Symbolic violence and the neighbourhood: the educational aspirations of 7-8 year old working-class girls

This article focuses on the experiences of 7-8 year old working-class girls in Belfast, Northern Ireland and their attitudes towards education. It shows how their emerging identities tend to emphasize relationships, marriage and motherhood at the expense of a concern with education and future careers. The article suggests that one important factor that can help explain this is the influence of the local neighbourhood. In drawing upon Bourdieu's concepts of symbolic violence and habitus and Elias' notion of figuration, the article shows how the local neighbourhood represents the parameters of the girls' social worlds. It provides the context within which the girls tend to focus on social relations within their community and particularly on family relationships, marriage and children. It also provides the context within which the girls tend to develop strong interdependent relationships with their mothers that also tend to encourage and reinforce the girls' particular gendered identities. The article concludes by arguing that there is a need for more research on working-class girls and education to look beyond the school to incorporate, more fully, an understanding of the influence of the family and local neighbourhood on their attitudes towards education and their future career aspirations.     

ISLANDS, INDEXATION AND MONETARY POLICY

This paper develops a synthesized macroeconomic model that incorporates the local-global informational asymmetries of an "islands" economy into a setting characterized by endogenous wage indexation. In such an economy, agents are unable both to filter out the separate influences of demand and supply shocks on observed output prices and to distinguish between the separate price effects of local and aggregate disturbances, so that optimal wage indexation depends upon both the variances of supply and demand disturbances and the information-conditioned forecasts of agents. As a result, optimal monetary policy generally depends upon the variances of local and aggregate supply and demand.     

DOMESTIC WORK, FAMILY CHARACTERISTICS, AND EARNINGS:

Using the 1996 Indiana Quality of Employment Survey, we reexamine gender and class differences in the effects of domestic work and family characteristics on earnings. We expand upon Coverman's (1983) original model by including several new measures. We find that the gender gap in domestic work has narrowed considerably, not because men are doing more but because women are doing less than they were twenty years ago. Women's earnings suffer more than men's from time spent on domestic work and generally benefit more from partners' domestic help. Women's earnings are more advantaged than men's by having preschool children, and men's earnings are more advantaged when their partner works. We find significant class differences in the effects of domestic work between working-class and non-working class women and in the effects of family characteristics between working-class and non-working class men. Non-working class women's earnings suffer more from time they put into domestic work, but their earnings generally benefit more from partners' or outside domestic help. Working-class men's earnings are more advantaged by having school-age children and more disadvantaged by having progressive gender ideologies. Non-working class men's earnings benefit more when their partners hold a job but suffer more as their partners work more hours.     

Unions and unequal pay: The establishment of the “family wage”

Equal pay laws in many OECD countries establish the right of men and women to equal pay for work of equal value. Nevertheless, during the first half of the 20th century, before the enactment of equal pay laws, employers and unions in several countries promoted unequal pay through “family wage” arrangements. This article seeks to improve understanding of the historical and sociological origins of “family wage” arrangements through both comparative research and in‐depth historical archival research on family wage arrangements in Israel. It shows that unions played a complex role in promoting family wage arrangements. While their action refected their patriarchal understanding of society, they were also guided by socialist principles.     

Renegotiating family gender identities in a disadvantaged Atlantic Canadian working-class community: young adults' perspectives

Within a climate of reduced social welfare support, disadvantaged working-class communities in Canada are in transition as they consider their futures without the industries that were once the staples of their economies. In this paper, I examine how a group of young women and men living in Industrial Cape Breton – a disadvantaged Atlantic Canadian working-class community – negotiate the traditional gendered identities ascribed to them through local history with twenty-first-century conceptions of family and gender. Young adults in this study suggest that class-based and gender-based capital plays a significant role in how these changes are experienced by individuals, families, and communities. Furthermore, the social, economic, and psychological expenses for individuals attempting to secure economic comfort and gendered respectability in their disadvantaged communities leave little time and energy to critically reflect on the systemic social and economic conditions that enable class-based gender inequalities to thrive. As a result, traditional concepts of the masculine family ‘breadwinner’ and the feminine family ‘caregiver’ survive even as the societal basis for these roles is eroded by global capitalism.     

