“Let’s Get To Work” — on the Weekends!

I started following Ed Schultz, the beefy, loud mouthed, pro-labor MSNBC anchor on Twitter a year ago last spring, when Pennsylvania education cuts were starting to reverberate across the state, forcing thousands of K-12 schools to cut art, band, music, drama, and science programs. Right around this time, the Pittsburgh Opera decided to give Governor Tom Corbett a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to the arts, and Pittsburghers staged a raucous rally to protest Corbett’s award and to bring attention to the cuts. Schultz caught wind of the statewide crisis and helped to focus attention on it by giving it ample coverage on his show.

Schultz, occupying the coveted 8:00 PM slot for two years, from 2011 to 2013, was the only MSNBC host who seemed to be following the school cuts as closely as I was. Watching Schultz I had the feeling—one I rarely get from the mainstream media—that he was speaking for me and the thousands of other “little people” across the country who were losing their jobs, their homes, their schools, their unions, their homes, their healthcare, and their dignity in the wake of the great financial collapse of 2008.

During his education coverage last spring, I watched The Ed Show almost every night, but over the course of Schultz’s tenure at MSNBC I didn’t watch as often as I should have, and now I feel bad. In March of this year Schultz announced he was moving to 5:00 PM on Saturdays and Sundays later in the spring. He claims that he “raised his hand” for the assignment, but it’s hard to believe that he would give up a prime time weekday slot, voluntarily, for a weekend gig.

Schultz, admittedly, doesn’t look or sound like a lot of the other hosts on MSNBC. He’s 59, barrel chested, and a former football player. He was an All-American quarterback at Minnesota State University in the 1970s, played as a free agent for the Oakland Raiders, and had a short stint with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in Canada. In 1982, Schultz became a sportscaster for KTHI-TV, in Fargo, North Dakota, and started calling the radio play-by-play for North Dakota State University football games. He didn’t broadcast his political opinions until the 1990s, when he started adding political commentary to his sportscasts. Then, he started broadcasting “on location” in economically depressed American towns. Oddly, Schultz stayed No. 1 in his market for 10 years, “despite the fact that [his] political views changed radically—from conservative to progressive—during that time.”

As Schultz tells it, his second wife, a nurse named Wendy, was the one who brought him out of what he describes as his “right-wing darkness.” She introduced him to homeless people and veterans where she worked, and she encouraged him to meet with struggling Dakota plains farmers face to face. By 2009, Schultz had a successful radio show, The Ed Schultz Show, on the Jones network.  MSNBC first tapped him to host a 6:00 pm show, then a 10:00 pm show, and then moved him to the coveted 8:00 pm slot when Keith Olbermann left in a blaze of rage and bluster.

During his time at MSNBC, Schultz has put his foot in it at least once. In 2011 he called Laura Ingrahm a “right wing slut.” He quickly made an on-air apology and took a week off the air, without pay, as penance. But most of the time, Schultz has been a rare champion of the working class, taking his anchor desk to Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan as these rust belt states have fought off attacks from Scott Walker, the Koch Brothers, and the Ohio supporters of SB 5, a severely anti-union bill that was signed into law and then reversed by Ohio voters—with the help Schultz’s powerful 8:00 pm newscasts. As Schultz explained in an interview with the AFT, “we’re . . . staying focused on the plight of the workers, on outsourcing, privatization, the loss of collective bargaining rights, cuts to wages, on the attacks on workers, and working on solutions that will help the working class in this country.”

Was Ed Schultz sidelined, or did he go willingly? There are conflicting accounts. This blogger speculates that Schultz was pushed out because he could not make a dent in audience attracted to the Bill O’Reilly Show, Fox’s 8:00 PM behemoth. But according to The Daily Beast, it was Schultz’s idea to move to the weekend. He still does his radio show every day, and he told his boss at MSNBC, Phil Griffin, that he wanted to spend more time with his wife, who has recently undergone treatment for ovarian cancer, at their home in Minnesota.

Ed Schultz’s replacement is no slouch—the eggheady Nation-affiliated Chris Hayes, who created a loyal following for his weekend show, Up with Chris Hayes, over the last two years. The charm of Up was that Hayes interviewed small groups of super smart people about things they had written books about, and then wowed his audience with his ability to understand everything that his guests were saying, weave it together into a narrative, and, sometimes, cut people off and referee.

Hayes is also not completely alienated from the working class. He explained to Politico that he “grew up in the Bronx,” the son of a teacher (his mother) and a community organizer (his father). In 2012, his brother worked as a paid organizer for the Obama campaign. “I come from a working-class background,” explained Hayes. “My first job was as a labor reporter for a socialist newspaper in the Midwest, called In These Times.” Hayes insists that he has a “genuine awe and admiration” for Schultz’s focus on working-class and labor issues, and he says wants to continue the conversation that Schultz started.

But Hayes has more of a challenge ahead then just paying homage to the working class. Hayes’s Up formula of intelligent conversation with learned professors, sitting Congressional representatives you’ve never heard of, and double or triple the number of women of color and/or gay and lesbian guests than we see on the other networks, might not play well in prime time. Hayes simply will not have as much time to talk, or to listen, as he did before. As Inside Cable News argued, the secret formula that made Up so great “is nontransferable.” Will Chris Hayes find a new way to be the bleeding-heart brainiac—in 47 minutes—that made Up so watchable?

