Thanks to the deep mid-1970s recession, and its effect on my father’s employment situation, I spent my last two years of high school in the Southwest, where oil was booming and jobs were plentiful. That sojourn gave me the opportunity to experience Red State America first hand, and to evaluate its differences from the Tri-State area. At the time the Southwest couldn’t match the tolerance and diversity of the New York, where people from all kinds of cultural backgrounds live together in proximity. On the other hand, class differences were much smaller there, with people with different levels of education and in different occupations sharing membership in the same church, following the same sports teams, and living in the same general area. The New York area, in fact the whole Northeast, is far more segregated by class than most of America, with people from different economic strata living, for the most part, in different worlds. And frankly, the attitude of many with college degrees toward those without, and those working in occupations that do not require them, is less than respectful, a disrespect that is often returned. This has consequences.
In the Southwest, the guy driving up to the country club in his Cadillac and the guy who takes his keys and parks his car might have been high school buddies. The former might have hit it lucky in business, the latter might have suffered some bad breaks.
In New York, the college educated and non-college educated tend to move to New York City from elsewhere, and have little in common. The latter are more likely to be immigrants, and may not speak English. In the suburbs, they live in entirely separate communities. Church and family extended family bonds are less common, material lifestyle is often the main social common denominator, and interactions between the more- and less-educated are generally strictly transactional, with power resting, as always in the marketplace, with those doing the buying rather than those doing the selling. Generally, those with higher educations are those expecting to be served. Among New York’s opinion leaders, you have families where for three generations everyone who did not develop a substance abuse problem has finished college. Those are the options. Doctor. Lawyer. Failure.
Many of the city’s opinion leaders hold a low opinion of jobs in the retail and service sectors, which are not considered “good jobs.” Going with that, however, is an attitude that those who hold such jobs are losers as much as those on public assistance, and perhaps more. This attitude, coming down from the top, is adopted by those at the bottom — that these are jobs no self-respecting and valued person would have. Thus, jobs dealing with the public, especially the affluent, educated and entitled public, are not a joyride in metro New York. Meanwhile, Denis Hamill once wrong a series of articles about the people moving into the neighborhood where he grew up, and where I have lived for 20 plus years, that could be summarized in my case as “go back to Yonkers you college-educated sonofabitch.”
Some of the consequences of New York’s class problem are economic.
In the Southwest just about every teenager and college student had a part time job, generally the type of paper hat job that is disparaged here. I worked as a movie usher, gas station attendant, hotel bellhop and, for much of my time there, as a busboy, dishwasher, and short order cook. Labor force participation is high, and employers are unable to hire adults for low-wage jobs. They have no choice but to hire and train irresponsible teens, firing one after another until they get a good one. Those teens learn to find jobs, and eventually become reliable enough to hold them.
In the New York area fewer teens had jobs, and statistically fewer have jobs now. At the top, parents want their children to get internships, often unpaid, in professional fields, rather than have them spend time on something that doesn’t help their college applications or resumes. For some, having their child wield a broom and mop for pay would be an embarrassment; in the Southwest there would be pride that the kid was a hard working go-getter.
At the bottom teens tend not to have any jobs at all, except for government summer youth employment positions where productivity expectations are low. Part of the reason is the supply of jobs. In New York City a large share of adults are out of the labor force and not working, so low-wage employers don’t have to rely on teens. Moreover, for decades the city had fewer low wage retail and service jobs than its population and income would appear capable of supporting, as many shopped outside its borders in the suburbs.
However, one reason native-born poor kids are less likely to have low-wage jobs here is they have been convinced they don’t want them. The attitude that work in a McDonalds is demeaning reaches from the top of the income distribution to the bottom. New York’s teens are thus deprived of the life experience I gained when, after I collapsed after busting my butt in back-to-back shifts while sick with a cold, the restaurant manager, lean Don Bean the ex-marine told me “boy, some day you’ll thank me for teaching you to work hard while you’re young.” He was absolutely right.
It wasn’t always this way in New York. My father was able to put himself through college, in part, by shoveling coal into the boilers at the “sugarhouse” (the Refined Sugars and Syrups plant) in Yonkers. My father-in-law started young in Brooklyn, hauling people’s groceries in his wagon, and carrying up the stairs, to earn tips to be used for a trip to the movies, and held a variety of jobs thereafter. In our families, there have been people who had a scholastic bent and went on to the appropriate jobs, and others who did not have a scholastic bent and went on to other jobs. It wasn’t a big deal.
In public policy, New York’s class problem manifest themselves in its public education system. Once the city and region were leaders in vocational education, with top-notch performers in all occupations. Now, in New York City only half of all students finish high school within four years, and just about all of these expect to go on to higher education. That means that almost everyone who is not college material doesn’t even finish high school, a damning statistic if ever there was one. They are dumped in the social landfill, with the sorting beginning as early as age four, when acceptance to “gifted and talented” programs is determined. With universal pre-K, the sorting may occur at age 3.
Certainly anyone with the ability and curiosity to be a scholar should be encouraged in that direction, and intellectual achievement should be honored. The less class-conscious Southwest doesn’t emphasize academic achievement the way New York does, and there is an anti-intellectual attitude there that is harmful. Arriving in high school in 11th grade, I found that just about every teacher I had was to be addressed as “coach,” and while the teaching didn’t impress all of us flooding in from the coasts, the football stadium — lighted for Friday night games — was better than the one at my the college I attended back in the Northeast.
