American Notebook: Are Workers Middle Class?
Miller, S. M. & Riessman, Frank
Are workers becoming "middle class"? Is Fortune correct in describing workers as a "salariat" rather than a "proletariat"? A belief is spreading among social scientists and unionists that...
...This group is closest to middle-class standards both economically and socially...
...In a study of Michigan auto workers, Ely Chinoy found that half had "never thought of becoming a foreman or failed to mention foremanship" in discussing plans for the future...
...Unfortunately, in contemporary social science the allinclusive term "lower class" is generally used to refer to both workers and the true lower class...
...Photograph after photograph urge these claims—the stark save-money signs of gas stations in the country which seem like ironic cries for help, department stores beseeching YOU to remember your dead loved ones by buying a 69-cent white plastic-foam cross, neon-lit cowboy bars, lost young lovers in Chattanooga, couples sitting in shiny cars watching drive-in movies, people not knowing what to do with themselves when they are confronted by the week end—the list could be extended...
...Also review by Miller and Mishler, Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 1959...
...The suburban workers studied by Berger had not developed a middleclass style of life...
...Values are supposed simply to follow income: raise income and values will change...
...Is Fortune correct in describing workers as a "salariat" rather than a "proletariat...
...An important warning: The socalled "middle-class psychology" of workers which we have been describing cannot be taken as an adequate description of the actual psychology of the middle class...
...This contrast in attitudes is nicely illustrated in a story that circulated some years ago...
...Daniel Miller and Guy Swanson, Inner Conflict and Defense...
...Almost every issue of a major sociological journal will add to the list of class differences in attitudes and behavior, although the interpretation is often unreliable...
...Are workers becoming "middle class...
...Middle-class striving on the part of workers, if it existed, would have the following characteristics: 1) it would be central to their total pattern of behavior...
...3) Consumer Goods or Values...
...and a few had actually turned down the chance to move up to such a position...
...educational differences among workers are much more important than income variations...
...One respondent, for example, answered "yes" to the question, "Are you trying to get ahead...
...To be a member of a workers' family still means to live a "different" life...
...There is a quality of "EVERYMiddle Class...
...If a middle-class job is your goal it is a tremendous advantage to have been born middleclass...
...A quiet, lyrical moment like "Beaufort, South Carolina" is one example...
...The desire to improve one's economic position does not necessarily involve subscribing to middle-class ideals nor to the American mania of perpetual upward mobility...
...nor the "lower class" who are irregular members of the labor force in unskilled and service occupations...
...Do workers absorb middleclass values and strive for "success" as middle-class people do...
...Middle-class individuals do not use, and often frown upon, collective action as a means of self-advancement...
...By workers we refer to manual or blue-collar wage-earners...
...But the fact that most of these children come from workingclass families has been widely overlooked...
...Seymour M. Lipset and Reinhard Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society...
...Bennett Berger, Working Class Suburb...
...Hyman's analysis of public opinion data revealed that workers do not tend to value education—a major vehicle for advancement—as much as do middle-class persons...
...THING-ness" in Frank's America...
...Frank's America does not reach this mark...
...This is again an example of the environmentalistic fallacy: a description of influence is accepted as an adequate description of behavior...
...That mobility strivings can have a varied content was demonstrated to us in a small-scale study of workers we conducted a little while back...
...Joseph Kahl has written an article in which the difference between middle-class and working-class goals is explored...
...Religious behavior also differs: Protestant workers are much more likely to prefer active church services than are middle-class Protestants (Lipset...
...Drake and Cayton report the contemptuous attitude of lower and working-class Negroes towards "strivers and strainers...
...Workers improve the conditions of their life mainly through the collective action of their unions...
...Twenty-five per cent claimed they would definitely not want to be foremen...
...The enormous energy and activity of American life implicit in "Assembly line" and "Convention hall" represent, if inadequately, the restlessness and mobility which, properly directed, might take the country along a better course...