Part of the problem here may be one of demographics. Did Ed Schultz attract an older, bluer-collar, and less affluent audience than Chris Hayes did? Does Hayes, with his fashionable specs, wry humor, and baby face (he’s only 34), represent the kind of affluent, college-educated viewer that MSNBC wants to attract? Is the working class in the US in decline—so much so that they are not even sought after as an audience for the only liberal cable news outlet on the dial?

Regardless, the MSNBC staff is probably scrambling over at Hayes’s new show, All In, because its ratings have not been great—worse than what Schultz used to pull in. But as political blogger Jason Easley has argued, MSNBC has “time on its side.” While FOX might continue to dominate with older, more conservative viewers, cable news viewers are getting younger, and more progressive, with every passing year.

In the meantime, if you miss your daily dose of the pro-labor grizzly bear, Ed Schultz, check out The Ed Show online or at 5:00 PM on Saturday and Sunday. Schultz claims he will use the freedom of his new schedule to spend more time on the road, talking to the working-class people he continues to see as his special cause. And he still starts every show with his signature tag line “Let’s Get to Work.”

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.

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

Upstairs, Downstairs, Downton: What Downton Abbey Can Tell Us about Class in America Today

In season two of Downton Abbey, the inimical Dame Maggie Smith (who plays the “Dowager Countess”) finds out that one of the family’s servants will be allowed to live out his final days (after suffering an incurable war wound) in the family’s lavish second floor quarters. The Countess is displeased by this and opines that “It always happens when you give these little people power, it goes to their heads like strong drink.”

If you are a fan of the show, one of the 7.9 million US viewers who watched Downton Abbey kick off its third season on PBS earlier this month, you know full well that the “little people” in this early 20^th century British world—the kitchen maids, ladies’ maids, footmen, valets, chauffeurs, cooks, housekeepers, and butlers—have very little power. They scheme and scrap for the merest improvements in pay and job title. A few of them rise above their station, but class divisions are brutally enforced, and if anyone seems deluded with power by “strong drink,” it is the titled and wealthy upstairs residents who are served an impressive array of wines and spirits on a nightly basis.

I am a fan of the show, transfixed by the class differences represented in the series which tries very hard—from the dialogue, the sumptuous costumes, and the setting—to be about another time and place. But is it? Let’s look at a few of the myths that swirl around Downton Abbey and consider what we can learn about the real history behind the show— and about ourselves.

Myth #1. Noblesse oblige, the idea that nobility must act nobly, was an effective system for class management in late Victorian England. In Downton Abbey the nobles are incredibly kind to their servants. In one episode, Lady Grantham catches the kitchen staff setting up a soup kitchen (with stores from Downton Abbey) for unemployed WWI veterans. Instead of firing her staff, Lady Grantham offers to help. In another episode, as Lady Grantham is battling the Spanish flu, Lord Grantham starts a series of clandestine make-out sessions with the new maid, a war widow named Jane. She has a smart son but no connections to get him into a good school. Lord Grantham realizes that he cannot continue the affair, and Jane nobly resigns. But not before Lord Grantham gives her some financial and string-pulling aid that will help her son get a good education. In the world of Downton Abbey, servants are cared for, and sometimes even cherished.

But what about the real life English servants who toiled under the staircase in the first quarter of the 20th century? According to a California blogger the gap between rich and poor in England a century ago was frightful. The effects of poverty and malnutrition produced a five-inch difference in average height between rich and poor young men! As for the secret lives of servants, the long running British series Upstairs, Downstairs as well as Downton Abbey were both “inspired” by the real-life memoir of a servant girl, Margaret Powell, born in 1907. Her 1968 best seller, Below Stairs (recently released in the US), gave a much more negative and varied portrait of English employers. In one kind family, like that of Lady and Lord Dowell, servants received gifts of silk underwear at Christmas time. But the servants in Mrs. Hunter-Jones employ were issued thin straw mattresses (not a perk), older servants were “accidently” left out of family wills and left to age with nothing, and female servants were often impregnated by a male member of the employer’s family and cast out. Powell recalls, as one reviewer explains, “how easy it was for the master to manipulate the servant.”

Finally, according to historian Jennifer Newby, the servants on Downton Abbey are far too clean and well rested to approach the standards of historical realism. Most servants of the period had limited access to bathing facilities, and they were forced to work from before dawn until long after dark with few breaks. Instead of getting their own servants’ party on Christmas day (as they are permitted in Downton Abbey), one servant whose diary Newby read described eating Christmas dinner “on the draining board, by the sink (again).”

