RSF Authors Enobong Hannah Branch and Caroline Hanley Discuss Their New Book: Work in Black and White
Enobong Hannah Branch and Caroline Hanley are the authors of the RSF book Work in Black and White: Striving for the American Dream. Branch and Hanley interviewed 79 middle-aged Black and White Americans to explore how their attitudes and perceptions of success are influenced by the stories American culture has told them about the American Dream — and about who should have access to it and who should not. In a new interview with the foundation, Branch and Hanley discuss their findings. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Enobong Hannah Branch is the Senior Vice President for Equity and a professor of sociology at Rutgers University.
Caroline Hanley is an associate professor of sociology at William & Mary.
Q. What motivated you to write Work in Black and White? Why is it important to understand and compare how Black and White middle-aged Americans make sense of the American Dream?
Branch: Caroline and I have been collaborators for a long time. We were working on a project for 14 or 15 years on how to understand economic inequality in America, and that’s the project that brought us together. My dissertation was focused on Black women’s labor and labor inequality and Caroline’s was looking at regional differences in economic inequality. And our work came together because you couldn’t understand regional differences in economic inequality without understanding the occupational restrictions of Black women. So, we had done work coming forward in time from 1960 to closer to the present. And this project, for me, is an exploration of what happens now. What does it mean to pick up in the present moment where economic inequality is entrenched? We have left the immediate post-Civil Rights Era of inequality, where group-based differences were the medium between which inequality was preserved. And now it’s a little bit more difficult, not impossible, but a little bit more difficult to say, “Well, it’s because of my identity.” We’re looking at how people are making sense of difference. We’re both quantitative by training and in our orientation, so not just examining the inequality, but also looking at, more carefully, how people are making sense of the inequality were, for me, some of the real driving questions behind this work.
Hanley: I would add that we specifically wanted to talk with middle-aged Americans as part of unpacking some of that meaning-making process. One of the things that I’m really interested in, that we have embraced with this project, is economic insecurity. We’ve studied economic inequality before, but economic insecurity is a more complex concept to delve into. Because economic insecurity is people’s fear or experience around a fear of hardship produced by economic loss. So, we wanted to dive in and embrace the complexity of how people are making sense of the inequalities they see around them. And folks who are middle-aged are really well positioned to reflect on recent trends because they were raised with expectations around opportunity that came from their parents’ experiences from earlier eras. And yet, they’ve had to confront a very different reality in making their way into and through adulthood. So, we really wanted to focus on those folks and their experiences.
Branch: And how you reconcile those two things. How do you reconcile the sense of broadening inequality and broadening insecurity with the tendency that most people have, which is when I’m insecure, then my attention to the broader inequality is lessened? But the broader inequality that has driven the racial patterns we’ve observed for years is something that both Black workers and White workers have had to make sense of and contend with. How willing you are to see and understand was a question for Black workers and White workers. Were they having the same understanding and reflection of this moment, knowing that they enter this moment from very different places?
Hanley: The way we talk about the past is important because it shapes our understanding of the present and our sense of what’s possible in the future. There are two big problems with the way we as a nation talk about our recent economic history. One is the story of post-industrial economic restructuring. When we talk about economic changes since the 1970s, we tend to emphasize how the decline of manufacturing, new technologies, and globalization undermine the foundations of secure employment relations. Now, that’s not wrong. But it’s also not the whole story. The headline really should be that the world of work changed, but our employment policies failed to keep up. We could have less inequality and more security if we choose to update our labor market policies for the twenty-first century.
The second thing we often overlook is that nostalgia for the secure employment relations of the post-World War II period is rooted in a racialized history of unequal access to good jobs. Economic insecurity is not new for everyone. What’s more, in many ways, the good jobs that were available in the postwar period, especially for White men, were actually created at the expense of security for other groups of workers due to systemic racism and sexism in New Deal employment and labor law. So, one of the things that really motivated us in writing this book was to fill in those gaps and provide a fuller and more accurate account of how we got here. An account that opens the door to more productive conversations about how things could be different in the future if we can build the political will to make it so.
Q. How has the nature of work, job security, and the labor market changed from the post-World War II era to the post-industrial era?