...We shall deal here with three atguments for the view that workers are becoming middle class: 1) objective conditions of life no longer distinguish workers from the middle class...
...But for the worker, this is much less true...
...But at least as important is the subjective outlook of the workers themselves...
...Business, professional and white-collar groups disagreed...
...Since the Russian success with their Sputnik, Americans have been made painfully aware that many of our most talented youngsters don't go to college...
...Their book is constructed around the differences which social class creates in personality...
...nel in the way middle-class children are...
...One can simply want to enjoy more of the good things of life for oneself and one's family, apart from matters of status or prestige...
...Different kinds of studies—some more reliable than others—all point to the same conclusion: "getting ahead" does not play as crucial a role in working-class life as it does in the middle class...
...Studies demonstrate that workers' children are rarely encouraged and accepted by school person...
...Herbert H. Hyman, "The Value Systems of Different Classes: A Social Psychological Contribution to the Analysis of Stratification," in Bendix and Lipset, eds., Class, Status and Power...
...The possession of that better home may, in turn, give the family higher prestige among neigh bors and friends...
...Being able to manage, that's getting ahead...
...and yet remain uninvolved in the to-What one may gather from current tal middle-class value system...
...1/ Objective Conditions For many craft workers income levels are good, especially when compared to those of lower white-collar employees...
...Some even expressed the idea that "the competitive game [to rise higher] was not worth the candle...
...Bennett Berger found among workers moving to a suburb (a locale that is regarded as a hotbed of statusstriving) that relatively few sought or would accept promotion...
...A worker may want a bigger income so that he can afford a more comfortable home...
...A belief is spreading among social scientists and unionists that in their middle age unions are becoming middle class...
...A few shots of the American jazz and painting worlds might have dramatized this potential...
...does not mean that they really have a middle-class standard of living...
...6) Proletariat, Salarlaf, or...
...Many studies reveal that workers and middle-class people differ in both crucial and non-crucial aspects of attitudes, beliefs, and behavior...
...Daniel Bell has reported that "the most bitter complaint of auto workers is that they have no way of knowing, from one week to the next, how many hours they will work in any given week...
...lower income and revolt occurs...
...In American life, living better—having an easier, more enjoyable life—simply involves having the things many middle-class people have...
...On the other hand, working-class families, despite low incomes, were among the first to buy television sets, not for the prestige-value but because TV was a highly economical and exciting form of entertainment...
...41 Middle-Class Hankering...
...Many workers, however, accept the union as their vehicle for getting ahead...
...The fact that workers now possess some of the things which were once thought to be exclusively middle-class property (e.g., automobiles, vacuum cleaners, high school education, etc...
...It is also true that the means used for getting ahead are different in the middle class and the working class...
...For both, of course, there is the expectation (frequently unrealized) of a higher income...
...In the steel industry between the middle of 1956 and the fall of 1958, semi-skilled workers had a 20 per cent, and unskilled workers a 25 per cent drop in employment...
...3) it would be individualistic, directed towards a personal rather than a group or collective achievement.* • Two objections to these criteria are that middle-class individuals living in an "other-directed" world do not pursue success, and that group means of achieving improvement are increasingly accepted by white-collar workers...
...21 A Profile of Success The available information indicates that the objective conditions of middleand working-class life continue to differ...
...But the content of this desire must be carefully clarified, for although the same terms are used by middle-class people, they may have entirely different connotations in working-class usage...
...he wants to start his own business in order to become his own boss, to get away from a foreman's controlling demands and to go his own way, free from...
...In this way they could hope to free themselves from the exhausting rhythms of the assembly line...
...and 8) the homogenization of attitudes and values which occurs in a mass society obliterates class differences...
...In a wealthy state like New York, about half of all children entering high school don't finish, and most of these dropouts are from the working and lower classes...
...Yet the wages of large groups of workers, in the South, in New England, and in "sick" industries are still very low...
...Seymour M. Lipset, Political Man...
