Working Men Views of Poverty

Abstract

Despite the alarming numbers of workers living in poverty in developed countries, work is still commonly seen as a way out of poverty. From a social constructivist perspective and based on qualitative research of the working poor in Israel, the article explores low-income Arab and Jewish working men’s views of poverty. It addresses research topics such as the meaning of work, the perception of the workplace, and the experience of poverty and coping strategies. In addition, the article examines the presence of ethnic differences in the social construction of in-work poverty. At the theoretical level, the article questions dominant views of work as the main exit from poverty, highlights the impact of gender and ethnicity in the construction of in-work poverty, and suggests the need for more context and gender-informed policies to respond to the complexity of the male working poor population.

Keywords

poverty in-work poverty working poor Israel gender ethnicity masculinity

Official figures place some forty million individuals in the working poor population in United States and European Union (EU; US Department of Labor 2009; Eurofound 2010), casting doubt on hegemonic neoliberal discourse that places poverty in the welfare sphere, remote from work (Berner 2008; Bradshaw 2011). Based on social constructivist theory and a qualitative research study of the working poor in Israel, this article explores low-income Arab and Jewish working men’s perspectives. It addresses three methodological flaws in poverty scholarship. First, despite the robust body of poverty studies, the issue of in-work poverty is still an emerging area, upon which this article aims to expand (Caputo 2007; Thiel 2007). Second, most research on this topic has been developed from a statistical, top-down perspective and has missed workers’ voices, views, and experiences (Newman and Massengill 2006). The few significant qualitative studies addressing these populations are predominantly anecdotal and lack a systematic methodology (Ehrenreich 2001; Shipler 2004). Third, most studies on the topic of the working poor lack a gender and ethnicity-informed perspective (Strier et al. 2014).

This article responds by expanding knowledge on the issue of in-work poverty and providing an emic and more contextual, gender, and ethnicity-informed perspective. The study focuses on main research areas related to working poor populations including the centrality of work, perceptions of the workplace, the experience of poverty, and coping strategies. The article is divided into five sections. The literature review presents the central research issues related to the working poor. The context section briefly explains the study background. Methodology specifies the theoretical framework and methods of data gathering and analysis. The findings section presents the main themes and finally, the discussion addresses gender and ethnicity roles in the construction of in-work poverty and their implications for practice and policy.

Literature Review

Definition of the Working Poor

As the definition of poverty is an ongoing theoretical dispute and methodological controversy, predictably the definition of in-work poverty is far from having reached a consensus (Bardone and Guio 2005; Caputo 2007; Meyers and Lee 2003; Rosenfeld 2010). In-work poverty takes many forms, and a major challenge in studying the working poor population is that its complexity and variety defy an accepted, clear definition. Lack of consensus in defining in-work poverty (Jossart-Marcelli 2005) has limited the ability of studies on the topic of working poor to inform policy (Andreb and Lohman 2008; Biolcati-Rinaldi and Podesta 2008). Defining in-work poverty entails reaching a shared definition of the work concept, no less affected by theoretical and methodological quarrels than is the poverty concept. According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), the employed comprise all persons who during a specified brief period, either one week or one day, were in paid or self-employment (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] 2009). This broad classification defines the working poor population as the proportion of employed persons living below the poverty line.. Persons at work are persons who during the reference period performed some work for wage or salary, in cash or in kind. Moreover, this exceedingly wide and elastic definition of “employed” includes “for operational purposes, the notion “some work” may be interpreted as work for at least one hour” (ILO Laborsta 2011). The main methodological difficulty is that the data generally relate to employment during a specified brief period, either one week or one day. Usually no distinction is made between persons employed full time and those working less than that. In the EU, in-work poverty refers to a person who worked at least one hour in the last week and his or her income falls below the poverty line (Eurofound 2010). American studies adopted an operational definition of in-work poverty that includes families where one or both parents work at least halftime, and their income is less than twice of that which constitutes the poverty line (Acs, Phillips, and Mckenzie 2000; Blank, Danziger, and Schoeni 2006). The US Department of Labor (2009) defines the working poor as persons employed at least twenty-seven weeks yearly with a total income below the poverty line..

The present article adopts a definition that reflects working people’s experience, that of individuals with a solid significant relationship with the labor market, whose income falls below the national poverty line. We define that relationship as that of people working at least twenty hours a week, who were employed at least six months in the last year, and whose main family income comes from wages for labor.

