Meaning of Work and Money in the Ghetto

• In Event: 025 - Regular Session. Culture and Inequality

Abstract

Recent increase in unemployment and underemployment has further plagued poor communities. Sociological work focuses on labor market, welfare dependency, and types of labor markets in poor communities. Research also documents the relationship between higher education and labor market opportunities. But we have little systematic knowledge about what this has meant for young adults coming of age under dire conditions of joblessness and weighing their work and education options. Drawing on 3 years of fieldwork in Connecticut, this article outlines the moral economy of work and money in a poor inner city community, emphasizing the meaning system that influences how young people transitioning to adulthood make decisions around work and education. Young men and women view time as money, more specifically--they view an hour as worth 8 dollars and 25 cents-- Connecticut’s minimum wage. The more hours one spends working the more reliable, dependable and “non ghetto” status they earn. Further, there is a local functioning knowledge base and hierarchy that organizes different types of low-wage legal, semi-legal and illegal work available to the poor. Money is also related to work--money is not perceived as merely a medium of exchange or path to financial security, but spending money indicates “class” and mobility. The local socio-structural characteristics and global economic forces shape the moral economy. My ethnographic observations have implications for the social meaning of money in the ghetto--unlike middle-class construction of money as future financial security, money in the ghetto is used for immediate gratification.

Author

• Ranita Ray, University of Nevada-Las Vegas