Myth #2. The class hierarchies in Downton Abbey are a relic of a distant place and time. As a writer for Bitch magazine explained, “what Downton Abbey…offers for the modern viewer is the idea that, today, class differences have been overcome.” Indeed on Downton Abbey the bleak separation between “upstairs” and “downstairs,” the great divide in speech, dress, quarters and manner, seem utterly remote to our American sensibilities. We still believe that in America of all places a child born into a poor or working class family can rise—with relatively frequency—to become rich and famous (or at least middle class). Ironically, however, The New York Times reported just a year ago that social mobility in the United States is lower than it has been in decades and that it is lower in the US than in Canada and all of Western Europe. According to a study from 2006, only eight percent of American men born into the lowest fifth of American society were able to rise to the top fifth, compared to 12 percent in Britain and 14 percent in Denmark.

Myth #3. Americans don’t have servants. First of all, yes we did. In addition to the US being a slave holding society for more than 300 years, many 19^th century immigrants to the US worked as servants, as Daniel Sutherland has shown.

And, second, yes we do. The 2010 the Census Bureau reported that there were more than 700,000 nannies alone working in the US, a number which is certainly much smaller than the actual number, since so many domestic workers receive pay “under the table” and/or are undocumented immigrants.  According to a shocking 2012 report on the state of domestic workers in the US today, 67 percent of live-in domestic workers are paid below their state’s minimum wage, and nearly half are paid less than is required to support a family. 65 percent do not have health insurance. Many work without contracts, without a day off, and with numerous work-related pain and illnesses—including sleep deprivation. They encounter unreasonable requests from employers, about which they remain silent: “91 percent of workers who encountered problems with their working conditions…did not complain because they were afraid they would lose their job.” These jobs are especially abusive, the report explains, because of the intimate nature of the work. The report described one awful (but not atypical story) of a live-in nanny who was given no bedroom of her own and was forced to sleep on a mattress on the floor—in between the children she cared for during the day.

Yesterday during his inauguration, President Obama said, “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else.” But she does not—not today. In the US we have a large and growing underclass that has virtually no hope of advancement. We have servants that we mistreat as badly as any ruling class has ever done. And the noblesse oblige of Downton Abbey is either an aberration or a complete fiction—perhaps the most remarkable achievement of Julian Fellowes’s vivid, and narratively compelling, imagination. Through Downton Abbey we transport ourselves back to a glorious past that never existed, and, at the same time, we escape from own brutal, unequal, and empire-crumbling present.

If that strikes you as too extreme, consider this. The Earl of Carnarvon, the owner of Highclere Castle where Downton Abbey is filmed, and who actively campaigned to have the series filmed there because he needed the money, thinks that people love Downton Abbey because “they miss the feudal system…because the feudal system made people feel secure.” And if that sounds too extreme, consider this. Recently a group of economists determined that Tsarist Russia distributed its wealth more equally than we do in America today.

Perhaps I am being too defeatist? If so, I can’t help it. As the Dowager Countess says, “Don’t be defeatist dear, it’s terribly middle class.”

Kathy M. Newman

Restoring Traditional America

Over the weekend The Daily Kos highlighted a cartoon from Tom the Dancing Bug (cartoonist Rueben Bolling) that responded to Bill O’Reilly’s election night claim that Obama’s win signaled the death of traditional America. According to O’Reilly, “the demographics are changing, it’s not a traditional American anymore.” Bolling wondered what would happen if Barack Hussein Obama traveled back in time to the world of Leave it to Beaver. In this imaginary scenario, Obama tells the Cleavers of his plan to raise the marginal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans, reduce the gap between CEO pay and that of the lowest paid employees, and bolster the social safety net. The “Beave” and his family point out that those features were already in place in their traditional 1960s America. “Golly, mister,” the Beave exclaims, “I think you’re bringing back traditional America.”

I do, too. I am writing a book about how workers and unions were represented in 1950s popular culture.  In Striking Images: Labor Unions on Screen and in the Streets in the 1950s, I argue that workers were represented in popular culture more often, and more positively, than we remember. This is, in part, because union membership was at its highest point in U.S. history (roughly 35% of all US households). Unions were also active, not passive. There were more than 30,000 strikes over the course of the 1950s.  In other words, union membership was traditional.

For example, in 1965 Eisenhower, declared that “the protection of the right of workers to organize into unions and to bargain collectively is the firm and permanent policy of the Eisenhower Administration.” Rachel Maddow once quipped about Eisenhower’s relatively liberal policies that she was “in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.”

As we return to a more traditional America, how are ordinary workers being represented in popular culture? This is a question we often ask on this blog, and we make our share of withering critiques, as Susan Ryan did when she addressed the phenomenon of “extreme work” reality television and how workers are being exploited in front of and behind the camera.

But there are some other more positive, and possibly even authentic ways in which workers are being represented in popular culture. Here’s a quick run down:

Striking workers are back in the news. Thanks to the massive (and largely successful) Chicago teacher’s strike and a well-organized blitz of Black Friday job actions at Walmarts across the country, the mainstream media has been covering strikes with more sympathy than in years past. Do a search for “Black Friday” and “workers” and more than 2 million hits pop up. While some of the coverage of Black Friday’s job actions underplayed the overall impact of the Walmart actions, other headlines suggested the range and the power of the strikes which took place in more than 100 cities in 46 states.

