospects, but it does often bring a lifetime of debt.  Unemployment rates for recent graduates remain high – 53% according to The Atlantic a year ago, and many have taken low-wage, hourly jobs that don’t require a college degree.  Meanwhile, student loan debt has increased to an average of $26,600.  For too many, higher education has become a trap door rather than an elevator.

I’m not suggesting that education isn’t worthwhile.  Far from it.  A good education brings many advantages, only some of which have to do with employment or income. Martha Nussbaum is just one of many scholars arguing that education has value for society. But education simply won’t address the root causes of today’s economic inequality.

First, while state legislatures and business organizations pressure public universities to focus on preparing students for jobs in specific fields, like health care or fracking, the widely-touted “skills gap” turns out to be a myth.  The American economy is not being stymied by a lack of appropriately trained workers.  Wharton School management professor Peter Cappelli suggests that we should “Blame It on the Employer.”  He suggests that employers ask themselves a few key questions starting with this zinger: “Have you tried raising wages? If you could get what you want by paying more, the problem is just that you are cheap.”

Second, even when we talk about increasing access or establishing “universal” programs, education addresses the individual, not the system.  Even at its best, education helps some working-class young people prepare to move into the middle class, an outcome that might improve the economic opportunities of those individuals but doesn’t address the broader economic structure.  A thousand well-trained nurses might earn a decent living, but they will work alongside aides, janitors, and clerical workers who don’t. Simply put, moving some people into better paying jobs doesn’t eliminate the low-wage jobs they left behind.

Moreover, we should expect to see more low-wage jobs over time, not fewer, and education won’t change that.  Indeed, as Jack Metzgar and I have both written here, multiple times, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the most growth in jobs is in those that don’t require a college degree.  Regardless of how many people get college degrees, too many jobs in the U.S. will continue to pay low-wages, offer little or no benefits, and provide almost no job security. The only difference will be that workers will have more education and, in most cases, more debt.

If we want to improve the lives of low-wage workers and their families, we need public policies that will create more jobs, increase wages (see Metzgar’s suggestion earlier this year for a law requiring productivity sharing), and protect people from the financial ravages that often accompany illness, natural disasters, and other devastating and expensive events.   But how likely do you think it is that our state or federal legislators will create such policies?

The only possibilities for change lie in activism and organizing.  And what does it take to foster resistance and build solidarity?  As our labor studies colleagues might remind us, learning about economic, political, and social processes as well as the history of activism, theories of class, and narratives of oppression and resistance can prepare people to articulate and advocate for their own interests and for the common good.

Hmm, so maybe education is the answer, after all?

Sherry Linkon

How the Working Class Gets Schooled

I just returned from a rousing three-day street corner teach-in called “Occupy the Department of Education,” held in Washington DC. I wanted to occupy the DOE because, for me, what started as a fairly straightforward involvement in a movement against massive education cuts in Pennsylavnia has evolved into a sense of urgency that we must reverse the damage that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and corporate education reforms are doing to public education.

This week my nine-year old son will be “opting out” of the high stakes test given in the Pittsburgh Public Schools (the PSSA).  The test is used to grade my son’s school on its annual progress (Adequate Yearly Progress as defined by NCLB). I wrote an editorial about my decision to have my son opt out of the test, which has been seen and/or shared by at least 50,000 people in the last week. A companion piece at a lively blog called The Answer Sheet at The Washington Post is also generating considerable traffic. Apparently, I’m not the only parent who’s concerned about high stakes testing.

Many of those parents are, like me, middle class.  But the emerging movement against school reform might be even more important for the working class.

My son’s school, Pittsburgh Linden, is a magnet school in Pittsburgh’s East End, one of the wealthier parts of the city—near the universities and the hospitals. Because it’s a magnet Linden students come from at least six different zip codes and from a variety of racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds. 70% of the students are African American, Asian, Hispanic, or two or more races, while the remaining third are white. About 35% qualify for the federally funded lunch program, suggesting that despite the tony neighborhood, many of the students come from poor and working-class homes.

When NCLB was enacted the rhetoric was about fixing schools that served the poorest and most disadvantaged students. But a decade into NCLB, it is clear that high stakes testing is not improving our schools. These standardized tests are being used to assess the student, the teacher and the school, and depending on the outcome, they may be punished or rewarded.

But even before any formal punishments, these tests are forcing a narrowing of the curriculum. At Linden and at thousands of public schools across the country, much of the school day is devoted to pre-tests, practice tests, test prep, and test taking strategies. State budgets cuts have made the situation even worse, and the combination has left my son and many others without band this year (he was going to start the clarinet), and with many fewer hours of library and music each week. Middle-class kids (including my own son, who is learning piano) might get music lessons outside of school, but for working-class students, the narrowed curriculum cuts off their opportunities.

