Abstract
Job readiness programs are a propitious site for investigating the literal making of the US working class. With the imposition of workfarist policies, these programs have become a mainstay of social service provision to, and paternalist management of, the poor. We draw upon ethnographic fieldwork carried out in two different job readiness programs to illustrate variations in the ideological frameworks for this project of working class formation. Our first case, a prominent faith-based program targeted to the homeless, draws upon scripture to produce what we call “disciples” who treat work as a biblical mandate and way of serving the Lord. Our second case, a local nonprofit program serving welfare recipients and other poor job seekers, draws upon motivational discourse and practices to produce “dreamers” who cling to the promise that work delivers both upward mobility and personal fulfillment. Despite their differing languages and logics, both programs aim to accommodate participants to the world of low-wage work, instill within them the moral value of labor, and develop worker subjectivities premised on the obfuscation of class and the optimization of employability.
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Notes
This is a pseudonym, as are the names of all individuals quoted in this article.
Korteweg (2003) argues that welfare-to-work job clubs are sites that aim to transform welfare-reliant women into “masculine worker-citizens.” Randles and Woodward (2017) argue that welfare-to-work programs, like marriage promotion programs, strive to construct “good neoliberal citizens.” This study does not so much contradict these claims, as complement them in so far as it analyzes the more nuanced ideological projects at play across diverse organizations engaged in the class conditioning that is “job readiness.”
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Funding
This research was funded by several grants from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University: a Summer Project Assistantship award, an Appleby-Mosher faculty research grant, and a Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration faculty mini-grant.
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Purser, G., Hennigan, B. Disciples and dreamers: job readiness and the making of the US working class. Dialect Anthropol 42, 149–161 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-017-9477-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-017-9477-2