Hanley: Americans today are experiencing a high degree of economic insecurity, which operates alongside historically high levels of inequality. We argue that both of those trends are fundamentally rooted in a restructuring of the employment relationship. The fundamental changes that we’ve seen in the nature of work over the last 40 years or so are a polarization of job opportunities that has hollowed out the middle-class and a growing imbalance of power between workers and employers.
To better understand the polarization of work opportunities, it’s helpful to picture an hourglass with a very, very narrow middle. Since the 1970s, we’ve seen a shift from more of a diamond-shaped structure, where it’s wide at the middle and narrower at the top and bottom to this hourglass shape. And the day to day of between the top and bottom of the hourglass is different, but at the end of the day, it’s the balance of power between workers and employers that determines how new technologies, new forms of work organization, new sources of competition in the American economy affect employees and who reaps the rewards of increased productivity. Employers have increased their power relative to employees on both sides of the hourglass and that has produced a growing insecurity across the board that is not confined to lower-skill and less-educated workers.
Branch: We often look at the macroeconomic trends but if we look at how individuals are experiencing this, they’re saying “I used to be able to get a job and have that job” or “I thought I would get a job and have that job.” And that job was going to be the thing that was going to help them buy a house and put their kid in school. There was a sense of mutuality in the relationship, it wasn’t just employers extracting from employees. So, I went to a job and that job provided benefits for me and I gave to the job. Versus an extractive relationship where when employees are no longer giving employers something in a job context the worker becomes expendable.
The workers we spoke to have lived a lifetime of seeing their parents go to work, find a job, and stay in that job for 25, 30, sometimes 40 years. Their parents had pensions. These are things that contemporary workers struggle to find or even imagine. The way that we understand work has shifted fundamentally. One of my favorite quotes in the book is from an older worker. He’s laughing at young people who are talking about the fact they can’t find good jobs. And he says, “You don’t even know what a good job is. That never applied to you.” The notion of work that was grounded in the postwar labor contract has shifted. It used to be that employers had some obligations to the employee, but now we struggle to find that.
Q. What are the differences between how middle-aged Black and White workers make sense of rising economic insecurity and their ability to obtain secure work?
Branch: Man, how much time do you have? [Laughs] That’s not a short answer. We start the book with the fictional example of Joe and Jason and Jane and Janette; Joe was White, Jason was Black and Jane was White, and Janette was Black. And we use the example to show what workers thought they could have access to and the conditions that shaped their economic realities and show the ways that the postwar labor market in the ’60s and ’70s was different for different people and different from the labor market now. So, in the ’60s and ’70s, Joe had a job at the union plant that he can rely on, while Jason was excluded from that job. The expectation for Jeanette was that she was required to work, while Jane was expected to stay at home. In both of these scenarios, there were difficulties making ends meet, but they were able to manage.
Then, when you track how things changed over time, and you pick up with Jane and Jeanette, Joe and Jason in the 2000s, in twenty-teens, the economic realities look a lot different. Because of the supports, both familial and economic, that Joe and Jane had, they are more likely to own their home than Jason and Jeanette. They are more likely to have had other assets and resources. They were more likely to be married than Jason and Jeanette were. In the familial story sense, the experiences of White families and White workers were really different than the experiences of Black workers.
One of the things that’s important in their stories is that all four of them invested in education and all four of them expected education to have translated into economic rewards. And the only person that was really able to get the benefits of education, somewhat in the ways that they expected, was Joe. But the challenge for Jeanette and Jason, and to an extent Jane, was that Joe was okay no matter what level of education he had. He was better off than Jeanette was, even when Jeanette, the Black participant, invested more and got more degrees. The economic impact of awards never matched.
Hanley: It’s not new for working-class and poor Americans to experience anxieties that come with job loss or wages that are not high enough to maintain the standard of living. But those feelings of economic insecurity are increasing among middle- and even upper-middle-class Americans. And that’s new for well-educated workers with at least a college degree. Especially White, well-educated workers, who until recently, have been able to expect that higher education would deliver security. And we see that play out in the way that White Americans, in particular, are mourning that loss of good jobs that were available with hard work and with education. We also see, at times, White Americans misperceiving their economic situation as a loss of racial privilege. When, in fact, what is actually going on at the macro level is a restructuring of class relations that intersects very significantly with race and gender to create different opportunities.
