Explorations of Class and Consciousness in the U.S. 1

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Explorations of Class and Consciousness in the U.S.[1]

2001 Journal of Anthropological Research Vol 57(1): 41-60.

E. Paul Durrenberger

Department of Anthropology

409 Carpenter Building

The Pennsylvania State University

University Park, PA 16802

Abstract

In the United States there are both classes and a folk model that denies their existence. I explore some anthroplogists’ and sociologists’ conceptualizations of class and folk models of class. I then discuss the salience of elements of these folk models that Katherine Newman outlined as meritocratic individualism for some lawyers, praralegals, and support staff in a legal agency and for some service sector union stewards. I conclude that there are powerful forces in the United States that operate against folk models that recognize class, among them, the structuring of everyday workplace experience by law and administrative practice that operate against the recognition of class. The same is even more true of academics and that provides the experiential basis from which some perpetuate counter-factual folk models of individualism as academic analysis.

Key words: class, unions, power, folk models, practice, working class, middle class

Explorations of Class and Consciousness in the U.S.

Introduction

The paradox of studying class in America is the denial of classes—our folk models tell us the thing we want to understand does not exist. “Social mobility based on character and hard work is written into our institutions as well as our Constitution, our popular sayings and our myths,” writes Goldschmidt (1999:62). Pre-industrial stratified social orders coded the system of stratification into their cultures as surely as ours denies it (Goldschmidt 1955, 1999).

In her studies of downward mobility, Katherine Newman (1988, 1993) outlines a folk model of “meritocratic individualism” that characterizes the managerial middle class who are in positions of command or authority. “Their job,” Barbara Ehrenreich (1990:133) tells us, “is to conceptualize . . . what others must do. The job of the worker, blue or pink collar, is to get it done.” She continues that:

The fact that this is a relationship of domination—and grudging submission—is usually invisible to the middle class but painfully apparent to the working class.

I use ethnographic data to explore the folk model of meritocratic individualism among such unquestionably middle class folks as lawyers and such clearly working class people as union stewards in the service sector.

A lawyer with the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago (LAFC) told me:

A literary tradition is to use a crazy man like don Quixote to reflect normalcy and in the end reality is crazy. People who work here aren't normative. Reflect society against us and see if it makes any sense.

It's not the same for paralegals and secretaries. Attorneys have schooling. In a manufacturing job, of importance is working conditions, benefits, salary. People who work here have these three things in common. People have an agenda and are crazy enough to try to implement it. We're here to provide equal justice and we actually believe in it. Most jobs, after a while, you're just pushing it through. Here the final outcome is alive and fresh and now.

A few days before I had been in the ten by ten waiting room of a tall dark urban building in Chicago’s loop. The lowered ceiling and wall cutting the transom above the door in half suggested that this ante room had once been larger. There were six chairs, one man in his 30s, and a woman in her 20’s with a year old baby on her shoulder. Across the space in a 5 x 8 compartment separated from us by a glass window were two women incessantly answering their telephones with “Legal Assistance.” The travel magazines on the tables seemed out of place. A sign announced in Spanish that the minimum wage was $4.75 per hour. Another in English was about food stamps. I was waiting to talk to paralegals, support staff and attorneys on the other side of the door, but fortunately, not about the legal problems with which they are accustomed to dealing.

United Auto Workers Local 2320 organizers legal aid workers who work for legal aid foundations that provide legal assistance for poor people, especially when they run afoul of the myriad of bureaucracies that govern their lives from social services to child and family services to landlords. UAW Local 2320 represents the attorneys, paralegals and support staff of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago (LAFC). What made this unit especially interesting to me is that they had united two bargaining units (support staff, and paralegals on the one hand and attorneys on the other) into one unit. The rationale of the union local was that employees all had the same interests relative to management.

One of the union organizers at Local 2320, himself an attorney, explained to me that during the 50s the Supreme Court had ruled that some workers are professional while others are not and that while professionals can vote to be in the same bargaining unit with non-professionals, the non-professionals cannot on their own volition alone include professionals. When the LAFC was first organized 20 years before, the National Labor Review Board ruled in favor of the employer’s petition that there not be a single bargaining unit, so there was one unit for attorneys and one for others. There was one union with two halves with a unified executive board and equal representation and joint bargaining. Each unit had the right to vote on its own contract separately—there were two parallel documents. The problem arose if one unit adopted its contract and the other did not.

The support staff tended to ratify contracts and lawyers tended not to. In 1994 or 1995, when the current contract was being negotiated, there were funding cuts and a proposal from management to postpone raises for attorneys so management would not have to lay off seven of them. Attorneys thought the support staff would agree to postpone raises to save the jobs of seven fellow-members.