The Ed Show. Ed Schultz, the one time sports broadcaster and conservative shock jock now spins his blue-collar bluster in a more progressive direction on MSNBC every weeknight at 8:00 PM. Schultz starts every show with the tag line “Let’s get to work.” If you were watching The Ed Show last week you would have seen coverage of the raw deal that Hostess workers were given in the Twinkie show down, a piece about the unionization of exotic dancers, a report on a union on the rise in Phoenix, Arizona, and an exposé on what Walmart really pays its workers. You won’t find this much working-class related news in video form in one place anywhere else.

Blue: America at Work and Blue: Portrait of an American Worker. In a coincidence of naming, two photographers of the contemporary American labor scene have titled their projects “Blue.” Ian Wagreich’s Blue: America at Work was “kickstarted” in August and includes stunning black and white portraits of American workers in industrial settings. The photographs are visually gorgeous, and they are as much as about aestheticizing the industrial landscape as they are about giving a voice to individual workers. They remind me of Charles Sheeler’s arresting photographs of the Ford River Rouge plant. Waigreich’s work photographs are currently on view (until December 10^th at Washington D.C.’s Art Museum of the Americas in a show called “On Labor”). Photographer Carl Corey’s photographs from his collection Blue: Portrait of an American Worker are in color, and provide a more literal “close up” of the workers themselves. One of Corey’s goals in taking these photographs, as he explained in an interview with The Wooly Pulpit, was to advocate for American workers: “my hope is awareness will breed support for the American Worker.” The workers look proud, even stoic, and the photographs remind me a bit of the classic worker portraits taken by Milton Rogovin.

Current TV’s profile of the American worker. During the lead up to the election, Current TV posted a new worker profile every day for 30 days. Thirteen of the workers profiled were women, and 10 were African American, Latino, or Asian. The jobs covered included cop, firefighter, graphic designer, bus driver, Boeing mechanic, bartender, CPA, nurse, farmworker, and web developer. The profiles included detailed interviews, includingquestions about union membership and political leanings. Though not all of the workers profiled were working class, the interviews echoed common themes. Everyone who had health insurance was grateful for it, and everyone who did not have it wanted it. When asked “what is the one thing you could change about your job if you could,” almost everyone wanted better pay and/or benefits. One of the most inspiring quotes came from the Boeing mechanic, Monico Bretana, the highest paid union worker in the group: “I would have to say that I’m a working guy; I work for my money. Just like everybody else, I just want to be treated fairly, I just want to have a decent living wage, decent benefits to cover me and my family, and the union has provided that for us. And I want people to know that unions are not what people perceive anymore. We’re here to help the middle class, we’re here to help maintain a good living standard.”

Now doesn’t that sound sort of like the 1950s? Of course, I don’t want to go back to the 1950s altogether. I don’t want to go back to Jim Crow America, or Operation Wetback America, or Mad Men America. But when it comes to taxes on the wealthy (can we get the marginal tax rate back to the 1950s rate of 91%?), the tradition of union membership, and images of proud, beautiful blue-collar workers, I would be happy to go back in time.

Kathy M. Newman

He’s No Coach Taylor: Mitt Romney and Friday Night Lights

As someone who counts getting escorted out of an auditorium by Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf’s hired goons as one of my proudest moments, I never thought I’d admit to having something substantial, even intimate, in common with Mitt Romney. But as it turns out, the Republican presidential candidate and I are both fans of the TV series Friday Night Lights (2006-2011), a gritty, realist drama centered on a high school football team and the largely working-class residents of the fictional town of Dillon, Texas. What more, we both find inspiration in a motto that “Coach” Eric Taylor, with a combination of unwavering determination and tenderness, utters to his team at the end of every pre-game locker room huddle: “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose.” Indeed, in the final stretch of completing my Literature PhD last summer, the slogan stared back at me from the wall in front of my desk. In the midst of tearful frustration and paralyzing anxiety, Coach Taylor was there, Zen-like, to help me get my head back in the game.

So imagine my dismay when a friend shared an article describing how Romney, high off his “victory” in the first presidential debate, adopted a slightly amended version of Coach Taylor’s motto — “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, America Can’t Lose” — as the official home-stretch slogan of his campaign. I was hardly the only person shaken up by Romney’s appropriation of the Friday Night Lights motto. Peter Berg, the series creator, immediately sent Romney an angry letter accusing him of having plagiarized his expression. “Your politics and campaign are clearly not aligned with the themes we portrayed in our series,” he further explained. Unmoved by Berg’s request that he “come up with (his) own slogan,” Romney continues to feature the line on his Facebook page and in campaign materials. His campaign website even encourages visitors to “Support America’s Comeback Team” by ordering a $10 set of red, white, and blue rubber bracelets with the motto emblazoned on each one.

