Twenty-Five Years of Dissent: An American Tradition by Irving Howe

Author:Irving Howe [Howe, Irving]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781032045498
Google: dko8zgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 57283528
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1979-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The point is that work performed by the manual occupations—the “working class,” after all—comes closer to the intuitive notion of work as a strenuous, exhausting, burdensome task than that performed by their social betters. It is an “energy intensive” activity; and if one measures work by the energy spent, then the laborer may outwork his boss even when putting in fewer hours.

Even so, the number of hours worked is the best single measure of work we have. (This is so because time units are easy to apply to any activity, and are more “objective” than, say, energy expenditure or productivity.) By this criterion, who works more? The evidence is skimpy. Government employment statistics indicate that the poor are more likely to be unemployed. But unemployment rates are calculated as a percentage of the labor force—those working or looking for work—and labor-force participation may vary by class. Fortunately, our above-mentioned Houston survey data contained information about the respondents’ work habits, and enabled us to compare the poor and nonpoor irrespective of labor-force participation.

Our findings were that among men, the black and Anglo poor were less likely to be employed than the nonpoor (68 percent vs. 86 percent for blacks; 53 percent vs. 83 percent for Anglos), a matter of 18 and 30 points difference, respectively. Among Mexican American men, 86 percent of the poor vs. 91 percent of the nonpoor were employed: no statistically significant difference. Nor was there an appreciable difference, among employed men of all three groups, in the number of hours worked by the poor and the nonpoor. Among women, there was no significant difference by poverty status in hours of housework performed by either Mexican Americans or Anglos. Poverty-status black women put in more hours of housework than other black women—and more hours than nonpoor Anglo women. Moreover, when various kinds of activities besides employment in the narrow sense of full-time paid labor were lumped together—such as looking for work, and going to school—there was no significant difference between the poor and the nonpoor in any ethnic or sex category. Our findings therefore raise questions, not only about the allegedly unequal distribution of the culture of shiftlessness, but about the poor’s tendency to work less. I am unaware of other studies with similar controls that compare the poor and nonpoor in this manner.

Comparisons between the rich and the nonrich are also sparse. Our Houston sample did not contain any rich people, as distinguished from middle-class respondents. Mills presented data on the “very rich” in The Power Elite, published in 1956. His sample consisted of three generations of the ninety or so reputedly richest people in the country in 1900, 1925, and 1950. Although Mills interpreted his findings as supporting his earlier contention that “the very rich in America are not an idle rich and never have been,” it turns out that 26 percent of his 1950 group were, in his words, “rentiers and not much else.” Moreover, the percentage of idle rich had increased from 14 percent in 1900 to 17 percent in 1925 and to 26 percent in 1950.

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