Work — what’s it good for?

For the lower class, work is one way of getting money and keeping the Man from hassling you.  It’s not necessarily the best way, but it works.  Taking pride in one’s work is not likely.  Jobs are transitory.  Work is an option.  Your job is no part of your identity.

For the working class, on the other hand, taking pride in one’s work is important.  In fact, pride is generally a very significant thing for the working class.  Making money is important, and that’s a solid reason to work, but turning down added money in order to be proud of what one does is perfectly normal.

It doesn’t matter all that very much what the work is.  Oh, it’s best to have a job you enjoy, but whether you love your job or hate it, it’s important to do it well.  If you’re a plumber, then by God you want to be a good plumber.  If you’re flipping burgers, then you want them to be good burgers.

And this pride in one’s work is one of the major divides between working class and lower middle class.  Some people make no distinction between those two classes, and economically they’re pretty interchangeable, but behaviorally they’re not.  Working class people work to survive, because it’s what people do, and they try to do it well; middle class people work to get ahead, and if they try to do it well, that’s usually to impress someone so they can get a better job.

Generally speaking, the middle class hates work.  Work is necessary to acquire money and status and all the other good things in life, but work itself sucks.

The fact that an awful lot of middle-class jobs are mind-numbing pointless crap may have something to do with this.  It’s hard to take pride in pushing paper.

In the middle class you choose your job on the basis of how much it pays and where it is and who you’ll be working with, not generally on what you’ll actually be doing — because for one thing, you expect to be doing something different a few years down the road, because you’ve been promoted or downsized or gotten a better offer elsewhere.

But then when you get to the professional class, work is once again something you take pride in — but you may still have the middle-class obsession with getting ahead, moving up the ladder.  You work in one field, and you want to be the best in that field — law, medicine, programming, teaching, whatever.  (Some teachers are professionals, some are middle class.)

And for the upper class, work is an option.  It’s something you do when you need money, or want to please your family, or are bored.

You may notice a certain symmetry here.  Ask people, “Who are you?” and the answers will depend on class:

Lower class:  “I’m Joe Smith.  I live down on Howard, ‘cept when my old lady throws me out.”

Working class:  “I’m Joe Smith.  I’m a welder.”

Middle class:  “I’m Joe Smith.  I work for IBM.”

Professional class:  “I’m Joe Smith.  I’m a lawyer.”

Upper class:  “I’m Joe Smith, of the Philadelphia Smiths.  The cadet branch out of Upper Darby.”

Notice, also, that the middle class is made up of employees — people who work for other people, or for corporations, not for themselves.  Working class and professionals are a mix of employees and proprietors.  Upper and lower class can be anything, depending on their exact circumstances at the moment, but the default is unemployed.

I could have a lot more to say about attitudes toward work, actually — one attitude in particular:  the fear of unemployment.

The lower class isn’t afraid of unemployment; that’s their natural condition.  They’ll often just stop showing up for work because they’re bored or got a better offer or hell, it was too nice a day to sweep floors.

The working class doesn’t have too much trouble with unemployment.  It’s rough, but layoffs happen and they’re not a reflection on anyone’s personal worth as a human being, and there will be other jobs.  Skilled, dedicated workers are always in demand.

The middle class is largely terrified of unemployment.  Losing a job is a horrible stressful event to be avoided if at all possible — you may never find another one as good, you’ll lose all your seniority, all your contacts and the network you’ve built up to handle the office politics, your benefits will be endangered, you might miss a car payment.  It’s a vicious blow to self-esteem.  When you’re working, you’re somebody, you have a place in the world; when you’re downsized you’re just wastepaper, with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

The professional class doesn’t have too much trouble with unemployment.  Oh, it’s a blow, but educated, experienced people are always in demand.

The upper class isn’t afraid of unemployment; why should they be?

3.

So if class isn’t directly tied to wealth, what is it tied to?

Attitudes.  Beliefs.  Behavior.