...they rated "opportunities" much higher...
...He found that a majority of manual workers thought it more important for the government to guarantee every person "a decent and steady job and standard of living" than to make "certain that there are good opportunities for each person to get ahead on his own...
...We would expect these workers to imitate middleclass life and to adopt important middle-class symbols, for they come closest to the middle-class pattern of living...
...Only 25 per cent admitted to ever wanting 'advancement...
...Moreover, the "mobile" workingclass son is much more likely to end up as a poorly paid white-collar worker or the owner of a marginal small business, than is the middleclass son who stays in his own class...
...It is, instead, a place of impetus without direction, of activity without adequate psychic meaning, of loneliness and lethargy rather than privacy and a liberated personal life...
...Unemployment occurs more frequently among wage-earners than among white-collar workers, especially during the kinds of recessions we have come to know in recent years...
...August B. Hollingshead and Fredrich Redlich, Social Class and Mental Illness...
...In their report, Kornhauser, Sheppard and Mayer carefully depict the pattern of attitudes of the most highly skilled, best paid and best educated workers...
...We do not agree with the first point, which stems from the work of Riesman and These three conditions would have to be met before we could say that workers strive for middle-class status...
...On the other hand, about 70 per cent of the sons of middle-class fathers stay in the middle class...
...John Useem, Pierre Tangent and Ruth Useem, "Stratification in a Prairie Town," in Wilson and Kolb, eds., Sociological Analysis...
...August B. Hollingshead, Elmtown's Youth...
...Pierre Martineau, "Social Classes and Spending Behavior," Journal of Marketing, 1957...
...Workers always have a nagging fear of unemployment, for even during boom times many plants shut down temporarily or are closed because they cannot compete with newer, more efficient factories...
...Havighurst and Neugarten have pointed out that as middle-class goods become more accessible to workers, middle-class standards and prestige symbols change to include such new items as high-fl equipment, dishwashers and a college education...
...We use information about this "lower class" only when we think it applies to the working class and not merely to a statistical agglomerate of lower and working classes...
...Arthur Kornhauser, Harold Sheppard and Albert Mayer, When Labor Votes...
...A small research is that many workers have percentage of workers has an outlook a distinctive way of life: it centers on that may be called class-conscious...
...Miller and Swanson have concluded that workers and middle-class people have strikingly different basic life styles and ways of defending themselves psychologically...
...A great number of studies demonstrate that workers are much less likely than members of the middle class to join associations...
...These findings reveal a false assumption in the salariat argument...
...Joseph Kahl, "Educational and Occupational Aspirations of 'Common Man' Boys," Harvard Educational Review, 1953...
...at least three-quarters of the men were not interested in promotion...
...In suburbia, so the story went, many middle-class families, wanting to keep up with the Joneses, were putting up television antennas when they didn't have sets...
...In a very important study Richard Centers observed the same tendency...
...In citing various studies we do not necessarily defend their methodology or implications...
...To the middle class, if everyone is advancing then no one is bettering himself, since success is measured in relation to the progress of their immediate peers...
...They contend that middle-class and working-class people want to become independent businessmen for very different reasons...
...25 per cent had turned down the opportunity to advance...
...We would also have to ask a fourth question: Do workers strive consciously to imitate middle-class attitudes and behavior?** The information necessary to answer questions about these conditions is not fully available...
...The individual worker reared in our culture looks for personal achievement, not by violating the interests or mores of the group but by taking advantage of the expanding employment opportunity within the plant or the economy as a whole...
...Attitudes towards politics and civil liberties also differ importantly in these two social classes (Lipset and Stouffer...
...He discovered also that workers and their children Whyte, for it is the style and not the fact of success-striving that has changed...
...Although great confusion prevails in interpreting results, considerable divergence in the modes of child-rearing are reported in workingclass and middle-class families (Bronfenbrenner...
...Kinsey and his co-workers have documented differences in the sexual behavior of the American male which follow class lines...