My personal stake in Romney’s use of “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose” lies not just in my appreciation of a show containing some of the most respectful, affirming representations of working-class people since Roseanne. I also wrote a dissertation chapter focused on what I’m calling the Friday Night Lights “franchise” of texts: the 1990 sports journalism classic by Buzz Bissinger (who, in a disappointing yet intriguing twist in this saga, is voting for Romney); the 2004 film, also directed by Berg, based on Bissinger’s book; and the TV series inspired by the book and film. I wrote about these texts because I needed to reckon with something from which, as a working-class girl from a sports-obsessed small town, I fled: the kind of “small-minded” people who turned their children into heroes on the football field only to watch them take their place on the assembly line — or, more bleakly, the cell block — after graduation. What I observed in these texts, however, was how small-town high school football can function as a collectively owned asset — an ever-growing “archive” of moments demonstrating the inherent worth of members of that community — with which to counter constant exposure to the unstable, exploitative labor conditions created by unregulated free-market capitalism. Football, in other words, is a matter of working-class dignity. As one coach from Bissinger’s book put it to his young team: “Later on in life they can take your money away from you, they can take your house, they can take your car, they can’t take this kind of stuff away from you, something you’ll always have and always be proud of.” Any way you look at it, Romney and his ilk are the “they” to whom this coach is referring.

The main source of my anger over Romney’s use of the “Clear Eyes” slogan — a slogan belonging to those small-town working class kids and the Coach they respect, who respects them back whatever their circumstances — is the entitled smugness with which he just reaches out and takes. This theft reflects the general attitude of the corporate class toward the world they inhabit and the policies they promote to sustain their right to take. Cutting taxes for the wealthy while raising middle class taxes to pay for such cuts, as Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan would do, is a particularly frightening example of this “we take what we want, no apologies” outlook. As we learned from the 2008 mortgage crisis and corporate bailouts to follow, the economic system is designed to insulate the takers from any potential repercussions associated with their greed.

That greed is especially insidious when cast as an appeal to the very “heartland” working people who will be most affected by the taker’s anti-labor, social contract gutting political moves. One of the most haunting moments from Bissinger’s book comes when he cites a few lines from George Bush senior’s 1988 Republican National Convention acceptance speech. Hot on the tail of an enthusiastically received campaign stop in Midland, Texas, where he once briefly lived, Bush reminisced:

Now we moved to West Texas forty years ago, forty years ago this year. And the war was over, and we wanted to get out and make it on our own… We lived in a little shotgun house, one room for the three of us, worked in the oil business, and then started my own.

And in time, we had six children; moved from the shotgun to a duplex apartment to a house, and lived the dream—high school football on Friday nights…

There’s so much taking going on here. Bush, a Yale graduate and banker’s son, takes hardship, takes struggle.  With the slippages of a clever speechwriter, he turns a one-room “shotgun house” into a densely populated shack (did they really have six children before moving out?). From shotgun to duplex to house, he takes upward class mobility, that story, for his own. And, like Romney, he takes “the dream” of small-town high school football.

Romney is not only taking Coach Taylor’s motto. Like Bush, he is making a grab at working-class identity. In a cover photo featured last week on his Facebook page, Romney’s back is turned to the camera, rain pouring down his jacket in a nighttime scene reminiscent of Coach Taylor’s many contemplative looks across an empty field. Since we don’t see Romney’s face, there is little to distinguish him from a Coach whose sincerity, humility, and finely-tuned force of character mark him as a man that anyone — even a feminist agitator like myself — would follow.

Bush and Romney want access to those moments of greatness beneath the lights not just as admirers, but as participants in the collective authoring of the American story: “making memories,” as the series’s Silverado-driving fullback Tim Riggins would put it. However disingenuous a performance, Bush senior was telling communities like Midland, “Not only do I value the dream that you’re living, but I’ve lived it too — I’ve made those memories. Your story is my story.” The irony, of course, is that the archive of community memories granting value to working-class experience is especially important in light of conservative economic policies that leave working people with so few stable assets to hold onto, things they can’t take. Plumbing small-town high school football for political capital is an attempt to destabilize something that remains a small but deeply meaningful source of self-empowerment for the working class.

In one of the series’ most memorable episodes, Coach Taylor walks slowly through the locker room at halftime of the first game played by the East Dillon Lions, the inexperienced, poorly equipped team with which he has been saddled. As he regards his battered team — his quarterback has a badly sprained ankle; one of his fullbacks is spitting blood — a look of sad resignation crosses the Coach’s face. He walks back to the field, ready to do what he must: forfeit the game in order to keep his vulnerable players from further harm. Coach Taylor knows that for his team to stand a chance of eventual success, players must have their health, decent equipment, and any other resources he can provide.

Contrast that with another Romney attempt to channel the Coach. Last week, he staged a touch football game between his campaign staffers and members of the press corps. Romney’s advice to his team? “Figure out which of their players is best and take them out early… That’s right, don’t worry about injuries guys, this counts. Win.” Coach Taylor leads with a community-first ethos that Romney, with his instinct to “take out” anyone standing in the way of his personal win-loss record, could not fake if his life depended on it. Responding to the slogan drama, one popular Friday Night Lights fan blog gives it to him straight: “Hey Mitt: You, sir, are no Coach Taylor.”

Sara Appel

Sara Appel is a Visiting Research Scholar in the Program in Literature at Duke University.

Take Back Your Vacation

Perhaps you have seen this television advertisement? A plump, mousy woman in a khaki skirt, a yellow top and an emerald green sweater jumps up on her desk. She addresses her co-workers, using her telephone as a megaphone: “Can I have your attention? I have 47 vacation days. That’s insane.”

