The good old days
Jan. 22nd, 2012 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupBoth major political parties seem to yearn for the 50s: Democrats for the tighter wage distribution and the fact that people could raise a family of five on the salary of one person with a high school diploma working forty hours a week, Republicans because they view it as a time of "traditional values". If you ask them they say they mean less sex and more marriage, but liberals accuse them of yearning for the racism and sexism as well. And they're probably right: some conservatives actually wish we would go back to Jim Crow; some others don't, but also prove their points with statistics that register a woman who is regularly beaten but can't afford to leave as a marriage success.
I don't think this places the liberals on the winning side of the issue, however. Because when we reflect on how nice it was for people to walk from high school to union jobs, where they could earn a solid income until they died, we're really reflecting on nice it was for white men to walk from high school to union jobs, where they could earn a solid income until they died. White men had essentially created a cartel of labor through which they extracted a larger share of corporate profits, which was great for them, but hurt everyone else who would have liked to work. Slow food? Dependent on the mother having all day to cook. The "good death" at home? Dependent on free labor from women. Cheap schools with excellent teachers, and caring nurses with all the time in the world to take care of you? Dependent on women being unable to work in other industries.
There's also a pretty good argument that meritocracy will lead to a widening of the income distribution. If you were a smart kid born poor, the best strategy for you in the 50s was to unionize, so you could harness the power of all the other workers to raise your salary via collective bargaining, which the collateral effect of raising theirs as well. Now, the best strategy is to study and get a middle class job (which is not as easy for you as it is for middle class kids, but vastly easier than it would have been in the 50s), which leaves the average-intelligence-and-poor out in the cold. It also allows people who are good at investment, or thrift, or are simply incredibly hard workers, farther up than they would go in a more class limited system.
It would be nice to get the best parts of the good old days without the associated bad parts, but I think those are a lot more entangled than we'd like to believe.
I don't think this places the liberals on the winning side of the issue, however. Because when we reflect on how nice it was for people to walk from high school to union jobs, where they could earn a solid income until they died, we're really reflecting on nice it was for white men to walk from high school to union jobs, where they could earn a solid income until they died. White men had essentially created a cartel of labor through which they extracted a larger share of corporate profits, which was great for them, but hurt everyone else who would have liked to work. Slow food? Dependent on the mother having all day to cook. The "good death" at home? Dependent on free labor from women. Cheap schools with excellent teachers, and caring nurses with all the time in the world to take care of you? Dependent on women being unable to work in other industries.
There's also a pretty good argument that meritocracy will lead to a widening of the income distribution. If you were a smart kid born poor, the best strategy for you in the 50s was to unionize, so you could harness the power of all the other workers to raise your salary via collective bargaining, which the collateral effect of raising theirs as well. Now, the best strategy is to study and get a middle class job (which is not as easy for you as it is for middle class kids, but vastly easier than it would have been in the 50s), which leaves the average-intelligence-and-poor out in the cold. It also allows people who are good at investment, or thrift, or are simply incredibly hard workers, farther up than they would go in a more class limited system.
It would be nice to get the best parts of the good old days without the associated bad parts, but I think those are a lot more entangled than we'd like to believe.
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Date: 2012-01-26 07:50 pm (UTC)I think it's unlikely that this is the issue. 90% of the population was white in the '50s (source: Google kindly referred me to a crazy white supremacist website that keeps meticulous track of this sort of thing) so population-wide benefit to whites from oppressing non-whites were probably slim. Women obviously were much more numerous and significant, but I don't think that's it either. For one thing, today a man would have a lot of trouble supporting a family of five on a high school diploma even if his wife stayed at home; for another, I've heard many families say it's trouble supporting themselves that drives the woman into the workplace.
I'd also say we have at least as much of a cheap underclass today as we ever did back then: we're no longer forcing women into nursing, but we do import a ready supply of Mexican and Filipina nurses whose visas make it pretty difficult for them to leave the field. And although that doesn't apply to education, we currently have an oversupply of teachers and it's debatable how much teachers' pay has risen in the past half-century, which isn't the picture you'd expect if the opening of the labor force to women caused a big problem with teaching.