...Harvey Swados has described the exhausting and dehumanizing quality of assembly work, even in modern plants...
...Evidence to support the contention that workers seek to emulate middleclass standards is scanty...
...Workers are less likely to become neurotic and a little more likely to become psychotic than are middle-class people, according to Hollingshead and Redlich...
...Among personnel managers, it is a generally accepted view that factory workers tend to rate security above other elements in a job, while white-collar employees tend to prefer "opportunity for advancement...
...If they fulfill our expectation we might conclude that there is some tendency for workers to become middle class...
...But this mode of analysis is much too mechanical...
...Neither view is adequate...
...factory pressures...
...Ely Chinoy, Automobile Workers and the American Dream, St...
...Charles H. Hession, S. M. Miller and Curwen Stoddart, The Dynamics of the American Economy...
...To put it simply, the lower class individual doesn't want as much success, knows he couldn't get it even if he wanted to, and doesn't want what might help him get success...
...Pierre Martineau, market research expert of the Chicago Tribune, has cited a number of investigations to demonstrate that at the same income level (even a relatively high one) wage-earners have different tastes, styles, and modes of reaction than middle-class people...
...he said: "Having a steady job so that you can pay your bills...
...Sol Barkin of the Textile Workers' Union has summed up this point very well: The union seeks to advance the worker as a member of a group rather than as an individual competing with others...
...If one were to develop a scale of class-consciousness, this group would be the closest to the fully class-conscious pole...
...But of all union members, this privileged segment is the most pro-union, the most likely to participate actively in the union, the most likely to vote Democratic and the most likely to think in liberal terms...
...Ford workers fought in the 1955 collective bargaining negotiations for a provision that would permit assembly line or production workers to cut their wages 35 cents or more an hour by taking a sweeper's job...
...In education, for example, workingclass children do not fare well...
...through the year, a man may get as many as twenty 'short work weeks...
...Of the boys (in a group from Boston wage-earner and lower white-collar families) whom he studied carefully, at least 60 per cent had families which were concerned with "getting by" rather than rising into the middle class...
...favor a job that provides steady employment and low income over a risky but more promising job...
...Americans, like any people engulfed in a corrupt social order, go on liv - ing, if only by inertia...
...Workers, by contrast, do seem to seek these goods mainly for their usefulness, not for their prestige...
...Many work-there is a feeling that the should-be ers do share a major part of the mid-"noble proletariat" has succumbed to dle-class orientation...
...Charles R. Walker discovered that in a Pennsylvania steel mill there was "a resistance to promotion [that] was striking...
...individuals are deeply concerned with We think that the outlook of the the problem of success, there are un• majority of workers is neither that of doubtedly some groups of workers a class-conscious proletariat nor that who are intent upon such goals...
...of actuality, as distinct from the forWhile fewer workers than middle-class mulas of preconception...
...Today, the bitch-goddess success...
...A desire to get ahead, for "success," most certainly does exist in the working class...
...Centers' most significant finding was that more than three-quarters of the workers in his sample of white males identified themselves as working class when given a choice of "upper class," "middle class," "working class" and "lower class...
...But for a significant portion of the middle class it is the prestigevalue of these goods which is most desired...
...But enough is known to cast doubt on the thesis that most workers strive for a middleclass success and the way of life associated with it...
...The oft-cited Fortune survey which reported that most work ers identified with the middle class had unfortunately neglected to include the choice of "working class" on its ques tionnaire...
...But we cannot assume that the status which goes along with the improvement in living standards was a dominant reason for wanting it...
...The mark of a good civilization, however, is that through its institutions it transforms this instinctual will to exist into an elaborate sense of beauty and meanillg...
...We must therefore distinguish between the actual goods and the symbols which become attached to them...
...We do not include white-collar or agricultural workers...
...Data on social mobility show that only 30 per cent of working-class sons rise to middle-class positions...
...Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis...
