THE FUNCTIONAL UNDERCLASS
There has been reference in the previous chapter to class; on no matter is American social thought in its accepted and popular manifestation more insistent than on social class or, more specifically, the absence thereof in the United States. We have a classless society; to this we point with considerable pride. The social mythology of the Republic is built on the concept of classlessness—the belief, as President George Bush once put it, that class is “for European democracies or something else—it isn’t for the United States of America. We are not going to be divided by class.”1
Yet truth, if sufficiently obvious and inescapable, does obtrude. Presidential oratory, however well-intended and even eloquent, does not serve entirely to suppress it. Determinedly and irrevocably into the American language has come the modern reference to “the underclass.” There are individuals and families that, it is conceded, do not share the comfortable well-being of the prototypical American. These people, this class, are concentrated, as I have already indicated, in the centers of the great cities or, less visibly, on deprived farms, as rural migrant labor or in erstwhile mining communities. Or they are the more diffused poor of the Old South and of the region of the Rio Grande in Texas. The greater part of the underclass consists of members of minority groups, blacks or people of Hispanic origin. While the most common reference is to the underclass of the great cities, this is at least partly because its presence there is the most inescapably apparent.
So much is accepted. What is not accepted, and indeed is little mentioned, is that the underclass is integrally a part of a larger economic process and, more importantly, that it serves the living standard and the comfort of the more favored community. Economic progress would be far more uncertain and certainly far less rapid without it. The economically fortunate, not excluding those who speak with greatest regret of the existence of this class, are heavily dependent on its presence.
The underclass is deeply functional; all industrial countries have one in greater or lesser measure and in one form or another. As some of its members escape from deprivation and its associated compulsions, a resupply becomes essential. But on few matters, it must be added, is even the most sophisticated economic and social comment more reticent. The picture of an economic and political system in which social exclusion, however unforgiving, is somehow a remediable affliction is all but required. Here, in highly compelling fashion, the social convenience of the contented replaces the clearly visible reality.
Appreciation of this reality begins with the popular, indeed obligatory, definition of work. Work, in the conventional view, is pleasant and rewarding; it is something in which all favored by occupation rejoice to a varying degree. A normal person is proud of his or her work.
In practical fact, much work is repetitive, tedious, painfully fatiguing, mentally boring or socially demeaning. This is true of diverse consumer and household services and the harvesting of farm crops, and is equally true in those industries that deploy workers on assembly lines, where labor cost is a major factor in the price of what is finally produced. Only, or in any case primarily, when this nexus between labor cost and price is broken or partly disassociated, invariably at higher income levels, does work become pleasant and, in fact, enjoyed. It is a basic but rarely articulated feature of the modern economic system that the highest pay is given for the work that is most prestigious and most agreeable. This is at the opposite extreme from those occupations that are inherently invidious, those that place the individual directly under the command of another, as in the case of the doorman or the household servant, and those involving a vast range of tasks—street cleaning, garbage collection, janitorial services, elevator operation—that have an obtrusive connotation of social inferiority.
There is no greater modern illusion, even fraud, than the use of the single term work to cover what for some is, as noted, dreary, painful or socially demeaning and what for others is enjoyable, socially reputable and economically rewarding. Those who spend pleasant, well-compensated days say with emphasis that they have been “hard at work,” thereby suppressing the notion that they are a favored class. They are, of course, allowed to say that they enjoy their work, but it is presumed that such enjoyment is shared by any good worker. In a brief moment of truth, we speak, when sentencing criminals, of years at “hard labor.” Otherwise we place a common gloss over what is agreeable and what, to a greater or lesser extent, is endured or suffered.
From the foregoing comes one of the basic facts of modern economic society: the poor in our economy are needed to do the work that the more fortunate do not do and would find manifestly distasteful, even distressing. And a continuing supply and resupply of such workers is always needed. That is because later generations do not wish to follow their parents into physically demanding, socially unacceptable or otherwise disagreeable occupations; they escape or seek to escape the heavy lifting to a more comfortable and rewarding life. This we fully understand and greatly approve; it is what education is generally meant to accomplish. But from this comes the need for the resupply or, less agreeably, for keeping some part of the underclass in continued and deferential subjection.
