Abstract
Beneath the litany of statistics about rising economic inequality and job insecurity lies the reality of people’s lives—their feelings of security or insecurity, the sense of commitment that they feel to their employers and their families, and how they manage those feelings and commitments. Marianne Cooper’s Cut Adrift and Allison Pugh’s The Tumbleweed Society look beyond the statistics and probe their consequences for our families and personal lives. At the same time, they argue that the ways that people manage their emotions about security and commitment at once conceal and facilitate economic inequality.
In Cut Adrift, Cooper argues that to make sense of economic inequality, we need to understand the inequality of security. As the state and employers in the United States have become increasingly divested from the provision of security for workers, Cooper wanted to understand how “security projects”—all of the economic and emotional labor done by a family to create, maintain, and further their particular notion of security—vary by class. Cooper conducted ethnographic research and interviews with fifty families in the Silicon Valley in California. Her respondents included sixteen upper-class families, eighteen middle- to lower-middle-class families, eight working-class families, and eight families headed by single mothers.
Cooper found four main types of security projects. First, Cooper’s poor and working-class respondents used “downscaling.” These families had lowered the bar on their requirements for security and had resigned themselves to living with less. They also worked to suppress their anxiety about security and the future. At the same time, they expressed an attitude of optimism and acceptance even when their circumstances were bad and getting worse. Thus, these respondents worked to transform feelings of insecurity into feelings of security, making life and its problems more bearable and manageable. Many respondents did so by envisioning a brighter future, even in the face of much evidence that such a future was unlikely.
Cooper’s upper-class respondents, in contrast, tended to use “upscaling.” These families, despite possessing more money than most people in the United States will earn in a lifetime, felt that they did not have quite enough. Their goal, and what security meant to them, was to be impervious to risk, to be entirely self-reliant so that even if they lost their income, they would be able to continue living in the same manner for the rest of their lives. These families, far from being immune to anxiety, managed their anxiety by worrying incessantly—about money and about their children’s educations.
“Holding on” was a third approach, which Cooper found among her middle-class respondents. Like her upper-class respondents, they emphasized education and the cultivation of their children’s futures. However, they had to achieve these goals on half or less than half of the salary of the upper-class respondents.
Finally, Cooper’s poor and working-class respondents often employed an approach she terms “Turning to God.” These families relied on their churches, and on their faith, to build their security projects. This was the strategy invoked by those suffering the most consistent and extreme economic hardships.
In “upscaling” families, men worried more about general financial concerns and women worried more about their children’s development and education. Cooper found that in middle-class families that used the project of “holding on,” women worried more about both money and children.
Cooper links these gender differences in middle-class families to the improving circumstances of better-educated women among the working and middle classes and the deteriorating circumstances of working-class men. The women in these families were more likely to have gone to college than the men, and the men also seemed to cede control of the finances to their wives. This is a new version of masculinity, Cooper argues, in which masculinity is to be free from worry about money, to be the more carefree and positive member of the couple.
Cooper then convincingly argues that the security projects her various respondents engage in serve to reinforce economic inequality. When her middle- and working-class respondents talked themselves into feeling secure despite hard times, they compensated for the very inequality that created the hardships in their lives. And when her upper-class respondents convinced themselves that they needed more to feel secure, they justified both their existing wealth and their quest for more wealth.
Another now-familiar statistic illuminates the class divide when it comes to divorce: married couples who have attained higher levels of education are less likely to divorce than less-educated couples. In The Tumbleweed Society, Pugh looks at marital instability and job insecurity together, investigating the relationship between them. Pugh finds that all of her respondents perform emotional labor to reconcile their insecure work with their ostensibly more permanent familial commitments, but that how they do this varies by class. She then argues, like Cooper, that this emotional labor makes the social costs of insecurity and inequality invisible to policy makers and society at large.
Pugh interviewed eighty people in the Washington, D.C. area and in Virginia, sixty-three of whom were women. She groups them into three categories: the laid-off, the relocators, and the stably employed. The laid-off were let go at work or were so desperate for work that they moved in search of a job. These workers had very low expectations of work. Their home lives were also characterized by insecurity, with separation and divorce being common. The relocators were highly skilled and highly paid workers whose employers moved them for their jobs or their spouse’s job. Relocators were in constant search of better prospects in their careers, seeking more flexibility, more independence, and more satisfying work. In their home lives, however, they maintained enduring, long-term relationships characterized by pragmatism. The stably employed worked in some of the few remaining lifetime jobs in our economy—teachers, firefighters, and health paraprofessionals. Their home lives were also characterized by stable and long-term marriages.
