Paul Willis

Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs

New York: Columbia University Press. 1977.

1 Introduction

The difficult thing to explain about how middle class kids get middle class jobs is why others let them. The difficult thing to explain about how working class kids t working class jobs is why they let themselves.

It is much too facile simply to say that they have no choice. The way in which manual labour is applied to production can range in different societies from the coercion of machine guns, bullets and trucks to the mass ideological conviction of the voluntary industrial army. Our own liberal democratic society is somewhere in between. There is no obvious physical coercion and a degree of self direction. This is despite the inferior rewards for, undesirable social definition, and increasing intrinsic meaninglessness, of manual work: in a word its location at the bottom of a class society. [ 1 ] The primary aim of this book is to cast some light on this surprising process.

Too often occupational and educational talents are thought of as on a shallowing line of shrinking capacity with working class people at its lower reaches unquestionningly taking on the worst jobs thinking somehow, `I accept that I'm so stupid that it's fair and proper that I should spend the rest of my of course, assume a zero or near zero reading at its base. The real individuals at the bottom end would scarcely rate a score for being alive, never mind for being human. Since these individuals are currently far from walking corpses but are actually bringing the whole system into crisis this model is clearly in need of revision. The market economy of jobs in a capitalist society emphatically does not extend to a market economy of satisfactions.-->

I want to suggest that `failed' working class kids do not simply take up the falling curve of work where the least successful middle class, or the most successful working class kids, leave off. Instead of assuming a continuous shallowing line of ability in the occupational/class structure we must conceive of radical breaks represented by the interface of cultural forms. We shall be looking at the way in which the working class cultural pattern of `failure' is quite different and discontinuous from the other patterns. Though in a determined context it has its own processes, its own definitions, its own account of those other groups conventionally registered as more successful. And this class culture is not a neutral pattern, a mental category, a set of variables impinging on the school from the outside. It comprises experiences, relationships, and ensembles of systematic types of relationship which not only set particular `choices' and `decisions' at particular times, but also structure, really and experientially, how these `choices' come about and are defined in the first place.

note the somewhat non-standard (at the time and for anthropology) definition of culture

[...] aspects of working class culture through the concrete study of one of its most revealing manifestations. My original research interest was, indeed, in working class culture in general and I was led to look at young non-academic disaffected males and their adaption to work as a crucial and privileged moment in the continuous regeneration of working class cultural forms in relation to the most essential structure of society - its working relations.

Both sets of concerns in fact turn on the important concept of labour power and how it is prepared in our society for application to manual work. Labour power is the human capacity to work on nature with the use of tools to produce things for the satisfaction of needs and the reproduction of life. Labouring is not a universal transhistorical changeless human activity. It takes on specific forms and meanings in different kinds of societies.--> The processes through which labour power comes to be subjectively understood and objectively applied and their interrelationships is of profound significance [...] of society which is produced and the particular nature and formation of its classes.--> These processes help to construct both the identities of particular subjects and also distinctive class forms at the cultural and symbolic level as well as at the economic and structural level.

and note here the central place given to 'subjectivity' as the necessary mechanism through which classes are constructed.

Class identity is not truly reproduced until it has properly passed through the individual and the group, until it has been recreated in the context of what appears to be personal and collective volition. The point at which people live, not borrow, their class destiny is when what is given is re-formed, strengthened and applied to new purposes. Labour power is an important pivot of all this because it is the main mode of active connection with the world: the way par excellence of articulating the innermost self with external reality. It is in fact the dialectic of the self to the self through the concrete world. Once this basic compact with the future has been made everything else can pass for common sense.

labour power, and an objective decision to apply it to manual work, is produced is the working class counter-school culture. It is here where working class themes are mediated to individuals and groups in their own determinate context and where working class kids creatively develop, transform and finally reproduce aspects of the larger culture in their own praxis in such a way as to finally direct them to certain kinds of work. Part I of the book presents an ethnography of the male white working class counter-school culture. For the sake of clarity and incision, and in no way implying their lack of importance, other ethnic and gender variants are not examined.