About a week before the testing starts, the hallways and classrooms are often stripped bare. The PSSA guidelines require that everything that could reveal an answer to the test be taken down or covered up, and sometimes schools, wary of cheating accusations, go overboard. One teacher was asked to cover the clock in her classroom because it was a “number line.”

Before the test many schools emphasize the importance of rest and good nutrition. I received a robo-call from the school district last week admonishing me to make sure my kids went to bed early on Sunday night. Some schools hold pep rallies for the PSSA and show videos using the soundtrack of Rocky to get the kids excited about doing well on the test. Why? Because the fate of the school depends on how the students score on this single test.

Once the test starts the atmosphere of cheerleading is over. Bathroom breaks are only permitted at certain times, and I have read reports of kids who were too scared to ask for permission to use the bathroom and who sat in their chairs and wet their pants during the test. One teacher wrote me to tell me about a child who opened her test and threw up on it because she was so nervous. She still had to take the test because it had been “opened.”

Increasingly, corporate education reformers (folks like Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee) want teacher evaluations, firings, promotions, and pay to be tied to these exams. This means that teachers, who most people would assume are middle class, are increasing forced into a more working-class position (as Michael Zweig has argued) in which they have less control over what they teach or how they are credentialed and evaluated.

So what are the consequences of high stakes tests on poor and working-class children? Numerous studies (such as this one) have shown that parents’ income is the largest predictor of how a student will perform on a standardized test. According to these studies, teachers rarely have more than a 10-15% influence over how an individual student will perform. In other words, lower-income children are handicapped out of the gate. And so are their schools. It also means that poor and working-class children are more likely to have their schools closed.

School closings often have a devastating impact on the communities that are centered around them, and they don’t improve academic opportunities for the students at the closed school. This study, for example, argues that students who are assigned to schools farther away from home participate less in after school programs, and their parents are less involved.

Ironically, perhaps, schools themselves can provide a sense of home to the poorest students. One study found that 10% of students in a Chicago school that was closed were homeless. What was it like for them to lose their homes, and then their schools? And what will happen to them in the fall if Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel succeeds with his plan to close another 50 schools?

Schools that serve the least privileged students in the US are also the ones most  likely to have young, less-well trained, and inexperienced teachers. Programs like Teach for America lead to what experts call the “churn and burn” phenomenon, in which idealistic young teachers are sent to low-income, often low-performing schools and just as quickly leave the profession—forever.

In other words, the gnarly combination of high stakes tests, recessionary state budget cuts, schools closings and the de-professionalization/de-unionization of the teaching profession are hurting poor, minority and working class children the most.

But a growing number of students, parents and educators are fighting back. On April 9^th, Newark high school students are walking out of their classrooms to confront the politicians who are cutting the education budget. High school students in Rhode Island are boycotting their high stakes tests. Teachers in Seattle are refusing to administer a standardized test called the MAP. Established groups like Parents across America and a wonderful new organization, The Network for Public Education, are working at the local and the national level to dismantle NCLB. Respected national education leaders like Diane Ravitch and Mark Naison are helping to turn the tide against a decade of harmful testing and meaningless reform.

One of the most inspiring people to speak at Friday’s protest was Chicago Teachers Union leader Karen Lewis, who linked her union’s 2012 successful strike to the upcoming Chicago school closings and to high stakes testing.  Towards the end of her remarks, Lewis asked why we keep submitting to the game of high stakes tests when they serve us so poorly. “What is the story that the winners tell the losers to keep them playing the game?”

I’m done playing the game, and I’m ready to change the story. Will you join me?

Kathy M. Newman

News for the Consumer Class

It is no surprise to readers of newspapers – or readers of this blog — that newspapers contain little coverage of labor and working-class economic issues. Although I’d hesitate to say there was ever a “golden era” of labor coverage, there was a time not too long ago when newspapers regularly reported on the activities of labor unions – contract negotiations, strikes, and community activities.

The shift away from more active labor reporting came in the late 1960s, when the newspaper industry started to employ the tools of the growing consumer research industry to target “quality” demographics – that is, more upwardly mobile readers, with higher education and higher incomes.  Although we like to think of journalism as a democratic practice, by the 1970s it served only a select group of consumers.

We can track the consumer shift in newspapers in Editor & Publisher, the leading trade journal where newspapers placed advertisements to sell their audience to national advertisers. The main commercial message of U.S. newspapers in the mass-market era of pre-1970s was simple: they had lots of readers who earned good wages in America’s booming industry and could buy advertisers’ products.

