Kalmanovitz Initiative

April 30, 2018 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

WCP: Class, Politics, and the Return of Roseanne

The reboot of 1990s sitcom Roseanne brought with it a staggering number of viewers, indicating a strong demand for working-class representation in television and media. In Working-Class Perspectives, Kathy Newman highlights the need for shows like Roseanne while critiquing the disconnect between the people the show is meant to portray and the public actions of its lead actress, Roseanne Barr.

When ABC brought Roseanne back to life on March 27 it attracted more than 25 million viewers to its initial episode—and an additional 5-10 million caught the second airing or streamed it online. In today’s media ecosystem these numbers are staggering; only live sporting events get these kinds of numbers, typically, since most television viewers stream their TV rather than watching it in real-time. A recent study found that 60% of young adults, for example, watch TV exclusively via their computers and smart phones.

Roseanne’s ratings stunned everyone in the entertainment industry, including ABC. But the network should have anticipated this success. Roseanne emerged as part of an explicit new direction for ABC, called the Heartland Strategy, that was conceived the day after Drumpf won the presidential election. That morning ABC executives met at their headquarters to understand what Drumpf’s election signified for their own brand. As the New York Times reported, “They began asking themselves which audiences they were not serving well and what they could do to better live up to the company name—the American Broadcast Company.”

Ironically, perhaps, the person who first conceived of a reboot of Roseanne for ABC’s heartland strategy was Sara Gilbert, the actress who plays daughter Darlene Connor. Sara Gilbert is an LA-raised, Yale graduate, and out lesbian—certainly not a member of the heartland audience that ABC is trying to woo. But since playing Darlene Connor in the 1990s, Gilbert has become more interested in the heartland audience as the Emmy-winning co-host of The Talk, which has been on CBS since 2010. In looking to revive Roseanne, Gilbert did her homework: “‘It was very important to me [to show that the Connors] were still struggling,’ she says. ‘We did a lot of research, and it showed that people who were in their income bracket then were actually often making less now, not even factoring in inflation.’”

Gilbert got everyone in the cast to agree to come back to the show except for its title start: Roseanne Barr. Finally, Gilbert promised Roseanne that she would do battle with ABC for the right to produce the kind of show they could be proud of—and she promised ABC that she would keep Barr in check. Whitney Cummings, creator of the successful working-class sitcom Two Broke Girls, signed on to become a producer and writer for Roseanne, and Wanda Sykes, the African-American comedienne, was hired to be the head writer.

The rebooted Roseanne has received cheers and boos from all corners—much like the original. Those who love it say that Roseanne is funny, just as funny if not more so than the original, and that the Connors are a realistic working-class family—the kind of family that almost never appears in a positive way on network television or anywhere else in the mainstream media.

The Connor home looks almost exactly the same as it did in 1997, including the same tattered couch in the center of the living room, covered with the same crocheted granny square blanket. When Darlene’s estranged husband returns to the Connor house, and he remarks no one has redecorated Darlene’s old room, Darlene quips, “It’s a decorating choice called poverty.”

The first four episodes use humor to deal with a range of issues that affect poor and working-class families, starting with bad health and expensive, insufficient health coverage. In the first episode, Dan and Roseanne have a trading session with each others’ prescription pills so that they can each get a bit more of what they need. Their younger daughter, Darlene, moves back home with her two children because she has lost her job, and everyone in the family endures the daily struggle to make ends meet. Becky tries to become a surrogate mother to make what she thinks will be a quick and easy $50,000—only to discover that at age 43 her eggs are of such poor quality she probably can’t conceive a child through in vitro fertilization or by any other means. The show also highlights the cost and challenges of elder care when Roseanne and Jackie’s mom gets kicked out of her nursing home threatens to move in with Roseanne.

For every reviewer praising Roseanne, at least as many slam it. Many argue that the new Roseanne is not funny, and that it offers a narrow portrayal of working-class life—a crude, cartoonish, and insulting portrait that diminishes the diversity within the working class. But the harshest criticisms are targeted at Roseanne Barr herself. During the first run of her show, Barr was seen as a working-class feminist who forced the networks to address taboo subjects including racism, homophobia, money woes, infidelity, domestic violence, and teen sex. In 2012, she sought the Green Party nomination for president, losing out to Jill Stein. In a bizarre evolution, today Barr openly supports Donald Drumpf, endorses conspiracy theories like Pizzagate, and bashes the Parkland students, Muslims, and trans people on Twitter. Many claim that to support Roseanne is to sanction Roseanne Barr and her hateful, if oftentimes incoherent, tweets, and public statements.

