Search The Site
 
More options | Back issues
Home
News
Opinion & Forums
Careers
Multimedia
Leadership Forum
Technology Forum
Resource Center
Campus Viewpoints
Services
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle Review
A weekly special section
Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Gina Barreca

In Celebration of Labor Day

One of my favorite bumper sticker declares: “Unions: the folks who brought you the Weekend.” Unions also brought us this weekend’s holiday (for those who have Monday off, that is…).

Personally, I take Labor Day seriously, even though doesn’t have the same significance for me as it does for some people because I don’t own white shoes. But I like Labor Day for what it conjures up: images of hot-dogs, stoop-based Spauldings games, the day-before-school-starts, and ladies fanning themselves with folded paper plates.

I also like it because I am a working-class girl. It is a badge I wear proudly, along with “Union Made.” (And yes, “Union Maid.” That too.)

Soon after she got off the boat from Sicily, my grandmother started sewing buttonholes for the shirts of elegant, unknown men who worked in offices— while she herself, and her seven children, worked and lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side of New York City. They were not aware of the idea of a “weekend.” They were not aware of the power of organized labor. My grandfather, a tailor, was grateful for whatever income-producing labor he could find. A proud man, like most immigrants of his generation, my grandfather would have accepted employment of almost any kind rather than admit defeat in his profession. A hand-out was an admission that you had failed; a request for financial help was a white flag signaling “I surrender.”

Very few people from my old neighborhood held out their hands.

“You wanna eat? Your family wants to eat? You work,” was the inelegant motto of my neighborhood. We could have had the motto translated into Latin and embroidered on a flag, but that would have meant only more work because who would sew the flag and do the embroidery if not for us?

It has not changed very much in the course of the century. Working-class people work, even if they have fancier names for themselves these days. Actually, I’m not sure why anyone would change the name of the category.

Is there a problem with the term “working class”? Meaning you have to earn your keep? Meaning nobody provides you with a free ride? Meaning that you pay your own insurance, rent, tuition, and phone bills? Meaning that you don’t secretly long for a member of your immediate family to pass away in order to inherit some dough? Meaning you get up, get something done, and fall asleep knowing that you can list your accomplishments?

“Working Class” is one of the proudest things I call myself.

My own father showed up every morning at 6 a.m. to work to a loft on 24th Street and Sixth Avenue with his brothers, making bedspreads and curtains for people who could afford to spend money on such luxuries. He left home seven days a week when business was good. Only when business was bad did any of the Barreca brothers have “time off” for other activities. If any adult member of my family was idle, it didn’t signal “leisure time” or “relaxation.” Instead it meant that lean times were ahead and that compensatory activities would need to take place: harder work, another part-time job, or putting in time for somebody else “off the books.”

In my family, you considered yourself at your most fortunate when you were employed. A job—however hard or demanding the work— was NOTHING to complain about.

Does it surprise anybody, then, that I like my work? That I know how lucky I am to love my job?

I am grateful to be able to teach the literature that I love and I am grateful for the fact that I have an office to go to every morning.

The privilege of working in my profession is not something I take for granted, even after twenty-one years of teaching in the English Department at UConn. So even if I complain sincerely and constantly about the ridiculous rituals, meaningless meetings, and pathetic policies of where I work, if they told me “You no longer have your job” I don’t know what I would do.

Well, actually, I do.

Yes, I would collect unemployment and look for a better job, but I would sue for illegal termination of employment, and show up hoping they—the powers that be— would change their minds. Thank you, AAUP.

Lesson? Enjoy your work, be thankful for a chance to make a difference, and celebrate Labor Day with a sense of appreciation for all of us who have the right and the privilege to be the workers of this world.

Posted at 04:50:08 PM on August 31, 2008 | All postings by Gina Barreca

Comments

  1. Incredibly well-said.

    — kellan · Aug 31, 09:25 PM · #

  2. A tenured university professor who thinks she’s working class? What a joke. You belong to one of the most over privileged parasitic aristocracies in the history of this country.

    — prole · Sep 1, 01:23 AM · #

  3. Is it Spauldings, really, those pink bouncing balls, you mean? I remember them with a different name.

    — Penman Ship · Sep 1, 07:25 AM · #

  4. I’ve been teaching in Ontario for 16 yrs and still call myself American. It’s where I’m from, so it’s part of who I am, and is my “citizenship” in a sense. I believe the term “working class” operates in a similar fashion, prole, but I understand your point even as I would defend Bareca’s right to employ the term when describing herself in light of her origins if not her present economic condition.

    — eric · Sep 1, 07:58 AM · #

  5. Are you one of those “parasites” too, Prole? Someone who believes that being a teacher (K-12, Higher Ed, tenured or not, adjunct or full time— we all teach) is to be “parasitic” is really missing the point.

    — whoever · Sep 1, 10:29 AM · #

  6. Being part of an aristocracy means one is born into that status—not that they earned it—which presents a problem for me in that I believe academics deserve to share in today’s hot dog eating fun.

    Becoming a tenured prof at a big university takes years of HARD work and is certainly a well-earned achievement. Is Prof Barreca is a “privileged parasitic aristocrat” I would argue that she has a right to celebrate labor day (and eat hot dogs with relish with the rest of the “working class”) because she earned it.

    Now, I am going to start up the grill and eat some hot dogs myself.

    Happy labor day all.