When I was growing up in my nice middle-class suburb this didn’t really register, because I didn’t see much of anyone who wasn’t middle class.  There was a range from lower middle class to upper middle class, with a few aberrations (like my own family) in the mix, but it was a pretty narrow range.

Then I went off to college and met honest-to-God members of the upper class, like the Vanderbilt girls, and the kids of nouveau-riche arrivistes, like Wendell Colson (Chuck Colson’s kid, before and during the Watergate scandal), and European aristocracy, like Jan Stoeckenius, and ghetto kids, like Iago (whose real name was Joachim, but he had passed for Hispanic in order to survive on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant), and old-line Southern aristocracy — damn, what was that guy’s name?

Anyway, it was an eye-opening experience — but still limited, because after all, this was Princeton.  These were all Ivy Leaguers, regardless of their backgrounds — they were all bright and motivated and believed in the value of education, in one form or another.

Then I flunked out and lived in the slums of Pittsburgh for a year and a half — in South Oakland, to be exact, near Panther Hollow.  Where I got to meet lots of traditional working-class folks, the kind of people who would never think of sending a kid to Princeton.  And I also got to meet slum kids who weren’t bright and ambitious, like Iago; instead they included thieves and drug dealers and hustlers, and welfare cheats and day laborers and assorted others.  No actual pimps or whores, though — a gap in my education that still lingers.

After that I spent nine years in Kentucky — six in Lexington, which was midwestern suburban with a definite class structure unlike anything I’d seen in New England, and three in Dry Fork, up in the hills.  Hill folk weren’t quite like anything else I’d seen.

And finally we wound up in Maryland, in the suburbs of Washington, where the accepted wisdom is that it’s all race that matters, not class — which is bullshit.

And somewhere in there, it registered that it’s attitude that matters, not money.

Specifically, I think it’s attitudes about money, about work, about possessions, about status, about displays of wealth, and about class that define class.

So let me consider those attitudes.

First, about money:  Is it important?

If you’re lower class, money is important, but it’s a transient phenomenon, one you can’t control; sometimes you have money and sometimes you don’t, and it’s better to have it than not, but you can’t really do anything to ensure you’ll have it.  You can work, but that’s really slow, and eventually you’ll get fired or laid off or the paycheck will bounce.  You can steal, but you never know how much you’ll get, and it could get you jailed or killed.  Sometimes money will just come to you out of nowhere — a lottery win, an unexpected high-paying temp job, a generous friend — but it won’t stay, because it’ll all go for rent or clothes or utility bills or medical expenses.

Money’s untrustworthy stuff.  You know that some people seem to be able to accumulate so much of it it’s not a problem for them, but you don’t understand how that works.  Money is luck.

If you’re working class, money is why you work.  It pays the bills.  You save a little when you can, put it in the bank, and hope it’ll cover retirement — or at least car repairs and medical bills.  It’s important, but you don’t really like it or care about it all that much.  It’s fuel.

If you’re middle class, especially upper middle class, money is desperately important; you usually have enough, and when you don’t you have credit, but you’re always in debt and have to watch out not to go too far into debt, because you need to spend money to maintain your lifestyle and that spending doesn’t always match income.  Money is how you keep score.

If you’re upper class, money doesn’t matter.  It’s nice to have, but it’s not anything to worry about.  You’ll always be able to get more if it runs out, and of course you know how to save and invest, so it probably won’t ever really run out.  Money gets you things you like but don’t need.  Money’s a toy.

If you’re an intellectual, money’s a tool.  If you’re a pseudointellectual or a social climber (which are two faces of the same coin), it’s a weapon.

There are other categories, other classes, but I think that’ll do for now.

2:

When I was a kid, I didn’t think much about class.

This was partly because I was growing up in a quiet New England town where it wasn’t much of an issue. Pretty much the entire town was white middle-class folks.