Some Roseanne detractors admit the show is funny. The African-American critic and memoirist, Roxane Gay, found herself laughing at some of the jokes. But she couldn’t accept that the Connors had voted for Drumpf, as Roseanne Barr claimed to have done also, in real life.

I could not set aside what I know of Roseanne Barr and how toxic and dangerous her current public persona is. I could not overlook how the Conner family came together to support Mark as he was bullied at school for his gender presentation, after voting for a president who actively works against the transgender community. They voted for a president who doesn’t think the black life of their granddaughter matters. They act as if love can protect the most vulnerable members of their family from the repercussions of their political choices. It cannot.

Gay’s argument is entirely logical, but political ideologies are not. In my own extended family I know dozens of Drumpf voters who have black, brown, and gay children and grandchildren whom they love as fiercely as they support Donald Drumpf—whose policies and racist/homophobic hate mongering threaten the very lives of these same children and grandchildren.

After the first episode Roseanne’s ratings slipped down from the jaw-dropping number of 35 million, but the subsequent episodes still drew enough viewers to make all of the other networks jealous. That so many viewers are watching Roseanne suggests that the mass audience is hungry for representations of working-class people—which—if we follow Michael Zweig, is a majority of the American people. On Roseanne, and in real life, the working class includes people who can’t afford their prescription drugs, who have chronic health problems, who have close family members in the military, who can’t afford to redecorate, and who take in family members who can’t afford to pay rent on their own.

Roseanne also reminds us of that some working-class people voted for Drumpf, though most—like Roseanne’s sister Jackie on the series—voted for Clinton. One analysis of voter data found that “economic hardship among white working-class Americans actually predicted more support for Hillary Clinton, not Drumpf.”

Indeed, part of the cognitive dissonance of watching Roseanne is knowing that however down on their luck the Connors are, Roseanne Barr is one of the richest women in the US, worth more than 80 million dollars. Roseanne Barr, not Roseanne Connor, is more typical of the loopy super rich who have flocked to Drumpf’s cause, from the millionaire Congressional reps who used Drumpf to get their tax cut, to the one-percenters who feed Drumpf’s ego at Mar-a-Lago. Drumpf called Roseanne Barr to congratulate her after Roseanne debuted because if there is one thing Drumpf loves, it is high television ratings.

Watching Roseanne, I am prompted to wonder just how bad things are for working-class people in the US. One study tells us that more than 30% of Americans have no wealth. Most African-American families have seen stagnation and/or a reversal in income and wealth gains over the last 40 years. The United Nations is even investigating poverty in the US because the situation here is just as bad, if not worse, than poverty in some third world countries.

The Connors have been left behind by both political parties, no matter who they voted for. They deserve universal health care, good jobs, living wages, and affordable housing—as well as a president who doesn’t threaten the personhood of Roseanne Connor’s gender fluid grandson and her African American granddaughter.

My final thought after watching Roseanne concerns the Democrats, rather than the Republicans. As long as the Democratic Party gets its money and its policies from the 1%, it will never be a party of the working-class, immigrant, black, brown, and other marginalized peoples represented, at least partially, by the Connors. The Democrats need a heartland strategy, or, at the very least, a heart, to radically change the laws, tax codes and policies that have created the greatest levels of inequality and poverty in American history. Now that’s a program I would definitely watch.

Read the post in its entirety and other WCP posts on our website.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-18 academic years, John Russo, and English Professor and Director of the American Studies Program at Georgetown University, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors. Last year, the blog published 43 posts that were read over 131,000 times by readers in 178 countries. The blog is cited by journalists from around the world, and discussed in courses in high schools and colleges worldwide.

April 24, 2018 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

BLOG: What Does Being a Student in DC Have to Do with Global Labor Standards?

Jessica E. Richards (COL ’20) is a participant in the KI’s 2018 Worker Justice DC alternative break program.

At the end of every day during the week, our trip leaders asked us to sit down and think about what we had experienced that day. What were some moments that stood out to you? What do you want to remember from today? Make sure to write that down, so you can keep it with you, they would say. Looking back at the week in its entirety, there are too many impactful moments to list. What stands out even more than these moments, however, are the new lenses I learned to look at things through, and the connections I made not only with the other members of our team, but between issues I have heard a lot about and the people who are actually living their effects in my own community, D.C.