...the family, and the family is groupThese, we suggest, are the shadings (Continued on page 516) REFERENCES Daniel Bell, "The Subversion of Collective Bargaining," Commentary, March, 1960...
...Urie Bronfenbrenner, "Socialization and Social Class through Time and Space," in Maccoby, Newcomb and Hartley, eds., Readings in Social Psychology...
...See Miller and Riessman, "WorkingClass Authoritarianism," British Journal of Sociology, 1961...
...The most interesting conclusions on this subject have emerged from a recent study of the voting behavior of Detroit members of the United Automobile Workers...
...Class A counter argument maintains that the spread of mass culture, inundating all classes, has caused common life styles and "homogenized tastes" to prevail in the United States...
...indeed, high earnings in manufacturing industries are due largely to time-and-a-half overtime...
...Samuel Stouffer, Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties...
...2) workers have the same desire for success that middle-class people have...
...but no office employees were laid off during the same period...
...Robert Havighurst and Bernice Neugarten, Society and Education...
...Income alone, when considered separately from occupation, does not seem to be crucial in determining attitudes and behavior...
...And of a middle-class salariat...
...This leads to much confusion in both empirical and theoretical studies...
...These images might not fully explain why Americans annually consume sixty-billion tranquillizers or produce six-hundred-million gallons of liquor but they lend credence to such statistics...
...2) it would include a desire for prestige rather than merely for improvement in living conditions...
...among workers who suffer most from discrimination—Negroes, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans —poverty is often extreme...
...Much more important than TV and the mass media in shaping life-styles are family, education and occupation, (though all of these are in turn affected by mass culture...
...As for the second, there has indeed been a tendency towards group improvement, but it has met with much criticism and is limited to occupations that are poorly paid or of a civil service type...
...5) Mass vs...
...Many wage earners work far more than a forty-hour week...
...what we wish to emphasize is the weight of the evidence...
...Richard Centers, The Psychology of Social Classes...
...But in reply to the follow-up question, "What does getting ahead mean to you...
...On the problem of how central is the success-drive among workers, the findings of Herbert H. Hyman are very striking: The components of this value system, in our judgment, involve less emphasis upon the traditional high success goals, increased awareness of the lack of opportunity to achieve success and less emphasis upon the achievement of goals which in turn would be instrumental for success...
...But an evaluation of a number of sociological studies suggests that the extent of "middle-classization" among workers• is, to recall Mark Twain's comment on rumors of his death, "grossly exaggerated...
...Charles R. Walker, Steeltown...
...This concept of success is rooted in a desire for stability, not social position These divergent attitudes towards status are illustrated in an odd but insightful pamphlet called "The American Worker" by Paul Romano and Ria Stone...
...Nor should we forget that the "high" wages in manufacturing are not really so very high: an average weekly pay in 1959 of $90 is not a luxury income if one considers present prices and taxes...
...However, the view is not entirely gray...
...There is, however, work done some time ago by Useems and Tangent which shows that while workers would like more money and better living conditions they dislike the anxiety and competitiveness which goes along with their attainment...
...Many other the attractions of middle-class life and workers share a desire for advance-no longer demands our special conment or education for their children cern...
...The synthetic popular culture of today seems to have a rather deep effect upon youth, but later experiences on the job and in the family may well outweigh the influence of the taste-makers...
...It establishes rules of conduct and conditions of employment for all, instead of special terms for individuals...
...This is true no matter what indices of class are used...
...Greyhound depot and find he has missed his bus, or spend an hour in Times Square...
...In the 1930's at the same time it is not true that there was a tendency to idealize and everyone in the middle class worships sentimentalize the worker...
...And about one worker out of twenty "moonlights"—that is, holds more than one job...
...The middle-class person is likely also to be concerned with gaining in prestige and social status...
...Their basic pattern was not changed by having a little grass in front of their homes...
...there is justification for some of the enthusiasm in Kerouac's introduction...
Vol. 8 • September 1961 • No. 4
