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September 11, 2018 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

WCP: Middle-Class Influence vs. Working-Class Character


Children start learning the culture of their social class early on, and those lessons shape not only their own behavior and opportunities but also the way others respond to them. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Jack Metzgar reviews Jessica Calarco’s book on how middle-class children learn to negotiate for better opportunities, while working-class children are taught to be deferential.

“Jesse” is one of a cohort of 80 students sociologist Jessica Calarco observed from the 3rd through the 5th grades and then revisited in middle school for her new book, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School.  Calarco also interviewed the students’ parents. Her research reveals that middle-class children practice “strategies of influence” in school because their parents prioritize academic success, while working-class kids generally follow “strategies of deference” because their parents care more about developing long-term character.

In middle school Jesse lost a homework packet and simply accepted a “0” grade when the assignment was due.  Several weeks later his mother found the packet and made Jesse complete it.  When Jesse turned it in, his teacher “firmly, and a bit incredulously” returned the packet ungraded, saying: “It’s a little too late for that now.  I mean, that [assignment] was like a month ago.”  Here’s how Calarco describes Jesse’s reaction:

“Jesse does not look up.  He nods slowly, but he keeps his shoulders hunched forward and his head low.  As Ms. Cartwright heads back to her desk, Jesse glances up at me, his face and shoulders heavy with resignation.  He murmurs quietly, almost sadly: ‘It wasn’t to get a better grade.  It was to make me a better person.’”

Jesse later explained to Calarco that his mother had told him to complete the late assignment not to improve his grade but because it was the right thing to do – “to work hard and take responsibility for his actions.”

Jesse is from a working-class family, and Calarco recounts in heart-breaking detail how the working-class kids she observed are disadvantaged in grade school by their inability and unwillingness to push teachers to give them more time on a test, help them with answers, and allow them to turn in homework late. Middle-class kids, on the other hand, often treat teachers’ instructions as but opening statements in a game of negotiating that these kids become amazingly good at as early as the 4th grade.

According to Calarco, middle-class kids are taught to question and negotiate with the authority of their teachers, who are there to serve and help them. They learn that children should ask for help and seek  special accommodations when they need them.  Working-class kids, conversely, are taught to defer to teachers, to do what they’re told, and not to burden teachers with unnecessary questions but to work out their problems on their own.

Calarco argues that it is not only teachers’ own middle-class predispositions that disadvantage working-class students (a “hidden curriculum” noted by other scholars like Annette Lareau), but middle-class kids’ own crafty agency, and their knowledge that they can count on their parents to intervene if necessary, that makes it nearly impossible for teachers to give the same time and attention to working- as to middle-class kids.  In Calarco’s observation, teachers are often frustrated with the demands middle-class kids make on them and appreciative of the working-class kids’ deference and respect.  But the middle-class students are so confident, persistent, and often humorously, good-heartedly creative in seeking attention that as a practical matter, teachers have to give them more time just to get through their day.  This dynamic is further aided by working-class kids’ commitment to not being a bother to teachers and to working out things on their own, and many of them see what the middle-class kids are doing as undignified begging at best or even cheating, which they disdain ever doing.   At a Working-Class Studies conference where she presented some of this research, I asked Calarco whether the working-class kids’ disdain for middle-class negotiating might be based in a commitment to personal integrity.  She said, “Oh, for sure, though nobody used those words, of course.”

As for remedies, Calarco argues against both teaching working-class kids to negotiate better or urging middle-class parents to restrain from teaching their children strategies of influence.  Rather, she advocates for teachers and schools to enforce sharper boundaries against negotiating the special deals middle-class kids are so good at bargaining for and to stick to those boundaries when parents complain and threaten to go to the school board.

I found her arguments for that approach sensible and cogent, but as with many remedies for addressing our growing inequalities, it puts too much responsibility on only one of our institutions and on teachers, whom Calarco so vividly shows want to treat all their students equally and often work ingeniously if unsuccessfully to do so.  I wish Calarco had pulled back a bit to a larger frame that built on one of her most insightful paragraphs:

“All the parents . . . regardless of class or mobility, wanted to support their children’s academic success.  At the same time, parents worried that too much support could undermine their children’s development of good character (i.e., respect, responsibility, and work ethic).  Middle-class and working-class parents alike struggled with how to balance those seemingly competing priorities.  Ultimately, middle-class parents prioritized good grades, and working-class parents prioritized good character.  Both groups, however, made those choices with reservations.”

