by
Sarah Jaffe
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THE NUCLEAR FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN THE FOCUS OF SO MUCH HAND-WRINGING and moralizing in recent years was not a product of human nature but rather of a particular period in US capitalism. The family wage, designed to allow a male breadwinner to support a wife and children, was bargained for by the labor movement and accepted, though uneasily, by business leaders during the New Deal period. It allowed many working-class women, as well as their wealthier sisters, to stay home with their children; as discussed earlier, it built the middle class. The family wage—that is, material conditions—shaped our ideas of the male and female role in the workplace and in the home, in public and in private.
It also shaped the “moral values” of the period. Men took pride in their work and in their ability to provide for their families; women took pride in their children and in their caring skills that held the family together. The family wage helped to normalize certain ideas about women’s work and its value and about gender roles. If women were to be supported by their husbands, they didn’t need to make a living wage, and could be paid less when they were in the workplace—and despite the popular mythology, some women were always in the paid workforce. If women should be at home, social systems for child care were unnecessary, and in fact were examples of the state usurping the private rights of families.
The movement seemed as much about changing politics, the minimum-wage law in particular, as it was about organizing workplace by workplace. Since most fast-food chains operate on a franchise model, the immediate boss in most workplaces is operating on a thin profit margin, kicking back a required payment to the corporation at the top, and wringing profits out of the workers by keeping them at minimum wage or just above. By targeting the sector, and particularly the biggest names in it (McDonald’s, Burger King), the campaign was saying that the extremely profitable brand-name corporations and their exceedingly wealthy executives were in fact responsible for the conditions in their franchises. The National Labor Relations Board backed that claim up, ruling that the fast-food giants could indeed be considered “joint employers” of the workers making burgers and fries on the front lines.
“Every facet of the movement is interconnected. You have the Fight for $15—keeping people in a low-wage position is a locus of control, that’s a method to control people,” Kennard Williams said. “Using those same systems to deny people health care—that’s used to control people; if you have an oppressive racist police force—that’s obviously used to control people and keep the status quo. With the Occupy movement, power consolidated to just a small series of corporations that control other corporations—all of it is methods of control.”
This kind of power analysis is an awareness that used to be called “class-consciousness.” It has become distinctly unfashionable to say such things, but that does not make it less true; in fact, in the twenty-first century of globalized inequality, it is perhaps more true than ever. Class is not simply one of a list of possible identity categories. It is a relation of power that is shaped in part by race; in part by gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity; and by immigration status, education, and even region. In the 1960s, centrifugal social forces pulled movements apart, largely on the basis of what gets derisively termed “identity politics,” and movements splintered; in response, elites opened up a few spaces for people of color, for women, and for queer and transgender people at the same time as broader inequality spiraled out of control. Having a few representatives at the top was not enough; a few more women CEOs have not changed the fact that the face of poverty in America is largely a woman’s face. We elected the first black president, and got worse material conditions for the majority of black people.