Q. What is the racial futures paradox? How does it inform beliefs about achieving the American Dream?
Branch: A study that came out of the Associated Press National Opinion Research Center showed that the gap between Black and White American’s expectations of the future — the belief that their family had a chance of doing better or doing better with time — was the largest it’s ever been in 2013 when we were coming out of the Great Recession of 2008 and the economic forecasts were uneven at best. And this gap was something to be explored. So, how do you make sense of Black optimism and White pessimism? This is something we saw in our interviews with Black and White men and women. So, when we talked to workers and heard what they said, a theme that kept emerging was that Black Americans were, more often than not, optimistic despite the challenges they faced and their economic realities.
The argument we make is that our perceptions of our economic realities are both objective and subjective. Yes, there are challenges: you’ve earned this much money and it goes this far, that is an objective reality. But subjectively, how you feel about your precarity, the insecurity of the economic moment is connected to your expectations of how secure you would be. There’s the reality of what you have and what you think about what you have is grounded in what you thought you would have. So, White workers who had been privileged in the labor market — where who they competed against was much more limited — had greater expectations that the future would be better than the past. And the way that they experienced the serial recessions and the inability to rebound was devastating.
Whereas Black workers, who had continually been economically restricted — it wasn’t just recessions, but outright labor market discrimination across time — thought that this economic moment was hard, but it was the first time they thought it was hard collectively. And there was an opportunity to make it, to do the things that would create opportunity without being blocked by racial discrimination. You saw Black workers saying, “This is a hard moment, but I can make it work. Watch me hustle.” So that difference of orientation, grounded in expectations of struggle, was really different for Black and White workers, and that’s the racial futures paradox.
Hanley: So, both groups are looking to the past to understand the present and develop those expectations about the future. And they’re looking back and seeing these very different racially distinct paths, and that becomes the basis for trying to make sense of the present and the future.
Q. How has rising economic insecurity altered gendered expectations for families? Do these expectations vary by race? If so, how?
Branch: The way that we understand the family and the expectation or insistence for women to work outside of the home or to remain in the home was always a gender dynamic and it was a gender dynamic that workplaces either enabled or restricted. Remember, we’re going back to a moment when employment relationships shaped family dynamics. There was an expectation that White men will be paid a family wage and that White women will stay home. This was an expectation that emerged through unionization and agreements that Black men were explicitly excluded from and the expectation was that Black women were expected to work.
From that work construct came a broader social contract. Magazines, like Life Magazine, that catered to a woman’s world and the cult of true womanhood, heralded domesticity, and that’s what a woman was supposed to do. And Black women were always held outside of that conceptualization. There have been several books and several studies that point to how Black women have embraced the need to provide and care for their families in ways that affirm their womanhood in a way that White women were not afforded; White women were not afforded that duality. The socially reinforced expectation for White women was that if you were married, you were to be home, and that shaped relationships. And part of what we were looking at in the book was how Black and White men and women talk about relationships at a time where, economically, two incomes are more often than not needed for a family to stay afloat and be “comfortable;” comfortable in air quotes because how you define comfort can shift.
You saw the White women in our sample, many of whom are working, still holding on, in some ways, to the notion that men should be responsible for the finances. We heard Black women saying, “We can get it together.” Black women weren’t holding on to this conception. Going back to the point Caroline was making a moment ago, they’re looking at expectations in the past to shape their understanding of what’s right for them in the present. And you can imagine how those expectations are a constraint on relationships — what Black and White men are allowed to do and how they’re able to partner.
I think one of the most fascinating things in the data was, at a collective level, Black women were the most highly educated group, but the most economically insecure. While White women have lower levels of education, but often, through partnerships, were much more financially secure. So, you saw the impact of expectations on individual patterns but also how they played out in partnerships.
Hanley: Just to give a little bit of context around that, one of the key things that has happened with the restructuring of work is that take-home pay for the bottom 50- to 60-percent of the workforce has been essentially flat since the 1970s. So, people have had to turn to an array of coping strategies to try to maintain their standards of living. This includes increasing the total number of hours worked within the household, increasing use of debt to try to finance needs and wants. And over time, that increasing number of working hours fostered the increasing reliance on women’s labor force participation. This is especially true for shaping the change in White women’s labor force participation and the centrality of white women as breadwinners in the household and the upending of White women’s role in the household.