To see these matters in the clearest light, one must first look at their resolution in Western Europe.
In the last forty years in Germany, France and Switzerland, and in lesser measure in Austria and Scandinavia, the provision of outside workers for the tasks for which indigenous laborers are no longer available has been both accepted and highly organized. The factories of the erstwhile German Federal Republic are manned, and a broad range of other work is performed, by Turks and Yugoslavs. Those in France are similarly supplied by what amounts to a new invasion of the Moors—the vast influx from the former North African colonies. Switzerland has long relied on Italian and Spanish workers. The industrial north of Italy, in turn, has depended heavily on a reserve army of the unemployed from the south—the more backward Mezzogiorno—and now increasingly from North Africa. The British economy has been sustained in no small part by migrants from the former dominions—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the West Indies.
The employment of these workers goes beyond manufacturing establishments and factory assembly lines to a wide range of jobs. Restaurants, household and other personal services and less elegant public employments are all their conceded domain. In the large and generally excellent Swiss hospitals, decline and death would, it is said, be probable, if not inevitable, in the absence of the menial foreign staff. Swiss highways would not be repaired without them, or snow or city garbage removed. This is work that the older Swiss work force does not do. Nor, to repeat, do native workers man the assembly lines or undertake the nonprestigious tasks in Germany, France or elsewhere in Western Europe in any nearly sufficient way.
There are marked further advantages in this arrangement—in the availability of this admitted underclass. If it becomes unneeded, it can be sent home or, as more often, denied entry. This has been accomplished in Switzerland with such precision in the past that involuntary unemployment has been often in the low hundreds. Most important of all, these workers, coming as they do from countries and occupations (mostly poor and tedious peasant agriculture) with much lower incomes, are impressed by their new comparative well-being. They are not, accordingly, as assertive as to wage and other claims as would be local workers, and their assertiveness is further tempered by the fact that they are not, with some progressive exceptions, voting and participating citizens. Many, once a certain financial competence is acquired, plan to return home. And some may have entered the country illegally, which usefully enforces their silence.
Not much has been made of this migration, some ethnic tension apart, and even less of the fact that in the years since World War II it has been essential for Western European economic life. That is because the offspring of the traditional older working class have gone on to the more pleasant and remunerative employments, the employments that are also called work. Still less has been made of a functionally similar underclass in the United States. Here too it has one of the uncelebrated but indispensable roles in modern capitalism. Both its character and also its uses are, however, rather more ambiguous and diverse than those of the foreign workers in Europe, those who are often called guest workers to emphasize their seemingly temporary role.
In the latter years of the last century and until World War I, American mass-employment industry and the less agreeable urban occupations drew their work force extensively from Eastern Europe as well as from the labor surplus of American farms. As this supply diminished, poor whites from the Appalachian plateau and, in greatly increasing numbers, blacks from the South moved to take their place. The assembly plants and body shops of Detroit were once staffed by workers from the adjacent farms and small towns of Michigan and Ontario, as well as by immigrants from Poland and elsewhere in Europe. As that generation went on to personally more attractive or socially more distinguished occupations, the assembly lines there reached out to more distant refugees from poor farming and mining areas and to the erstwhile sharecroppers and other deprived rural workers of the Deep South. With the latter recruitment Detroit became a city of largely black population; the automobile industry would not have survived had it had to rely on the sons and daughters of its original workers. Nor would many other public and private services have been available in tolerable form.
In more recent times, migration from Mexico, Latin America and the West Indies has become a general source of such labor. For many years now, legal provision has been made for the importation of workers for the harvesting of fruit and vegetables, there being very specific acknowledgment that this is something native-born Americans cannot be persuaded in the necessary numbers to do. There is here, somewhat exceptionally, a clear legal perception of the role of the underclass.