She doesn’t spell out the reservations, maybe because they’re pretty obvious.  As Jesse’s story suggests, he just wanted to be “a better person,” not to be too much of a bother, and for sure not a beggar or a cheater.  He could do with some negotiating skills, and with some more willingness to speak up for himself so he can be treated more fairly.  But no matter what he does, he’ll never catch up to the increasingly manipulative influencing skills the middle-class kids are developing – partly, and importantly, because neither he nor his parents want him to.  By prioritizing good character, however, he is gradually undermining his academic competitiveness and eventually his competitiveness in a bifurcated labor market that increasingly has only low-wage and high-wage jobs that track education levels.  His parents may sense that, and thus their reservations.  Middle-class parents’ reservations are likely based on the same perception – that if their kids have to sacrifice a little character and integrity to achieve academic success, it will be worth it in the long run because it will improve their chances of getting one of those increasingly rare jobs with good wages and conditions.  But is this really what middle-class parents want: Finagling, transactional grade-hounds constantly seeking competitive advantage so they can find a career, not just a job, a career that may value those same finagling, manipulative transactional skills they’re honing in school?

I doubt that is what any parent wants, but those are the pressures being put on us by the increasing distance between good jobs and bad jobs based on educational attainment.  Parents should not have to prioritize between good grades and good character.  We need to attack our growing inequalities with higher wages and better conditions for all the bad jobs that do much of the work we all depend upon.  In the long run, even most winners can’t really win in a winner-take-all society.

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 2015-19 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.

Filed Under: Visiting Scholars Tagged With: Education, Jack Metzgar, Jessica Calarco, John Russo, Parenting, Public Education, Sherry Linkon, Teachers, WCP, Working-Class Perspectives

September 6, 2018 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

WCP: Labor’s Day, More or Less?

The U.S. labor movement is facing bitter legal and political attacks. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective Wade Rathke asserts that the talk of unions dying off is greatly exaggerated. Rathke points to a surge of worker-led organizing across the country and the ability of unions in other parts of the world to thrive in even harder circumstances than the ones set by Janus.

The cover of Harper’s Magazine’s Labor Day issue for September 2018 asks “Is This the End of American Unions?”  The magazine doesn’t answer the question, but I will: “of course not!”

First, we shouldn’t assume that Janus dooms unions. Few other countries have representation fees for either the public sector workforce or the private sector workforce, yet they have labor unions.  French unions don’t have such provisions.  Nor do Australians. Unions in the United Kingdom lost union shop provisions for all workers under Margaret Thatcher.  Very few unions around the world — from India to Argentina to Brazil to South Africa to the European Union — even have “exclusive” representation.  Yet, all have unions and even labor movements of various shapes and sizes, strengths and weaknesses.

I asked organizers with the largest British unions (Unite, Unison, and the GMB) about how they responded when Thatcher ended their union dues regime.  As they all explained, they decided that instead of fighting to reinstate the old rules, which the public saw as internal and esoteric, it would be smarter to have their members fight for more rights and benefits on the job.  In fact, the GMB organizing director detailed a plan to move the whole union away from even payroll deductions to standing orders, or what we would call bank drafts, so that no one could stop the union.

Some American unions have also thrived by shifting the focus to building worker activism. Rand Wilson, now chief of staff of SEIU 888 and formerly a Teamsters strategist during the great United Parcel Service strike twenty years ago, suggested in Harpers article that the Janus decision may generate “a more activist base” in unions.  That’s how SEIU Healthcare Illinois-Indiana-Missouri-Kansas (formerly United Labor Unions 880 and more recently SEIU 880) survived after losing the ability to collect agency fees in Illinois after the adverse Supreme Court decision in Harris v. Quinn. The impact was serious financially, but not substantive organizationally. Keith Kelleher, the founder, chief architect, head organizer, and recent president of the local union, always made sure that more than 50% of its rolls were full members, and the union beefed up the program even more in anticipation of the decision.  In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Kelleher detailed the strategy and almost thumbed his nose at the efforts to derail the union.  That success rested on decades of organizing through active engagement of members and leaders in every aspect of the union’s program. Is there any mystery why this is the largest single local union in the Midwest, despite only being founded less than 40 years ago?

Many hold up the Culinary Workers (UNITE HERE Local 226) as the strongest single local union in the country.  When I visited some years ago, I was amazed at their full service, all-in approach to building the union.  Yet Nevada is and always has been a right-to-work red state.   Does anyone think the 60,000 private sector membership of this union reflects anything other than full engagement with workers?

Workers and their unions have risen phoenix-like over and over.  In the last thirty years, more than a half-million informal workers in home health care and home child care have won coverage under union agreements in some of the largest organizing victories since the 30’s and 40’s. In the same period of decline, we have seen a historic victory at JP Stevens Mills, the grape boycott of the United Farm Workers, and the remarkable growth of all public sector unions.  The living wage movement and the Fight for Fifteen have moved workers forward despite extreme opposition at the highest levels of government and amid rising inequality.  Earlier this year, teachers in the deep red states of West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and North Carolina broke out of their classrooms and into the streets, inspiring millions over wages but also, importantly, over classroom conditions and school funding.

As these cases demonstrate, it isn’t the law that empowers workers and their unions. It’s workers themselves. When labor grows, the law tends to support it. When unions are in retreat, the law also weakens, because it can — sometimes faster than we might wish. Action follows reaction, back and forth, but the combustion and boiling heat of struggle by workers is indomitable. If unions are going to survive Janus intact, they must have a base of engaged members. What was passive, must become active. Unions that are unable – or unwilling – to activate their membership will either wither or merge. But the ones that persist will be stronger and more able to face the future.

