American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears

by Farah Stockman

College-educated people tend to talk about racial justice as the costless extension of basic human dignity, infinitely expandable to all. EQUAL RIGHTS FOR OTHERS DOES NOT MEAN LESS RIGHTS FOR YOU. IT’S NOT PIE., read one familiar sign at a protest rally. But to many workers, racial justice was a code word for who got first dibs on jobs, which are finite and zero sum. “There are only so many jobs in this building,” the union steward had told Uncle Hulan. I also began to see why so many white workers took the closing of the plant harder than their black counterparts did. The black workers had never felt entitled to their jobs in the same way. The loss of the factories had hurt them, too, of course. It had hurt them worse, in fact. But for many black workers, the economic pain of globalization had been tempered by hopeful signs of social progress, including the election of a black man as president. Working-class white men, on the other hand, had seen nothing but losses for three decades. The ebbing away of their position in society hurt. Even American citizenship, among the sole inherited advantages they possessed, seemed to mean nothing to the “degree club,” who sent their jobs to Mexico, China, and other places. Their decline in economic status had not been tempered by social progress. Instead, it had been accompanied by increasingly vocal calls for an end to white privilege. By 2011, working-class whites had been declared “the most pessimistic group in America.”