We may just note here that the existence of this culture has been picked up conventionally and especially by the media in its sensational mode as violence and indiscipline in the class room. [2] The Raising of the School Leaving Age (RSLA) in England in September 1972 seems to have highlighted and further exposed the most aggressive aspects of the culture.[3] Both the major teachers' unions have commissioned special reports [4] and have formalised arrangements for union support in excluding 'trouble-makers' from class. Over half the local authorities in England and Wales have set up special classes in school, and even quite separate ,sanctuaries' in the case of Inner London for such kids. The Secretary of State for Education has ordered a national investigation into this whole area.[5] Disruption and truancy in schools is high on the agenda of the `great debate' which Mr Callaghan, the current Prime Minister, called for on education. [6]-->

In the sense, therefore, that I argue that it is their own culture which most effectively prepares some working class lads for the manual giving of their labour I power we may say that there is an element of self-damnation in the taking on of subordinate roles in Western capitalism. However, this damnation is experienced, paradoxically, as true learning, affirmation, appropriation, and as a form of resistance. Furthermore, it will be argued in Part II where I analyse the ethnography presented in Part I that there is an objective basis for these subjective feelings and cultural processes. They involve a partial penetration of the really determining conditions of existence of the working class which are definitely superior to those official versions of their reality which are proffered through the school and various state agencies. It is only on the basis of such a real cultural articulation with their conditions that groups of working class lads come to take a hand in their own damnation. The tragedy and the contradiction is that these forms of `penetration' are limited, distorted and turned back on themselves, often unintentionally, by complex processes ranging from both general ideological processes and those within the school and guidance agencies to the widespread influence of a form of patriarchal male domination and sexism within working class culture itself.

the labour process constitute an aspect of the regeneration of working class culture in general, and an important example of how this culture is related in complex ways to regulative state institutions. They have an important function in the overall reproduction of the social totality and especially in relation to reproducing the social conditions for a certain kind of production.

This is the spine of the book. In pursuit of these aims the book makes a contribution in a number of other areas. It explores the educational paradigm at the heart of the teaching relationship in our schools, makes a critique of vocational guidance and suggests some explanations for the persistent failure of state education to radically improve the chances in life of working class kids. [7] There is also in Part II an intervention into the discussion of sexual stereotyping in relation to patriarchy and capitalism, and some notes towards an argument within theory about the respective status, and form of relationship between culture and ideology.

The qualitative methods, and Participant Observation used in the research, and the ethnographic format of the presentation were dictated by the nature of my interest in `the cultural'. These techniques are suited to record this level and have a sensitivity to meanings and values as well as an ability to represent and interpret symbolic articulations, practices and forms of cultural production. In particular the ethnographic account, without always knowing how, can allow a degree of the activity, creativity and human agency within the object of study to come through into the analysis and the reader's experience. This is vital to my purposes where I view the cultural, not simply as a set of transferred internal structures (as in the usual notions of socialisation) nor as the passive result of the action of dominant ideology downwards (as in certain kinds of marxism), but at least in part as the product of collective human praxis.-->

The Hammertown case study

One main case study and five comparative studies were made in the research reported in this book. The main study was of a group of twelve non-academic working class lads from a town we shall call Hammertown and attending a school we shall call Hammertown Boys. They were selected on the basis of friendship links and membership of some kind of an oppositional culture in a working class school. The school was built in the inter-war years and lay at the heart of a closely packed inter-war council estate composed of standard, often terraced, reasonably well maintained houses interlinked with a maze of roads, crescents and alleys and served by numerous large pubs and clusters of shops and small supermarkets.