We should also pay attention a lesson from the more than one-hundred “living wage” campaigns that ACORN and Local 100 United Labor Unions ran in coalition with other unions and community groups: we can win if we take the issue to the public rather than defining it solely in terms of worker versus boss, union versus company.  That’s because winning isn’t just about a specific vote. In our first forays in Houston and Denver, back in 1995, we lost by 2 to 1 in both cities. But we won overwhelmingly in working-class black, brown, and white precincts, and we consolidated a strong base, building power even while losing.  Our opposition sometimes helped. In Houston, the anti-campaign developed a patronizing “good idea, bad tactic” measure, conceding us the high ground.  In Denver, a class-based effort financed by hotels and restaurants took the low ground, crystalizing the issue for the future.  And we learned from these battles. When we set the living wage number lower to offset the job loss arguments, we won in New Orleans – and then in cities across the country.

We see similar elements in the recent struggles – and victories –by teachers, who were often ahead of their unions in engaging the public, just as the Chicago teachers did so effectively several years ago.  In Missouri, unions won with an initiative to overturn legislation passed by the conservative Republican majority and signed by the Republican governor because they went directly to the people to argue for the merits and fairness of their proposition. Such battles can be risky, but the teachers dared to struggle, and their victory offers a lesson to us all about taking our issues to the people.

If our unions are to survive the legal and political attacks ahead of us, we have to build labor-community coalitions like this everywhere.  This can’t be tactical and transactional.  It has to be permanently strategic and transformative.  The times will never be good for us, but our own work can bend the times in a better direction for our success.  We cannot win on the battlefield laid out for us by corporations and employers.  We have to create our own field where we can even the odds. That requires the full engagement of workers and the public in our fights.

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.

Filed Under: Bargaining for the Common Good, Visiting Scholars Tagged With: ACORN, Bargaining for the Common Good, Fight for 15, John Russo, Sherry Linkon, Teachers, Wade Rathke, WCP, Working-Class Perspectives

January 22, 2016 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

OVERTIME: Labor Stories of the Week (Jan 22, 2016)

Will the snowstorm keep you hunkered down all weekend? Catch up on some vital labor stories from the week.

Silencing students who speak out for workers. Four Loyola University Chicago students face disciplinary proceedings for demonstrating in solidarity with Aramark dining staff on their campus who seek fair pay and decent health care. Support these students by signing their petition calling for the charges to be dropped.

How to combat Friedrichs. Dr. Joseph McCartin makes the case that organized labor can survive attacks on collective bargaining by standing up for the broader common good and taking on the corporate interests that loot our communities.

Blessed be the adjuncts. America Magazine reports on Jesuit schools’ growing reliance on contingent faculty, the struggle of adjuncts to improve working conditions, and whether Catholic social teaching on labor informs university practices.

Protect female farmworkers. More than anyone, female farmworkers are vulnerable to sexual violence yet have little recourse or support. There are several steps we can take to protect them.

Captive no more! 106 labor experts, including KI Director Joe McCartin, petitioned the NLRB to drastically reform the rules for captive-audience meetings, which allow management to corner workers into rejecting unionization.

With no one to the rescue, teachers take a stand. Teachers called in sick in mass to protest the crumbling, destitute state of Detroit public school buildings and the danger they pose to students and teachers alike.

Child labor made your smartphone? Amnesty International finds that children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo that are as young as seven are mining for cobalt in life-threatening conditions.

You can’t outsource your responsibility to workers. The Department of Labor is putting companies who hire temps on notice; under a new guidance, they can be found responsible for labor abuses even when they are not the direct employer.

Wall Street over people? While the budget impasse in Illinois has held up funding for everyone from college students to domestic violence victims, the state continues to pay banks millions of dollars every month for toxic deals of dubious legality. What that says about our financial system is even more alarming.

Overall, it’s a striking illustration of the brutal efficiency of the big banks at extracting every possible ounce of profit. Through recklessness and fraud, they crashed the economy, costing millions of people their jobs and their homes. For this they were rewarded with a trillion-dollar government bailout. Then, as cities and states struggled with the fallout from the crisis, slashing services to their most needy residents, the banks picked their pockets to pull out an additional few billion, just because they could.

Maybe they can get away with it, but it certainly seems worthwhile putting up a fight to stop them.

Where the Big Short comes short. While the real culprits in the financial meltdown never paid for their crimes, some groups are fighting to hold Wall Street accountable and empower communities.

Filed Under: In the News Tagged With: Aramark, Child labor, Department of Labor, Interest rate swaps, Jesuit Values, Joseph A. McCartin, Loyola University Chicago, NLRB, Overtime, Public Education, Sexual violence, Teachers, the Big Short, Wall Street

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Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor develops creative ideas and practical solutions for working people that are grounded in a commitment to justice, democracy, and the common good.
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Washington, DC 20057
202.687.2293

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