Erin O'Brien's monograph uses the interdisciplinary methods of ethnography and in-depth interviewing to challenge the shared view of liberal academics (such as William Julius Wilson, Todd Gitlin, and Arthur Schlesinger) that strongly held identities of race, gender, and ethnicity serve as barriers to the building of majority coalitions for economic justice. In a work relevant to both scholars of social movements and activists within them, O'Brien discerns the quotidian ways in which workers construct their own solidarities on the job and the role that nonclass identities can play in such development.
By working 11 months in a hotel and food service venue in the Washington, DC, area and by conducting in-depth interviews with 25 co-workers, as well as with 23 other hospitality industry employees, O'Brien empirically tests the claim that “identity politics” poses a barrier to the development of a shared consciousness as workers. Her core claim is that individuals who develop “associational identity politics”—a sense of shared fate with members of their primary group—possess a “cognitive developmental” orientation that enable these individuals to empathize with the struggles of other marginalized or disadvantaged groups. Given that workers in the United States do not conceive of themselves primarily in terms of class identity, the author contends that the “cognitive” predilection of “identity-based” groups to think in collective terms facilitates “collective worker solidarity,” rather than precludes it.
For O'Brien, “consciousness” is not a given; rather, individuals develop it by navigating the contours of the workplace and popular culture. Thus, individuals whose own primary group identity has, for example, helped them see through the ideology of the American dream are more likely than those without associational identity politics to recognize how those outside their group also can be unfairly treated on the job.
Thus, in her sample of 48 workers employed in the Washington area service industry, of the 19 who evince collective worker solidarity (a sense of shared fate with fellow service workers and a willingness to act on that recognition), 14 of them also have a strong (often primary) racial, ethnic, or national identity. And of the 23 who express feelings of “coalitional solidarity” (identifying with the struggles of groups apart from their own), 17 possess associational identity politics, yet are also able to express solidarity with the plight of a group other than their own.
O'Brien's in-depth interviews reveal that the reason a majority of her subjects (29 of 48) do not have faith in collective action at the workplace is in part due to adherence to an individualist ideology, but also to their awareness of the barriers that the transient nature of service employment poses for collective action. Thus, those workers who lack “collective worker consciousness” do so for reasons having little to do with “identity politics.” While she finds that six (of the 24) whites in her sample may have racial prejudices that prevent them from identifying with non-white workers, adherence to identity politics (by African Americans, Latinos, and a few whites who self-identity as gay, overweight, or disabled) never inhibits empathy with those outside one's “identity” group. In short, O'Brien contends that nonadherents to associational identity politics are less likely to recognize the shared difficulties faced by service workers—low pay, instability, and the difficulty of balancing work and family—than do those who possess a strong racial, gender, or national/ethnic identity.
The author makes a convincing empirical case that African Americans and Latinos often extend their solidarity with disadvantaged members of their own group to members of other groups who, they believe, also face structural barriers to equality of opportunity. Any veteran of multiracial progressive electoral coalitions will concur that Latinos and blacks often readily vote for progressive candidates of another race (including whites; at times, competition for scarce urban resources can render Latino/black alliance politics more difficult). Rather, the major challenge is to get white voters (of all classes) to support nonwhite progressives. Only the massive deindustrialization of the Midwest during George W. Bush's administration led a small majority of white working-class voters to pull the lever for Barack Obama in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana.
O'Brien's sample of “service workers” includes 24 whites and 24 African Americans. Within this biracial division, three of the whites and one of the blacks also identify as Latino. Obviously, this sample significantly underrepresents the percentage of Latinos (and recent immigrants) in the restaurant and hotel sector, and somewhat overrepresents African Americans. The sample also likely overrepresents individuals who have pro-union and collective worker solidarity, as African Americans have disproportionate connections to (and a favorable opinion of) the labor movement (25% of African Americans belong to trade unions, versus only 11% of whites). A larger percentage of Latinos and recent immigrants in the sample might have increased the number of respondents who experience the seamier side of “nativist” identity politics—linguistic and ethnic discrimination on the job, both from supervisors and fellow employees.
O'Brien may not adequately recognize—nor theorize—why white members of her sample (and perhaps of the working class as a whole) disproportionately do not develop a sense of collective worker solidarity. One does not have to be a simplistic adherent to theories of “whiteness” to believe that a portion of white workers view minority and immigrant workers as competitors for scarce jobs and as violators of the “work ethic.” This subtle prejudice may even exist among whites who engage in low-paid, unstable service-sector work. While whites may be acculturated not to overtly express a “white identity,” identity is always defined relationally—and as outlined in the following, the whites in her sample certainly evince opinions rather divergent from the African Americans in her sample.
Thus, the role that an implicit “white identity politics” may play as a barrier to multiracial class solidarity has to be teased out from O'Brien's data. She acknowledges that 10 of the 12 in her sample who reject “coalitional solidarity” because of “faith in the American dream” are white. While 17 of the 24 African Americans interviewed expressed coalitional solidarity, only six out of 24 whites did so (and only one of 12 white men did so, the one being the only openly gay man among them). Of the five other whites who identified with oppressed groups outside their own, all were women—one self-identified as a Latina, another as disabled, a third as a feminist, and a fourth with those discriminated against on the basis of their weight.
Even more striking, of the 19 interviewees who expressed collective solidarity as workers, 16 were black and only three were white. O'Brien argues that awareness of the structural barriers to collective worker solidarity (the high turnover rate and the absence of steady hours) motivated most of those who did not adhere to collective worker solidarity. But of the 10 individuals who cited “diversity” and “linguistic differences” as a reason for their lack of faith in collective workplace solidarity, seven were white (three were African Americans who were not comfortable with linguistic diversity on the job.) Although six of the 24 whites evinced overtly negative racial stereotypes of nonwhites, O'Brien says that she is reluctant to term this a white identity politics because the whites in her sample do not explicitly “feel group identification or group consciousness” (p. 134). But does one have to explicitly express an identity in order to act upon attitudes disproportionately shared among an identifiable group?
Yet O'Brien indirectly may be teaching a lesson of considerable import to scholars and activists. The barrier to progressive, majoritarian coalition politics does not derive primarily from identity politics on the part of racial, national, and ethnic groups (a politics far less separatist than it was in the 1960s). Rather, a continuing (but perhaps decreasing) obstacle to collective worker solidarity that theorists and organizers must interrogate is the willingness of a portion of the white working class to embrace conservative arguments that their economic plight is due not to the deindustrializing policies of corporate America but to allegedly unfair competition from immigrant and minority workers.
In a discipline where the formal realm of legislative and electoral politics is often taken to exhaust the political, O'Brien is to be commended for expanding our horizons regarding the nature of politics and of the central role that justice (or the lack thereof) for service workers will play in the future distribution of economic and political power in the United States. She provides telling evidence that identity politics among workers of color (and new immigrants) often aids them in building alliances for social justice across racial, national, and ethnic lines. She may not, however, have fully confronted the subtle ways in which “white identity” serves as a barrier to building solidarity amid difference. That task remains a major intellectual and political challenge for our society as a whole.