For example, this Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph ad from January 6, 1940 instructed advertisers to “Hitch Your Budget to a Boom.” The indicator, according to the ad, was that “Pittsburgh industrial electric power sales are up 45%.”  The equation was simple: “More electric power means more buying power; for more electricity, used by industry, means more production, more employment, more wages, more money to spend for your products.”

By the 1970s, the Editor & Publisher ads make clear, newspapers shunned the mass working-class audience. Newspapers decided that delivering wage earners to advertisers wasn’t enough; they wanted to deliver “quality” consumers to their advertisers.

You can see this new tone in an ad for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the dominant newspaper in the famously working-class city. The May 9, 1970 ad featured a drawing of a young, fashionable woman on a black and pink striped chair.  The design’s flattened image, bold color, and wavy stripes style echoed George Dunning’s 1968 animated Beatle’s film fantasy Yellow Submarine. The visual image of the ad makes a break with the past (earlier ads rarely portrayed a select group of readers visually), and the text of the ad makes the break with the Plain Dealer‘s mass readership, too: “Our readers are the first people – affluent moderns who are the first with new things for better living.  And who find where to buy them first in The Plain Dealer.”

For some newspapers, like the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the afternoon competitor to the morning Los Angeles Times, the shift from its mostly working-class readership to becoming “the rich man’s newspaper” was swift. In an April 11, 1970 full-page Editor & Publisher ad – with a stereotypical “rich man” image of a suited, cufflinked, and pinky-ringed executive in a leather chair peering out from the stock exchange pages – the newspaper seemed overjoyed to target a new audience.  The ad read, in part:  “Suddenly, we find ourselves in the money. For about two years we’ve suspected a circulation shift toward richer readers. Now it’s official… This calls for a fresh look at the whole Los Angeles market.” The tagline was “Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, where the money is.” (Ironically, union jobs helped to create better-compensated readers in LA and across the country.

We can see the shift to consumerism in newspaper stories, as well. By the 1970s, the tone of articles about labor began to take a consumer perspective across all the mainstream news media. For example, consumers, not workers, became the central narrative figures of strike coverage. Instead of describing strikes primarily as disagreements over collective bargaining, stories cast them as being about how strikes inconvenienced consumers– transit systems immobilized, goods in short supply, services delayed.  With the new focus on consumers, newspapers let their labor beats wither and die. Today the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are the only top newspapers in the country with a dedicated labor beat reporter.  Starting in the late 1960s, most newspapers across the country added a “workplace” columnist, who covered life in the preferred office cubicle environment, and covered topics like workplace romances, office parties, and what to wear on casual Fridays. This is the predominant kind of “workplace” coverage today.

Of course, one could argue that a lot of general news readers became television news viewers by the 1970s, which is true. But TV, which welcomed mass audiences, didn’t provide the same level of labor and working class coverage. No national news network had a dedicated labor beat reporter, and few local TV stations covered labor and working class issues on a regular basis.

The transformation of journalism’s target audience away from citizen/workers to citizen/consumers created two big “blind spots” for journalism when it comes to working-class issues. First, labor journalism is nearly nonexistent. Over the past several decades, some stories have examined the shocking levels of income inequality, but no consistent beat covers labor or working-class issues.  The occasional stories that do appear lack any sense of continuity or content.  It’s not unlike the sports pages covering the Super Bowl game, but without reporting the entire season’s worth of the games leading up to it. How could one appreciate the Super Bowl story’s magnitude?

Second, stories that do get reported often reflect a consumer point of view. Anji L. Phillips of Bradley University and I have tracked this in reports on the 2012 bankruptcy and shutdown of Hostess Brands. (We both had Hostess facilities shuttered in our communities in Iowa and Illinois.)  From a journalistic point of view, it’s a tragic and fascinating story of a major national corporation and employer. One might expect the Hostess Brands story to delve into the very checkered managerial history of Hostess, with leveraged buyouts, a slew of acquisitions, a revolving door to the CEO suite (six CEOs in a decade!), union concessions, underfunded pensions, two bankruptcies in 10 years, hedge fund investments, lax accounting, and poor product development.  In many ways, Hostess Brands could have been a story that exemplified the excesses and shortcomings of American business since the 1970s.  Instead, the main interpretive frame of the closing of Hostess Brands, and the loss of 18,500 jobs, cast it primarily as a consumer story.

