Response to Reviewers

As Eileen Boris notes in her fine review, I recently spent five years in southern Louisiana, among white blue-collar workers who embraced Donald Trump. Berkeley, California, where I've long taught sociology, was on one side of the widening blue-red divide, they on the other. I wanted to "cross an empathy wall" between these worlds, if I could, to understand how they feel about a range of issues. In my brief essay here, I thought to ask how my Louisiana Trump supporters might be impacted by and look upon the issues raised by my other books, so wisely reviewed by Premilla Nadasen, and how they might view precarious work.

I came to know a particular group—many older, Cajun, Catholic, and evangelical, who worked in a variety of occupations as operators, pipefitters for petrochemical companies, construction workers, cleaners, auto repair workers, telephone linemen, clerical workers, and accountants around the massive petrochemical plants on the outskirts of Lake Charles and elsewhere along the southern part of the state. But this group shared much in common, they felt, with others on the right in rural and Rust Belt America.

So how would the central issues of my other book strike the Louisiana right? In a spirit of pragmatism, men often shared chores with their wives—nearly all of whom worked—however traditional their religious beliefs about women's role. Some had learned to cook during stints of divorce. Retired men often shopped and goodheartedly did errands "for my wife." Only at Pentecostal Sunday dinners did meal preparation become a strictly female task—and in one home I visited, the men's table was in the dining room, the women's table in the kitchen. (The man who invited me to join him as a guest there asked the host if I could "integrate" the men's table.) The undervalued labor of care, a preoccupation for me (The Second Shift), was of little note. Culturally, they lived in more of a man's world.

Their "time bind" was of the sort I describe for blue-collar workers in The Time Bind. They did not feel, as their upper-middle-class counterparts did, sucked into their careers by the allure of recognition and accomplishment. They loved hunting and fishing and couldn't get enough time for it. One man, a material estimator for a company that made offshore drilling platforms, had been given one week off a year (sick time and vacation combined) for the first five years of his job there, and two weeks off a year for the second five years. "I haven't seen a month off work since I was twenty- two," he told me.

Like others I describe in Strangers, he never outsourced personal tasks to paid others, although whites just two class levels up had outsourced personal tasks to black female servants. Those black women had often subtracted time they would have devoted to their own children in order to care for the children of white employers, in a domestic version of the care chain I describe in Global Woman and Outsourced Self. As a social class that neither hired nor worked as personal service providers, this was also not an issue which held their attention.

The themes—fitting gender roles to paid work, balancing work and family, paying others to do personal chores, valuing care—were the same, but the relative importance of and responses to them differed. And a major form of affective work they did, I believe, was to cope with a forced estrangement from "their own land."

As Louisianan Trump supporters, they were the elite of the left behind. Elite because, as children of blue-collar parents, most had prospered. (The abjectly poor, black and white, often didn't vote.) Left behind because the government and mainstream culture, they felt, either ignored them or perceived them as "backward" in their beliefs, education, way of life. So what felt precarious to them was not so much their own jobs as the future of jobs like them and the social world built upon work. More generally still, what felt precarious was the neglected fate of...