think of medical technicians, factory workers, bus drivers. Men’s jobs, and some
women’s, are physically demanding: consider construction workers, long-haul truck
drivers, physicians’ assistants. Women’s jobs—in nursing, customer service, managing
small stores—can be emotionally demanding, too.
Job demands are compounded by those of child care. Many couples tag team, with
parents working different shifts to minimize child care costs. Here’s what that looks like:
Mike drives a cab and I work in a hospital, so we figure one of us could transfer to
nights. We talked it over and decided it would be best if I was here during the day and
he was here at night. He controls the kids, especially my son, better than I do. So now
Mike works day and I work graveyard. I hate it, but it’s the only answer: at least this
way somebody’s here all the time. I get home at 8:30 in the morning. The kids and Mike
are gone. I clean up the house a little, do the shopping and the laundry and whatever,
then I go to sleep for a couple of hours before the kids get home from school. Mike gets
home at 5, we eat, then he takes over for the night, and I go back to sleep for a couple
of hours. I try to get up at 9:00 so we can have a little time together, but I’m so tired
that I don’t make it a lot of times. And by 10:00, he’s sleeping because he has to get up
at 6:00 in the morning. It’s hard, it’s very hard. There’s no time to live or anything.^24
That’s the face of working-class life today. Not easy. And it shouldn’t be surprising that
many—women as well as men—look back with nostalgia to their parents’ generation,
when women worked only intermittently or part time.
Working-class people may not know the exact statistics, but they understand the
differences between their families and those of the poor. Poor married mothers (60%) are
more than twice as likely to be at home full time as married mothers in the middle (23%).
Nearly 60% of working-class mothers work full time; only 42% of poor moms do. In
families with children in center care, 30% of poor families get subsidies; very few
working-class families do (about 3%).^25
I know, but only because I study such things, that child care subsidies for the poor are
sporadic and pathetically low (sometimes $2.00 an hour).^26 I know that poor moms stay
home because the minimum wage is so low they would lose money by working. And that
poor men have trouble finding full-time work because part-time jobs allow employers to
avoid paying health insurance.
Mike’s family doesn’t know any of that, or if they do, they may not care. All they see is
their stressed-out daily lives, and they resent the subsidies and sympathy available to the
- Why Does the Working Class Resent the Poor?