Often times, learning the details of how the power in international markets is distributed feels like walking down dead-end roads that all end exactly the same way. While I know it’s important to learn about particular injustices that an international capitalist market breeds, conversations usually seem to center around an unstated question: “Is this system working?” And when working would mean fostering an equitable society with equal opportunity for all, the answer is unsurprisingly and overwhelmingly no. The discussions we had as a team over Worker Justice DC, however, pushed us to ask better, deeper questions. We practiced analysing systems in place not only by asking why they aren’t working, but by taking it a step further. If this system is clearly not working (to achieve its stated goals), what is continuing to fuel it? In whose interest is it for this system to continue to operate unchanged, while entire groups of people are suffering under it? Or in other words, who is benefitting from this? Asking this question allows us to move beyond an analysis that points out the problem — to one that catalyses us into effective direct action strategies.

If we know, for example, that the workers who sewed our Georgetown sweatshirts are being underpaid and forced to work in unsafe conditions for more than eight hours a day, thinking about why the laws that are in place are not actually empowering these workers can bring about an exhausting hopelessness. What talking through these issues with United Students Against Sweatshops and various other solidarity organisations reminded me, however, is to ask who is benefitting from these processes. Actors who are benefitting from these interactions usually hold the power to change them, if they are incentivised to. And that is where student power comes in. The commoditisation of the university education has socialised students to see ourselves mainly as consumers receiving a service, as opposed to agents in a community. As students, we are not powerless unless we decide to give up that power and allow institutions to make decisions on our behalf. As both students and consumers, we can hold institutions that claim to represent our interests accountable until they actually do. And until that day, the fight will continue.

While being able to visit and hear from organisations all across the spectrum working for labour rights in DC was undeniably an experience that I will take with me moving forward, these questions WJDC allowed me to ask have already snuck their way into other areas of my life. In my work with Free Minds Book Club and Writing Workshop, a movement working to empower currently and formerly incarcerated people through literature, I have been able to make connections I did not see before. The Federal Bureau of Prisons is constantly instating policies and bureaucratic obstacles that make it more difficult for incarcerated folks to get books. I did not want to believe that there were really that many people out there whose sole aim it was to stop someone who was incarcerated from being able to educate themselves. It did not make sense to me. What my reflections on my WJDC experience have allowed me to see with more confidence is who needs to be held accountable in this situation. Even if no individual person wants to restrict people’s access to education, if prisons are for profit, companies make more money the longer people are incarcerated. We know that when people have access to education, they spend less time in prison and are less likely to be rearrested. This means less money for the company that is keeping them incarcerated. In this case, private prisons are benefitting from restricting access to books for prisoners.

Each night our leaders asked What do you want to remember from this week? Well, I believe I have the beginnings of an answer. I want to remember the vulnerability this team encouraged, that allowed me to be honest with what I didn’t understand. I want to remember the people that helped me ask new questions and see new answers.

April 23, 2018 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

WCP: Becky and the Grind

Working one’s way out of poverty, once an attainable ambition for the working-class, has now become a practical impossibility. In this week’s Working-Class Perspectives, Jack Metzgar details the story of Becky, a working-class single mother who struggled to do all she could just to not fall deeper into poverty, and the complex social dynamics of a family trying to support her.

Becky’s aunt had given her $300 to catch up on her electric bill so the power would not be turned off in her apartment. But when Aunt Millie checked with the electric company, the outstanding bills had not been paid. Becky had spent the $300 on something else, maybe something more important than electric power, but probably not. Regardless, Becky had lied to Aunt Millie and, thus, had crossed a moral Rubicon that raised doubts about whether her extended family would provide any future financial assistance, which she often needed. Worse, it was a huge lapse in her usually fierce self-respect and familial reliability.   As aunts and uncles talked it over, they debated “cutting her off” vs. “how to get her turned around.”

Now in her late thirties, Becky had grown up poor and had struggled since she got pregnant in high school, but for most of her life she had been exemplary in turning her lemons into lemonade.   In better times and in a better place, her exertions and street-wise savvy would have been enough to get her a better life. She had finished high school while raising her daughter and working a variety of low-wage jobs, some requiring a 90-minute commute on a string of buses. Her daughter, now in college on a scholarship and loans, had been the center of her life, and she had been a mother we all admired for her grit and determination – her gutsy interventions in schools and the various bullshit jobs she endured. Her latest job, however, had been as an off-the-books home care worker for an elderly man to whom she got very attached; when he died recently, she had to do her grieving while being unemployed and ineligible for unemployment compensation. Worse, she had injured her shoulder lifting the old man from bed to chairs and back again, and now she needed an operation that Medicaid would pay for, but she wouldn’t be able to work for months while she recovered.

