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Working Hard & Making Do

University of California Press

This book about the livelihood of working-class families was motivated by an entirely mistaken premise.

As residents of the rural state in which the research was conducted, we were well aware that the region offered considerable opportunity for people to engage in a broad array of economic activities, including employment in a formal labor market, informal or unrecorded work, barter and other forms of nonmonetary exchange, and self-provisioning activities, such as growing one's own vegetables and hunting. We anticipated that the practice of melding a variety of these activities emerged among, and was a major recourse for, those whose participation in the waged labor force was less than optimal because of either inadequate jobs or the lack of full-time work.

We also anticipated that a spate of industrial activity that began in the 1960s and quickly brought the local labor force in line with the rest of the country had led to the creation of a different set of jobs that required and enabled families to rationalize the use of their labor. Gone would be the unwaged housewife, to be replaced by the working woman and the local day care center; gone would be the homegrown tomatoes and woodpiles, to be replaced by convenience stores and oil delivery trucks. In sum, we expected that working-class families with members employed in the new waged work in the formal economy increasingly would turn to modern forms of labor and consumption, while other working-class families those who worked for low wages, those en-

gaged in traditional rural activities, those with jobs in the service sector and especially in the seasonal tourist industry would have no alternative but to practice forms of labor activity outside the formal waged market.1

We were wrong. We were wrong in part because we had not yet uncovered a central fact about the changing economy in the area in which we conducted our research: That area had not just (re)industrialized2 and become more "modern" but also had experienced a degradation in the jobs industry provided. As a result of these two overlapping changes, not all waged work in the county and not even all industrial work was being cut from the same cloth. Quite simply, there was good work that offered the benefits and amenities which had prevailed under what is sometimes called the Fordist regime,3 and there was bad work that, though no less "modern," failed to offer those same benefits and amenities. The emergence of an economy constituted by this dualism was hardly a local phenomenon. While controversy abounds about the degree to which bad jobs are replacing good ones and why, there is now little debate that the growth of bad jobs is widespread and characterizes the contemporary U.S. economy. Neither the statistically rural Coolidge County* in which we conducted our research, nor Vermont, the state in which that county is located, was immune from this development. Even in the face of economic recovery during the 1990s, Vermont's Commerce and Community Development secretary said, "We've created jobs; we've just created a disproportionate amount of jobs in a sector that doesn't pay as much."4

It also turned out that we were wrong because, in drawing on the wealth of studies of marginal populations in "developed" regions as well as of those in "less developed" parts of the world,5 we had reversed an important, and perhaps relatively new, direction of causality between regular waged employment and the other aspects of a household's survival strategy. Ironically, and contrary to our expectations, we found that the households with access to decent jobs were also precisely the households that relied on the combination of very different economic activities they used the labor of a second worker, they engaged in entrepreneurial side-work, they depended on friends and neighbors for access to a broad array of goods and services, and they built their own

To protect the confidentiality of our respondents, we have changed the name of the county in which we conducted our research. Coolidge County cannot be found in any Vermont atlas. The details about Coolidge County do, however, accurately represent a very real place.

homes and grew their own tomatoes. We also found that this combination of economic activities was a source of pride, comfort, and security to these working-class families as well as the source (and savings) of income. Because much of this work had as its precondition a specific household organization of labor, it also had the effect of reconstituting what at first glance passes for "typical" gender relationships within the household. We were surprised to find, however, that those living in families without at least one good job were considerably less capable of deploying the same kind of complex, multifaceted survival strategy and that in these less well-off households, sustaining customary gender privileges came at a greater cost. These unexpected findings motivate this book.

Although the processes of economic restructuring, as they are enacted in Coolidge County, provide the broad context for this work, neither economic restructuring nor Coolidge County is the subject. We do not seek to explain in depth or in detail the causes of economic restructuring. This topic has received considerable attention elsewhere.6 For our immediate purposes, it is sufficient to note that the effects of restructuring transcend the rural-urban divide (but may be more extreme in the countryside)7 and the gender divide (although men and women are affected in somewhat different ways).8 What is most important for this book is how this process has affected the household economy. We do not focus on the effects of economic restructuring that have received the bulk of scholarly attention declining wages and increased economic inequality9 although we offer evidence about these issues. This is a book about a different aspect of economic restructuring the loss of the other advantages working families had come to expect from employment. Though largely invisible in the scholarly literature, these advantages are central to how families live. We have found that the failure of the economy to provide these other benefits long-term and stable employment, vacations and sick days, regular hours, assured pension plans and health insurance is an equally (and perhaps even more) significant impediment to the capacity of households to get by and to recreate the socalled traditional household with its complement of gendered activities.

We chose Coolidge County, Vermont, as the site for this research for both practical and conceptual reasons. One practical reason is that it is close to where we live and work. A second, more important reason is that it was subject to a particular version of the economic restructuring that has characterized the U.S. domestic economy for the past two decades. In addition, it is small enough to see close at hand where, in

fact, it is only visible how families have struggled to accommodate themselves to these shifts in the economic tide.

On the conceptual level, we were all too aware that aggregate studies of economic processes can be profoundly misleading. Lying behind national level data are the significant and important regional differences that are most consequential in shaping the economy of any specific area, and thus of the families whose futures are fundamentally tied to the place...