> just a point of order: I'm not sure how unemployment got into this.
I don't know either; I think I picked it up from the Mills quote. Anyway, the case you give of the guy refusing work to watch the soaps is certainly more interesting than a simple unemployment case.
Personally, compared with this guy, I've never worked for a large corporation or organization since I taught at a state university for a few years. I've been a working-at-home free-lancer for over 20 years, so have never been laid off. The only way I could "make it" any better than I have is by starting an agency and hiring free-lancers, and I certainly don't want to go in that direction.
When I was married my wife
> the specific case i was talking about was about someone who refuses
> work in order to watch the soaps, but also because he's angry about a
> lay off and angry that he probably won't ever "make it." he'd gotten a
> new, comparable job after the lay off, he just didn't like it, so he
> quit. she works for the same company that he quit. he feels that the
> work is "beneath" him, even though it paid the same. their main
> problems are about each person's gendered expectations of how the other
> ought to behave, what kind of job and job opportunities and
> expectations one should have, what their duties are around the home,
> etc.
>
> similar things happen in Arlie Hochschild's _Second Shift_. The women
> who had jobs that were more important and more highly paid than their
> husbands often ended up doing more work than women who had lesser jobs
> than their husbands. The wives who made more money had to compensate by
> doing more housework so their husbands wouldn't feel even more
> threatened.
>
> As an aside, Kathleen Gerson studies men who did close to half of their
> share of the housework. Those men were mostly men who had hit a wall in
> their careers, realized that they'd never go further and decided to
> renegotiate their relationship to wife, children, home, and housework.
> That is, they renegotiated their identities, finding satisfaction in
> family/home where they would otherwise have found it at work had their
> careers been successful.
>
> In my own research on downsized professionals, men did the same. I
> described this as renegotiating their identities by redefining what
> success meant to them. I should note that it was the younger men who
> tried to readjust by finding meaning in family/ friends/home. The older
> men, 50 and up, didn't because they didn't reject or resist their
> downsizing. Indeed, they actively embraced the "new economy" arguing
> that this is the way is _should be_. Younger men, however, were far
> more jaded and often had been laid off before.
>
> At any rate, women, OTOH, hated the "new economy" pretty uniformly,
> openly criticizing it. (Mind you, they were as high up on the corporate
> ladder as the older men, so...) Women renegotiated their identification
> with work and success. They chose to drop out of the corporate world
> altogether and look for "meaningful" work: their own business or work
> for a non-profit or political/social organization they felt gave their
> lives some meaning.
>
> when I have time, I'll be happy to tell you more about the Centertown
> Project, which was an attempt to reinvigorate civil society in a small
> community in the rustbelt. We ran out of funding and the man who'd
> initiated the whole thing became ill with Parkinson's, but I think that
> the thrust of our work would be something the left could draw on.
>
> I have one question, though. How do rent parties address the structural
> issues of unemployment? I assume I know what rent parties are, but
> perhaps there is a social history there that I'm unaware of.
>
> Carol Stack talks about how the habit of sharing--the normative ethos,
> in fact, that one must share one's abundance when one obtains any at
> all--can be a problem. That is, when one couple in her research saves
> up enough money to "move out" they never do because they are expected
> to share their abundance with down and out relatives and friends. While
> having a more communal sense of property certainly helps the community
> survive, I'm not sure how the practice gets at the bigger issue: how
> fucked that people don't have enough to live on in the first place,
> white flight, deindustrialization, racism, etc.
>
> are we just talking at cross purposes here?
>
>
> kelley
>
>
> kelley
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org
______________________________
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive: They sparkle still the right Promethean fire; They are the books, the arts, the academes, That show, contain, and nourish all the world; Else none at all in aught proves excellent. (Love's Labour's Lost)