work

As a white woman between 25 and 44 with a college degree, I am the least likely category of person to be unemployed according to an interactive graphic detailing the joblessness rate for people according to their race, education level, age, and sex (since Jan. ’07).  It is a rather devastating look at social inequality.  I recommend visiting the site to see for yourself, but below are some screen shots with some comparisons.

For comparison, the overall joblessness rate which, as of Sept., was at 8.6 percent:

The joblessness rate for white people (notice it is lower by 1.4 percent):

The joblessness rate for black people is almost twice that of whites:

Let’s add education level.

The joblessness for whites who have not yet graduated from high school is 17.5 percent:

The joblessness for comparative blacks is 10 percentage points higher.  Notice that the scale on the right hand side has changed from 0-20 percent (above) to 0-50 percent:

If we look at young blacks (15-24 years old) who haven’t been able to complete a high school degree, the joblessness rate is 42.7 percent:

If we restrict the numbers to young black men without a diploma, we see a whopping joblessness rate of 48.5 percent.

For comparison, here is the same kid, but white (the joblessness rate is cut in half, but is still huge, even by recession standards):

Ever wonder why young men turn to the underground economy?  Well, this is why.  Somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of them can’t get a job in the “above ground” economy.  What’s a kid to do?  Add in the rational choice of choosing work that pays more than minimum wage, and you’ve got a whole group of young people who participate in illegal activities.

Then, of course, we police black neighborhoods more aggressively than white neighborhoods, convict black people more frequently than white people, and send them to prison more often and with longer sentences (see also this post).

And, too add insult to injury, after all is said and done, a black person without a criminal record is less likely to get a job interview than a white person with one.  A black person with a criminal record: his chance of getting a call back after dropping off a resume (even at a place like McDonalds) is something like five percent.  No I’m not joking.

<sarcasm>Oh, but if they just had a good attitude and learned to talk right, they too could be successful in this life.</sarcasm>

It’s almost too much to bear.

Via Matthew Yglesias.

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.

Sociologists have noted that race and gender have been more politicized in the U.S. than class.  In contrast, class is highly politicized in Europe, leading to a much stronger labor movement.   The weak labor movement in the U.S. is partly to blame for the stingy federal policies around vacation and holidays.  The U.S. federal government dictates that employees are given exactly zero paid holiday and vacation days a year (that means, if you get such things, it is because your employer is being generous/in a benefits arms race with other employers).  This is in stark contrast to most other OECD countries:

Yep, that’s right.  In every country included except Canada and Japan (and the U.S.), workers get at least 20 paid vacation days.  In France and Finland, they get 30… an entire month off, paid, every year.

When I show figures like these (and there are many of them, parental leave, work hours, military spending, class inequality, etc) to my students, they are STUNNED.  Most Americans are woefully ignorant of how pro-business U.S. policies are compared to the policies of like countries.  I think this ignorance contributes to the resistance many Americans display when politicians and activists talk about improving protections for workers.

Gin and Tacos:

We’re a nation of people working harder and harder for less and less, and the merest suggestion that we should do anything other than work 9 hour days without pause until we drop dead is met with cries of socialism…

The quality of life of a typical American certainly suffers from our ignorance of life in other nations.  If we were more aware of what a strong labor movement could offer, we might be more supportive of those movements.

I’ve always loved this bumper sticker:

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.

Nicolé L.-G. sent along a story on Jezebel about a new policy that Whole Foods is offering to its employees.  Whole Foods has heretofore offered a 20% discount to all employees but, from now on, employees who are willing to undergo surveillance of a selection of body measures (blood pressure, cholesterol tests, and BMI calculations) and refrain from nicotine use, can try to qualify for better discounts:

Whole Foods specifies that you are only allowed the discount that correlates with your “worst” measure.  So, even if you’re a non-smoker with 110/70 blood pressure and <150 or LDL <80 cholesterol, if you have a BMI of 30 or higher, you’re stuck at the “Bronze” level.

As has been discussed on this blog, and excellently at Shapely Prose, BMI does not translate directly into “health.”  But Nicolé did a great job offering some additional analysis of this policy.  She wrote:

…according to the popular media’s perception of weight management, eating healthy (whole) foods is one of the best ways to achieve health, so why make it easier (cheaper) for already “healthy” people to continue eating healthy and make it harder (more expensive) for “unhealthy” people to eat better quality food? I wonder how the employees with a healthy (thin) appearance would have felt if the increased discount was given to those with bad cholesterol, higher BMI’s and high blood pressure?!

Then there’s the idea that your employer will now be keeping track of your health information! It supports the idea that our bodies and weight (across genders) are being relegated to the role of either a commodity or liability for a company; useful for aiding or damaging the bottom-line. The way [CEO John] Mackay speaks of the collection of the “bio-marker” data as being cheap or expensive denotes a sense of ownership that the company then has over our physical autonomy that no company has a right to.

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.

Catherine L. sent in the following picture of a (gramatically incorrect?) ad in the window of a sportings good store in Wellesly, MA:

“Mothers’ hours” refers to those hours during which kids are in school.  The term reveals the assumption, or prescription, that it is women who take care of kids after school.