Becky’s own mother and father, now separated, were both too poor to be much help financially, though they tried to help out in various ways when they could. Collectively the extended family had the means to help Becky fill some of the gaps for a while, but they might not do that if they couldn’t count on her to keep her word and do what she had promised. The aunts and uncles had seen others of Becky’s generation fall under the weight of the daily grind of working dead-end jobs that didn’t pay enough to reliably put food on the table and a roof over their heads. One wrong move and you could fall into a downward spiral of cascading personal and financial problems. Just the threat of living on that edge was stressful enough to drive many into alcohol and drugs for temporary relief – which, of course, always made things worse, making multiple wrong moves more likely, if not inevitable.   Becky’s brother, for example, had pretty much succumbed to the grind a few years after high school, and how he gets by now nobody wants to know.

Becky’s generation had grown up in a deindustrializing place where, with very minor ebbs and flows, things got worse each decade of their lives. The jobs kept leaving, as did the people, those who could. Most of the bad jobs got worse, and what new jobs there were at the Dollar stores were oppressively monitored to prevent employee theft – “worse than being in jail,” said one of the nephews who knows whereof he speaks. If they were the cardboard rational economic actors of Economics 101, Becky’s generation should all leave town to find better jobs in more auspicious economic climates. But where exactly would that be for people without college degrees? And even if having a socially rich network of families and friends were as unimportant as Economics 101 suggests, would a rational actor actually benefit economically by moving away? Is there a study that shows that, or is it just the rational-man logic that works out nicely in mathematical formulas?

The aunts and uncles, now mostly retired on modest pensions and Social Security, came up in better times when steady work in factories, offices, and stores was not so rare, but they too have lived with some grind. They know how the grind works on you over time, grinding you down inside as well as out. Through bitter experience, they also know that sometimes helping out those in danger of giving up actually assists them in giving in to their cascading spiral of defeat.

Might Becky have used that $300 to make a wild bet on the lottery or to buy drugs to sell or use? Or might she have used it to help out her boyfriend’s children? She spends more and more time at his place, and maybe she is half-consciously abandoning her apartment one bill at a time and preparing to move in with him? Like many single mothers with daughters, she and her daughter Dory were as close as twin sisters, at least when Becky didn’t have to be the stern parent. Now that Dory is gone and hopefully headed for a better place, has Becky begun to lose her way, abandoned and confused? Or is she once more working with new lemons to see if lemonade can be made of them?

The aunts and uncles need to know. For every one of Becky’s generation who has been beaten down by the relentless grinding of the grind, two or three are persisting against the odds, constantly uprooted by lost jobs, pay cuts, sadistic supervisors, and just plain hard work on weakening bodies. Becky has been one of these. To give up on her now would be a defeat for the family and its own tenuous morale. But if she has already given up on herself, it would be worse than a waste of scarce resources to help her out again – it would dishonor and insult those who are still, against the odds, pulling their own weight, or at least trying to.

Aunt Millie, the family welfare manager, will eventually find out where that $300 went. She thinks Becky may be capable of a boldface lie, as Becky has always been able to present a bold face to bad circumstances. The aunts and uncles trust that Millie will be able to tell, but who knows for sure (in the short term). Millie herself seems to be growing weary of managing small amounts of money as her siblings bicker about who does or does not have the moral rectitude to deserve their help. Nobody doubts that Becky is responsible for her own life, regardless of the circumstances she has had to face, nor that they are responsible to help her if they can.

As a peripheral observer of this extended family dilemma, I marvel at the practical moral complexity of the family conversation and can’t help comparing it to the superficiality of educated middle-class pundits’ palaver about low-information voters and the white working class. Or, worse, the simplistic judgments about moral and cultural rot of the conservative authors of Coming Apart: The State of White America: 1960-2010 and Hillbilly Elegy. Why is it so difficult for people with college educations (especially elite ones) to see how fucking heroic Becky has been for 37 years and how it may now all be for naught if the grind turns out to be stronger than she is? Why is it so hard to see that if we want to reduce opioid addiction, suicides, and other moral failures, we need to reduce the grind – with dramatically steadier jobs and higher wages? $300, for Christ’s sake! There are lobbyists in Washington, D.C., tonight spending that to buy politicians a bottle of wine for dinner.