People in the three categories felt differently about commitment at work (their own and their employers’ to them) and at home. Laid-off women tended to prioritize independence—from disappointing men, from an unhelpful state, and from relatives who tended to fail them. They also valued work, which was the central source of self-sufficiency. Focused on independence at work and at home, they felt some triumph at the pleasures of freedom in both arenas. The laid-off men, in contrast, often felt more anger at home than at work, despite insecurity in both arenas. They blamed themselves rather than their employers for their lost jobs, but tended to blame their female partners for their failed relationships.
Relocators employed a language of choice for both work and home. They chose to leave at work, and they chose to stay in their marriages. These workers also felt that they benefited from job insecurity as it increased their choices. Among the relocators, Pugh discovered what she terms a “moral wall”—a symbolic barrier that people constructed to separate one set of relationships from another. While they may have felt that their employers owed them little beyond engaging work and a good salary, they felt that their partners owed them commitment. This is in contrast to the laid-off women, who thought and felt consistently about commitment at work and commitment at home.
Pugh found among both the laid-off and the relocators a “one way honor system” in which they expected little of their employers, but expected much dedication and commitment of themselves to work. Among the stably employed, in contrast, Pugh found that high expectations about work were a mutual affair between employer and employee. Many stably employed people described work in familial terms, with similar levels of obligation and commitment on both sides. These individuals held their employers to a standard of commitment similar to that which they expected of themselves and their partners. They tended to have more stable and lasting marriages than did the laid-off.
Pugh concludes that it is not just higher incomes and greater education that make the difference in terms of marital stability, as the statistics might lead us to believe. What higher incomes buy in the relocator families she interviewed is generally the provision of care by women who can do paid work either part-time or not at all. These women, along with the substantial salaries of their partners, provided the security and stability no longer guaranteed by stable employment. But the stably employed people Pugh spoke with did not require higher incomes to make possible their increased security at home. The loyalty and security provided by their employers translated into security and stability at home.
Secure work and generous employer-provided benefits make a significant difference for people’s economic and family stability and security in both Pugh’s and Cooper’s books. These are, however, increasingly rare. In the face of this rising insecurity, both Cooper and Pugh make a strong argument for the invisible emotional labor we all perform as we struggle to adapt to the conditions of our neoliberal state and laissez-faire economy. And both books make compelling cases that our emotional labor makes less visible the inequality and insecurity that have come to characterize the early twenty-first century.
Cooper and Pugh also offer an alternative explanation to the question of why Americans tolerate as much inequality as we do. Others have posited that Americans’ persistent belief in the power of the individual to make their own way by talent and effort has made us complacent. Both Cooper and Pugh suggest that the emotional labor that working- and middle-class people are performing in response to economic and job insecurity makes them less likely to resist, express anger at a state and economy that have abandoned them, or join a movement. They are pointing to ways that capitalism generates passivity.
I have a similar reaction to both books, which is to ask how we can generate the kind of outrage and agency that would spur the economically disadvantaged to take action on its own behalf. Cooper and Pugh convincingly show us why profound inequality does not generate outrage, anger, indignation, and rebellion among the disadvantaged, and instead generates passivity, shame, self-blame, and remarkable resourcefulness at accepting their lot in life. How can this passivity and acceptance be challenged?
And why is this more true today than it has been in the past? For example, at the time of the labor uprisings of the 1930s in the United States, economic inequality had reached similar heights, state and employer responsibilities for worker security were minimal, and yet a movement for greater economic equality and for more state and employer supports for worker security developed despite these odds. And the movement achieved many of these goals. What do we have to learn from the birth of the labor movement about the conditions required for change to occur again? Poor and working-class people have likely used the emotional coping strategies outlined by Pugh and Cooper throughout modern history. What is it that enables disadvantaged and disenfranchised people to develop and mobilize a sense of entitlement?
Entitlement has become something of a dirty word, and fiscal conservatives have certainly done their best to sully the concept. And yet, entitlement to security is what is needed—a sense that we are, all of us, entitled to security. Security in employment, housing, health care, education, and retirement is the cornerstone of the American dream. Yet this security is increasingly rare and certainly not seen as an entitlement in the current political climate.
With their focus on economic inequality and insecurity, it is striking that neither Pugh nor Cooper includes much analysis of race. Given that so much economic inequality in the United States is buttressed by and originates in racial inequality, such an analysis would have been useful in understanding the origins of passivity and the absence of entitlement among the disadvantaged. An exploration of the conditions that generated the civil rights movement and the labor movement would have been helpful in understanding what is needed to bring about change.