Employment Protects Less and Less Against Poverty
May 9th, 2008 by SocProf and tagged Economy, Labor, Poverty, Social Exclusion, Social Inequalities, Social Stratification, Working Poor
Via Le Monde,
Employment constitutes less and less a protection against poverty. This is one of the conclusions of a report in France, from the National Observatory on Poverty and Social Exclusion (ONPES – a national research institute).
The report confirms that the trend of poverty reduction over the past two decades seems to have paused: in France, in 2005, 6.3% of people were below the poverty line (approximately $1,000/month for a person living alone), a percentage similar to that of 2003. What has changed is the intensity of poverty, which has gotten worse: the gap between the median income of the poor and the poverty line is widening. What this means is that the poor are getting poorer and their income becomes more distant from the poverty line and their quality of life is more and more marked by precariousness.
And this is where employment becomes a factor. There are more and more working poor: in 2003, they were 1.47 million; by 2005, they were 1.74 million (7% of the active population). Poverty affects first and foremost those that experience long periods of unemployment, but also those are work all year long in part-time jobs (21% of the working poor) and the non-salaried or independent workers.
Family status also has an impact on the probability of being working poor. One third of the working poor have an unemployed spouse (as opposed to 23% of the active population), another third has no partner (as opposed to 25%). So, even when individually, workers make more than the poverty line, their familial situation is what drags them into the category of working poor.
When I read this article, it reminded me of something similar I had read weeks before on the sociology blog OrgTheory, by Kieran Healy on the declining significance of occupation on wage inequalities, reporting on an article from the American Sociological Review. The abstract states this:
“Wage inequality has increased dramatically in the United States since the 1980s. This article investigates the relationship between this trend and occupational structure measured at the three-digit level. Using the Current Population Survey from 1983 to 2002, we find that the direct association between occupations and wage inequality declined over this period as within-occupational inequality grew faster than between-occupational inequality. We estimate multilevel growth models using detailed occupational categories as the unit of analysis to assess how the characteristics of occupations affect changes in mean wages and levels of wage inequality across this time period. The results indicate that changes in mean wages across occupations vary depending on the characteristics of individuals in those occupations and that intra-occupational inequality is difficult to predict using conventional labor force data. These findings seem largely inconsistent with the common sociological view of occupation as the most fundamental feature of the labor market. Correspondingly, a more comprehensive approach—one that incorporates the effects of organizational variables and market processes on rising wage inequality in the New Economy—is warranted.”
Bottom line: one’s occupation is less and less correlated to wages, hence the article title: “The Rise of Intra-Occupational Wage Inequality in the United States, 1983 to 2002″. That is, 70% of the increase in wage inequalities occurs within (rather than between) occupations.
Kieran Healy focuses on the organizational implications and how this flies in the face of the idea that as occupations require more skills, then, they should command greater wage inequalities than less skill-based occupations (the old trope that education solves everything, to put it dumbly). I would argue that this is the practical version of the Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of Liquid Society.
Social risks (such as poverty or increased inequalities) become all the more prevalent as states lose their ability to provide stable and secure living conditions. States are now “spaces of flows” (p. 135). Arjun Appadurai (1996) delineates these flows (or “scapes”) as part of the process of globalization. These scapes are independent of any particular nation-states. They comprise mediascapes (flow of information through the mass media, television, the Internet), financescapes (flow of capital through the global financial system), technoscapes (flow of technology or flows made easier thanks to technology), ethnoscapes (flow of people, immigration, refugees, tourists), and ideoscapes (flow of ideas such as consumerism, market, democracy).
Such flows shape individuals’ lives both positively (greater access to knowledge and information) and negatively (insecurity generated by financescapes, precarization of work), each scape creating its own type of risks. The solidity of the state is undermined by the “liquidity” of flows since they are transnational, transborder phenomena. This is what prompted Zygmunt Bauman (2000) to describe the first modernity as heavy or solid modernity, as opposed to the liquid late modernity, which is the condition of globalization.
As Bauman indicates, in liquid society, power now is related to the capacity to travel light and to uproot instantly. This creates a new form of inequalities: to paraphrase Bauman, those free to move without notice rule. A new principle of social division is not just related to wealth versus poverty but to mobility versus immobility. This discrepancy between a free, mobile, volatile capital and a tied-down, territorial labor partly explains the current state of weakness of organized labor. There is no longer a mutual dependency or mutual engagement.
As Bauman puts it (2000), “capital can travel fast and travel light and its lightness and motility have turned into the paramount source of uncertainty for all the rest. This has become the present-day basis of domination and the principal factor of social divisions (p. 121).” Therefore, the current logic in corporations is downsizing and phasing out. Correlatively, the modern nation-state, being territorial by definition, becomes equally powerless to control let alone shape the global flows or scapes defined above. Liquidity and scapes are not simply phenomena affecting the large-scale aspects of the social structure. They also have deep impacts on people’s lives, mostly through the process of individualization.