Read the post in its entirety and other WCP posts on our website.

April 17, 2018 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

Lane Windham, KI Associate Director, Receives Prestigious Labor History Award

KI Associate Director Lane Windham has been awarded the prestigious 2018 David Montgomery Award from the Organization of American Historians (OAH) at its annual meeting in Sacramento, California. The honor, which is cosponsored by the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA), is awarded to the best book on a topic in American labor and working-class history. Lane was awarded for her groundbreaking book Knocking on Labor’s Door about union organizing in the 1970s. Lane also serves as co-director of the Women Innovating Labor Leadership project (WILL Empower), which aims to identify, train and convene a new generation of women labor leaders.

David Montgomery Award

Lane Windham, Georgetown University. Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide (University of North Carolina Press) counters the argument that the power of the labor movement declined in the 1970s as unions stopped organizing and workers turned away from unions. Through her focus on women, people of color, and southerners, historian Windham contends that workers combined traditional working-class tools with new legislative gains and organizing strategies from the civil rights and women’s rights movements. Case studies of shipbuilding, textile, retail, service, and clerical employees reveal how labor organizing did not weaken or cease. Instead, labor’s ability to win union elections steeply declined, tracking the increase in employer resistance to union organizing. Windham’s book explores union organizing in both the industrial and service sectors, showing the vibrancy in union organizing in each, despite different constraints and obstacles. Windham also plumbs the national scene, looking at the push for new unionization and how corporations fought successfully to weaken labor law and its enforcement. Well organized and researched, utilizing an impressive range of sources, Windham’s Knocking on Labor’s Door showcases the voices of local working-class activists, even as it reveals a national story. It is an apt example of the legacy of labor and working-class history that David Montgomery championed and an important study of labor’s most misunderstood decade.

The award was presented on April 13 by OAH’s 2017–18 President Edward L. Ayers and 2018–19 President Earl Lewis.

April 16, 2018 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

WCP: The Home Maintenance of Working-Class Identity After Deindustrialization

Children of working-class families are often encouraged to both stay true to their familial roots while simultaneously pursuing white collar careers. In Working-Class Perspectives, George Karl Ackers explores how working-class families maintain traditions that originated in the skilled trades while those same jobs have disappeared.

Five years in a St. Florian foundry, they call it Industrial Park

Then hospital maintenance and tech school just to memorize Frigidaire parts

But I got to missing your Mama and I got to missing you too

And I went back to painting for my old man and I guess that’s what I’ll always do

So don’t try to change who you are boy, and don’t try to be who you ain’t

And don’t let me catch you in Kendale with a bucket of wealthy-man’s paint

Don’t call what your wearing an outfit, don’t ever say your car is broke

Don’t sing with a fake British accent, don’t act like your family’s a joke.

“Outfit”

This song, written by Jason Isbell when he was part of the band The Drive by Truckers, creates a story from life messages that his father passed to him. More than any academic account I have read, it encapsulates the lessons that the working-class men I interviewed about the ongoing impact of deindustrialisation on male work identity in the UK taught to their sons. To ‘not call what you’re wearing an outfit’ is a variation of the southern American working-class value ‘don’t get above your raising’. While in Britain there is a similar phrase, ‘don’t get ideas above your station’, I think the American expression is more useful as it makes a direct link to family judgement, while ‘station’ has a more open social meaning. In his book ‘Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class, Bill C. Malone suggests that this expression ‘is not an injunction against wealth as such, even though riches carry the potential for corruption. Instead, it is a rebuke to pretense and snobbery, and a plea for respect for and loyalty to ones roots’.

While this song reflects a loyalty to family and background, it also expresses a father’s desire for his son to not repeat his hardship or employment, as the father warns his son to not repeat his work as a house painter by saying: ‘don’t let me catch you in Kendale with a bucket of wealthy-man’s paint’. This multifaceted narrative suggests the son should not repeat his journey but also should not forget the integrity of his working-class background. The tension of balancing individual and family identities is not new or an exclusive feature of working-class male familial relationships. However, deindustrialization made, and is still making, the negotiation of family background a more practical issue, as industries that for generations had been a staple resource for producing and reproducing working-class culture and identity have now closed or gone into rapid decline.

