Inheritance and Hegemony
-How the American Workforce is structured by who you know not what you know
I am working on Inheritance and Hegemony because I want to find out how labor is allocated in the DC/Baltimore Metropolitan area in order to help my reader better understand their place within the American workforce.
In a George Lipsitz comments in his article How Racism takes place that 80-90 percent of jobs in America are not announced in any forum. Obviously this means that 80-90 percent of workers in America have their current position because they have an in, a relationship that allowed them to cut the proverbial jobs line and garner employment. What makes this investigation so important is that the American people have lived under the veil of the “meritocracy” concept for far too long. How can people traverse the workforce if they are constantly being acculturated with false ideal of how labor is dueled out in American society? As far as my personal interest in this topic it stems simply form the fact that every job I have had so far in my short life has come from a contact or connection not applying and interviewing.
Historically inheritance in the labor force has just been accepted as the status quo, sons took over for their fathers, if you father was a businessman, you were a businessman, if your father was a fisherman, you were a fisherman. After the industrial revolution and urbanization this line became blurred. Ideals arose, like meritocracy, where the poor started to believe they could go from rags to riches, especially in America. My focus will be looking at current hiring practices, most likely no older than a decade, so 2000-2010. Further I will be looking exclusively in the DC/Baltimore metropolitan area and expect to look at data for both private and public sector labor.
American Studies is an interdisciplinary field, it is important then to look at both subjective and objective data when researching. I want to look at objective data on the division of labor, who is getting what jobs, what do the numbers say, etc. I also want to attempt to find some subjective data, data from interviews or anything that can reveal how real people in America feel about labor. I want to know if people think there a glass ceilings that their class, race, gender, etc. create that keep them down or on the other hand that allow them to succeed.