comparisons are made "laterally" and "upwardly". people don't look at those poorer than themselves or what have you and think, "gee, i'm glad i'm a man and not a woman because i'd make less money than i do now." they look at the woman and think that she made stupid choices or that her job isn't as difficult or that her choice to raise family, marry, etc is the reason why she doesn't earn as much. good ole meritocratic individualism. moreover, i seriously doubt that white people in my neighborhood look at their black neighbors and think, "gee i'm glad i'm a racist or that employers are/society is because my job pays more than his."
people don't understand structural racism or how it can be the case that an employer will pay whites more or how it is anything but the individual's fault if they're segregated into certain occupations.
in a society like the US, we're constantly comparing ourselves to those who have more --relative deprivation it's called. (i first learned about it in a soc of religion class where the teacher, trying to make an analogy said, "do people fall in love b/c they might experience relative deprivation". my girlfriend said, "sure do". eliciting a great deal of laughter from everyone!). we don't imagine that we are lucky or better off, but that we don't have enough and that it seems like everyone else has more.
all this talk of whether workers feel they are subjectively advantaged seems pretty silly to me, particularly when i think of the "cultural capital" exercises i used to have students in elite and public universities do. i'd define for them "professional middle class" "middle class" etc with occupational, educational, and income characteristics. then i'd have them tell me what kind of cars those groups drove, what kind of clothes they wore, what kind of food they preferred, what kind of houses they lived in, etc.[1]
quite fascinating. for the upper middle class students at elite private colleges, most of them could amply fill in the blanks when it came to their own economic status, but when it came to others, they were at a loss and the answers became sparser and more reliant on media images. it was somewhat similar for the students from public universities. but they were more capable of knowing what those better of than them might drive, wear, eat.
kelley
[1] idea came to me after a class i taught on sociology of work in which i learned that there was a difference between "white trash" and "hick" and that there were "white trash" foods, clothes, cars, hairstyles, colognes, etc.