Why Doesn’t More of the Working Class Move for Jobs?

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2017

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Joan C. Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, discusses serious misconceptions that the U.S. managerial and professional elite in the United States have about the so-called working class. Many people conflate "working class" with "poor"--but the working class is, in fact, the elusive, purportedly disappearing middle class. Williams argues that economic mobility has declined, and explains why suggestions like “they should move to where the jobs are” or "they should just go to college" are insufficient. She has some ideas for policy makers to create more and meaningful jobs for this demographic, an influential voting bloc. Williams is the author of the new book, “White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.”

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The Closer Podcast brings you the inside story of deals changing the world, told by the people who know how it all went down.
0:09.0	Understand the human motivations behind groundbreaking business decisions with host Amy Keene.
0:14.6	Listen to The Closer, Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green-Carmichael. The idea of the American dream is fundamentally one of
0:37.8	mobility, both geographic mobility and economic mobility. Go west young man or east young woman.
0:45.5	Get a degree, move to where the jobs are and climb a ladder.
0:49.5	But if that dream was ever a reality, the statistics show that today it's often not.
0:54.1	Americans are just not moving to where the jobs are, and two-thirds are not
0:58.6	getting advanced degrees. It's not just because moving in education are expensive.
1:04.0	Today, to explore why, we're welcoming back Joan Williams.
1:08.0	You might remember that we talked with her right after the US presidential election
1:12.0	about the politics of the white working class.
1:14.8	Today we're shifting years and talking about economics, values, and jobs.
1:19.8	The article she wrote for us in November, what so many people don't get about the U.S. working class,
1:25.0	has since become the most read article ever at hibr.org.
1:29.0	Since these issues struck such a chord, we asked Joan to explore them more deeply in a new book, one that I actually
1:35.3	had the pleasure of editing, White Working Class, Ending Class Cluelessness in America.
1:40.9	Joan, thanks for coming back on the show.
1:43.0	Delighted to be here, Sarah.
1:44.4	I just wanted to ask you to start with a story that really struck me in the book,
1:48.4	and that's the anthropologist story.
1:51.9	At age 16, I was going out with a boy from Brooklyn. This is long
1:56.7	before Brooklyn was sheik. This is Bay Ridge and I was from Princeton New Jersey so
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Harvard Business Review, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Harvard Business Review and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.