In his analysis of liquid modernity, Bauman (2000) asserts that two features characterized liquid modernity. One is the end of what he calls an “early modern illusion:” the idea that history had an end where society would achieve a stage of perfection, the expression of the good society (p. 29). This assumption was present in early modern social thinkers such as Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx. Liquid modernity involves the end of such notion of collective progress.
The other feature is what Bauman (2000) calls “deregulation and privatization.” Any improvement to be made in living conditions is no longer seen as the job of the modern state but is more and more left to the efforts of individuals. The end of a progressive conception of society means that any idea of the “good society” has shifted to the idea of “human rights,” from the social realm to the individual.
The result, for Bauman, is that, if individuals are freer to determine their own idea of happiness, it is also entirely up to them to achieve it and any failure will be attributed to their own shortcomings. In this sense, any notion of emancipation is no longer a social project to be achieved collectively but an individual task, with new experts (life coaches, therapists and counselors of all sorts, such as the omnipresent Doctor Phil) to guide individuals along the way. Furthermore, individual fulfillment will involve some form of consumption. Paraphrasing Peter Drucker, Bauman (2000:30) puts it this way, “no more salvation by society” (p. 30).
As presented in Aldous Huxley’s (1936) Brave New World and George Orwell’s (1948) 1984, solid modernity dystopia depicted the loss of individuality as the major source of fear. There inherent totalitarian tendencies of solid modernity have not materialized. In fact, just the opposite seems to be occurring. Bauman (2000) contends that it is the emergence of individualization rather than the totalitarian nightmare that is the mark of liquid modernity.
Individualization means that members of society can no longer count on social safety nets or the welfare state to negotiate the impact of risks on their lives (such as a job loss, loss of pensions and savings to the insecurities of the market). Liquid modernity leaves them “free” to figure out solutions on their own. Individuals are left to deal with societal and systemic conditions as part of their own individual life-projects. As Bauman (2000) writes, “risks and contradictions go on being socially produced; it is just the duty and the necessity to cope with them which are being individualized” (34).
Such a conundrum is perfectly illustrated by Richard Sennett (1998). In the 1970s, Sennett had conducted a study of blue-collar workers in the United States and more than fifteen years later, he inadvertently met the son of one of the workers he had studied. This gave him the opportunity to compare trajectories between two different generations in the American workforce. According to Sennett, Enrico (the father, a janitor) lived in linear time with a clear career trajectory: he kept the same job for almost all his career, he and his wife could monitor the slow but steady increase of their savings every week, see the improvements in their quality of life based on visible measurement criteria (such as buying a house in the suburbs). Enrico’s job was unionized and protected and his pay increases determined by seniority. For Enrico, it was easy to plan years in advance, what his life would be like when he retired. The narrative of his life was secure and clear.
In contrast, Rico (the son, a consultant) had a much less linear life. After graduating from college with a business degree, Rico had had to move several times, experienced downsizing and started his own consulting firm. Flexibility (being at the whims of clients) and lack of control became the trademarks of his professional life while his father’s occupational life was marked by certainty. On the one hand, Enrico was involved in a social and collective structure (union) that provided security to his position and prospects. Rico, on the other hand, experiences individualization with no clear trajectory.
But Sennett is more interested in the deeper personal and interpersonal consequences of such a shift from linearity to fragmentation. The very notion of “career” as a linear path progressing step-by-step and oriented toward the long-term, is fast disappearing. More and more, a short-term logic predominates: where Enrico had a career, Rico has contracts and projects. Such a short-term logic, Sennett contends, takes a psychological and emotional toll. Indeed, Rico complains that his life does not present to his children the ethical role model he would want them to emulate. He talks to his children about loyalty, long-term commitment while everything in his life illustrates short-term, lack of commitment and limited loyalty. As Sennett (1998) notes, “this conflict between family and work poses some questions about adult experience itself. How can long-term purposes be pursued in a short-term society? How can durable social relationships be sustained? (…) The conditions of the new economy feed instead on experience which drifts in time, from place to place, from job to job.” (26-27)
This phenomena is what Sennett calls the corrosion of character as the traits required by new economic conditions damage or corrode those qualities necessary to sustain human relationships and a consistent sense of self. Bauman (2000) offers a somewhat similar view of this assessment when he applies the notion of short-term commitment to personal life where the effects of disengagement and loosening of ties have resulted in the passage from marriage to cohabitation. His point is certainly not that there has been a moral decline in the process, but that individualization requires finding individual solutions to socially and globally-produced issues. In liquid modernity, personal relationships also involve risks that have to be dealt with individually not by falling back on imaginary and unavailable traditions.
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