She looks around earnestly, and one of her co-workers, an African American woman, glances up uncomfortably, as the office “Norma Rae” continues on her soapbox: “I have been saving them and earning them for what. To be a bridesmaid? We come in day after day. That ends now. Let’s take back our summer. Who is with me?” She scribbles “Vacation Now” on a piece of paper and holds it up for all to see. A lone man claps for her, nervously, and a white male co-worker, who has been watching the scene from his private office, lowers his window shade. The thirty-second advertisement is over, and the sponsor flashes on the screen: “Only Las Vegas. VisitLasVegas.Com.”

This ad is one of many right now, from various companies, that encourage workers to do a number of “radical” things, like use their vacation days or take a lunch break. In a television advertisement for McDonalds, one worker stands up defiantly and announces she is going to lunch. A female co-worker warns her, “Those days are gone now.” But an Asian American co-worker stands up and pulls off his employee badge. “I’m going with you. I don’t want to be chicken. I want to eat it.” An Applebee’s campaign features an inflatable decoy to make it look like you are sitting at your desk so you can sneak out to lunch.

These ads have received much attention. The New York Timesdevoted an article to them, and bloggers have been weighing in as well. Most agree that the advertisements are a cynical ploy to tap into worker frustration in order to sell the worst kind of corporate fare—McDonalds, Vegas hotel chains, Applebee’s, and Gold Peak Tea (which is offering a competition for $100,000 for “one year off” from your job).

Of course, cynical manipulation is the business of advertising, and these ads are particularly good at it. The VisitLasVegas.Com series presents a cast of white-collar workers who are trapped in cubicles, chafing under the tyranny of the trilling ring of the office phone or the constant ping of the email. One employee, when awarded a certificate for never having taken his vacation days, throws a monster fit, kicking over plants and ripping up his prize. Another employee who can’t stand his job executes a dramatic getaway—using a grappling hook to rappel through the ceiling tiles. The ads are quite funny, and they pound away at a singular theme: your job sucks, and you must find a way to get to Las Vegas.

It is easy to see these ads as an attempt by corporations to turn employee dissatisfaction—up sharply since the recession—into profit. As Harry Katz, dean of the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations argues, “It’s an effort by management to co-opt the Occupy Wall Street spirit and redirect it to promote its product.”

On the other hand, as I argued in my first book, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, there is always the teensy weensy possibility that ads like these might get people thinking about doing something truly radical. Isn’t it possible that in playing on consumers’ sense of being beaten down by their jobs, these ads have to ignite a modicum of resentment against the system?

Perhaps a more persuasive argument is that these ads work like a cultural trap door. As much as they might seem to re-direct worker dissatisfaction—they also do much to reveal it. And hiding behind the humor in these advertisements are some surprising truths about the 2012 American worker.

1) We don’t take lunch breaks. 65% of American workers eat at their desks, according to a recent study by a company called Right Management. Within the corporate world there are two schools of thought on this issue. One group, represented by a company called the Energy Project, argues that workers are more productive when they take a real lunch break. According to their  website, Energy Project has helped companies like Google keep their workers from burning out. At the other end is a corporate treatment like that reflected by a recently settled lawsuit, , involving a woman who was fired by Target for taking her lunch break late three times over 18 months—once by two minutes. She won $275,000 in damages.

2) We don’t use our vacation days. Right Management found that the average American worker leaves 11 unused vacation days by year’s end. Why is this? The survey revealed that workers are afraid of getting fired. John de Graaf, director of the organization Take Back Your Time, wonders why the US is so different from other Western countries. “This is the only wealthy country in the world that does not guarantee any paid vacation time,” de Graaf said. “Every other country understands that this makes people healthier and creates a better workforce.”

3) We don’t (or can’t) call in sick. Only one third of the lowest paid 25% of working Americans get compensated if they have to stay home sick. Even in the private sector, only 60% of American workers have paid sick leave. Who has the best sick leave policies? Most unionized workers, and, especially, unionized government workers—like teachers, cops and firemen—whose pay, benefits, and right to belong to unions have been especially under attack in the last year.

4) We get fired for whatever. If you work for Chick-fil-A, you might be fired if you don’t attend your boss’s weekly prayer breakfast, even after you donated a kidney to your boss. And here’s another great list of things you could be fired for, including shaving your head, wearing a Packers’ tie in Chicago, and tweeting a joke from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. You can keep up with these and other outrages at Corey Robin’s blog.

When I watch these ads, I am compelled to think more deeply, and depressingly, about the current state of the American worker. I am personally shielded from many of these outrages, as a tenured professor at a prestigious university. But I will confess that I do often work on vacation. I am writing this post a few hundred feet from a wild rocky beach on the Pacific Coast. But before I run off to play with my kids, let me close by wishing you the best possible summer vacation, or just any vacation, during these dark times for American workers.