I don’t fault journalists for using the Twinkie as a “hook” for getting the audience into the story (about 90 percent of the national news stories in 2012 we analyzed did this). But, I do fault journalists who made Twinkies the main frame of the story (about 50 percent of the stories did this).

The consumer framing of labor news always ends up badly for labor unions, as their position gets lost in the emphasis on consumers. For example, even though Hostess workers’ labor unions made big concessions worth $110 million a year and lost 10,000 jobs in the first bankruptcy of 2004-2009, more than 60 percent of the 2012 news stories blamed the union for the Hostess closing. From the news media framing of the story, only the union’s resistance to more contract concessions stood between consumers and a continuing supply of Twinkies, Ding Dongs, and Ho Hos.

Given that the news will not likely change the way it’s been covering labor for the past 40 years, an alternative is for labor communicators to use the consumer frame themselves.  A big factor in success of the UPS strike of 1997 was workers leveraging their relationships with UPS consumers.  The same could have happened in the Hostess case.  Eric Blair in Labor Notes suggests how this might have worked:

At Hostess, whose products are iconic American brands loved by millions, a campaign to safeguard Twinkies from private equity vultures might have had the dual impact of winning public support for the workers and angering management by interfering in its relationship with its customers. The fact that consumers started hoarding the famous snack cakes during the Bakery workers’ strike suggests the potential.

This could be the way forward:  workers as the advocates, not enemies, of consumers.

Christopher R. Martin

Martin is Interim Head and Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Northern Iowa.  He is the author of Framed! Labor and the Corporate Media (Cornell University Press) and is working on a book about news media coverage of labor in the twentieth century.

Raising the Minimum Wage — The Right Way

Ever since President Obama took office I’ve periodically wished I had the ability to call the White House get him on the phone and say “Hey, you’re not doing it right!”  Let me be clear—I don’t mean he hasn’t done the right thing—just that he’s too often done the right thing the wrong way.

For example, like many economists and advocates for working families, including Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, I thought the President’s economic stimulus package was way long on help for the “Too Big to Fail” banks and other Wall Street institutions and way short on dollars for infrastructure projects, support for education and job training, and other programs that would have helped the working families who inhabit the nation’s Main Streets.

Same thing with health care reform.  Yes, it needed to be done. But he did it wrong.  Instead of a system that guarantees health insurers millions of new customers, does little to rein-in costs, and gives anti-reform advocates the ammo they need to scare small and medium sized businesses into opposing the plan, he could have done something simple: Medicare for all, or at least for all of us over the age of 55. Not only would this approach have made Medicare solvent by bringing younger, healthier people into the system, it would have given the government immense power to negotiate lower costs with providers.

Unfortunately, the same principle applies to the President’s proposed minimum wage increase.  It’s the right thing to do, but nine dollars an hour? Really?  At least in this instance Mr. Obama’s not alone in being wrong.  Predictably, the Republicans and their bosses in the business community, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business, and the National Restaurant Association, became apoplectic seconds after the words “raise the minimum wage” rolled off the President’s tongue during the State of the Union address.

Their reaction was as predictable as the specious claims they make about the cataclysmic effect giving the folks at the bottom of the economic ladder a boost will have on the economy.  Business leaders wail and gnash their teeth any and every time raising the minimum wage is proposed, including back in 2006 when labor led the successful effort to win voter approval of an Ohio Constitutional amendment that both raised the wage and indexed it to inflation.

The fact that their dire prognostications have never come to pass—last time I checked people are still doing business in Ohio despite the onerous burden of having to pay workers a whopping $7.85 an hour, and Costco is thriving despite paying starting employees more than $10 an hour –apparently doesn’t matter to them or to the members of the media who give their ludicrous contentions credence by repeating them.

Unfortunately, President Obama’s proposal was every bit as predictable in nature and scope as the arguments against it.  Raising the minimum wage $1.75 is fine as far as it goes—which isn’t far enough.  Had the President and his advisors really given the issue some thought they could have crafted a plan that would have both insulated the administration from criticism and gone a long way toward addressing the income inequality that plagues the working class and the middle class and has the U.S. economy stuck in neutral.

Here’s the deal.  Part A:  raise the minimum wage to $9 per hour for the vast majority of employers.  Their protestations to the contrary, it won’t bankrupt them or force them to cut jobs.  Especially when they begin ringing up the additional sales Part B of the plan generates: raising the wage to $15 per hour for full time and $11 per hour for part-time workers employed by the nation’s largest companies.

There’s little doubt that companies like Wal-Mart will attempt to avoid paying the higher wage by eliminating full-time employees or turning to temp services for workers.  To stop them, the law must include provisions that prevent employers from moving workers from full-time to part-time status and that classify temps as employees of the corporation using them.  Those two provisions would help ensure that companies comply with the letter and spirit of the law.