The illegal alien work force,demand for unskilled labor,and the minimum wage

Estimates of the illegal alien work force, employment, and the number employed below the legal minimum wage are not available, but are often required for the study of a variety of public policy issues, e.g., immigration and refugee policy, and policy towards the monitoring of minimum wage laws. This paper attempts to fill this void by developing estimates of these quantities. Of equal importance, however, is determining what light this and other related evidence throws upon the oft-expressed view that the demand for unskilled labor at below-legal-minimum wage rates is virtually inelastic. Evidence is presented which contradicts this belief. I am grateful to Janet Hunt and Richard H. Timberlake, Jr. for valuable comments but I absolve them of responsibility for any errors.     

Ethnographic Study of Gay and Bisexual Working-Class Men in the United States

SUMMARY

Thirty-nine working-class gay and bisexual men were interviewed using ethnographic techniques to better understand their resilience in light of homophobia, heterosexism, classism, AIDS, violence and discrimination. Several themes emerged: heterosexual assumption, sense of difference, socialized to hide, gay identity confusion, coming-out as an ongoing process, managing stigma, conflict with religion, family support, relationships, self-concept, working-class attitudes, and drug and alcohol abuse.     

“Flexible Citizenship” or Familial Ties that Bind? Singaporean Transmigrants in London

Easier travel and communication technologies, together with the global demand and supply labour market exchanges occurring under post-Fordist capitalism, create the conditions that make transnational family formations more common than before. Geographically dispersed family members are governed by different citizenship regimes that affect familial interactions and the possibility of family reunification. Such family formations have significant implications for the nation-state framework and the way that citizenship is practised in a transnational world. Singapore, a young city-state in Southeast Asia, provides an insightful case-study to examine migrant motivations and citizenship behaviour. The political leaders in Singapore represent the nation-state's internationalising drive – which includes encouraging Singaporeans to live and work overseas for a period of time – and its domestic nation-building goals as strategies that are both necessary and yet in tension with one another.
This paper draws on discourse analysis to examine the ways in which the Singaporean state plays upon familial logics and citizenship regulations as one of its strategies to bind overseas citizens to the country. I also employ findings from in-depth interviews with Singaporean transmigrants in London to discuss the manner in which the above considerations frame their decisions on migration and citizenship. In doing so, I argue that research on migration and the transnational family should consider how they both articulate and are in turn articulated by the nation-state. I then show how my research results have important implications for citizenship policymaking in a transnational world, particularly with respect to gendered familial discourses and nation-building processes. I also suggest that my research findings indicate areas for further academic enquiry into the morphology, strategies and temporality of transnational family formations.     

Time,Space, and Memories

ABSTRACT

This article traces the ways that gendered and generational family practices were remembered across time in the context of working-class homes in Victorian Britain. Two everyday domestic objects—the father's chair and the grandfather clock—are examined and analyzed, drawing on John Gillis' work on ritualized family spaces and contested notions of time (Gillis 1996). Both these objects resonate with the contested use of domestic space and the layered meanings of family time in working-class lives, not least because both are often remembered in autobiographical accounts of home and family. The special place of the father's chair highlighted the feminizing of the home and accompanying development of rituals to welcome and ensconce the father in his domestic domain each day. The sound of clocks underpinned the bringing together of industrial time, separating leisure and work for those at school or employment away from home, and at the same time conveying the cyclical nature of family life and its everyday routines from day to day, year to year, and generation to generation. Memories of chairs and clocks embedded in autobiographies offer important evidence about the images, sounds, and sensory experiences that resonated most powerfully when remembering and composing the hierarchies and tensions of working-class family life.     

Trapped workers,urban freedoms and labor control in Brazilian agriculture: Evidence from Southwest Goiás

Labor entrapment in Brazilian agriculture is not limited to ‘marginal geographies’ or sectors, but is a troubling presence at the core of some of the country's most developed and urbanized agricultural regions. This paper looks at the conditions of labor resistance and control in a dynamic and highly urbanized agricultural region of central Brazil that may explain the use there by employers of entrapped workers from distant regions. Commercial agriculture is intensely seasonal and sensitive to the quality and timing of delivery, so the fulfillment of labor demand continues to be a central concern of rural employers despite arguments for surplus labor. In the context of rural exodus, Brazilian farmers can no longer count on a flexible supply of residential workers. The article considers the importance of two ‘urban freedoms’ derived from the migration of rural workers to cities during the last 35 years. One is the increasing presence of labor unions and regulation in wage markets. The other is the creative strategies that households develop to weaken their dependence on agricultural work. To understand these strategies, gender relations within and outside of the household are taken into account. The paper ends by critically examining the argument that wage compression is the reason that employers in Brazilian agriculture resort to labor replacement in dynamic regions.     

