What do you picture when you hear the term ¨working class¨?
Most would likely paint a picture of a construction worker or factory worker. That construction or factory worker likely looks strong and male (we’ll allow him a little belly fat, but overall, he´s well-muscled).
For the working woman, what image is conjured up? Maybe a home health aide, cashier, or housekeeper?
Men’s blue-collar and white-collar job options offer skilled and unskilled positions, and college degrees are not needed to earn higher wages. Men are able to enter into positions that pay above minimum wage directly out of high school with no education required in the construction or utilities industries. A clever and driven man can become an assistant electrician or plumber, a framer, or cabinet makers’ assistant, then an apprentice, get into the union, become a master and run their own business. This is a vocational career ladder that requires no money up front.
What is the equivalent for women’s professions? An above minimum wage job for women is to be a waitress, but there is no career ladder for waitresses. Restaurant managers generally are paid less than servers, so that’s not a step up. A waitress or bartender has a very brief career lifespan, from 18 to 45, give or take a few years, and the wages lower over time. This is a dead end. So she would need to, simultaneously, invest in entering another industry, such as nursing, by paying tuition and attending courses, then enter that profession at a lower rate of pay than what she made serving.
Many people like to point to wage differentials between men and women within the same industry performing the same roles, but the more significant lifetime wage difference is due to the sexual division of labor into different industries. Male and female labor is divided vastly in terms of economic return. Women typically need to invest more cash up front for lower returns on investment. Women’s vocations are college-tied, such as nursing or education, requiring a higher initial debt load. Men have more vocational paths available to them that allow them to start from scratch and work their way up.
In general, all working people, men and women, are getting screwed and getting the short end of the stick. Men as an entire group are not to blame, and they are not all fortunate. It is simply to make the point that women need their own champions to create pathways and vocational ladders that allow them to earn beyond minimum wage, to work their way up from the bottom without immediately indebting them. Because without this option, many women will rationally conclude that they should convince a higher earning man to share his earnings with her (the basis of the traditional family).
Consider a few examples from the pop cultural world. One is Mike Rowe’s popular television show Dirty Jobs which has led Rowe to advocate for young people (but primarily men) to be supported to enter trade school in larger numbers as an alternative to minimum wage service sector positions. Mike Rowe’s show is called Dirty Jobs, but I have never seen him work as a home health aide changing an old man’s diapers, as a housekeeper cleaning pubic hair off a shower-bath, or in a daycare wiping up vomit. What could be a dirtier job than those? Yet, those are all normal tasks for jobs that are mostly associated with women.
The second is Barbara Ehrenreich’s book of investigative journalism from the late 1990s and early 2000s Nickle and Dimed which was about the economic reality of relying on the minimum-wage service economy for women.[1] In it, she performed typical women’s working-class labor, and not only did the jobs take a big toll on the body and were not paid well, they were also jobs that women were never given any respect for, but were shamed for doing. Unlike Mike Rowe’s blue-collar workers who tend to espouse a sense of pride, the daily experience of women that Ehrenreich worked with was one of many indignities and social invisibility.
A third example is a recent campaign book by the architect of the trade wars, Robert Lighthizer, No Trade is Free.[2] This work on the trade war has one basic premise: reshore manufacturing to America and all social ills will be solved and there will be prosperity for all (well, for most).
Every single one of these works on contemporary labor in America illustrates that the disappearance of manufacturing jobs and their replacement by low-wage service sector jobs garnered an untold amount of economic loss and despair for ordinary people in the US. However, only Barbara Ehrenreich’s work specifically shows how this reality has impacted the female worker.
But despite the rhetoric regarding the loss of manufacturing, and the images conjured up of steel workers in Pittsburgh and auto workers in Detroit, women have been disproportionately affected by the loss of the manufacturing sector in the US. Men without university degrees have more options for economic recovery than women without degrees.[3] In this context, one can understand the fad for the “traditional wife” that appeared for a time, because it seems like a legitimate strategy for achieving a higher social position that otherwise could have been offered by higher wages, which are now out of reach for most women.
The manufacturing work that was offshored has largely been performed by women in Southeast and South Asia. However, their economic gains have largely been tempered by both legal policies and informal customs which sees that most of their wages are returned to their own families and do not end up enriching women individually. Despite the fact that the workforce contains both men and women, globally, poverty is a feminine fact of life more than it is a masculine one. Most of those who are in poverty are women. Those who have the least amount of money in the world are women.[4]
There need to be more blue-collar roles that pay above the minimum wage available to women. Women who cannot attain a job that requires a college education should not need to be relegated to a “traditional” role that relies on seducing a man out of part of the paycheck made out to his name.[5] It is all good and well to recognize that women in the past have largely provided reproductive labor that readies a laborer for work each day, but broader recognition doesn’t resolve the fact that the paycheck is in his name only, and he can apportion it as he likes to the non-working members of the family.[6] This is a system that is not good for either women or men, and it is very confusing to me that a man would defend this system as “traditional” since it puts him at a disadvantage when he is laid off.[7] A traditional family is seen as a mini-company where the father is automatically set up as the CEO who pays out his dependents for performing their domestic labors, labor which would cost him far more if he had to pay market rates for it.[8]
Women should be able to find jobs that pay a living wage right out of high school and then be able to move up in that field. Although men who are not well suited for white-collar desk labor have the option to seek and attain decent wages in physical vocations, there is no such equivalent option for women. Women who are not well suited to the demands of university training remain stuck in minimum-wage work. Where are their union jobs? Where are their trade schools?[9] It is very likely that reshoring manufacturing would help them as well, since women are well-represented in factory labor. However, until that day comes, which it might never, we should carve out pathways for women to earn higher wages in jobs with lower barriers to entry.
[1] Ehrenreich, Barbara. (2001). Nickle and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America. New York: Metropolitan Books.
[2] Lighthizer, Rober. (2023). No Trade is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers. Broadside Books.
[3] People point to women’s higher rates of university attendance and enrollment as a point to show women’s advancement, but in fact, it is simply a survival strategy. Women need college more than men do in order to earn above minimum wage. This so-called sign of progress actually represents a lifetime earnings penalty, because women need to put in more money up front in order to get out an equivalent amount to their male counterparts.
[4] Alvarez, José E., and Judith Bauder, 'Taking Women’s Property Rights Seriously', Women's Property Rights Under CEDAW (New York, 2024; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 Mar. 2024), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197751879.003.0007.
[5] There’s a reason why Ibsen’s A Doll’s House caused a wave of divorces. Watching the way that Nora had to coax and stroke her man’s ego and never be recognized for the work that she did, which had to remain secretly behind the scenes, and never be allowed a sense of pride and satisfaction in herself, to offer herself up to be infantilized by her husband, caused married women to be disgusted with themselves and rebel.
[6] Other than in legally mandated cases of spousal and child support, which are regarded as punitive measures, it is rare to see a formalized system that transfers a portion of a worker’s wages to his dependents. I’ve only ever heard of a system, which is voluntary, of allotting a portion of a worker’s pay to their non-working dependent in the US military. If the goal of reshoring is to create male breadwinners, and if higher male pay is for the purpose of family support, then there must be a formally enforceable system of mandating them to share their bread.
[7] Sato, Kazuma. (2014). "The Impact of Husband’s Job Loss on Divorce," Economic Analysis, Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), vol. 188, pages 121-140, March.
[8] “New research by the Bureau of Economic Analysis has found that if the value of household production were included in gross domestic product (GDP), it would add approximately $3.8 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2010.”
[9] And I’m not talking about beauty school, which offers a terrible rate of return on investment
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