Of course, that a company is offering work to primary caretakers is actually quite nice and supportive of families.  But it would be entirely easy to instead say “parents’ hours” instead.  Still, it’s possible that employers would be suspicious of any man who wanted to work only part time and assume they were both bad fathers and bad workers.  Employers are known to discriminate against men who do not put their job before their family.

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.

American school children learn all about the U.S. gold rush in the Western part of the country. Goldmining was a speculative, but potentially highly rewarding endeavor and attracted, almost exclusively, adult men. But the entrepreneurship of gold mining (though not mining as wage work) is long gone in the U.S.  Still, gold is in high demand:  “The price of gold, which stood at $271 an ounce on September 10, 2001, hit $1,023 in March 2008, and it may surpass that threshold again” (source).  Who are the gold entrepreneurs today?  Where?  Under what economic conditions do they work?  And with what environmental impact?

I found hints to answers in a recent Boston.com slide show and a National Geographic article (thanks to Allison for her tip in the comments).  While there is still some gold mining in the U.S., there is gold mining, also, in developing countries and all kinds of people participate:

According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), there are between 10 million and 15 million so-called artisanal miners around the world, from Mongolia to Brazil. Employing crude methods that have hardly changed in centuries, they produce about 25 percent of the world’s gold and support a total of 100 million people…

Environmentally, gold is especially destructive.  The ratio of gold to earth moved is larger than in any other mining endeavor.

It makes me rethink whether I really want to buy gold (because, you know, I do that constantly, darling, constantly).  In fact, jewelry accounts for two-thirds of the demand.  In the comments, HP reminds me:

Gold (along with even more problematic metals) is found in pretty much all consumer electronics. It’s in your computer, your cellphone, your .mp3 player, your TV/stereo, etc. You’re buying gold all the time already, whether you know it or not.

UPDATE! A reader, Heather Leila, linked to a picture she took of gold prospecting in Suriname (at her own blog).  She writes:

The gold mines aren’t what you are thinking. They aren’t underground, you don’t carry a pick axe and a helmet. The garimpos are where the miners have dammed a creek and created large mud pits. The mud is pumped through a long pipe lined with mercury. The mercury attaches itself to the specks of gold and gets filtered out as the mud is poured into a different pit. The mercury is then burned off, while the gold remains. This is how it was explained to me. From the plane, they are exposed patches of yellow earth dotting the endless forest.

See also our posts on post-oil boom life and gorgeous photos of resource extraction by Edward Burtynsky.

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 stereotype that professors are more likely to be liberal than people in other occupations was confirmed by a recent study by sociologists Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse:

The study measured a number of reasons why college professors may be more liberal.  Among others, they argued that already liberal people may be drawn to academia because they perceive that academics are liberal.  That is, just as women are drawn to teaching and men to construction work because these jobs are gendered, academia is a politically-typed job that draws people who identify as liberal already.

They also speculate that the relative low pay, given the high educational attainment that the profession requires and high status that it brings, may lead professors to lean towards democratic principles of economic redistribution.  They write:

Deprived of economic success relative to those in the world of commerce, intellectuals are less likely to be invested in preserving the socioeconomic order, may turn toward redistributionist policies in hopes of reducing perceived status inconsistency, and may embrace unconventional social or political views in order to distinguish themselves culturally from the business classes (quoted here).

I think this is a fascinating and provocative question, even given Gross and Fosse’s excellent work, and one that I’ve wondered about many times.  Thoughts?

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.

Even the most cursory discussion of the history of women’s paid employment in the U.S. will include the importance of World War II, when the scarcity of men meant many jobs became available to women for the first time.

The U.S. wasn’t the only place this happened, of course. In the face of a massive attack by the Nazis, the Soviet Union allowed women to occupy combat positions, including setting up three regiments to fly night bombing raids (according to Wikipedia, it was the first nation to allow women to do so). The regiments became known as the Night Witches:

“We slept in anything we could find—holes in the ground, tents, caves—but the Germans had to have their barracks, you know. They are very precise. So their barracks were built, all in a neat row, and we would come at night, after they were asleep, and bomb them. Of course, they would have to run out into the night in their underwear, and they were probably saying,—Oh, those night witches!’ Or maybe they called us something worse. We, of course, would have preferred to have been called ‘night beauties,’ but, whichever, we did our job.”

Members of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment:

Lilya Litvyak:

In this video, Lidiya Gudovantseva recalls working as a sniper, including the first time she had to kill a German soldier and later being injured herself:

When the war ended, many women in the U.S. were pressured to leave their jobs; similarly, female Soviet soldiers found that opportunities for promotion dried up during peace time. They were apparently even barred from military colleges, closing off many positions to them altogether, though the military’s draft policies stipulated that women should be called up next time there was a war. Women served as a reserve labor force for the military, to be called up when needed (and praised on Soviet propaganda posters) but pushed out of the ranks to provide room for men the rest of the time.

Dan Ariely, in this great talk, describes some of his surprising research on cheating.

He finds that almost everyone will cheat, but only a little bit.  People are less likely to steal money, than other things (e.g., office supplies).  “Priming” works, too: If people are reminded to be moral, they are less likely to cheat.

If we see people we think are like us cheat, we are more likely to cheat than we would have otherwise (but we have the opposite reaction to cheaters that we see as not like us).  Ariely then applies his findings to the Enron scandal.

A fun and fascinating 16 and a half minutes:

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.