LABOR IMMOBILITY AND THE FORMATION OF GENDER WAGE GAPS IN LOCAL MARKETS

Family ties have an important effect on the wage gap between male and female workers because wives are often more geographically tied to their husband's location, which may not be the best market for the wife's skills. Theory implies a testable inverse relationship between urban size—reflecting labor market size—and male-female wage differentials. Our results indicate that the wage gap between married men and women narrows with urban size. About 17 percent of the wage gap between married men and women can be accounted for by urban size—or, more fundamentally, by geographic immobility due to the family tie constraint.     

Caught Between Love and Money: The Experiences of Paid Family Caregivers

This paper considers the experiences of family home care providers, paid an hourly wage by California’s In Home Supportive Services program to care for disabled or elderly relatives. These caregivers are unique in that they provide care in what Arlie Hochschild calls the “third sector” of social life, where norms and responsibilities tied to work and family intersect. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of family home care providers, we find that providers perceive their paid caregiving as deviant behavior that violates social norms surrounding family care, i.e. that people should not be paid for the care of kin. Family caregivers manage the norm violation associated with their carework by offering “accounts” that 1) emphasize the tasks and skill associated with caregiving and 2) by framing their carework as a public good that benefits the larger community. These accounts allow family providers to distance themselves from the norm violation of receiving a wage for care and to reconstruct their actions in a positive light.     

Policing a menstrual monster: how working class girls discuss their menstrual reactions and experiences

Much of the research on menarche and menstruation has been conducted with white, middle-class, heterosexual participants. The purpose of this study was to investigate among a group of urban, working-class participants how social identities shape girls’ construction of their preparation for menarche, emotional responses to the event, and subsequent menstrual maintenance practices. Fifteen adolescent girls (ages 11–16) participated in flexible in-depth interviews meant to explore their family and life history, their menarcheal experiences and menstrual practices, and transition to womanhood more broadly. Thematic analysis of the data revealed three significant themes highlighting how participants made sense of menstruation. Participants discussed a culture of silence around menstruation which contributed to their feeling poorly prepared for menarche; noted negative and uncontrollable emotional reactions to menstruation; and expressed embodied suffering and efforts to engage in self-policing in order to take back a perceived loss of control of their bodies. It is argued that more research taking into consideration how social identities can impact the experience of menarche is needed to create sensitive and informed education that targets the unique needs of working-class adolescents.     

The impact of deregulation on labor demand in class-I railroads

This paper examines the impact of the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 on labor demand in Class-I railroads during 1961–1990. The demand for labor is a function of output, hourly wage rates, a time trend, and a vector of interactive dummy variables. Since deregulation, the labor demand curve has shifted downward; wage elasticities have become more elastic, ranging from −0.668 in 1980 to −1.187 in 1990; output elasticities trended upward from 0.557 to 0.809; and the marginal product of labor rose from 3.421 to 5.296 during 1980–1990. These findings suggest that unions’ bargaining power has declined, that the total wage bill is likely to decrease if the real wage rate rises further, and that cost savings and efficiency gains are realized through increases in the marginal product of labor. We thank an anonymous referee and Henry McFarland for insightful comments and assistance.     

DIFFERENT CLASSES,DIFFERENT FATHERS?

This paper discusses how social class and different economic conditions influence men's parenting. The paper is based on a qualitative study of 30 Swedish couples who live together with their biological children. The study shows that, despite the generosity of the Swedish welfare state and family subsidies, both internal and external economic conditions affect the way men construct their fatherhood. This was shown most clearly in the couples’ discussions around parental leave where parents under economic pressure often distributed the leave in a gender-traditional way. It was also apparent how traditional class patterns and structures still have a strong influence on today's parenthood. Fathers in working-class households often saw fatherhood as creating meaning in their lives and saw the process of becoming a parent as an explicit aspiration to establish something ‘natural’, well known and predictable. Fathers in middle-class households, on the other hand, considered fatherhood as something new, a reflexive project or an opportunity to develop their identity and to get to know new sides of themselves. In practice, these different ways of creating meaning in fatherhood are illustrated by the finding that working-class fathers tend to take up fewer parental leave days and uphold more traditional patterns of family life than fathers in middle-class households.     