Which firms would qualify as “large” under the plan?  Those that directly employ 100,000 or more and average 80 workers per location.  Under this definition franchise operations like McDonalds and most other fast food chains would be exempt.  In addition, the increase would have little or no impact on large employers like IBM, UPS, FedEx and others who already pay above the proposed new minimum.

The plan would affect retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, Macy’s, Kroger’s, Home Depot, and Lowe’s along with America’s biggest banks—the folks responsible for the 2008 economic implosion would.  (Here’s an important side note: although most people equate low wages with retail, bank employees are grossly underpaid, and financial institutions are infamous for aggressively opposing union organizing drives.)

Using Wal-Mart as an example and assuming that 40% of the company’s 2.1 million workers are full time, their aggregate annual wages would climb from $17.4 billion to $26.2 billion.  Annual wages for the retail giant’s 1.2 million part-timers would jump by nearly $5 billion, from $12.5 billion to $17.2 billion.  In all, the increases would pump an additional $14 billion into the hands of Wal-Mart workers every year.

Imagine the staggeringly positive impact this one policy would have on the economy when the wages of the more than 3.5 million people who work for America’s other large corporations are factored in.  Billions of dollars will be spent on homes, cars, clothes, food, dining out, movies, electronics, and other goods.  People who now live paycheck to paycheck will actually be able to save and plan for the future. In short, millions of working families will have an opportunity to grab a piece of what has become a fading American Dream.

The increases would also help reduce the deficit—something Republicans should love.  Higher wages will generate more income and sales tax revenue.  As salaries rise, so will the flow of dollars into Social Security and Medicare, especially when tens of thousands of workers are no longer eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit because they’re earning a living wage.  Finally, government spending will fall because the legions of low-wage workers at Wal-Mart and other firms that now receive government benefits will no longer need them.

But instead of a bold plan that could end decades of wage stagnation, we get a small across-the- board increase that simply won’t get the job done.  Someone get me the number for the White House.  I need to call Barack and tell him he’s doing the right thing the wrong way.

Again.

Leo Jennings

The Last Good Blue-Collar Job?

A journalist from a Scottish newspaper contacted me last month wanting my reaction to the announcement that 2,300 people had applied for eighteen trainee driver posts to service a soon to be reopened rail line in the Scottish Boarders running to the south of Edinburgh. With nearly 128 applicants for each of these jobs, the reporter was keen to discover what was behind this headlong rush. Well, to be precise, what I think she was after were some conditioned clichés about working on the railway, the romance of the iron road, and how it is (still) every little boy’s wish to be a train driver.

She seemed a little crestfallen when I suggested some alternative reasons why these new posts might be so valued.  First, the trainee’s starting salary was $33,230, about average in the UK before you take in to account the rise to $58,400 when fully qualified. I also suggested that recruits could expect a good pension, reduced travel prices, and, above all, the kind of security that many workers can only dream of. This is all in the context of a double dip recession and high unemployment levels. By this time, I could sense that young journalist’s imagined simple story of boyhood romance was morphing into something far more complex and probably less exciting.

She tried one last tack with me. ‘But why’ she asked, ‘were these jobs so good’? My answer was straightforward; railway work in the UK remains one of the strongest bastions of working-class unionisation. When the industry was privatised, or denationalised, two decades ago, conservative politicians made little attempt to hide that their goals included smashing the unions, reducing levels of pay, and eroding conditions of service. Contrary to the conservatives’ hopes, some railway workers have seen their real pay rates increase considerably, and this is especially true of the drivers.

Hot on the heels of the story about the new railway jobs came a similar story from the English Midlands about 1,701 people applying for three full-time and five part-time barista posts with coffee chain Costa Coffee. In other words, these more mundane, less obviously ‘romantic’ vacancies attracted more applicants per position – roughly 212 applicants for each job — than did the train driver openings. Among the biggest differences between the two jobs is the pay rate.  An article in the Guardian pointed out that no barista in London, let alone in the more economically deprived Midlands, gets within ten grand of the national average wage of £26,500.  Another key difference is that driving a train requires a year or more of theoretical and practical training while – and no offence to baristas anywhere – serving coffee does not involve a lengthy apprenticeship, much as some of us may want to fetishize its production. The relatively greater interest in the barista jobs may reflect many things, but it is fundamentally a function of the poorly performing economy and the dire labor market in the UK.

