Hard Work Is Not Enough

Gender and Racial Inequality in an Urban Workspace

Katrinell M. Davis

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781469630489, 9781469630472
• eBook ISBN: 9781469630496
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Great Recession punished American workers, leaving many underemployed or trapped in jobs that did not provide the income or opportunities they needed. Moreover, the gap between the wealthy and the poor had widened in past decades as mobility remained stubbornly unchanged. Against this deepening economic divide, a dominant cultural narrative took root: immobility, especially for the working class, is driven by shifts in demand for labor. In this context, and with right-to-work policies proliferating nationwide, workers are encouraged to avoid government dependency by arming themselves with education and training.

Drawing on archival material and interviews with African American women transit workers in the San Francisco Bay Area, Katrinell Davis grapples with our understanding of mobility as it intersects with race and gender in the postindustrial and post–civil rights United States. Considering the consequences of declining working conditions within the public transit workplace of Alameda County, Davis illustrates how worker experience — on and off the job — has been undermined by workplace norms and administrative practices designed to address flagging worker commitment and morale. Providing a comprehensive account of how political, social, and economic factors work together to shape the culture of opportunity in a postindustrial workplace, she shows how government manpower policies, administrative policies, and drastic shifts in unionization have influenced the prospects of low-skilled workers.

1

Concepts and Methods

Understanding Opportunity Shifts among Transit Operators in the Post–Affirmative Action Era

In this study, I sought out answers to the following questions: To what extent is African American women transit operators’ employment progress shaped by workplace conditions? How do workplace policies, tensions, and divisions influence their structure of opportunity? How is workplace progress related to work/life imbalances? And to what degree has union advocacy improved workplace conditions and attempts to address personal concerns including work/life imbalances and physical injury on the job? In this chapter, I describe the concepts and discussions that shaped my responses and present the data and methods that informed my analysis of workplace progress among African American women transit operators.

Three distinctive perspectives dominate discussions of low-skilled women’s progress in the workplace. Scholars tend to focus on neoliberal changes in employment relations, persistent race and gender bias and discrimination, and the diminishing role of labor unions in protecting workers and helping them to advance and gain stability in the workplace.

Neoliberal Changes in Employment Relations among Low-Skilled Workforce

Low-skilled American workers have fallen on hard times, generally thought to stem from economic restructuring and shifts from goods-producing to service and information-producing economies characterized by lower wages.1 By 1986, service industries made up 75 percent of all nonfarm wage and salary employment and 53 percent of real domestic output, while employment in manufacturing declined significantly. Just over 27 percent of full-time workers were employed by firms in manufacturing in 1970, declining to 15 percent by 2000.2 This structural shift was brought on by technological innovations, the exportation of low-skilled jobs to low-wage countries, and the globalization of markets that have increased the demand for the production of high-quality but low-cost goods. Those companies and types of work that remain in the United States require ever more skilled workers, increasing inequality between highly educated workers and their counterparts with less education and fewer marketable skills. Since it is harder to find a good paying job, many low-skilled workers struggle to manage familial obligations. They are underemployed or trapped in jobs that cannot provide the income, stability, and opportunity they need.

Workers have seen declines in their workplace outcomes because employers have gone to great lengths throughout the neoliberal era to cut labor costs whenever possible. Part of the business community’s cost-cutting strategy has involved uniting to defeat labor law reform and taxation, while working to roll back government regulations of workplace safety and health.3 As a result, in sectors that are predominate employers of women of color (like retail), the structure of opportunity has changed for the worse. Brown et al. note that, over the past twenty years, a job in the retail industry, especially in a supermarket, has shifted from a “full-time, relatively well-paid position (often unionized) to a job with irregular and part time hours, low pay, and few chances for mobility.”4 Similarly, in the face of intensifying global competition, employers like those within the hospitality industry have opted to “do more with less,” a strategy that cuts costs by way of wage freezes and reduced work hours. As a result, the problems that workers like room cleaners in hotels endure include unpredictable schedules and being pressured to meet impossible room quotas, as well as contending with on-the-job injuries and insufficient breaks throughout the work day.5 In conjunction with the increasing use of on-call workers, the average hours of room cleaning per worker have reduced from forty hours a week in 1960 to thirty-one hours a week in 2000.6

When it comes to outsourcing and other cost-cutting measures, the hospitality industry is not alone, and the changes make earning a family-sustaining wage and developing a career nearly impossible. Hospitals, for instance, have redefined job positions as a way to cut costs. Many routine tasks previously assigned to registered nurses (including taking vital signs and drawing blood), have shifted to nursing assistants, allowing companies to cut the hours and duties of the more highly paid registered nurses. Hospitals are also more frequently outsourcing management, instead of hiring supervisors from their current workforce or through direct employment. Job placement companies like Sodexho and Service Master supply managers to supervise workers in food services and housekeeping within hospitals, cutting off a once-promising career ladder of internal promotion.7

Maintenance of Status Segregation within the Workplace

While occupational returns are shaped by the skills that workers bring to the labor market, just as important is how workers are perceived and where they are positioned within any particular workplace. Occupations are social fields, containing systems of domination that often reflect or exploit antagonisms within local areas or the broader society.8 Employers play key roles in setting the ground rules that affect workers’ everyday lives and in instituting practices and rankings that reproduce or modify existing social hierarchies.

Structural studies exploring how racial and gender inequality operates at the occupation level generally explore how organizational and administrative actions produce and reconstitute racial and gender inequality. Most structural theorists draw heavily on social closure and the visibility discrimination theory in their investigations of how job contexts and deskilling restrict access to authority and job autonomy.9 Drawing on Blalock’s “visibility-discrimination” hypothesis, structural theorists maintain that occupation racial inequality is more intense when African Americans make up a significant percentage of the workforce.10 Most of the attention within this line of inquiry focuses on how African American–dominated jobs exploit workers by paying African American workers less than similarly situated White workers, limiting mobility and excluding racial minorities from positions of authority.11

Sociologists also argue that workers are disadvantaged in the labor market due to the statistical discrimination (i.e., negative stereotyping) they encounter at work.12 For instance, regardless of their actual parenting status, African American women workers are perceived as single mothers, and, in turn, are viewed as unprepared and weakly committed to paid labor due to family responsibilities.13 Furthermore, structural scholars examining the discriminatory effects of work and family workplace policies warn against restructuring work schedules to contend with work and family imbalances because schedules have been found to further intensify the gender division of labor within workplaces and hinder women’s rise to upper management. To this end, some structural innovations, like flexible work s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Concepts and Methods: Understanding Opportunity Shifts among Transit Operators in the Post–Affirmative Action Era
• 2. From Exclusion to Selective Inclusion: Pre-1975 Employment Trends in the Transit Industry
• 3. Open Doors, Segregated Facilities: African American Women’s Incorporation into AC Transit
• 4. A Rough Ride: How Worker-Centered Reforms, Ambivalence, and Declining Conditions Create Work/Life Conflicts
• 5. Drug Tests and Pencil Whippings: The Consequences of Workplace Discipline within AC Transit
• 6. A House Divided: The Impact of Persistent Bias on Low-Skilled Workers
• Notes
• Index