Kathy M. Newman

56UP: Class Structure Half a Century On

The Seven Up series on British TV is now 49 years old, and the latest, 56UP, aired earlier in the summer.  The series has followed the same set of children from different class backgrounds since 1964, when they were seven. The first film, initiallya one-off special of a general documentary programme World in Action, tested the proposition attributed to Francis Xavier (1506-1552), co-founder of the Jesuit order: “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” The program’s idea has been copied in various parts of the world, including the USA, but nowhere has it been as successful or long-lasting as here in Britain. Since 1964, every seven years a camera crew has followed up on the group of four girls and ten boys.  Some of the group have declined to continue, while others have dropped out and then reappeared. The participants were, and are, asked to reflect on various aspects of their lives. In earlier shows, the director, Michael Apted, asked the children to project their lives forward into adulthood. In mirror images now, he invites them to ponder their pasts. In its own modest way, the series is both gripping and profound in the way it explores the lived reality of the British class system. Each new set of programs adds a new layer of complexity in the way we see people mature and the impact class has on their lives.

The original premise of Seven Up was heavily focused around class.  The director wanted in part to show that the class trajectories of those involved had largely been decided before the point of active citizenship, or even prior to birth. On the whole this thesis has proved to be correct, with the working-class kids largely getting working-class jobs, and their middle-class counterparts enjoying upward mobility.

All the middle-class members of the Seven Up group have done pretty well with the exception of one who has suffered mental health problems since his twenties.  All the others have experienced a predictable, safe, and stable rise in living standards.  For the working-class members of the group, the story is somewhat different.  One has moved up in class status as she has risen through the ranks of university administration. Interestingly, she recognizes that chance has played a part in her career, seeing her life chances and those of her family as contingent on wider social forces as well as considerable personal effort and talent. One of the working-class boys has found social mobility as an academic, working in the USA. Here, too, success is underpinned by state-funded schooling,  especially at the university level.

While other members of the cohort do enjoy some sense of stability, as they get older the program has lighted upon the role aging and especially ill health plays in people’s classed experience. What seems largely a non-issue for the middle-class group is far harder felt with those for whom the working class is home.  Ill health plays out in a variety of ways, limiting life chances here just a bit or seriously compromising the ability to work at others.  One participant, Jackie, for example, developed health issues in her early fifties, so that she cannot work consistently and is forced onto the benefits system. While claiming benefits is not a great option at the best of times, the current government ‘crack-down on the benefits culture,’ in part driven by the financial crisis, means that her claim is under regular scrutiny and sustained threat of being taken away. This situation is compounded by the fact that she lives in social housing in Glasgow and is divorced with three adult sons. The power of these films is in the way they pose so many ‘what ifs?’  Jackie was originally from London.  Had she stayed there, had she not got divorced, or had she not developed health problems, her life may well have been radically different.  Recent statistics show that life expectancy in the UK is heavily driven by class position, and Jackie has found herself in the worst location, statistically, for life expectancy. Men in Glasgow City live to 71.6 years compared to 85.1 years for those in wealthy parts of London. Jackie, as a woman, is slightly better off — the figures for females are 78 and 89.8 respectively.

If stories like Jackie’s emphasize the power of class, others in the group argue that class does not matter.  In 56Up, possibly the most privileged member of the cohort absolutely denies the salience of class. In the original program, John had predicted with chilling accuracy his life course through fee paying school, elite university, then a career in the law. In each respect, the seven-year-old got it spot on, but in the most recent film, John disputes, with some anger, the idea that class has anything to do with the process or the eventual outcome of his life.  As evidence, he notes the way his life had been disrupted by the early death of his father when John was nine years old.  He points out that his mother had to undergo considerable sacrifice in order to maintain his education, although he acknowledges he benefited from fee waivers and charitable support from his elite school to help him on his way. I was struck at the vehemence with which John insisted that class had nothing to do with his current status and lifelong privileges. Indeed, he not only denied that class played any part in his own success but stressed that class no longer mattered much to anyone. He suggested that the whole series, dating back to 1964, had been obsessed with class and that it had been pretty irrelevant even then.

This has been a pattern in the programs between the 1964 original and the current edition, with the more privileged members insisting that class has no effect on their lives.  Through their claims, 56Up captures and implicitly critiques wider assumptions about class in modern Britain amongst elite groups and many of the political class. While middle-class success is seen as the product of individual effort, working-class failure is seen as both a collective and individual cultural failing. There seems to be a complete blind spot when it comes to issues of social structure such as the education system, the ability to access more benign sectors of the labour market, or even to have jobs where age matters less in terms of the physical effort one has to expend to earn a living. By contrast, 56Up records the effects of class on all those involved. One of the obvious but largely unaddressed issues in 56Up is the way the ladders of social mobility enjoyed by the working-class members of the cohort are gradually being pulled up or taken away altogether, meaning that future generations will find their lives tougher still.

So what do we draw from this most recent dip into the UK class system? We can see that class still matters enormously as it structures and underpins life chances and opportunities.  While nearly half a century has elapsed between the original black and white show and its less grainy contemporary counterpart, class privilege continues to play out through subsequent generations. While the working-class members of the panel are content, wistful, regretful, and/or resigned, some of their middle- and upper-class counterparts are angry. This anger is not necessarily the result of the actuality of their lives but seems directed at the production crew for framing their privilege in the language of class. Perhaps it is time for those of us who care about working-class issues to get angry, too. We should get angry at the growing evidence of class disparity in terms of life chances. But we should also reserve some of that anger for those who dispute that class is an issue.

