Pinched by Don Peck

Author:Don Peck [Peck, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-88654-5
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

7

UNDERCLASS: MEN AND FAMILY

IN A JOBLESS AGE

IN HIS 1996 BOOK, WHEN WORK DISAPPEARS, THE HARVARD SOCIOLOGIST William Julius Wilson connected the loss of jobs from inner cities in the 1970s to the social ills that overwhelmed many inner-city neighborhoods after that. “The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness,” he wrote, “are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which many people are poor and jobless. Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghetto neighborhoods—crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on—are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.”

In the mid-twentieth century, most urban black men were employed, many of them in manufacturing. But beginning in the 1970s, as factories moved out of the cities or closed altogether, unemployment began rising sharply. Between 1973 and 1987, the percentage of black men in their twenties working in manufacturing fell from roughly 37.5 percent to 20 percent. As inner cities shed manufacturing jobs, men who lived there, particularly those with limited education, had a hard time making the switch to service jobs. Service jobs and office work of course require different interpersonal skills and different standards of self-presentation from those that blue-collar work demands, and movement from one sector to the other can be jarring. What’s more, Wilson’s research shows, downwardly mobile black men often resented the new work they could find, and displayed less flexibility on the job than, for instance, women or first-generation immigrant workers. As a result, employers began to prefer hiring women and immigrants, and a vicious cycle of resentment, discrimination, and joblessness set in.

The community breakdown that followed—drinking and drug sales and addiction; an accelerating decline in the prevalence of nuclear families; the sclerosis of church groups and other social institutions—has been well documented. But it is nonetheless troubling, as an outsider, to witness everyday life in a nongentrified inner-city neighborhood today. In October 2010, I visited Kensington, a large, multiethnic neighborhood in Philadelphia, where the death rate of young black men during the early aughts was comparable to that of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and where it was plain to see how the neighborhood’s character and economy combined to stifle the life chances of its residents.

Storefront businesses are not altogether absent from Kensington; on and around the main strip is a collection of pawnshops, takeout restaurants, strip clubs, bail-bond offices, hair salons, and furniture-rental stores. But even at noon on a Monday, some of the more obvious signs of economic activity involved streetwalking prostitutes and “corner boys” just beginning to emerge from dilapidated row houses to sell drugs.

Many of those row houses once had screen doors and metal sashes, but metal can be sold for scrap, and the doors and sashes have mostly been taken. On one street, two women, working separately, pushed shopping carts filled with metal piping and other scavenged junk down the sidewalk. Other neighborhood women get work as babysitters or day-care providers or hairstylists; relatively few young men work regularly, at least in the formal economy.

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