Underlying both stories is a common question that must confuse the presumably middle-class newspaper readership: why would so many people want to do blue-collar work? One answer to this question might lie in reflections being made about working- and middle-class aspiration on both sides of the Atlantic, reflections that reassess the value of blue-collar work.  The most prominent example comes from US writer Matthew B. Crawford’s bestseller Shop Class as Soulcraft, subtitled An Inquiry into the Value of Work. Crawford’s basic thesis is that the middle-class obsession with getting the ‘good job’ often ends in a cubicle.  It may be a very nice cubicle, in which one may be able to exercise all sorts of autonomy over the type of posters and humorous postcards placed on its walls, but it’s still a cubicle. Crawford contrasts life slumped in front of a screen between cardboard dividers with the freedom and autonomy still enjoyed by many working-class jobs.  He makes much of his own chosen career in motorcycle maintenance, in which he enjoys endless problem solving mixed with extensive banter with other motorcycle aficionados. While Crawford enters this world from a background of relative educational and financial privilege, he does tap into something about the too often hidden rewards of working-class working life, namely the culture of workplaces shaped by ordinary men and women.

Similar revelations can be found in other accounts of middle-class forays into working-class culture, such as Don J. Snyder’s The Cliff Walk: A Job Lost and a Life Found. Snyder recounts how he lost a tenure-track college post and descended down the class ladder. In a fascinating story, he relates how he found redemption through labor with a set of working-class builders who overlooked his technical incompetence because they could see he needed the job. Snyder contrasts the basic humanitarian gesture involved in helping out someone in need with his experience of the middle-class world he had fallen from where many former friends and colleagues had simply turned their backs on him.

In my current job, I am occasionally contacted by the media about the current state of work, and not just about railways. Much like my students, journalists seem to assume that manual labor or blue-collar work is to be avoided at all costs. I always make a point of asking the often young journalist or assistant researchers about their own work and the conditions they enjoy. Usually, they describe a long-hours culture, working on temporary contracts, switching between employers who contract to bigger media players. To these younger media workers, the working-class world of blue-collar work must seem a strangely alien one, where workers more often co-operate than compete and place emphasis on the importance of dignity and respect for a job well done. No wonder they want to produce stories about this type of old-fashioned work.

Tim Strangleman

All Shook Up: What a Viral Video Movement Can Tell us about Global Class Politics

If you think the Harlem Shake is an annoying viral video trend, and possibly an offensive one, too, you are right. But the Harlem Shake is more than that. It has genuine roots in workplace culture and the teenage subaltern. Everyone from frat boys, to office workers, South African gold miners, and public school teenagers as well as Egyptian and Tunisian pro-democracy advocates see something in the viral trend to appropriate.

Since late January people have been uploading their own flash mob-type dance videos set to the rhythmic sounds of a 30-second electronic/rap mash-up called the Harlem Shake, recorded last year by a young DJ named Baauer. The first video to be uploaded was by a video blogger names Filthy_Frank, and it featured a bunch of dudes in latex costumes and masks dancing with an unfortunate combination of humping, pelvic thrusting, the limbo and the shimmy.

More than 100,000 Harlem Shake videos have joined the throng on YouTube, with combined hits of over 175 million. In the typical submission, one person, usually a man wearing some kind of helmet or headgear, starts dancing somewhere that doesn’t seem like a place for dancing—the bottom of a pool, a school cafeteria, an airplane, a fire truck, a locker room, a prison cell, or an office.

After about fifteen seconds a voice says, “do the Harlem Shake,” and a jump cut shows that the room is now crowded with crazy dancers—people in super hero costumes, green screen jumpsuits, Super Mario costumes, and stuffed animal head masks. They are jumping on chairs, humping the wall, humping each other, humping stuffed animals, and looking like aliens on acid. The videos are funny, containing a slight air of rebelliousness. It always seems as if the lone dancer has magically recruited an entire flash mob of crazy, uninhibited party people. These videos convey a feeling of freedom from—if nothing else—boredom.

Recently, the viral phenomenon has come under fire. Students in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida have all been suspended for filming Harlem Shake videos on school property, and, in one remarkable case, a student in New York City was suspended after merely talking about filming one. Joan Bertin, Executive Director for the National Coalition Against Censorship, has asked schools to stop suspending students for what she sees as a relatively harmless pursuit: dancing.