During the period of the research this school was a boys only, non-selective the research finished it was redesignated a single sex comprehensive school as part of the general reorganisation of secondary education in the borough. In view of this expected change and under the pressure of events and in preparation for RSLA the school was expanding in terms of buildings and introducing or experimenting with some new techniques during the period of the research. Streaming was replaced by mixed ability groupings, a resources centre was introduced, experiments were made in team teaching and curriculum development programmes, and a whole range of new `option' courses were developed for the `RSLA year'.--> I made contact with the group at the beginning of the second term of their penultimate year and followed them right through into six months of their working lives (their final year was to be the first year of RSLA). The school population was about 600 and contained substantial West Indian and Asian minorities. Basically this school was selected because it was in the heart of, and drew from, an absolutely characteristic working class inter-war council estate, itself at the heart of Hammertown. The school was exclusively working class in intake, but had the reputation of being a `good' school. This seemed to mean, in essence, that it had `reasonable standards' of recognised behaviour and dress enforced by an interested and competent senior staff. I wanted a to be as certain as possible that the group selected was typical of the working class in an industrial area, and that the educational provision it enjoyed was as good as, if not slightly better than, any available in similar British contexts. An added advantage of the particular school chosen was that it had a new and well equipped youth wing which was well attended by the pupils and gave the opportunity of a very open and informal initial entry into the school.

Comparative case studies were made over the same period. These were of: ' a group of conformist lads in the same year of Hammertown Boys; a group of working class conformist lads in a nearby Hammertown mixed secondary modern, informally known as a somewhat `rougher' school; a group of working class nonconformist lads in the single sex Hammertown grammar school; a similar group in a comprehensive near the middle of the larger conurbation of which Hammertown was part; and a mixed class male non-conformist group in a high status grammar school in the most exclusive residential area of the same larger conurbation. As far as possible, all groups were in the same school year, were friendship groups, and were selected for their likelihood of leaving school at the statutory minimum leaving age of sixteen. In the case of the high status grammar school this latter condition totally determined the membership of the group and its mixed class nature - they were the only boys intending to leave at sixteen in the fourth year (when I first contacted them), and indeed subsequently only two of them actually left at this point. These groups were selected to give a comparative dimension to the study along the parameters of class, ability, school regime, and orientation to the school.

The main group was studied intensively by means of observation and participant observation in class, around the school and during leisure activities; regular recorded group discussions; informal interviews and diaries. I attended all of the different subject classes and options (not as a teacher but as a member of the class) attended by the group at various times, and the complete run of careers classes which were taught by a dedicated and experienced teacher recently returned from secondment to a well-respected careers and counselling course. I also taped long conversations with all the parents of the main group, and with all senior masters of the school, main junior teachers in contact with members of the group, and with the careers officers coming into the school.

I followed all twelve boys from the main group, as well as three selected boys from the comparative groups, into work. Fifteen short periods of participant observation were devoted to actually working alongside each lad in his job, and were concluded with taped interviews with the individual and selected interviews with foremen, managers and shop stewards.

in the centre of England as part of a much larger conurbation. Like many other small towns around there, its population size and importance exploded during the Industrial Revolution. The coming of canals and the building of a foundry by Boulton and Watt for the construction of metal castings for other manufacturers in the middle of the eighteenth century transformed its nature. It was among the first of the industrial towns, and its population one of the first industrial proletariats.--> By 1800 it had extensive iron-smelting works and iron foundries as well as soap, lead and glass works. More recently it has become an important centre for bearing engineering, and the production of springs, cycle components, glass, screws, and nuts and bolts. It is indeed a Midlands nuts and bolts town, which was in its time one of the cradles of the Industrial Revolution.

It is now part of a huge industrial conurbation in the Midlands. People still think of it as rough and dirty, even though its civic record in public services and housing provision is better than most in the region. Tumbledown cottages and Victorian slum terraces have now been largely cleared away and replaced by modern council houses and highrise flats. But when boys from Hammertown meet girls away from home they still like to say that they are from the adjacent big city which, conveniently, supplies their postal code.

The population of the town reached its peak in the early 1950s and has been falling since, despite the arrival of substantial numbers of black immigrants. The population is now about 60,000 and, interestingly, has one of the highest `activity rates' [8] - especially for women - in the country. The age/sex structure of Hammertown is similar to that for the rest of England and Wales, but its class structure is notably different. It is essentially a working class town. Only 8 per cent of its residents are in professional and managerial occupations (half the national rate) and the overwhelming majority of the population are in some form of manual work. There is a startling daily inflow of around 3,000 middle class people from the south and west who will work but not live in Hammertown. The dearth of the middle classes is reflected in the fact that under 2 per cent of adults are in full-time education (again half the national rate).

