Exactly. It goes up and down the scale of incomes. Drop down a step from the level of ambitious success-bound college students and I'll tell you the story of my "big break."
A long time back I was stuck in one after another dead-end minimum wage jobs. I got out of high school in 1972, and you may recall the oil-powered recessions of 1973 and 1976. One time in 1974 I applied for a dishwasher job over in Tampa near the University, the day after the want ad hit the paper, and I was told that a hundred people had already called about that one job - that should give you an idea what the unemployment level was like back then for someone with no education and no significant work history.
Well, in 1978 I was working part-time pushing a lawn mower at the Blue Jays field in Dunedin, Florida. A couple of my buddies worked for a land surveyor as field-crew personnel. One day one guy quit, so I asked the other guy if there were any job openings, as I wanted a full-time job. So my buddy goes up to the chief of parties and says, "I know this guy, he needs a job, he's got no experience as a rodman, but he knows lots of math." (A survey field crew, from the bottom up, consists of a rodman, an instrument man, eye-man or I-man, and a party chief; the guy in the office who bosses the party chiefs is known as the chief of parties - aren't those great job titles? Any party chief needs a reasonable facility with applied trigonometry, which is considered "higher math" by construction workers.)
So anyway, the chief of parties, he says, and I quote: "I don't give a shit if he knows math. Can he hold the end of a chain? Is he white?" My buddy says, "Sure," and the C.P. says "OK, have him show up here Monday morning at 7:00 AM."
Now I suppose some folks, especially people who have never worked for minimum wage in their entire adult life, would consider the whole transaction to be below consideration. They may be able to drum up concern for a case of job discrimination regarding, say, a position as a college professor or a business executive. But who gives a damn one way or the other about an entry-level job as a construction worker for $3.00 an hour?
Except that that was the first job I ever had where there was the slightest scope for advancement. That was my "big break"; a year later I was a party chief myself, and I had me a crew, a big old dirty green 4x4, a transit, and a programmable calculator of my own. I'd got my foot in the door of a career. Today I have two decades of steady employment to my credit, and I own a house, and I have bought new cars, and my kids buy clothes at the mall and plan to go to college, and all the rest of that - all of which was permanently out of reach until I got that boost up out of the minimum-wage swamp.
Here's the fact: I would not have gotten that crucial break if I had not been white.
Sometimes I feel a bit guilty about that. Maybe "guilty" isn't quite the right word. I see an obviously poor black guy on the sidewalk and I think, "Hey, I wonder if that could be me today, except that at the right moment I happened to be the right color."
Occasionally I see articles in the newspaper, usually in the business section, about instances where the so-called "glass ceiling" works against women and minorities seeking well-paid professional and executive positions. How people in the working class resent reading articles concerning the sad case and consequent pending lawsuit of so-and-so, MBA, all indignant at the discrimination he blames for the fact that he only brings in $150,000 a year when he feels he deserves a half-million instead. The guys who publish that crap are just trying to discredit affirmative action, I think.
The fact remains that racial and sexual discrimination goes all the way down to jobs that pay 110% of minimum wage. I've heard it with my own ears - repeatedly I've overheard guys who do the hiring mention, as un-self-consciously as though they were chatting about the weather, that they "would never hire a n-word or a woman" for a position that has come open. (Yep, even in the 90s you can still hear talk like that, provided there is no one except white guys in the room. After all, none of us would ever tell.)
Of course, you'll never read any newspaper articles in the business section about discrimination in hiring employees for relatively low-paid positions like those.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net