Individual vs. household determinants of the demand for medical care: A study of rural families

This article investigates, from a household perspective, the demand for medical care. Earlier (economic) studies have typically focused on individual utilization patterns; however, the data set employed here allows for an investigation of the role of other family members on individual demand. The theoretical results suggest that the labor force status (via the wage rate) of one family member may, in addition to influencing that person's rate of medical care use, effect the utilization of other household members. Separate physician visit demand equations are estimated for husbands, wives, and the household unit. The empirical results indicate that the wife's (full) cost of receiving medical care is a significant determinant of utilization by both the husband and other family members. Overall, the findings suggest that demand studies should take the presence of other household members and family structure into consideration when analyzing the determinants of individual medical care utilization.This study was supported in part by grant no. 1R03 HSO 2417-01 from the National Center for Health Services Research, HHS.Laurence Miners received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently an Associate Professor at Fairfield University and his research interests are focused mainly in the areas of health and labor economics. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Laurence Miners, Department of Economics, Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT 06430.     

The Global Welfare Economics of Immigration

We study the effect of immigration on global welfare. The world is modeled as consisting of two regions, South and North, the former populated by low-skill workers, and the latter by both low- and high-skill workers. Production in the North uses both labor inputs in a complementary way. A trade union in the North keeps the wage of low-skill workers above the Walrasian wage, generating unemployment of low-skill workers. Northern citizens fund unemployment benefits for workers through taxation. Immigration from South to North has two effects in the North: a mixed native-foreign working-class lowers union power, because of reduced solidarity among low-skill workers, and hence it lowers the mark-up on the Walrasian wage that the union is able to negotiate. It also lowers the solidarity between employed citizens and the unemployed (as the latter, now, consist in part of non-natives) and thus the unemployment benefit, set by a democratic process, falls. We calculate the optimal levels of immigration, from the viewpoint of an observer who maximizes global welfare, according to an egalitarian and a utilitarian social welfare function. We compare these levels to the open-borders-equilibrium level. We find that the optimal level of immigration for the cosmopolitan egalitarian is significantly less than the open-borders equilibrium level, while the optimal level for a global utilitiarian is significantly greater than the open-borders level.     

Two Components of Wage Gaps Induced by Individual-level Variables: Intra-firm or Inter-firm?

Individual-level variables such as gender, education, occupation, and employment type are well-known factors that induce wage gaps in the labor market. This article aims to divide wage gaps into two components—those arising within each firm (the intra-firm wage gap) and those arising between different firms (the inter-firm wage gap)—and measure their respective proportions by individual-level variables, as studies suggest that each wage gap based on an individual-level variable has a unique mix of an intra-firm and inter-firm wage gap. This measurement can help enrich investigation into the generative process of wage gaps and formulate effective labor policies to reduce them. Accordingly, we compared the coefficients of the independent variables of the wage function estimated by a pooled ordinary least squares model and a fixed-effect model, using nationwide employer–employee matching data collected by the Japanese government. We found that wage gaps by gender and employment type mostly consist of intra-firm wage gaps, and those by education and occupation have a larger share of inter-firm wage gaps. The findings suggest that different research strategies are required to investigate the generative process of each wage gap, and that regulations on and interventions in organizational processes are important to reduce wage gaps based on gender and employment type.     

Anti-Discrimination vs. Anti-Poverty? A Comparison of Pay Equity and Living Wage Reforms

SUMMARY

Welfare reform focuses attention on the potential of pay equity and living wage strategies to move women out of the ranks of the working poor. In this study, we use data from a large municipality in the Northeast to simulate implementation of the two policies and compare their relative effectiveness in raising the earnings of female- and minority-dominated jobs, narrowing gender- and race-based earnings differentials, and lifting workers out of poverty. Results show that pay equity raises salaries across-the-board, but especially among low-skilled and minority-dominated jobs, and closes the wage gap. Both pay equity and living wage dramatically reduce the incidence of poverty; living wage, however, leaves virtually untouched the type of discrimination targeted by pay equity and has little impact on the wage gap. The implications of these results for addressing the needs of women transitioning off public assistance and wage justice are discussed. We conclude that both policies should be an integral part of welfare reform efforts, as well as key planks in an overall wage justice strategy.     

UNCERTAINTY AND STICKY-DOWNWARD BUT UPWARD-MOBILE WAGES

The usual search models of unemployment hold that firms do not offer wage cuts to employees in time of slack demand because the employees have alternatives open to them at wages higher than the reduced wage that would be required to maintain full employment. This paper extends these models by considering employees as choosing in conditions of uncertainty and showing that refusal to accept a wage cut is often rational in the absence of a higher alternative wage. Additional implications are derived for union behavior and simultaneous inflation and unemployment.