Social Class in America

On Sunday night, the eve of exam week, I found myself engrossed in a documentary about the social class system in the United States.

One of the potential essays for my Organisations exam is centred around the theories of motivation - what drives people towards particular professions and levels of achievement. The full context of the essay is whether organisations should use money as the main motivator for staff, or focus on some of the softer aspects of recognition and reward.

The documentary (appropriately titled People Like Us: Social Class in America) provided detailed examples of people from the welfare class, working class, middle class, upper class, and the elite. It also profiled several peoples' struggled attempts to move up a notch.

One lady in the welfare class was so proud of her cleaning job at Hungry Jacks that she wore her uniform almost everyday - even when she wasn't going to work.

People who had given up their rural working class roots and moved to the city in pursuit of the middle class spoke of their alienation in their new class and their rejection from their old class. A Kentucky farm girl trying to make it as a journalist in DC, returned home to visit her father, and he wouldn't talk to her at all about her new career.

What I found most interesting was the profiles of working class America. There were by far the most content with their position in society. Provided they had a job, their main motivators were family and friends. Hanging out at the bowling alley. Drinking a beer. Playing shufflepuck in a pub on a Thursday night. Building extension after extension to their houses as their families grew. For most of them, there was no desire to go out and get a university education and a professional job. Doing so would alienate them from their friends and family.

I can't tell you for certain how similar or different things are here in Australia. To be quite honest, in recent years, I've had little exposure to working class Australia, home of the good 'ole Aussie battler. My life has been that of chasing the professional dream, while simultaneously trying to fit in as much travel as possible.

My five years in the public high school system in Darwin was really the only time I've experienced the broad range of society and ideals. Several of the people I met during those years were living on welfare or surviving on single minimum wage incomes. Their children (my schoolmates), for the most part, had no serious aspirations. They were happy to drink, smoke, get a job in a supermarket, and start families.

Nine years on, I'm still working on my education (okay, so I've spent a few years 'in the industry' as well ;-), and I haven't even started to think about having a family of my own. Family seems to be a secondary priority amongst many aspiring middle class Australians. We're chasing that pot of gold, for sure, but we're missing out on many other facets of life along the way.

BTW, here's the description of the documentary from the SBS website:

"This feature-length documentary deconstructs the popular myth that there is no class system in America through a dissection of dozens of ordinary American lives. For 3 years, the producers crisscrossed the country, shuttling between swanky hangouts like the Hamptons, where the name-dropping nouveau riche frolic, to down-home events like Georgia’s Redneck Games, where blue-collar folk entertain themselves by bobbing for pigs’ feet and belly-flopping in mud pits. Along the way, the program discovers a society tightly stratified by income, education, geography, taste and attitudes."