Competition among workers: race and gender in the working classes
From the standpoint of workers and their communities, competition arises from the simple reality that the jobs generated by competing capitalists vary in earnings possibilities and employment conditions. Competition creates a wide variety of job options - that it, it creates employment and wage hierarchies. For many generations, workers have struggled to secure slots in the industry-occupation matrix that reduce their vulnerability to unemployment and increase their chances of earning a living wage. They also have devised multiple strategies to protect themselves from the wage-reducing pressures created by capitalists' periodic interest in replacing them with workers beneath them on the wage ladder.
For example, workers frequently have tried to control which populations are suitable for specific jobs, defining the job as "men's work" or as requiring a particular kind or level of education. Employees who are directly involved in the processes which generate their competition - for example, professors who train graduate students, artisans who must train apprentices - historically have had much greater power to shape their job turf. One way to recognize when a group of employees is losing intra-class power is when they find themselves increasingly vulnerable to job competition from another group of very capable workers who are presently earning a lower real wage. As the next section discusses at greater length, one of the hallmarks of the new global economy is that U.S. workers have been brought into direct and indirect competition with workers around the world.
Thus competition between workers stems from the competition between capitalists. Yet when working people in capitalist economies struggle to rise from the ranks of the unemployed or to secure/retain a particular job, they have tended to define themselves as members of a specific collective. Workers enter labor markets (as do employers) as gender-conscious members of specific racial-ethnic communities, and compete as self-identified members of those communities as they seek access to particular jobs and specific industries. From an historical perspective, white men have been the leaders in this tradition of defining specific sectors or jobs as their turf, not to be tread upon by white women or people of color of any sex. They have not, however, been alone, as white women of the pre-Civil Rights era railed against sharing office work with Black women and Latinas. The point is this: workers frequently invoke and deploy their complex cultural identities in the quest for good jobs and wages.
For example, "whitemaleness" has been a socio-cultural identity saturated with political power - -i.e., white men have used violence, the state, information, and ideology to construct themselves as the most capable race-gender group. They sought and achieved control over many jobs, and the rules that defined these jobs and determined who was eligible. They were, of course, more heavily represented among the winners. Winning workers tend to have higher wages and can compete for a wider range of positions.
The discussion of competition connects directly with the issue of racial-ethnic income inequality. The analysis of competition thus provides a foundation from which to make sense of two phenomena: racial-ethnic income inequality and race-gender discrimination both in the United States and around the world. Racial-ethnic income inequality draws life from workers' efforts to secure preferred niches in the ever-shifting mix of industrial and occupational employment opportunities. An abundant literature confirms the significance of race as a determinant of worker identity in the U.S. In other words, white workers came to identify themselves not simply as workers, but as whiteworkers - people whose communities, families, and cultures were superior to those of Blacks, Asians, and Latino.
To the extent that whites embraced the ideas of white supremacy, they were inclined to reject sharing jobs and work with colored people they deemed their inferiors. Thus working people played a role in the "racialization" of job competition. That is, white workers competed for jobs as members of a racial community for whom racial solidarity with their employers often trumped class solidarity with workers of color. In so doing, they become agents of racial discrimination. When successful, they are more likely to have jobs and to receive higher wages and salaries than their colored counterparts.
Racial-ethnic communities also are "gendered" - that is, individuals define themselves as members of gender groups (men and women), and notions of appropriate gender behaviors and work roles also shape expectations and decisions in the allocation of work. For example, white men in the United States have frequently struggled to exclude white women from specific industries and jobs, defining them as "men's work." Blue-collar white men historically resisted sharing the craft traditions with their white sisters, and it is only in the last thirty years that white women broke into the white-collar professions of law, medicine, and management. Gender-based job discrimination has historically restricted women to work men find unattractive.
In many capitalist societies of the last two centuries, many men gradually defined their manhood in terns of their ability to earn a wage that supported themselves, their wives, and children. However, men's abilities to realize this dream varied according to their position in the race-class hierarchy of male competition (which varies from nation state to nation state) and of course was often contested by women themselves. Thus in many working class white women shared responsibility for providing family income.
Race-based job competition within the male working classes has historically resulted in Black and Latino men with jobs that paid less. Thus we find that in many African American communities, Black women have established a tradition of wage work, and crafted their gender identities to include providing income for the families. In Chicano communities, a smaller per cent of women participated in the labor force than is the case in both Black and white communities until the 1980s. And, as mentioned earlier, white women have demonstrated an historic interested in the racial segregation of women's work, sometimes manifest in the segregation of wage labor, sometimes manifest in the pursuit of domestic workers in the home.
The above discussion helps make sense of the race, ethnic and gender distribution of employment in the United States. More specifically, we can use it to make sense of the economy at the time when capitalist profits began to decline and when employers subsequently began an aggressive assault on the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers and their families. Consider the following: in 1970, although race-based job segregation had declined for both men and women, most women still worked in female dominated occupations. Within broadly defined categories of men's and women's work, race-based job segregation continued to be the norm. White men dominated the ranks of professional, managerial, and craft jobs, with Black and Latino men pulling up the rear and therefore more concentrated in service jobs and operative jobs in manufacturing then their white male and female counterparts. Since the 1950s, large Black white unemployment gaps have been the norm; twenty years of Hispanic data also shows a significant white-Hispanic unemployment gap as well. That is, within gender and educational groups, Black and Latino unemployment rates have been twice those of white unemployment rates. They rise more quickly during business slowdowns, and decrease more slowly when the economy is coming out of a recession. An abundance of evidence suggests that job discrimination is a major cause of these unemployment gaps.
White women defined and dominated the best paid jobs in the women's professions - nursing, library work, primary school teaching - but earned less than did white men in the male-dominated professions. Most white women worked in clerical and service jobs. In the wake of the gains wrought by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, African American women had moved in large numbers out of domestic work and into manufacturing, sales, and service jobs. However, in the manufacturing sector, white, Black, and Hispanic women were disproportionately concentrated in industries that paid the lowest wages. About 30% of Latinas were not employed in manufacturing - more than 50% worked in clerical and service jobs. Across the board, Blacks and Hispanics worked in jobs that paid less and provided fewer benefits - that is, they worked in jobs and industries less covered by the previously discussed capital-labor truce of the 1950s and 1960s. The same was true of white women, although a smaller percentage of them worked and millions shared the family incomes of white men who lead the ranks of the blue and white-collar workforces.