Q. What role do middle-aged workers believe education plays in achieving secure jobs? How do they reconcile education’s declining ability to provide economic security?
Branch: This is a generation that thought education was going to be it. We were looking for early adopters for our study, so you had to have at least some college education to be in our sample. The older folks in our sample were born in the late ’60s and early 70s, and there were coming of working age at a time when education was not required to get a good job. So, they were the early investors in education, and they were the folks who told their kids, “You have to get an education.” The belief was that education would provide the ability to retain what they had to what they hoped for at the start of their careers.
But they were also folks who started their careers at a moment when economic instability and the threat of economic instability became more normative than anomalous. It became more common to expect disruptions and serial disruption. This is a group that has had a hard time ever getting back on their feet in the same way they saw their parents be able to. They saw their parents do things like buy homes and work for long periods of time without education. They thought education would give them the edge to do the same thing. And then the reality and the challenge when education didn’t pay out drove an anxiety for them. And not just from looking at their own experiences. For those with good jobs, and some of them had, the anxiety was that, even with education, I’m not confident I’ll get another one. It started to feel more like luck as opposed to predictability. And the hope was that education would have provided that predictability, that stickiness. There’s no question that those with college degrees earn more and do better on average than those without them. But for those with education and who are anxious, they’re looking at other people who also have educations and who are struggling. So, it’s not quite as black and white, to use the metaphor, as they’d hoped it would be.
Hanley: The role of education and gaining access to good jobs has shifted fundamentally over time, such that the stakes of not having a college education have never been greater. But a college education is less reliable as an insurance policy against hardship. And similarly, landing that dream job in the professions is less reliably an insurance policy against economic insecurity. We see that at the macro level through earnings inequality, which has increased over time among people with the same level of education and hold the same occupational position. It makes sense that folks — even people who do have those elite jobs and elite degrees — are feeling anxious. They look around and they see no one is safe from the possibility of their job ending.
Q. Should we change our expectations of the role of education in achieving economic security? If so, why?
Branch: It’s not that we should lower our expectations of education, it’s that we were asking too much from education to begin with. We were asking education to take the place of policy. We were asking education to take the role of opportunity. So, we’re not talking about opportunity structures. We’re not talking about policy change. We’re not talking about global labor markets. We’re just saying education.
Hanley: As important as education is for personal growth and fulfillment, democratic citizenship, and economic productivity ensuring universal access to high-quality education will not reduce economic insecurity in the aggregate. There are just not enough good jobs and not enough sources of stable income to go around. Schools provide individuals with tools that they use in the competition for access to good jobs, but they do not determine what types of opportunities are available or what kind of social supports exist outside of paid employment. We should adjust our expectations around the role that schools play. Education helps people meet opportunity, but it doesn’t create that opportunity. It’s our invisible policy choices around the labor market and housing, market regulation, as well as welfare state support that play a more direct role. And so, to advance changes that really can increase security, we argue that we need a public discourse around opportunity that really focuses on those institutions, starting with the workplace.
Branch: I want to add that Americans have an obsession with meritocracy and education is the way that we show we are meritorious. If we get an education, we can show that we’ve invested, we’ve worked hard, we’ve demonstrated our worth. Now, give me my key in the game of Monopoly, give me my income since I’ve passed go because now I’m ready. And we saw that the workers we spoke to never considered that education wasn’t enough. They hadn’t considered these invisible factors, and it caused them anxiety. We asked the people we were talking to, who are grappling with real change in their lives and with real vulnerability, what they’re telling their kids. And I kept being stunned by the fact that they were telling them to get an education. There was nothing more that they could reach for, nothing more that they could speak to.
So, it’s less that we need to expect less from education, it’s that we need to expect America to make the means to achieve the dream plausible. We need to not just put it on the backs of individuals to make sense of why they failed, which is what we do now. If you get an education and it doesn’t work out, well, you failed, and the system is blameless. And that’s the part we have to shift. The experience of vulnerability and the experience of failure is growing; it’s not decreasing. Just getting more education isn’t going to shift that for our society.
Q. What policies or interventions would you recommend to help mitigate economic inequality and the rise of insecure work?
Hanley: We need reforms on both ends of the hourglass. One of the important things that our work shows is that things are hard at the bottom. But we also need reforms that are reshaping and creating more opportunities for security for folks who did get that education and are in those white-collar and professional jobs. So, what does it mean to build out that middle of the hourglass to make bad jobs better? And to make good jobs better as well? We need employment and labor law reform that matches the twenty-first century.
