Current political and economic realities in the United States have highlighted the sense of loss and frustration felt and expressed by less educated white males. These men have come to embody the core of support for American conservatism in its most extreme and extremist forms. As a group, they almost represent a formal cultural movement of men who are angry at the way things are– so angry that they rarely let facts get in the way of their resentment about the status quo.
Neither do American politicians from both major political parties. Feeling the political and societal heat, and sensing an opening, politicians draw attention to the plight of this “new” underclass and court its support. They all declare that the policies they promote are the answer. Once in office, they pledge to fix things and restore hope—usually via promises of “good jobs” to those whose employment opportunities have dwindled, withered, and, in some cases, packed up and left town.
To be clear, the demographic these politicians seek to win over when they speak about the need to create more “good jobs” is very specifically white men with less than a college education. This slice of America has become shorthand for “Trump voter” or even “Republican voter,” but no part of what’s written below has a direct link to partisan politics. Similarly, although this resentment-driven political movement is not just an “angry white male” thing, it mostly is; less educated white men are its primary cohort and vector as a sociological and political force. To ascribe more inclusive demographics to this issue is equivalent to proposing that a suburban white woman is the image usually associated with the term “rap star.”
American politicians, from the president on down, talk about the need to create “good jobs” for these men who have seen their fortunes fade and their political orientation harden. But what do politicians mean by “good jobs?” Any job can be good or bad, depending on circumstances. Is a good job defined by high pay alone, by generous benefits, by workers’ rights, by all of these, or by something else?
Given the context of their comments and the audience for their promises, a clear definition of “good jobs” has been forged for use in the lexicon of modern American politics.
In America today, white males who do not have a college education and/or who do not seek “desk jobs” have—for the most part—concocted a notion of employment that is carefully circumscribed by a romantic idea of honest, hard-working , skilled laborers who live by a code of professionalism and honor. In these jobs, men toil mightily, but also call it like they see it, tell it like it is, don’t take any nonsense from anyone, and demand respect. They’re the man, after all, and whatever work they do must be “manly” enough to justify accepting it.
Yes, this cohort of America has demonstrated what work it will do and what work it will not do. There is no moral judgement to be made about this, as anyone is free to accept or refuse any job. But it’s time to stop pretending that the less educated white male worker in America does not have a very clear idea of what kind of job he considers worth accepting. He does, and he also has a clear idea of what he will not accept. All the proposals for “retraining” or calls for greater access to education are beside the point for those who have already made their decision about what constitutes a “good” job.
Here is a list of some of the qualities that define a “good” job for less educated white males in the United States of America today. It is, above all, a “manly” list.
- Involves heavy equipment, power tools, or vehicles
- Requires work clothes, boots, and/or specialty protective gear
- Characterized by very specific duties that require a very specific skill
- Assumes clear work hours that do not involve extra commitment without generous overtime pay or other clear benefit
- Permits frequent interaction with one’s supervisor and guaranteed “respect” from that supervisor
- Identification as part of a team, not as a unit to be moved as needed
- Coated with a patina of honor for occupying a recognized station of status—a job one can be proud of
Here is a list of unacceptable components or context of employment for less educated white males in the United States today. It is a list of features that are not “manly” enough.
- A lot of reading, writing, or paperwork
- Use of brooms, shovels, wheelbarrows or other inert, less dynamic or complicated, tools
- Face to face customer service, such as is found in retail—in other words, anywhere the customer must be treated as if s/he is always right
- Taking care of children or sick people, except as a driver
- Subject to requirements for flexibility in hours and/or duties and/or subject to a boss’ sometimes arbitrary orders or decisions
- Little or no opportunity to disagree with or challenge the boss or “system”
A handy shortcut for what is acceptable is this: Could the job be glamorized in a country song? If so, it’s a “good” job; if not, then it is probably not worthy of this demographic.
Using these criteria, possibly the “best” job is firefighter. It is no surprise, therefore, that the United States has far more firefighters than it needs and that community firefighting is almost always guaranteed to win outsized shares of municipal budgets, be spared cost-cutting, continue to expand to increasingly more luxurious facilities, and—often– feature (literally) scandalous benefits, overtime, and scheduling practices.
