...Halle...concluded that workers' "consciousness" is actually best understood by viewing it as composed of three overlapping perspectives.
The first is rooted in the world of work. Halle identified five basic characteristics of "blue collar" jobs in the factory: physical labor, a relatively dangerous or dirty environment, boring or routine tasks, close supervision and limited opportunities for upward mobility. Although some white-collar-jobs share some of these features, Halle found that this cluster of characteristics did produce a distinct social viewpoint and identity. Although the men did not usually define themselves as being working class, they were virtually unanimous in describing themselves as "workingmen" with problems and interests common to others like themselves.
Although this occupationally based class consciousness is often seen as limited to the approximately 20 percent of American workers employed in traditional manufacturing, it actually influences a far larger group. There are almost 19 million White men employed in manual, blue-collar jobs in America today, in contrast to about 16 million white men in managerial and professional occupations and another 9 million in lower-level white-collar jobs. Thus, about 45 percent of employed white men still work in essentially manual jobs rather than white-collar occupations.
This occupationally based identity as "workingmen" does create a distinct perspective. Ronald Reagan, for example, was widely viewed as antilabor by workers in the chemical factory, despite his popularity in other areas. However, when Halle turned to studying workers' attitudes related to their neighborhoods and communities, he found that this working-man's perspective did not carry over from the workplace. He noted that neighbors on the streets where workers lived were generally not all blue collar but rather a mixture of blue and white collar, including, in one typical case, a storekeeper, an elementary-school teacher, a real estate agent, a gas station owner and a salesman. Workers also did not see their neighborhoods as distinctly working class but rather as situated somewhere "in the middle" between slum or ghetto areas below and "nice" or "fancy" neighborhoods above.
In consequence, it was entirely reasonable for these workers to view themselves as "middle class" or "middle American" when thinking about their homes, neighborhoods and communities. Thus, what appeared to be two distinct identities, "workingman" and "middle American," Halle revealed as different perspectives between which workers would shift, depending on the context and situation.
Halle identified a third perspective that also influenced workers' political viewsa national identity they felt as Americans but one that was closely linked with a populist identity as "the people" or "ordinary citizens" whose interests were often opposed to that of national elites from business, the government or academia -- elites who were seen as "running the show" or "calling the shots" over various aspects of their lives.
One task Halle did not directly attempt, however, was to define the basic values that workers held and to determine how those values affected their political views. In the national political debate during the 1970s and 1980s, "middle American values ... mainstream values" and "family values" were frequently invoked and were generally defined to include both support for the work ethic and traditional family norms as well as a range of conservative or quasi-religious views on a wide range of moral issues. In many such discussions, it was often simply assumed that these represented key "working-class values" as well. But this obscured the more important question - was there actually a set of values that could be considered distinctly "working class" in character, that represented a distinctly working-class worldview?
One of the most sophisticated recent attempts to answer this question appeared in the recent study The Dignity of Working Men, by Princeton sociologist Michele Lamont. She recognized that asking workers to choose their most important values from a prepared list would essentially force their replies into a predetermined mold that had little to do with their real-world thoughts and feelings. Lamont used instead open-ended and nondirective questions. She interviewed 150 blue-collar workers, black and white, in the United States and in France, and compared them with middle-class people in both countries. Her questions asked workers to describe people similar to them and people who were different, people they liked and disliked, and those to whom they felt superior or inferior. Follow-up questions probed why they felt as they did, spontaneously eliciting a complex pattern of moral judgments and values. Both work and family did indeed emerge among the blue-collar workers' core values. But the real significance lay in how those were perceived.
For the middle-class American men Lamont studied, work meant a profession or career, a frequently stimulating and often fulfilling sphere of activity that had to be balanced against the demands of family in daily life. For the working-class men, in contrast, work was basically "just a job." For some, it might be interesting or challenging (as it is for many construction workers, for example), but, even for them, it was their family life and not work that provided the basic meaning and satisfactions of life.
And central to workers' vision of their family was the constant difficulty of supporting and preserving it in an often hostile environment. Lamont's workers repeatedly described having to "fight tooth and nail" to get where they are, of constantly having to "fight for what's ours." When asked to name their heroes, many of Lamont's workers chose their own fathers because "he held the family together" during hard times.
Seen from this perspective, work was viewed in two distinct ways. On one level, it was a sacrifice, a physically exhausting, hard and sometimes dangerous sacrifice that a worker made on behalf of his family. Yet on another level, these same qualities made a worker's mastery of the difficulties and challenges of his job a tremendous source of pride and personal worth.
But while they valued work itself, blue-collar workers had a much lower opinion of ambition and success. In Lamont's interviews, workers repeatedly said that to them, money is not the most important thing in life, that the quest they see middle-class people conducting for higher status seems to them unending and to offer little satisfaction.
In fact, while these workers generally did not feel resentment toward the middle-class managers and professionals above them-saying, for example, that "I can't knock anyone for succeeding" - their view of them was far from admiring. Middle-class people were "cold, shallow"; they did not really enjoy themselves; they were "worrying all the time," sacrificing their family, "missing all of life" and living "with blinders on."
Moreover, these workers sensed both a profound snobbishness and a dishonesty among the middle-class people they encountered. They perceived middle-class people as "snotty," "snobby" and constantly ready to "look down at people." They were "two faced," "phonies," "showoffs" and willing to "screw people to get what they want."
Workers saw themselves, in contrast, as more authentic and sincere and aware of the important things in life. They placed friends and friendship above success and money; and, along with work, family and friends, they saw honesty and good character as fundamental values. They admired people who were "honest ... .. straightforward ... .. no BS," "stand-up guys," who would "be there" for someone else in times of adversity and "carry their weight" in the struggles of daily life. As a value, they saw strength of character as far more important than success.
This description of the core "values" of working Americans is startlingly different from the usual media portrayal. Yet it is the perspective that spontaneously emerges as workers simply describe the kinds of people and attitudes of which they approve or disapprove. In fact, this distinct combination of viewing work, family, friends and good character as central values in life, while according a much lower value to wealth and ambition, is instantly familiar to trade unionists and others who work directly with American workers as an accurate picture of the pattern of distinctly "working-class values" that American workers actually hold. It appears unfamiliar only because, for so long, the term "values" has been applied instead to a-fixed set of conservative positions on a certain group of moral and social issues.
A significant number of American workers do in fact hold traditional or conservative views on many specific moral and social issues, but that does not make them working-class rather than middle-class values, nor are these views necessarily shared by all or even most American workers. Lamont's research, for example, shows that only 25 percent of her sample could be accurately described as deeply religious. Equally, opinion surveys have shown that the attitudes of individual blue-collar workers vary widely among different "family values" issues and that blue-collar attitudes have also become significantly more tolerant over time on a wide range of topics. Most important, Lamont's research dramatically demonstrates that the values that workers can accurately be said to share as a group-those that can property be considered specifically "working-class values" - are not only not objectionable but are, in fact, profoundly admirable.