Tim Strangleman

Is Marriage Becoming a Marker of Class?

A lot of people have been talking about marriage recently, from across the political spectrum.  In the ongoing struggle over same-sex marriage, North Carolina passed an amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions in early May, and President Obama voiced his support of marriage equality the very next day.  We’re also hearing about the “end of men” or, especially since the beginning of the Great Recession, the “mancession,” which paints pictures of female ascendancy and male decline, and how that role reversal will affect marriages.  And then there’s the firestorm sparked by Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, in which Murray uses falling marriage rates and rising divorce rates (along with honesty, industriousness, and religiosity) to support his claim that the white working class is in moral decline.

Suffice to say that we are in the midst of a period when journalists and academics are heavily scrutinizing the institution of marriage, offering interpretations of the demographic shifts documented by the 2010 Census and recent think-tank reports, but more importantly, predicting what will become of it in the future, why and how it will continue to change, and how society will be affected by those changes.

What intrigues me most in all of these ongoing threads about marriage is the way marriage is increasingly being discussed as a marker of class. While he wasn’t the first to make the link, Murray grabbed the spotlight by highlighting the connection between class and marriage, and critics’ efforts to rebut his claims kept the issue alive.

Both Murray and his critics agree that marriage patterns differ markedly by class.  Because marriage rates among the middle and upper classes have not declined over the past two decades, and their divorce rates are low, and because marriage rates have plummeted for white working-class and working-poor people, and their divorce rates have stayed high, marital status is, increasingly, a pretty good sign of what class someone belongs to.  Murray finds a 35 percentage point difference in the rates of married couples in the middle/upper class and working-class communities on which he based his study (83% v. 48%).  He ties the difference to the radically lower rate of divorce in the middle/upper class community and the significantly higher number of never-married people in the working-class community he studies.  He says that the increase in this number since 1960 is “driven mostly by the retreat of men from the marriage market.”

Critics of Murray accept his basic claim but disagree about the cause of these shifts.    Where Murray sees moral decline, his critics point to declining incomes and employment instability among working-class people.  Adding fuel to the economic argument is compelling research showing that while the rates of marriage and divorce differ, the stated values around marriage are remarkably consistent across classes. Working-class and working-poor people marry at lower rates, but not because they don’t believe in marriage.  Across the class spectrum, people consistently report that marriage should be delayed until they are in a stable, supportive, and loving relationship, of course, but also until they have economic stability. Perhaps the best explanation for the difference in marriage rates lies in the relative ease with which one group achieves economic stability while the other struggles to do so.

We can’t fully understand how economic factors contribute to marriage becoming a marker of class unless we throw gender into the mix.  As someone involved in both Working-Class Studies and Women’s Studies, I am deeply interested in the gendered dimensions of economic change, including how the ongoing economic crisis is shaping the institution of marriage within working class and working poor communities.   Working-class men, as individuals, have been hit harder by the economic shifts of the last 30 years than working-class women.  Working-class men’s employment and wages have been undermined in ways that make being a breadwinner increasingly difficult.  And the breadwinner role is still important to large numbers of working-class men, even as women now make up half the workforce, and single-earner families are increasingly rare.  Economic crises cause identity crises that undeniably shape working-class men’s self-image, but they also influence working-class women’s choices about whether and when to marry them.

And what of working-class women?  Here’s where things get interesting and complicated.  As individuals, working-class women have made some gains.  While working-class families used to be more likely to use their limited resources to send their sons rather than their daughters to college, this trend has reversed.  Today, working-class women of all races attend and graduate from college in substantially higher numbers than working-class men.  The employment picture looks better as well.  Working-class women have greater employment stability than men, and they are more likely to work in fields that are predicted to experience the greatest growth over the next decade.

But are these real gains, or do they just look like gains relative to working-class men’s losses? Do we really want to measure working-class women’s gains separately from the losses of working-class men, especially when those losses seem to be so dramatically affecting marriage rates?

Murray uses marriage and divorce statistics to make a bold claim about the decline of morality among the white working class, and plenty of people have rebutted him, but no one has really stepped forward with an insider’s view.  In all of this talk about marriage in the wake of Murray’s book, I find myself wishing for the voices of working-class people.  Hearing directly from working-class couples, whether married or cohabiting, might shed some light on whether and how improved economic circumstances would result in a rebounding of marriage rates among the working class.

It is not a foregone conclusion that marriage will henceforth be a marker of class.  After all, this certainly wouldn’t be the first time that academics and journalists have interpreted marriage statistics in ways that turned out to be dead wrong.  But while I think that predictions of the demise of marriage in the working classes are premature, I am willing to step out on a limb and predict that gender roles among working-class couples are in the midst of a transformation that will have lasting effects for decades to come.

Christie Launius

Christie Launius directs the Women’s Studies program at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and is helping plan the 2013 Working-Class Studies Association conference, to be held in Madison, WI.