Race, class, politics, and the disappearance of work

ABSTRACT

“When Work Disappears” has shaped research agendas on poverty, racial hierarchy, and urban social and economic dynamics. That is a lot for one article, yet two issues warrant more analysis. They are the ways in which socially defined “race” – rather than or in combination with class – explains the impact of sustained joblessness, and the political behaviours that may emerge in response to work’s disappearance. I point to evidence showing that both race and class have independent associations with the loss of work in poor African-American communities, as well as interactive effects. In the political arena – too often neglected by sociologists studying poverty – sustained, community-wide joblessness or underemployment are associated both with withdrawal from political engagement and with the recent resurgence of right-wing populism. Even after several decades of intensive research, we have more to learn about the interactions of race, class, politics, and the disappearance of work.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• class
• mobility
• populism
• politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Over the same period, “black non-Hispanics and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged sixty-five and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall” (Case and Deaton 2015, 15,078).

2 Commuting zones (CZs) are “geographical aggregations of counties that are similar to metro areas but cover the entire United States, including rural areas” (Chetty et al. 2014, 1,555–1,556). Because demographic data are not available for commuting zones, I am treating them as though they are the census bureau's Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSA's), about which we have a good deal of information. This substitution would be too inexact for any deep analysis. But it suffices to permit my observations and queries in this commentary about relationships among race, ethnicity, poverty, and mobility in the United States. Chetty et al. compare CZs to SMSAs (that is, restrict their analysis to urban areas) at various points in their analysis, and the findings are very similar.

3 As of 2014, the Gini index was 0.499 for blacks, 0.469 for non-Hispanic whites, 0.463 for Asians, and 0.455 for Hispanics (who may be of any race). The Gini index has been higher – that is, there has been greater income inequality – within the African-American population than within any other conventionally defined American racial or ethnic group since 1972, when the comparable series first began. www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/TableH-4.

4 Those factors are, within each CZ, the fraction of the population with a short commute as a measure of income or racial segregation, income inequality of the bottom ninety-nine per cent, the high-school dropout rate, a social capital index, and the proportion of families with single mothers.

5 Chetty et al. concur (1,558) that “all of these variables are endogenously determined”.

6 As Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told supporters in a Detroit suburb,

You’ve been reading the same stories as I’ve been reading, so go to your place and vote, and then go pick some other place, and go sit there with your friends and make sure it's on the up and up. Because you know what? That's a big, big problem in this country, and nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody has the guts to talk about it. So go and watch these polling places. Make sure it's on the up and up. Please. That would be one hell of a way to lose.”

He issued the same call a day later in Pennsylvania (Johnson 2016).

7 The finding of an unusually high level of economic insecurity among very affluent Trump supporters holds up even with controls for race, age, gender, education, other demographic factors, and zip-code level controls for various measures of economic well-being (Rothwell 2016, 10).