When I asked 13 former Royal Dockyard skilled tradesmen and 14 of their sons and grandsons about their career choices, many said something like ‘I did it to get on’. The phrase ‘to get on’ seemed short hand for making career decisions with an aim to achieve upward career mobility and better job security. For these men, the value of ‘getting on’ seemed to have a deep family history rooted in industrial society. The first generation, for example, discussed this desire for upward mobility as the reason they pursued a trade or craft apprenticeship. In fact, their parents saw a trade as offering a better and more secure job then they had been able to secure as unskilled workers. One of the men I interviewed, Francis Copper, for example, recalled telling his father he wanted to go in the navy. His parents persuaded him that this was not the best path. As his father said: ‘You shouldn’t do that, go in the Dockyard and do your apprenticeship and when you’ve got your indentures you can do what you like’. Although most sons suggested they did not passively follow their parents’ advice, when the dockyard closed and they lost their jobs, the idea of ‘getting on’ motivated them to navigate their new jobs for the good of their family. Jerry Naylor, another man I interviewed, discussed moving from being a network maintenance engineer into management at a national phone company: ‘My second daughter being born pushed me to move up and get more money’. As parents themselves, these men also stressed the value of ‘getting on’ to their sons, encouraging them to go into secure white collar work instead of following them into a trade. As Francis’s son Chris recalled, ‘Dad thought I should go into a bank and be a manager’.The generational sentiment: ‘don’t repeat my journey and don’t forget the integrity of your working-class background’ I heard from many of the fathers in my own study. These men had worked at the Chatham Royal Dockyard, a naval ship-building and maintenance yard officially established by Elizabeth I in 1567. This 400-year history meant that many workers could trace chains of their families working in this industry for hundreds of years. The dockyard closed in 1984, leaving most of its 7,000 employees having to search for new jobs, an event that inevitably created feelings of anger or despair. Twenty-seven years later, I wanted to explore the long-term effects of that closure on men who had worked in the ‘dockyard’, as well as on their sons and grandsons. The majority of British studies on deindustrialisation have focused on unskilled men, but I wanted to understand how deindustrialisation had affected skilled men.

Since most of the men in my study actively pursued middle-class work for economic reasons, ‘getting-on’ as a value could be seen as a contradiction of ‘not getting above your rising’. However, in moving into more middle-class paid work, men did not forget where they came from or lose their engagement with their background. Instead, they retained and continued their trade learning and hands-on work by developing unpaid DIY projects. For example, Darrel, a former shipwright, and his son Noel Carrin showed me the architectural drawings and the two-storey extension they had designed and built together. Similarly, Dominic Draper showed off his hand-carved bespoke wooden kitchen. These non-paid DIY projects seemed to allow men to sustain a story to their lives and a sense of integrity with their skilled working-class backgrounds. As Chris Copper reflected, ‘We’ve always been a hands-on, practical people. If I didn’t know how to do it, I’d ask dad’. Like Ben Steel, a former boiler maker, most men could not abide ‘getting a man in to fix something’. Therefore, in spite of what these men now did to earn a living, they still defined themselves as ‘practical people’, not above or removed from the virtue of their backgrounds. Like Jason Isbell’s father, these men were disciples of the philosophy ‘don’t ever say your car is broke’. DIY both allowed these men to continue their hands-on trade labour and was a powerful illustration of their commitment to male working-class identity.

Much like Isbell, the men in my study were encouraged to move away from working-class occupations. Moreover, due to the deindustrialization process, dockyard trade work ceased to be an option for them. We might assume that this would cause them to lose their engagement with their background and loyalty to working-class values. However, as these men navigated change, they consistently sought to embed these values in their family history. Collaborative domestic repair projects anchored their personal story in their manual trade backgrounds. These projects provided a practical demonstration that, although they had moved away from working-class employment, they had not “got above their rising” (or upbringing as we say in England). So even those who went into careers such as social work or school teaching saw these new spheres of work as relevant to their occupational or family background. These projects also allow them to transmit the value of working-class trade work to their own children, a practical manifestation of ‘don’t act like your family’s a joke’.

Read the post in its entirety and other WCP posts on our website.

WCP: Class, Politics, and the Return of Roseanne

BLOG: What Does Being a Student in DC Have to Do with Global Labor Standards?

WCP: Becky and the Grind

Lane Windham, KI Associate Director, Receives Prestigious Labor History Award

WCP: The Home Maintenance of Working-Class Identity After Deindustrialization

About

Contact