Class in America - Essay Example

in America America society has changed greatly in the past two decades with the gap between the poor and the rich increasing by day. Today, America is no longer the same country where people lived the same king of life. This is against American dream that fosters to make paths to all its citizens to achieve material success, social respect, and personal fulfilment. Dozens who fail to complete school and those in the class of the elite have suffered similar conditions of joblessness from the poor economic conditions. This paper summarises chapter one and chapter three of the book New Class Society: Goodbye American dream by Perrucci and Wysong. In America, the level of inequality is very high and quite evident from a tender age. While medium wage has not changed an inch from the last recession, upper class workers in America have good earnings to afford a luxurious lifestyle. Some decades ago, hard work qualified people to good jobs that ensured a successful life. Today, people with talents take a bigger share of money home for utilizing their talents. For example, the ballplayers and the movie star. However, some people earn below the poverty line for reasons they can overcome. Apart from income inequalities, other inequalities include discrimination against women, racial, and ethnic groups. Thus, the class inequality with a structured system of unequal rewards that enables a small minority to access rewards at the expense of others (Perrucci and Wysong 20-30). American class is complex to define but functionality model helps explain it. It states that social stratification is complex, multidimensional phenomenon, and cannot be understood using a single factor. Therefore, the model suggests understanding class inequality through occupation, production position, and class links. Marxian model views classes as organised according to variations in the levels of prestige each representing a combination of several qualities of individuals. These prestige levels may include cultural values, education levels attained, and levels of income. New class is evident in America today where people live differing lives each passing day. A new model that incorporates the production model helps in understanding the nature, origins, and dynamics of the new class. The new model recognises that the emerging new class system is organisationally based. The class structure is viewed as increasingly organised around and through large organisational structures. For instance, people gain their importance for the organisations they work for other than by who they are. In addition, classes are include individuals and families with comparable total resources over time. From the classes, it is possible to read the four forms of generic economic and social resources that include investment, consumption, skill, and social capital. The other approach to explain elaborates how large organisations act as avenues for legitimating the distribution process, causing inequality. Large organisations dominate the economic, cultural, and political arenas through their large distribution process that defines the new American class. Capital is generative in nature because it produces other resources when invested. Capital is a key resource in America, needed for any investment or business. Usually, many peasant Central Americans are peasant farmers with small chunks of land to do subsistence farming. It is impossible for the peasant farmers to compete with large estate owners farming for exports, which makes them move to the cities to look for jobs. Varying incomes for different groups means that they have less or more to invest in money generating projects. In conclusion, America has various classes including privileged class or super class, credential class, professionals, new working class or comfort class, wage earners, self employed and excluded class. The Global Economy and the Privileged Class Advancement in technology has contributed to the global economy fostering its growth. Many corporations can now outsource skilled labour to work in their companies replacing the working class Americans. In addition, technology enables that companies call for skilled workforce to solve for them some critical problems from their countries without moving. This has resulted to too many American citizens losing their jobs and hence their homes, cars, and other properties. Apparently, unnecessary employees must be downsized for the business venture to remain competitive in the market. Lifetime employment is becoming outdated with the global economy, which calls for workers to maintain lifetime employability through accumulation of skills. Over the past few years, American economy carries huge debts and adverse balance of trade that out of the existing fiscal and monetary policies passed by the government. This has created a non-conducive environment for companies to operate in America, which forces them to close down and move their manufacturing plants in developing countries where they can get cheap labour and fewer regulations. Investing in multinationals was at $75 billion in the 1970s, which rose steadily to $400 billion in the year 1985 (Perrucci and Wysong 114). Although in some cases, companies wanted to reap cheap operation costs available in the host companies, US wanted to protect its companies abroad. For instance, operation costs in Europe and Japan are quite high with labour for manufacturing workers higher by 15 and 25 % (Perrucci and Wysong 115). Opening multinationals abroad enables American companies compete favourably with other companies manufacturing the same products. The fact that multinationals do not bring their profits back to America makes them escape paying taxes. The aspect of global competitiveness has resulted to a new class working class in America as companies improve their productivity. The major losers of American firm closures are the production workers who have to look for new ways of survival. Apparently, the share markets in America encourage the downsizing of workers. This is because once a company announce a downsizing process, its shares rise by a significant percentage because of anticipated profits. For instance, when Xerox announced a planned ten thousand employees downsizing, its stocks went up by 7% (Perrucci and Wysong 119). Most members of the privileged class have ancestral origins with the company owners. Despite this fact, they work very hard to earn their positions either through academic qualifications or through years of hard work. In their current positions, they use every effort to remain competitive and move the companies forward. While many jobs have several ladders before getting to the upper level, jobs for the privileged class have one ladder. To get to this level one requires connections beside with members of their college, ethnic group, religious affiliates, or sorority. That is, they need social capital to get them in. On getting the leadership positions in these companies, the privileged class can influence Americans budget through government decisions like how much will be spent of Medicare. Efforts to mobilize the bigger class of Americans including the lawyers, managers, scientists, doctors and others have not yielded much fruit. Works Cited Perrucci, Robert and Wysong, Earl. “New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream?” USA, Rowman and Littlefield: 2008. Print Read More