class

Jamal Spencer, a student in Naomi Glogower’s sociology class at Michigan State University, sent in the following promotion for Black History Month, courtesy of the Los Angeles Clippers (source):

Spencer makes two interesting points. First, Black History Month is in February. Oops. Second, and more importantly, notice that the promotion includes admitting “1,000 underprivileged children free.” It is assuming that “Black” is coterminous with “underprivileged,” erasing middle and upper class Blacks and poor Whites. In fact, about half of poor people are White and about 75% of Black people are not poor. This promotion, however, strengthens the conception that the poor are Black, a conception that contributes to the (racist) maligning of and restriction of benefits for the poor. Happy Black History Month indeed.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The word “proletariat” “proletarian” refers to a member of the working class of a capitalist society, or the “proletariat.”  Combining the word with “precarious,” economist Guy Standing coined the term “precariat” to try to describe the reality of low wage workers in our modern, global economy.

In the ten-minute segment below, sent in by Jordan G., an interview with Standing is complimented by interviews with workers and activists in Britain.  He explains that new international labor markets have weakened the power of labor and strengthened that of employers.  The result is more jobs that are part time, with unpredictable hours, low wages, and few benefits.  This has been good for employers in that the risk inherent in capitalist enterprises has been transferred to the workers.  For example, if the hotel isn’t full, then the managers simply bring in fewer housekeepers.  This is hard on housekeepers, but easy on hotels.  Workers’ lives, then, are increasingly precarious, thus the term “precariat.”

Found at The Guardian via Global Sociology.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

An infographic accompanying an article at the New York Times reveals how “advanced economies” compare on various measures of equality, well-being, educational attainment, and more.  To illustrate this, for each measure countries that rank well are coded tan, countries that rank poorly and very poorly are coded orange and red respectively, and countries that are in the middle are grey.  The countries are then ranked from best to worst overall, with Australia coming in #1 and the United States coming in last.  You might be surprised how some of these countries measure up.

Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for the link.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Dolores R., Kelly, and Elyse all sent links to a new website, PlaySpent, designed to help people understand the challenges and trade-offs faced by low-income people with insecure employment.  The “game” begins when you’ve been unemployed, have only $1,000 left in your bank account, and need to get a low wage job.

I failed the typing test (seriously), so I got a job as a warehouse worker:

The site asked me if I wanted to pay for health insurance:

The site then asks me to find a place to live, balancing gas costs:

And it asks the player to choose between things your children need/want and your budget:

And then, of course, there’s groceries:

And the game goes on…

The site would be an excellent internet field trip for students in sociology classes or anyone who wants to better understand the many trade-offs that poor people are forced to make and the difficulty in making ends meet when you’re part of the working poor.

Says Kelly:

I thought this was an interesting tool to highlight the difficult choices that low-income families have to make.  It also points out how our society often disadvantages the lower class, such as how I was charged a fee for going below the minimum balance in my account, or by telling me how long it would take to pay off credit card debt only paying the minimum balance.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Via Shamus Khan, I found the Economic Policy Institute’s interactive graph that lets you see which Americans have earned most of the growth (or, more recently, suffered the losses) in U.S. incomes over time, based on IRS data (and reported in constant 2008 dollars):

You can select beginning and ending points and find out how incomes changed during that period and how the growth was distributed. For instance, the increase in average incomes between 1950 and 1960 were widely distributed:

If we look at the 10-year span between 1995 and 2005, the increase was much more concentrated among the very wealthy:

The data come from a study on historical income in equality in the U.S. by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. They compare the share of income earned by the richest 0.1% of earners in the U.S., France, and the U.K.:

See our previous posts on Saez’s work here and here.

I recently came across the guideline that was used to calculate how much money was to be paid out to the victims of the attacks on September 11. This was a fund that was set up by the US government partly because of the scale and the unprecedented nature of the September 11th attacks and partly to diminish the amount of lawsuits that the airlines would receive.

According to the New York Times article it goes as follows:

1. Economic loss.
2. Set amounts for pain and suffering: $250,000, plus $100,000 for each surviving spouse and child.
3. Subtract any life insurance paid.

Along with the rubric, The Times also included a chart that showed the amount of payouts that took place as of 2007:

Putting a price on a life is already a difficult concept to parse through. So I am not taken back that the people in charge actually found a price for each of the victims (some compensation had to be made for those individuals who now found themselves without the sole or part-earner in the household).

What I am taken back by is the stratification of how the payouts were dispersed. Who is to say a person makes no income is worth less than a person who makes 4 million and up? Who is to say females are worth less than males? Who is to say that food workers are worth less than individuals who work in finance?

I get the aspect that a person who was a blue collar worker or someone of no income will get less of a payout than a white collar worker or someone who was making $4 million based on the first guideline “economic loss”. But even that argument doesn’t hold much weight as that the food worker might be the next JK Rowling or that person of no income could be the next Bill Gates. Why would it not account for ability not yet realized? We are a meritocratic republic aren’t we?!

Even in a national tragedy like the attacks on September 11 we can’t seem to follow through on the belief that we are a classless society. These payouts are, unfortunately, the reality of the extreme stratification that we hide when we, as a society, claim that we are classless.

AFTER THE JUMP: STEVE GRIMES RESPONDS TO THE COMMENTS THREAD…

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