In the immigration legislation of 1990, there was at last some official recognition of the more general and continuing need for immigrant labor. Although much of the discussion of this measure turned on the opening of the door to needed skilled workers (and compassionately to relatives of earlier migrants), the larger purpose was not in doubt. There would be a new and necessary recruitment of men and women to do the tasks of the underclass. Avoided only was mention of such seemingly brutal truth. It is not thought appropriate to say that the modern economy—the market system—requires such an underclass, and certainly not that it must reach out to other countries to sustain and refresh it. It is important to note and emphasize that the contribution of the underclass is not confined to disagreeable industrial and agricultural employment. In the modern urban community, as noted, there is a vast range of tedious or socially demeaning jobs that require unskilled, willing and adequately inexpensive labor. To this need the underclass responds, and it makes urban life at the comfortable levels of well-being not only pleasant but possible. There is, however, the darker side.
In the inner cities of the United States, as less dramatically in Europe—Brixton and Notting Hill Gate in London, areas in France where North African migrants are heavily concentrated—there is a continuing threat of underclass social disorder, crime and conflict. Drug dealing, indiscriminate gunfire, other crime and family disorientation and disintegration are now all aspects of everyday existence.
In substantial part, this is because a less vigorously expanding economy and the movement of industry to economically more favored locations have denied to the underclass those relatively stable and orderly industrial employments once available in the large cities. But also, and more importantly, the normal upward movement that was for long the solvent for discontent has been arrested. The underclass has become a semipermanent rather than a generational phenomenon. There has been surprisingly little comment as to why minority communities in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere, once poor but benign and culturally engaging, are now centers of terror and despair. The reason is that what was a favoring upward step in economic life has now become a hopeless enthrallment.
Yet, considering the sordid life to which the modern underclass is committed, and especially when their life is compared with that of the contented majority, it is an occasion for wonder that the discontent and its more violent and aggressive manifestations are not greater than they are. One reason, evident in Europe and also important in the United States, is that for some of the underclass life in the cities, although insecure, ill-rewarded and otherwise primitive, still remains, if tenuously, better than that from which they escaped. The great black migration to the North after World War II was from a rural existence, classically that of the sharecropper, with rudimentary shelter and clothing; no health care; hard farm labor; exploitative living costs; little in the way of schooling; no voting rights; forthright, accepted and enforced racial discrimination; and, withal, extreme invisibility. Urban life, however unsatisfactory, was an improvement. So also for those moving from Puerto Rico and in the recent past from Latin America. For many the comparison is not with those who are more fortunate but with their own past position. This latter comparison and its continuing memory in the culture unquestionably has had the same tranquilizing effect on the American underclass as it has on that in Europe. It is one unnoted reason, along with ineligibility because of recent arrival or illegal presence, that underclass voter turnout in elections is relatively low.
While the urban areas inhabited by the underclass have seen outbreaks of violence in the past, notably the widespread riots in the second half of the 1960s, the more surprising thing, nonetheless, is their relative tranquillity. This, however, it will be evident from the foregoing, is something on which no one should count in the future. It has existed in the past because, as noted, the underclass has been in the process of transition—that from a lesser life, and with the prospect of generational escape. As this process comes to an end—as membership in the underclass becomes stable and enduring—greater resentment and social unrest should be expected. A blockage in the movement upward and out of the underclass will not be accepted. However, although it will not be accepted, it will not in the ordinary course of events be anticipated.
It is not in the nature of the politics of contentment to expect or plan countering action for misfortune, even disaster, that, however predictable and predicted, is in the yet undisclosed future. Such planning, invoking as it always does public action—provision of good educational opportunity, good public housing and health care, competent attention to drug addiction, family counseling, adequate welfare payments—is systemically resisted by the contented electoral majority. In what is the accepted and, indeed, only acceptable view, the underclass is deemed the source of its own succor and well-being; in the extreme view, it requires the spur of its own poverty, and it will be damaged by any social assistance and support. None of this is, of course, quite believed; it serves, nonetheless, to justify the comfortable position and policy.
1 Quoted in Benjamin DeMott, The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Class (New York: Morrow, 1990), pp. 9–10.