That was the worst day in the history of this unit. People brought to a head all of their differences and stresses between them. Everyone was outraged. Support staff for contradictory reasons. Attorneys were doing something THEY were not being asked to do. Attorneys had control of their destiny. Support staff were equally outraged but for contradictory reasons. It wasn’t logical. . . . . We saved the seven jobs; it was unifying for attorneys. We made a sacrifice and called on management to sacrifice and they did. Support staff thought it was a betrayal.

As a footnote. We were going to set up a committee to explore the laws and become a single unit. I have favored it since 1991, but it was not favored by anyone else. But we did it this year. So now we are one unit.

The victory of the last campaign here is that we got the units unified. The vote was overwhelming to unify. It was higher from attorneys than from support staff. [Some] attorneys felt they couldn’t get their special interests if they were in with support staff and the fact that the staff went into epileptic fits over the saving of jobs didn’t help. But we pulled it off in spite of that.

When I discussed Newman’s findings with him and he said:

This would be a good place to test the meritocracy versus structural distinction. But some lawyers are ideologically motivated. It might not show up.

Class?

Fifty years ago (1950) Goldschmidt stated what he called the enigma of American social structure thus: “. . . despite great differentials in wealth, prestige and power, there are no clearly marked social classes” (483). He reviewed the anthropological, sociological and psychological literature on class in America up to then. Since he did a thorough job of it, I refer readers to that article rather than repeat it here. Anthropological and sociological work failed to raise the question of whether informants were representing social realities or whether the methods select “that pattern of thought which coincides with the predilection of the investigator” (487). He concluded that because the differences in wealth, economic conditions, prestige and power are as great in America as in any stratified society, and because of minimal mobility as well as differences of life ways, systems of values, and attitudes, there is a class system in America. He also pointed out that it is a tenet of American culture that all have equal opportunity and reported evidence of that time that “over half of the working class and two-thirds of the middle class believe ability is an essential element to mobility” (492).

Goldschmidt went on to describe four classes: an elite, a middle class whose power is derivative from the elite and act as local pseudo-elites, a working class that rejects the middle-class ideal of economic advancement through individual achievement and attempts collective action for social gains, and a fourth sector of laboring people who are so hopeless that they do not expect to advance individually or collectively—an underclass (494-495).

As anthropologists return to the challenge of understanding class in the United States, one of our continuing problems is to be able to see the phenomenon in a land where the notion much less the discussion of class and class privilege is anathema because of incessant proclamations of the equality of opportunity if not achievement. Race, ethnicity, personal initiative or failure but not class explain privilege, power, poverty, and impotence (Ortner 1998).

In the United States, the ideology of the individual and experience of diversity mask the realities of class (Sacks 1988). This is easy to see in a small less diverse land devoted to egalitarian ideology such as Iceland (Durrenberger and Pálsson 1989; Pálsson and Durrenberger 1996). It is more difficult to see in a large diverse land which actively promotes such an obfuscation as official ideology (Ehrenreich 1990). Kingsolver (1998) reviews recent anthropological literature on the ways people claim and assert power in workplaces based on gender, ethnicity, age, regional identity, and ownership of capital. She also discusses anthropologists such as those whose work is collected in Lamphere, Stepick and Greiner (1994) who consider the impact of gender and ethnicity in the experience of workers both on and off the job. Here I focus more explicitly on the folk model of meritocratic individualism.

In my work on shrimpers in Mississippi and Alabama (Durrenberger 1992, 1996) I found a similar folk model of individualism. All agreed that shirpmers were so independent that they could not engage in collective action. This folk model is counter-factual. The history of the rise and fall of the Mississippi shrimpers' union illustrates the changes in the political and economic system which made a union impossible in one configuration, made it possible in another, and impossible again in a third. As long as packers controlled access to schooners for shrimping, fishermen were unable to organize unions, though they tried and carried out several long strikes (Durrenberger 1994). When fishermen began to own their own power boats and trawls, packers could not produce sufficient shrimp to satisfy their needs without the independent shrimpers and shrimpers successfully banded together in unions. Their organizations were effective because of the favorable legal climate of the New Deal and federal level recognition of their legitimacy and because, even organized, they provided processors a more favorable alternative than owning their own fleets. When alternative sources of shrimp became available to processors through imports, shrimpers could no longer control the flow of raw materials to processors. Shrimpers borrowed heavily to invest in large gulf boats and needed the processors more than processors needed them. Finally, the union was outlawed under anti-trust law (Durrenberger 1992, 1994, 1995).

