Work in a New America.

Abstract

Times of affluence carry with them emphasis on leisure and social reform. In the 1960s, despite the continual undercurrent of protest and youthful political energy unleashed, the cultural emphasis?in the media, in the Democratic ad ministrations' social programs, in the expressed concerns of youth?was on per sonal and social improvement: the expansion of consciousness, the development of self, the discovery of vehicles for personal and spiritual fulfillment. Even the building of social movements (in the 1960s a complex of civil-rights activism, Vietnam War protests, student militancy, flower children, and media interest in communes, cooperatives, and progressive schools) was in an important sense a leisure pursuit, to be followed by those for whom basic economic security was not in question. But times of recession change the cultural mood. In the 1970s high rates of unemployment, continuing inflation, and increasing competition for high-paying jobs have brought a very different and more sobering emphasis on material security, on jobs, on work. Work in America in 1977, then, has not only academic interest as one of a number of aspects of life in the society to be understood in its continuing and changing faces; it is a central public issue in its own right. Tackling unemployment has continued to be a major plank in the Carter administration's platform. Neither interest in work nor the work ethic has disappeared in America. But, as I will present data to indicate, a concern for first, the meaning of work, including the compatibility of jobs with cherished life values, and second, indi vidual rights in work (neither of them new ideas) have continued to grow strong er over the past twenty years, particularly as the composition of the work force and government policies have shifted. However, it is also clear that the issue of work and the conditions of work are perceived differently by different groups in the population, depending on sex, age, race, education, and occupation.1

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