The structure of employment demonstrates the distinctively industrial nature of the working class community. There is a total labour force of about 36,000 of which fully 79 per cent is involved in manufacturing of some kind compared with 35 per cent nationally and 55 per cent for the conurbation. Metal and metal goods manufacturing accounts for over half of such employment. The other major sources of employment are in food, drinks and tobacco industries, mechanical engineering, vehicles, bricks, pottery and glass, and distribution. Employment prospects are generally good in Hammertown and even during recession its unemployment rate has stayed about 1 per cent under the national average.

Although the town was industrialised over 200 years ago, and has kept many of the same basic industries - especially metal and metal working - it does not have the small firm/family firm infrastructure of many similar towns. In fact its industrial organisational structure is strikingly modern. Much of the employment in Hammertown is in large factories which are often themselves a branch of national or multinational companies. Sixty per cent of the total workforce works in firms employing over 1,000 people. Under 5 per cent of those in manufacturing work in firms employing less than 25 people. Fifty-eight per cent of the total industrial floorspace is concentrated in thirty-eight factories exceeding 100,000 sq. ft. in size. Over 20 per cent of the total area of the town is in industrial use.

Hammertown is altogether something of an archetypal industrial town. It has all the classic industrial hallmarks as well as those of modern monopoly capitalism in conjunction with a proletariat which is just about the oldest in the world.

[1] There are masses of statistics demonstrating systematic differences between the working and middle class in Britain. There is little disagreement about the reliability of these statistics and the latest volume of Social Trends (no. 6, 1975, HMSO) brings together most of the official data. Sixty-three per cent of the heads of households are in manual work of some kind. The lower the social class the lower the income, the greater the likelihood of unemployment, the greater the likelihood of poor conditions of work, the greater the likelihood of being off work through sickness. See also for distributions of wealth and income: A. Atkinson, Unequal Shares, Penguin, 1974; F. Field, Unequal Britain, Arrow, 1974.
[2] See, for instance, `Control experiment', The Guardian, 18 March 1975; `They turn our schools into a jungle of violence', Sunday Express, 9 June 1974 (by Angus Maude MP); and `Discipline or terror' and `In our schools ... defiance, gang war and mugging', Sunday People, 16 June 1974; and the film by Angela Pope on BBC Panorama, `The Best Years?', broadcast 23 March 1977.
[3] Even the official government report on the first year of RSLA, mainly notable for its optimism in contrast to all other commentaries, accepted that there was a `core of dissidents' and recorded `a strong impression that misbehaviour had increased'. DES Reports on Education, The First Year After RSLA, April 1975. [4] See National Association of School Masters, `Discipline in Schools', 1975; NAS, `The Retreat from Authority', 1976; National Union of Teachers, Executive Report, `Discipline in Schools', in 1976 Conference Report.
[5] Reported in The Guardian, 27 June 1976. See also J. Mack, `Disruptive pupils', New Society, 5 August 1976.
[6] In an important speech at Ruskin College, Oxford, in October 1976, Mr Callaghan, the prime minister, called for a `great debate' on education to examine some of the new teaching techniques, parental `unease', the possibility of a `core curriculum' and `(educational) priorities (... ) to secure high efficiency (. . .) by the skilful use of the £6 billion of existing resources'.
[7] A. H. Halsley stated recently, even after the help of an OECD seminar on `Education, Inequality and Life Chance', that `we are still far from a complete understanding ... [of why educational] achievement is so stubbornly correlated with social origin' (`Would chance still be a fine thing', The Guardian, 11 February 1975).
[8] The activity rate is the proportion of the population, aged fifteen or over, which is economically active. This and most of the following information is taken from the structure plan of the local borough. Statistics relate usually to 1970.
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