Anthropology is accustomed to showing that folk models do not fit realities and explaining why and how the folk models gained salience. Kottak (1999:65) for instance, says, “By 1965 I recognized that the opinions held by some of these groups were misconceptions that interfered with their understanding of what actually determined fishing success. I had also come to realize that such confusion and misunderstanding were essential.” Gísli Pálsson and I (Pálsson and Durrenberger 1983, 1989, 1992a, 1992b; Durrenberger and Pálsson 1983) have analyzed how Icelandic folk models of fishing success are misleading and explained them in terms of their evolving relationships with economic systems.

Anthropologists can turn to a critique of sociological practice to help us avoid familiar pitfalls. Sociologists call the official invisibility of class to ideologists and sociologists alike that Ortner discussed (1989) “American Exceptionalism.” This is the idea that while other industrial countries such as Britain and Poland have well developed class structures that are visible in their union movements and political organization, the United States is the exception to the rule. Sociologists and others have offered explanations for American Exceptionalism. One is that Americans are exceptional in even talking about equality while the more general pattern is to accept and expect inequality based on class position (Goldschmidt 1999, Lewis 1993). The exception to American exceptionalism in Sociology is those Marxists represented in the collections edited by McNall, Levine, and Fantasia (1991), Burawoy and Skocpol (1982), and Bonanno, Busch, Friedland, Gouveia and Mingione (1994).

The middle class?

The folk model of meritocratic individualism that Newman (1988) describes includes the following tenets:

• REWARDS GO TO THOSE WHO ARE REALLY DESERVING

• OCCUPATION IS A MEASURE OF MORAL WORTH
• PEOPLE ARE MASTERS OF THEIR OWN DESTINIES
• THOSE WHO SUCCEED ARE MORALLY BETTER
• YOU WOULDN’T BE IN THIS MESS IF SOMETHING WEREN’T

WRONG WITH YOU

• SOLUTIONS ARE MOSTLY UP TO INDIVIDUALS

• INDIVIDUALS CAN ALTER THEIR FUTURES VS. IDEA THAT

INDIVIDUALS ARE SUBORDINATE TO LARGER FORCES

• SUCCESS IS A RESULT OF DETERMINATION AND TALENT
• PEOPLE WHO DON’T HAVE JOBS HAVEN’T BEEN TRYING

HARD ENOUGH

• HIERARCHY IS MERIT BASED

• PEOPLE GET WHAT THEY DESERVE
• MARKET FORCES ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN MORALITY—

THE MARKET DEFINES MORALITY

• INEQUALITY IS NATURAL

Newman documents how this folk model serves middle class individuals while they have jobs but destroys them when they lose their jobs and the self reifying daily practice and context for this folk model that explains their success or failure.

In her discussion of a factory closing she indicates that workers did not hold themselves responsible for being out of work but blamed remote authorities. This perspective, she argues, is grounded in working class experience. There was nothing personal when Singer would hire and lay off hundreds of people at a time (1988:199). She concludes that such experience bolsters a structural outlook among working-class people in contrast to the meritocratic individualism of middle class people.

Because these ideas of class-based differences in folk models of success and failure seemed ethnographically grounded and valid to me, I wanted to test them more systematically. The legal workers of LAFC seemed to be an ideal site.

I hypothesized on the basis of Newman’s ethnographic accounts that attorneys would be more personalistic and less structural and that support staff and paralegals would be more structural and less personalistic in outlook. I interviewed support staff, paralegals, and attorneys at the various offices LAFC maintains, informally talked with employees and their union representatives, observed meetings, and observed the union representatives in negotiations with other units. To collect quantitative data to test the hypothesis formally, I administered a questionnaire based on Newman’s articulation of meritocratic individualism.

I asked people how much they agreed with each of the following statements on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 5 (very much):

• People's success or failure depends on factors beyond their control
• The people who are in positions of authority are there because of their merit
• People make their own luck
• Hard work is not the main thing that explains the success of people in

higher positions

• People in higher positions are more talented or able than others
• People who make bad decisions deserve to get into trouble
• People should respect the market and economic facts more than ideas of morality
• People who get rewards such as higher salaries and higher positions deserve them
• Solutions to peoples' problems are up to them
• People in higher positions owe their success mainly to their own good decisions
• Social inequality is natural

Cultural status of ideas suggests some degree of consensus (Romney 1999). I used the consensus procedure of the set of computer programs Borgatti (1996) compiled, Anthropac, to test for consensus and found none among any of the three sub groups, by gender or by ethnicity. Furthermore, I could show no statistical difference between or among the responses by group, ethnicity (Hispanic, African-American, and White) or by gender. Most attorneys and staff agreed that people make their own luck (in agreement with the folk model) , disagreed that people should respect the market and economic facts more than ideas of morality (not in agreement with the folk-model), that solutions to peoples’ problems are up to them (in agreement), and disagreed that social inequality is natural (not in agreement). The results are equally in agreement and not in agreement with the folk model.