Distinguishes Class Differences

October 8, 2008 In the USA, since we don?t talk about class much, most Americans have trouble articulating definitions to distinguish the differences between classes What are some ways you can tell someone?s class? Neighborhood, financial situation, cars, clothing, schooling, mannerisms, speech, etc Dimensions of class: economic (income, type of job), political power (influence), cultural Some sociologists define class strictly by income but this doesn?t capture the whole picture. Unionized garbage collectors wit 20 years on the job can earn 60,000 and a junior college professor can earn 60,000 but most people would categorize the garbage collector as working class and the professor as middle class Kumar define lass as a relationship people have to the mean s of production People in the working class have little or no control over their own work circumstances Both white collar and blue-collar workers can be in the category of working-class. -They don?t have the power to decide how the work will get done, who?s going to do it, what the schedule will be or the pay scale. -Must follow orders from their superiors. Most people are working class. About 25% of the US population has a B.A. degree. Most people do not have college degrees thus lack access to the highest paying professions Middle class jobs are those where workers have a greater degree of control over their work lives. Supervise workers enforce discipline. Get paid higher waves. Have bosses they respond to but they also have varying degrees of autonomy over their work schedules and routines High class or capital class doesn?t have to work for a living. May work for fun but they don?t need to because they great deals of wealth. Owners of major corporations and transnational companies. Have enormous amount of money, land, stocks, and property Barbara Ehreinreich notes that US classes are mixing less than ever before. Used to be that people all walks of life would mix in universities, stores, parks, and residential neighborhoods. Rising tuition costs and financial aid cuts makes college increasingly ff-limits to working class. Since 1990s, gated communities on the rise In the absence of real contact with people who are from different economic or racial/ethnic groups, prejudices and media stereotypes substitute for knowledge Media stereotypes of the working class people Overweight, lazy, fat, poor eating habits, slovenly, narrow-minded, beer-drinkers, bad parents, unintelligent, unclean, immoral, ready to cheat the system, racist, sexist Descriptive elements (physical elements): overweight, slovenly/unkempt, unclean, tacky dresser, poor taste in everything Evaluative elements (innate qualities and values): unintelligent, dim-witted, no leadership skills, thoughtless, forgetful, lazy, immoral, not good parents, foul-mouthed, intolerant and ignorant Working class buffoon stereotype: not very smart, wife and kids are smarter than he is. Lacks common sense, lazy, thoughtless, forgetful, dim-witted and in need of supervisions -Fred Flintstone,, Archie Bunker, Homer Simpson, Doug in King of Queens -Stupidity of these characters makes them seem funny or even loveable, but no one really respects them Working class people portrayed as less intelligent and less refined but also less moral than other people. -On TV and movies, virtue and good ethics are more likely to be attributed to people whose speech and appearance are middle or upper class -Working class on TV are fighting and arguing with their spouse, kids, siblings, parents, in-laws and neighbors Although between 60 and 70 percent of working population in us have jobs that are manual, unskilled, or semi-skilled labor, only 10& of all TV characters have manual labor jobs Disproportionate number of women on tv are shown as stay at home moms, fully supported by husbands On sitcoms, humor often revolves around working class person being dumb (mispronouncing words, not knowing what something means), bad eating habits or being over weight Stereotypes are inaccurate. Statistically, working class is not lazy, since many are working more than one job. They are not more racist than the upper class. In fact they are more racially integrated than the upper class -this is because working class and lower income people live in communities and attend schools and work in places that are racially diverse Working class families tend to have more equitable distribution of housework than upper class. Since both parents tend to work and lack money to pay for maids and nannies, working class men today do a larger share of cooking, cleaning, and childcare than middle and upper class men. Greg Mantsios: major finding of studies examining portrayals of class in the media is that the interests of the wealthy are presented in the US news as if they are the interests of everyone Class lines are so blurred in the media, so that working class tend to identify with upper class Interests of working class people are not the interests of the rich people; makes working class people lose sight of what they really should be concerned with News media provide relatively little coverage of poor people?s lives Level of poverty in us is increasing twice as fast as the population growth yet Americans believe we live in a classless society News coverage of poor is misleading, predicts poor people as being black or Latino, drug dealers, gang members and prostitutes living in the inner city Majority of poor in the us are white and poor people of all races increasingly live in rural and suburban areas since metropolitan neighborhoods Media images of homeless: we think of homeless people as being mentally deranged, Viet Nam vets, drug addicts but in reality, 40% in US are women with children Framing of news stories often includes implicit moral judgments about low-income people; important to look at language used in media to discuss social problems and depict lower class When news discusses the problems of upper income white people, the language used to discuss situation is more respectful. -They aren?t drug addicts, they have a chemical dependency problem; they don?t steal, they ?evade taxes? Wolf of Wall Street: Jordan Belfort robbed investors of $200 million dollars, only served 22 months in a comfortable jail, wrote a best seller that?s going to become a movie, goes on TV and radio talk shows frequently -People of color who steal much less than this are doing years, even life, in jail Reality is inverted in the media so that working class and middle class people learn to fear, blame and resent those below them rather than those above them in the class structure. Types of crimes that get the most news coverage Aside from occasional big scandal, there?s a relative scarcity of daily news coverage about corporate crime. Much heavier daily emphasis in the news on crimes done by low income people Lots of coverage about liquor store hold ups, purse snatching and ATM robberies but this type of crime is a drop in the bucket compared to amount involved in corporate crimes Most common primetime TV shows are about law enforcement and crime investigation -Teach us that the threat to our safety comes from poor minority criminals when thousand of people die or become sick and disabled annually from work-related accidents and illnesses due to corporate negligence/non-compliance with safety laws Recent grocery worker strike in CA was portrayed in the news as harming the public. Stories focused on angry customers who couldn?t find things on the shelves rather than on the fact that workers were striking simply to maintain their existing contractwhich the company reused to renew. Most of the public didn?t get this message since it was obscured by coverage of angry consumers. Focus was on how the strike was hurting customers rather than on how big business is hurting workers Media stereotypes of working class people help reinforce and justify inequalities and legitimate the status quo distribution of wealth and resources, and subtly blame working class people for this lack of economic success and take attention away from systemic reasons Systematic reasons for class inequalities Inequitable education system funded with property taxes Economic policies that encourage companies to relocate abroad, eliminating well paying benefited jobs in the US Laws that allow billion dollar companies not to provide employee health care and to prohibit employees from joining unions Tax codes where millionaires pay proportionately less income tax than working class system of health coverage based on employment status, that bankrupts people if they get sick and lose their jobs Most media produces don?t come from working class backgrounds; they present images of life as it seems to them; its easy to laugh at other people?s expenses; its faster, easier, and less expensive to reuse old storylines and characters than create new ones; presenting affluent characters or working class people with no financial worries is more conducive to consumer expenditures