    — Hannah · Sep 1, 10:31 AM · #

  7. I think Labor Day is a great way to celebrate what was wonderful about the first half of the 20th Century, and therefore not too relevant anymore. Unions were a necessary tool to combat the excesses of capitalism. But it took a global economy to combat the excesses of trade unionism. My dad was a union man and I grew up reading union newsletters. I fully understand why unions were necessary to protect workers with limited choices of employment, but I believe they have outlived their usefulness in this country, where the industrial age has been replaced by an information economy and where no young person aspires to work 30 or 40 years for the same factory. Labor Day is about as relevant in 2008 as Groundhog Day, a quaint remembrance of days past.

    — MR · Sep 1, 06:52 PM · #

  8. “Working class” is a problematic term because, especially in America, because it implies the existence of a cohesive class whose lives, values, and way of life are frozen and immobile. From Barreca’s own life story, we know that’s not the case. Don’t “working class” people aspire to send their kids to college, see them get white collar or other professional jobs, enjoy dignified retirements, and, well, cease to be “working class?”
    The term also divisively implies the existence of a non-working class (“bourgeoisie,” “leisure class,” “intelligentsia,” “parasites”) that by semantic definition doesn’t “work” and is therefore less worthy of respect, dignity, and even, as some people in the last century thought, existence. But we know that’s not true, even in academia, where, I plainly confess, the low level of work leaves me bored. More than that, find a corporate CEO or 80-hour a week lawyer, however well off, and try to tell him he’s part of a social group that doesn’t work.

    — bored with academia · Sep 2, 03:31 AM · #

  9. Hmmm. I do not ever remember being bored…. Well, maybe when I went to a regular school after having been home-schooled. But as an adult, no. Never. I find it very hard to understand why anyone would find a “low level of work” in academia. Whether time is filled with research, scholarship, writing, creating, or preparing lectures and teaching, there is no end to the opportunity to do more. In my experience, one is more likely to never have time to do as much as one would wish to do.

    No, many people who regard themselves as “working class” wear that badge proudly, and do not aspire for their children to go to college or escape the “working class.” There is, in some circles, great antipathy between “management” and “workers.” When I was “management” in a Teamsters shop, some of the union members under my supervision made it very clear that they did not respect nor admire management, and that they thought college was for “elitists.” Somehow, these are the people who seem to be most easily misled into a coalition with the greediest and most xenophobic elements of our society—those who could LEAST be considered to be “workers.”

    — Joe Erwin · Sep 2, 05:43 PM · #

  10. Arguably the division between some alleged “working class” and the educated “elites” was exploited during Nixon’s reign and we are still in the wake of that. Watch the demo convention, especially the film about Obama: much of what we heard about the Obamas had to do with how hard they and their families “worked.” We’ll never have a candidate who stands up and says: “Yes, I inherited lots of dough and let me tell you, it’s given me great pleasure to have made so much money with the money I inherited. Making money with money is nothing to be ashamed of and I take pride in a system that allows all of us to do that.”

    Instead of the above, we’ll have litanies to some “working-class” background, and if you’re a Republican watching Obama, you’ll play up the anti-working class Obama —- how dare he go to Harvard, that hotbed of elitism, snubbing us regular folks who went to Vietnam and did our heroic deeds? Never mind that this same Obama chose to spend years working with a decimated working class community (Roseland) when he could have gone off to some elitist law firm and made a bundle.

    Labels, of course, are always dangerous, and thinking with them can be hampered. While one can argue this point, let us recall that an aristocratic president like FDR was not without sympathy for the “working class,” and that Bill Clinton, presumably marinated in the working class, championed NAFTA, a highly questionable decision as far as labor is concerened. One can carry identity politics too far.

    One question I always raise on “labor” day is what has happened to this term. Newspapers have a “business” section, and why not a “labor” section? PBS has programs on investment and the stock market and Wall Street Week, but do we have comparable attention paid to “labor?” I don’t think so. Why not? How “public’ is PBS? Also, how is it that quite often neocons and others have been able to dissociate unionization from the interests of “workers”?

    Gina’s right on about taking Labor day seriously, but I worry that the true history of labor and working in America remains hidden in our curricula, and when students hear the word “union” all they imagine is strikes and violence.

    — George T. Karnezis · Sep 3, 01:12 PM · #

  11. It’s an interesting comment that our OP (who wrote a fine little essay here) seems to think she must champion the “working class” as if we have all forgotten that this country has been predominantly labor oriented for most of its history. I, for one, thank those who work hard in the “working” sector of society, but let’s not forget that there are a great many implied pejorative connotations in (some but not all) people’s minds – my parents, both of whom worked hard in their lives, would have considered me a failure if I had dropped into the “working class” from the middle class (whatever that is) and tend to gossip about the children of their friends (often my HS classmates) who did not make it into some kind of job with a desk and an office. I think this may be somewhere in the background of Barecca’s piece – somehow, out of some sense of guilt, we feel the need to compensate for our perceived superiority of class in this country. There is, even if it is only implication and perception, a definite difference between the life of a tenured professor and the people who sew buttons on shirts – and it’s not just the professors who think this way.

    — Rusty · Sep 3, 04:40 PM · #

Commenting is closed for this article.
Copyright © 2009 by The Chronicle of Higher Education | Contact us
User agreement | Privacy policy | About The Chronicle | Site map | Help
Subscribe | Advertise with us | Press inquiries | RSS | Today's most e-mailed
Home | Chronicle Careers | The Chronicle Review