In one of the most life changing instances of the Harlem Shake, a group of Australian gold miners filmed themselves gyrating, humping, and doing the Caterpillar in the underground mine vault where they worked. They were promptly fired (so we can add dancing to the long list of bizarre things you can get fired for). Greg Harris, a spokesman for the Barminco mine company, explained the company’s reasoning: “An underground mine is no place for cowboys, clowns or fools. It’s an inherently dangerous place to work and workers are entitled to expect those working alongside them to respect the risks and abide by rules and regulations.” These miners weren’t exactly struggling financially before the firings, with their six figure salaries, but the firings show who has power and who doesn’t in the global extraction economy. A facebook page has been set up to call for re-instating the miners.

Meanwhile, a battle over what the Harlem Shake is, and who owns it, has been brewing closer to home. Last week Melissa Harris-Perry, a former Princeton professor and a member the talking eggheads crew at MSNBC, ranted about the viral perversion of what she explained was an authentic Harlem dance tradition.

Indeed, according to many accounts, the original Harlem Shake began in the early 1980s when a popular amateur performer, Albert Boyce (Albee), regularly performed a shoulder popping routine at pickup basketball games in Rucker Park. Though Albee did not live long enough to see his shake go viral (he died at the age of 43 in 2006 from alcoholism), in a 2003 interview he claimed that his dance was inspired, in part, by how he imagined Egyptian mummies might dance. “They was all wrapped up and taped up. So they couldn’t really move, all they could do was shake.”

Albee’s shoulder popping move became known as the Harlem Shake and was popularized on stage at the Apollo, in Harlem rapper G Depp’s 2001 “Special Delivery,” and in Young B’s 2003 “Chicken Noodle Soup.”

In May, 2012, a 23 year old DJ known as Baauer, born Harry Rodrigues, created a 30 second beat he titled “Harlem Shake.” His inspiration for the title had nothing to do with the dance: “‘A friend had shown me that track [from Philadelphia rapper Plastic Little’s ‘Miller Time’] where he says, then do the Harlem shake, and it just got stuck in my head for a while, so I used it.”

The resulting catchy 30-second track was a mash up of different dance hall sounds, as Baauer explains: “I just had the idea of taking a Dutch house squeaky-high synth and putting it over a hip-hop track…And then I tried to just make it the most stand-out, flashy track that would get anyone’s attention, so I put as many sounds and weird shit in there as I could. The dude in the beginning I got somewhere off the Internet, I don’t even know where, and the lion roar just makes no sense.”

The “dude in the beginning” is Reggeaton artist Hector Delgado saying “Con los terrorists,” or “With the terrorists,” a sentiment which does not seem to have any political relevance that I can see. Though Baauer didn’t know who he was, Delgado, in the viral media frenzy that has accompanied Harlem Shake, is, at least, getting his fifteen minutes.

The Melissa Harris-Perry critique of the Harlem Shake has its most trenchant counterpart in a short film made of Harlem residents reacting to the Harlem Shake videos. They say things like “What the hell is that?” “What the hell are they doing?” and “That’s not the Harlem Shake.” They are incredulous that anything so corny and poorly danced would bear the Harlem label.

The whole phenomenon raises some familiar, but still vexing questions. Who owns culture? Who owns the right to profit when cultural “borrowing,” “poaching” or “sampling” is involved? Who has the right to dance? And who has the right to make a short video on the job and post it to the Internet?

These questions now have a global context, as Harlem Shakers in Egypt and Tunisia have joined the viral movement. On February 25, a group of students in a wealthy Tunisian suburban school, including the son of a prominent opposition leader, filmed their own version of the Harlem Shake. In response, the Tunisian Ministry of Education suspended the school’s director. The students fought back, hacking the Minister’s website and “putting out a fake call for a mega Harlem Shake in front of the ministry’s offices.”

In Egypt, the Harlem Shake has also become political. A group of Egyptian teenagers started a group called “Satiric Revolutionary Struggle,” and they filmed a Harlem Shake outside the Muslim Brotherhood’s headquarters in Cairo. The group’s founder, 17 year old Mahmoud Tabei, said that he and his friends were “tired of the protests and the blood and the martyrs” and were looking for ways to “raise the hopes and spirits” of the democracy movement.

The Harlem Shake is not a simple, single phenomenon. It does have an interesting work place component, since many of the videos feature workers on the job, but is probably closer to an expression of global youth culture, since the vast majority of the videos feature high school and college students, or the kinds of young workers you might see on an episode of Comedy Central’s Workaholics.

The lesson, I think, is that viral movements are flexible. They can be used by a variety of people, for a variety of purposes. And when a viral movement goes as far and as fast as the Harlem Shake, it makes sense that the movement would begin to reference political and social issues. It also makes sense that tyrants, bureaucrats, and autocrats would want it stopped.