On the other hand, the ongoing academic push here has led to a requirement that all students gain knowledge that only some of them will ever need, just in order to graduate from high school. Have you solved a quadratic equation lately? The panic over “competitiveness” makes me wonder if we are going to be introducing calculus to the children of illiterates in seventh grade. Many children will never be able to do certain academic work. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t learn anything. We live in a city where “liberals” are those who want everyone to grow up to be a lawyer, and “conservatives” are those who believe gross education funding inequalities are justified by the fact that not everyone can, and there is no sense wasting money on those who can’t. The mere “opportunity for an 8th grade education” is enough for them. The liberal response is to call for the elimination of tests that measure what to them is the only abilities that matter.
Think of the contrast. Fifty years ago students for different backgrounds and with different academic abilities might have learned together in the same classrooms through 8th grade, before moving onto different tracks in high school – some academic, some vocational. Today there is an academic track that starts at age 4 and not age 14, and another track that is merely a weaker version of it, and ends in failure.
There is a school system that still works the old way – the parochial school system, with its K to 8 elementary s schools and its test admission high schools. The disadvantage is that for brighter kids, the upper elementary school grades can be a drag as the teachers focus on the kids who have fallen behind. The advantage is that the children of parents from different educational and occupational backgrounds – and different racial backgrounds — share the same classroom. That is much less common in New York City’s public school system. In the suburbs, of course, those with different background often do not even share the same school system, let alone classroom.
And, it is worth nothing that the school funding disparities are much smaller in redneck American than in the Northeast, in part because school districts are larger and in part because states cover a larger share of the bill. Does anyone else see the irony in solidly Blue State New York having the greatest school funding inequality in the country?
The lack of vocational training has another economic effect. One reason why New York’s low wage employers can hire adults rather than teens is that those who grow up here and do not finish college have no other choice, because they have no other skills. Meanwhile, for any non-academic job that requires any training at all, the city has to rely on immigrants for a large part of its labor supply. Without them there would be no one to maintain our buildings, cut our hair, or operate our neighborhood stores. Incredibly we are relying on poor countries for skilled labor, while generating unskilled labor ourselves. And in fields where immigrants have not filled the need – electrician for example – we have a labor shortage.
Where in New York are people learning to take non-academic, skilled jobs, and to take pride in them? Staten Island, perhaps, or among the Orthodox. The high level of unionization here hasn’t helped, because unfortunately many of the unions haven’t encouraged the non-college educated to take pride in their jobs. Rather, they have encouraged their members to resent their jobs and get away with what they can. In theory working people should feel better about themselves in an organized, unionized place like New York. Attitudes vary in both places, and in different services and trades, but my anecdotal observation is that they are more pleased with themselves in the Southwest than they than here. Country music makes it sound like it anyway. Back in the day, on the other hand, New York’s blue collar and service workers easily outperformed their counterparts elsewhere in the country, or so I’ve been told. They still do — but only if they moved in from elsewhere, and were not conditioned by the attitudes and failed by the education system by growing up here.
Finally, New York’s class problem has political implications. My observation is until the middle of the last century, the Democrats were the party of bigots, the Republicans the party of snobs. Then it switched. (Those who are neither bigot nor snobs are still waiting for a party to represent them, I guess). One of the great mysteries for opinion leaders in New York is why anyone votes Republican who isn’t, in effect, being paid to do so. The answer is that lots of non-college-educated people think that so-called liberals in places like New York, who claim to be looking out for their well being and may actually be doing so, nonetheless look down on them. What’s more, places like the Southwest are much more diverse and tolerant than they once were, though the quality of pizza and bagels is such that I still wouldn’t want to live there. Following their voters, the Republicans have been inching out of the bigot category, while the Northeast is just as snobby as ever, or more so. Pride is a powerful thing, and it takes some pretty big screw ups on the other side for people to swallow it, though the Bush Administration may have pulled the trick.
Even well meaning events, such as the recent forum on the disappearance of New York City’s middle class, often send the wrong message. That forum, repeating a common theme, once again decried the disappearance of unionized manufacturing. Well, are those who work in stores and services, each day contributing to the well being of others, part of the middle class, or the underclass? Does it matter that they perhaps can’t afford a car, that a whole family lives in a small apartment (by our standards, not anyone else’s), that vacations, if any, are to visit families and friends? Not to me. If they are in the underclass, it is because their children will attend inferior schools, the parks and libraries that benefited prior generations of people like themselves are not as extensive, and their lack of health insurance means any illness will mean a loss of all family savings (so why bother saving?) until eligibility for Medicaid is attained. That isn’t the economy. That’s public policy.
People with the same educational backgrounds are going to end up spending more time together based on what interests them. The question is whether or not there are other activities and interests that cut across educational backgrounds, and if people have the fellow-feeling to participate in them together. It is sad to think that respect for intellect and academic achievement must always be associated with disrespect for other abilities and pursuits. I don’t agree. And while not every child can be a lawyer or scientist, every child other than the severely mentally handicapped has the ability to master the more basic skills we all need, and has some abilities that can be developed, and there is no excuse for schools that do not provide that opportunity. New York’s class problem is its social, economic and political Achilles heel.