I think I was also just a little slow to pick up on some of this stuff. I was in high school before it really registered that there were any ethnic divisions in town, for example. (The major division was Catholic/other; the Catholics then subdivided into Irish and Italian, and the others mostly into Armenian and Yankee, with a scattering of Jews, blacks, and other oddities (like an Argentine family I knew) who usually-but-not-always got counted with the Yankees.)

(If you’re not from New England it may seem weird that the small minorities got counted as old-line Yankees, but they did. Hard to explain if you aren’t familiar with New England attitudes, but it basically comes down to Yankees thinking of themselves as “everybody else,” the default, not part of a specific group, so that any isolated families, too small to constitute their own group, got included.)

(And all the divisions were very low-key, in any case.)

Anyway, I didn’t think about it much, and more or less accepted the “classless society” contention. In the 1950s that was more or less the official doctrine, at least in New England. That was what Sheckley’s story was mocking — and really, it was reading that story when I was about thirteen that I first began to understand that the U.S. is not classless, that even my hometown wasn’t. There’d been evidence before that, but it hadn’t really registered with me.

I was a little slow.

I’d known that my own family was considered a little weird, but I hadn’t thought of it in terms of class. In fact, I still didn’t think of it in class terms for years; if you asked me what class we were, I’d have said middle class without giving it much thought; going by income and status, that’s more or less correct. Going by other markers, it isn’t.

When I read Fussell’s Class — well, when I skimmed it, really, as I didn’t read it through — I concluded that we were “X-class.” After all, my father was a college professor, which seemed to fit, and we were all a pretty brainy bunch.

Except that when I was at Princeton I met some real X-class people. Again, it took me awhile to realize this, and to notice that the fact that they were not much like me and mine, and to draw any conclusion from that.

I also met real upper-class people.

It took awhile, but it eventually sank in that in a lot of ways I fit better with the upper class.

Oh, not perfectly. For one thing, my family didn’t have enough money anymore for me to have the full set of upper-class attitudes. But it began to seem as if any time I heard a discussion of class attitudes, I’d react to the upper-class position with, “Well, yeah, of course,” and the others with, “That’s dumb.”

I dunno, maybe I’m just a poseur. This is one of those things where it’s really hard to say; class is so nebulous in America. But there are things that I’d just thought of as normal that, well… aren’t.

Like the fact that we owned a mansion.

I mean, it’s not a very big mansion, and because of where it is it’s worth less than the suburban split level I live in now, but still, it’s a mansion. My great-great grandfather built it around 1840. It’s been rented out since 1939.

And there are other legacies still in the family. I have books on my office shelves that have been in the family for 150 years; there’s an Oriental rug in the basement that’s been in use for ninety. There’s a set of eighty-year-old hand-blown Carder Steuben dessert ware in the kitchen.

That’s just some of the stuff I walked off with; most of the family heirlooms wound up with my younger sisters.

And then there’s the fact that I went to Princeton. Which was not accomplished on the basis of grades; mine were okay, and my SAT scores were excellent, and I had some other stuff going for me, but the reason I was accepted is that my father went to Princeton, and his father.

It took me the longest time to realize that most people’s grandfathers didn’t go to college anywhere, let alone the Ivy League.

Let alone grandmothers. Mine went to Smith. Seven Sisters, rather than Ivy League, but for the Class of 1901 the Ivy League was all-male.

So it gradually sank in that my family had been upper class once.

They weren’t fabulously wealthy or anything; the family fortune was about a million and a half at the start of the 20th century. Uninflated 1900 dollars, so that was definitely rich, but we were never in Rockefeller’s league. Most of it went in the 1929 crash, though, and then when my father was orphaned he blew a big chunk of his inheritance putting himself through Princeton, getting a doctorate from Harvard, and buying a house straight out of grad school. Raising six kids took care of the rest; my share, when my mother died, came to about forty grand and a few shares of GM stock — and the mansion in Pennsylvania and a bunch of books and rugs and china and old photos and stuff.

So we weren’t rich. And for a long time I took for granted that that meant we weren’t upper class.

Except now I’ve reconsidered.