I think that starts with addressing the systemic racism and sexism that was written into our policies that created good jobs in the post-World War Two period. That can mean getting rid of the alternative minimum wage for tipped employees, and strengthening access to union organizing protections in sectors like hospitality and retail that were directly excluded from labor law to preserve racial inequalities. It means shoring up the rights of direct care and agricultural workers who are in industries that were historically exempted from employment protections and still have a normative experience of basic rights being routinely violated.
I could go on, but I want to make sure to talk about what this means at the top of the hourglass. Again, we were talking to folks who are well-educated and in professional roles. One of the things that we find is that salaried workers and people who have white-collar jobs are suffering, oftentimes, not just from instability regarding how much those jobs will continue, but also from overwork. Salaried professionals are in a better position to access economic security when they have jobs, but they’re being asked to do more for less pay, less security, and fewer opportunities for advancement. That takes a toll at the personal and the family level. And so, implementing strategies to support employee engagement and protect against overwork. Things like the four-day work week, embracing remote and hybrid work, where it’s available, so people can avoid long commutes, and revising standards for access to overtime among white-collar workers are all very concrete and real possibilities that would improve the working lives of people at the top of the hourglass.
And it’s very important to think about shoring up income support for folks who are between jobs or who are unable to work, who are underemployed, or unemployed. One of the things that we show in the book is how unemployment rates are historically, and at present, oftentimes twice as high for Black Americans than among White Americans. And that is true when you’re looking at people at different levels of education. So, thinking about improving work, and improving the fairness and opportunity in the employment relationship really should go alongside thinking about sources of income security when people are between work or are underemployed.
Branch: One of the threads that we talked about in the book is that there’s so much emphasis on getting a good job. And there’s the anxiety and vulnerability because a good job is only good as long as you have it. Americans are anxious, now more than ever, about that moment when they’re going to get a call or when they hear about the layoffs in mass happening in other places. It breeds a sense of, “I’ll take whatever I have to take at this job.” We hear people in their 50s saying, “If I lose my job, what am I going to do next? I’m not going to be able to get another job like the one that I have.”
Caroline gave us lots of things that are policy driven at the employment level, but we need to address our approach to economic practice in America. Trickle-down economics is the thing that we’ve held onto. We think, “Well, as long as resources reach the top, eventually it’ll get better for everyone else.” And we’ve seen that, if I’m generous, that approach has been uneven in its applicability. We haven’t seen the kind of rising tide lifting all boats that we were promised from a trickle-down economics approach.
One of the things that we show in the book is that if you look through the 1970s, you saw income growing across earning percentiles. Then afterward, it was only growing for the top 25-percent. And if you broke it down even further, one might argue it’s not really the whole top 25-percent, it’s people in the upper 25 that are really driving that trend. So, we have to start having a different conversation, nationally, asking, “What is our overall economic strategy? And who does it benefit?” Because we’re either comfortable with the level of economic disparity and the unrest it drives, or we tackle it. And we tackle the need to reinvest in a social safety net that moves away from the systemic racial underpinnings of who we feared would benefit. We’re in a moment now where everyone is struggling or is one job loss away from struggle. I think the COVID-19 pandemic showed that when there is a collective will to ensure the welfare of all, we can do it. We saw real changes in child poverty and things like that, that were a result of whole economic change, that weren’t job specific. So, we really can make different choices about our economic system that create the conditions that allow employers to make different kinds of investments and that allow workers to make different kinds of investments that can really change society as we know it.
Hanley: And I just want to add that when we talk about employers, I think it makes sense to distinguish between our large-scale employers who have reshaped their markets, including supply chains for smaller employers. And so, either you work for one of the big guys who can afford to pay you a lot more because profit is huge and growing or you work for one of the smaller employers, whose bottom line is being squeezed at the top of their own industries, at the top of the market. We see this disturbing turn away from competition at the industry level, and it’s hurting workers and it’s hurting smaller scale employers as well. And I think that unless we find a way to talk about that shared vulnerability between workers and smaller-scale employers and how their interest would be served by looking again at the extent to which we’re actually fostering competition in our key industries, it’s only going to continue and get worse.