The unspoken (or at least publicly unspoken) logical result of this winnowing is that white males without a college degree who subscribe to the above consider most of the avenues of employment currently available to those without college degrees beneath them. That, in turn, means that they consider those who take these jobs—mostly women and Hispanic or other immigrants—to be not quite their equal.
Nobody has to look very far to witness clear examples of this ethos in American life. Here are a few that are so common as to be caricatures. Yet, for less educated white men, they are not caricatures but templates.
- Construction site: White guy in vest and hardhat sitting in and operating digger, forklift, or other heavy equipment while non-white men operate shovels, brooms, wheelbarrows, or hand tools in the mud, dirt, or dust.
- Skilled or unskilled labor: White guy with an air-conditioned vehicle and a clipboard or iPad talking on a phone or radio while non-white guys do all of the actual “work” that the group is there to do. (Paving driveways, loading and unloading anything by hand, clearing tables or washing dishes, landscaping, painting, roofing, planting or harvesting—these are some common examples.)
- Carnivals: White men no longer work in carnivals, except in supervisory positions. Carnival operators in the United States hire Mexicans (mostly—and mostly from the same town in Mexico), since, as they explain when justifying work visas for these Mexicans, white men hired dislike the living conditions and pace of work and quit after a few days.
Therefore, when American politicians talk about “good jobs,” what they really mean—and it’s time to recognize and admit this reality—is “jobs less educated white men will accept.”
These politicians are pandering. They are addressing a subset of Americans and pretending to buy into that group’s definition of “good jobs.” They are also pretending that their policies will revive this kind of job, even though not enough of them exist, and not enough of them will ever exist. They are also, unintentionally but shortsightedly, insulting other American workers who accept the jobs white men won’t.
Perhaps worse, this constant refrain about “good” jobs for less educated whites tends to validate in that very audience its image of what a good job is. Sadly, that image is neither realistic nor reasonable– not only because it is based on a past economic structure that cannot be resuscitated, but also because it is—largely– based on emotion, pride, and false nostalgia.
This equation means that politicians who promise or pretend to promise “good” jobs to less educated white males either do not understand what their audience hears or they are cynically pandering to that audience by presenting a promising employment landscape that is nothing more than an empty promise. There are many examples. Coal mining as a significant source of employment is not part of America’s future. Heavy equipment, factories, and machines in general require less and less human input, so jobs that rely on interaction with them will become even scarcer. At the present time, America needs fewer—not more—firemen, as tougher building codes and better construction and prevention practices have drastically decreased the incidence of fires.
All these aspects of the contemporary American labor market are indisputably true and have been documented for at least a decade. Contemporary manufacturing jobs, for example, generally require education and/or training in order to thrive in a modern, computer-driven factory or assembly line. Manufacturing jobs also generally require a great deal more flexibility in terms of duties and schedules than they used to. In other words, even the jobs that are held up as the type of “good job” that these men might aspire to no longer fit their definition of good jobs.
Yet politicians fail to communicate this reality to these aggrieved voters—or to the public at large. Very few candidates for office, if any, have the integrity to say, “without higher education or training, it looks like the best options for jobs in the future include health care and retail and landscaping and other sectors you haven’t considered.” And, although everyone knows this to be true, almost no politician is on the record disassociating immigration from the loss of jobs, since none of them will say, “OK, if we eliminate illegal immigrants as participants in our economy, are you able-bodied white men looking for work willing to take the jobs they currently fill? If not, who going to pick the crops and work non-skilled construction and clean buildings and care for the elderly and wash dishes?”
Pretending that politics can deliver the jobs that white males without a college education consider manly enough to be worth their time is nothing more than taking advantage of these white males’ emotions to win their political support or silence them as a barrier to desired political or economic outcomes that will not involve them.
It is important to underscore—again– that, while much of the above characterizes any worker in the United States or elsewhere, less educated white male workers are the political force that expresses it. People have a right to seek jobs that appeal to them, and workers should be proud of the work they do. The underlying issue this piece seeks to expose is the relationship between a specific definition of “good jobs” and that definition’s deleterious effect on American politics. It is, thus, an attempt to establish definitions, and to identify the patterns that result from definitions. Papering over this slice of American reality, or failing to identify it for what it is does these angry white men– and the rest of the American polity– a disservice.