You are free to dislike these viral movements, but don’t dismiss them. Instead of shaking your finger, I invite you to shake your booty instead. As Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.”

Kathy M. Newman

Missing Women: Watching The Makers

I watched The Makers: Women Who Make America on PBS last week with a conflicted eye.  No doubt, the documentary about the last 60 years of activism and social change on behalf of women reminded me of just how much my own life was shaped by the feminist movement.  My first act of political engagement was knocking on doors in support of Pat Schroeder’s first run for Congress.  I was twelve.  I wrote my first women’s history paper in 9^th grade, in part because I was angry that the textbook said so little about the woman suffrage movement. I learned about domestic violence, women’s health, and activism from Ms. magazine. In college, I marched to take back the night and hosted the weekly feminist collective radio show. I went to the University of Minnesota for my PhD because I wanted to study women’s history with Sara Evans.  A decade after anti-feminist women activists killed the ERA, I was trying to make sense of their views by writing a dissertation about an intelligent, independent nineteenth-century woman who opposed the idea of woman suffrage.  My dissertation committee had one “token” man.  In other words, I benefitted in specific, concrete ways from the battle for equal rights and the expanded choices it secured for women.

But the movement was also geared to women like me, as The Makers reminded me.  As a white child of a progressive, privileged household, I had the cultural and economic capital to view my life as full of opportunity.  I could be proud of my father for hiring the first female commercial airline pilot without thinking about the consequences of his regular contract negotiations with stewardesses, as we called them then.  Like many feminists of my generation, I sang along to songs about women wanting to be engineers but had no interest in that option.  I knew that all women were not the same, of course, but I didn’t think much about whether the movement that had empowered me was doing much for working-class women.

Eighteen years in Working-Class Studies has changed that perspective, and while I appreciated much of the documentary, I was also keenly aware of what was missing. The stories of key battles and strategies, video clips from protests, and even the interviews with women who were put off by feminism all resonated for me.  I was glad to see at least a few stories about working-class women and women of color – a couple of examples of women who sued for workplace rights (including flight attendants), a coal miner’s tale of fighting sexual harassment, Barbara Smith’s explanation of the goals of the Kitchen Table Press.  Yet the film’s primary narrative about women and work, especially, involved the gains women had made in professional jobs – establishing a construction business, becoming a dot-com CEO, working as a television producer – and, ultimately, the struggles white middle-class women face in balancing work and family.

While The Makers does include comments by several women of color and acknowledges the movement’s difficulties with recognizing or advocating for issues facing women who were not white or middle class, it also replicates the movement’s tendency to focus on the needs of women whose goals and expectations reflect their race and class privileges.  Like the women’s movement itself, the film largely ignores the concerns of working-class women. When traditional types of women’s work are mentioned, as in a reference to the growth of the typing pool in the 1950s, the implication is that service work was a temporary way-station, not the type of work that most women still do – perhaps not with typewriters but with computerized cash registers or blood pressure cuffs.  The solution to a telephone operator’s low pay, the film suggests, was not to organize and advocate for better pay for that job but to fight to get a few women access to higher-paying jobs that had been reserved for men. As Karen Nussbaum, founder of 9 to 5, the National Association of Working Women, notes near the end of the film, the women’s movement should have focused “more on the economic issues of working people.  It should have been about creating an alternative that worked for most women, and that alternative would have included child care, it would have included community services, it would have included after school care where your kids could get cared for by adults.  None of that happened, and I think that’s the great failure of the women’s movement.”  As Nussbaum’s comment suggests, the problem with The Makers may not be the filmmakers’ view but the real history of the women’s movement.

On the other hand, the film leaves out many examples of activism by working-class women and women of color.  Where was Angela Davis, who offered a radical vision that linked race, class, and gender?  Or bell hooks? How about Roseanne Barr, whose hit show started in the same year as Murphy Brown, a show the film celebrates, but provided a funny, realistic, and very political look at ordinary life in a working-class family?  How do we talk about the fight for women’s rights without recognizing the efforts of 9 to 5 or any other labor union  that advocates for the rights of women in the workplace – not just the right to a seat in the boardroom but the right to better working conditions in all jobs?

The Makers reminds us of how much our expectations for and assumptions about women have changed since the 1950s.  It also highlights the threats to women’s rights and opportunities, including the danger that if younger women take those rights for granted, we could well have to fight all over again.  It’s an inspiring film, and the history matters.  It’s also an important reminder that both the movement and the media need to pay more attention to working-class women.  As narrator Meryl Streep acknowledges, “As long as so many women are falling through the cracks, some argue, the feminist revolution will remain unfinished.”

Sherry Linkon