The Roots of In-work Poverty

In-work poverty is a multidimensional problem (Hong and Wernet 2007). However, whether its core source is situational and societal or personal and individual reflects theoretical views of poverty (Pillai, Basham, and Jayasundara 2009; Segal 2007). Shipler (2004) points out that the increasing numbers of the working poor mirror interlocking chains of factors like race bias and discrimination; proliferation of low income, dead-end jobs, and decaying housing; education and health care (Dyk 2004). Other studies suggest that in-work poverty is rooted mainly in low wages (Urban Institute 2009), limited number of work hours in the labor market (OECD 2009), or caused by globalization processes resulting in changes in the labor market worldwide, with its severe reduction in secure jobs (Brooks 2007).

Policies addressing the issue of the working poor include the promotion of minimum wages, tax credit, relief or exemption for low-paid workers, employment and training bonuses, lower social security contributions, additional family allowances for working families, free day care, and employer subsidies (Eurofound 2010). Despite the intimate relation between wage, ethnicity, and gender, policies in general overlook the great heterogeneity of the working poor population in terms of gender and ethnicity (Borjas 2006). Responding to this omission, this article focuses on the intersection of masculinity and ethnicity in the construction of in-work poverty.

Masculinity, Ethnicity, and in Work-poverty

Masculinity is a contested construct in which the competing representations are embedded in categories of power such as gender, class, and ethnicity (Connell 2005; Reeser 2010). Two shortcomings of the study of masculinity are the neglect of the multiplicity and plurality of the masculine concept and its consequently discursive, decontextualized nature (Haney and March 2003). Masculinity is understood today as a highly heterogeneous construct organized around hierarchical relations between its different forms and expressions (Hearn 2004, 2010). Ethnicity and class are highly significant in constructing masculinity (Aboim 2010) and both shape hegemonic views of maleness (Khosravi 2009). Studies show that dominant constructs of masculinity oppress men who do not conform to local hegemonic ethnic and class views (Kimmel 2013). Fodor (2006) argued that a major gender difference in experiencing poverty is that men often find themselves in a gender role crisis if they cannot function as successful breadwinners. Women, by contrast, tend to feel their roles as caretakers intensified and thus avoid a conflict with hegemonic ideals of femininity. Nonn (2007) states that ethnic groups develop masculinity codes that structure in-group social position and as marginalized persons, impoverished men become innovative survivors with creative strategies. Nonn examined the coping mechanisms these men adopt to resolve status issues. The working poor male’s identity is significantly challenged to prove economic self-sufficiency, as proof is usually provided in the form of holding a decent job (Baxandall 2004; Crompton 1999). Male self-esteem derives from performance at work and pay packet size (Nelson 2004). A concept deeply rooted in the contemporary Western world is that the home mirrors feminine culture and the external public sphere masculine culture (Bourdieu 1992). This gendered division of space is crucial in the ways men and women experience poverty, making it a threat to men’s psychological well-being (Anderson, Kohler, and Letiecq 2005). Widespread research documents the breadwinner role as an important component of hegemonic masculinity across industrialized nations (Kimmel 2010). Thus, poverty represents not only economic hardship but exclusion from privileges of the dominant gender status, so that low-income working men risk falling short of dominant engendered standards of what it means to be a man (Strier 2005). Masculinity in Israel is a highly heterogeneous construct which reflects the great diversity of its population. According to Shor (2008), the Israeli army provides Jewish men with a central arena for gender identity self-actualization (Rozmarin 2011). The ideal of Zionism entails the construction of a new male as opposed to the emasculated Jewish men of the Diaspora (Boyarin 1997). Peleg (2006) and Hollander (2011) argue that the ideal of a “new man,” with its image of a rough masculinity, was designed to be secular in contrast to the devalued image of the subjugated, religious Jewish male of traditional Diaspora society. Studies also show that the Arabs in Israel are undergoing a deep crisis of masculinity that is at once a reaction to, and a reflection of, their collective situation as holding an Arab Palestinian ethnic and national identity and an Israeli citizenship. Notwithstanding some important benefits accrued to them as citizens, they are subjected to structural violence, which includes policing, racism, and discrimination. Their socioeconomic conditions are poor, and their sense of identity and cultural vitality are on the defensive (Kanaaneh 2005; Sa’ar and Yahia-Younis 2008).

This study elaborates the intersection of gender and ethnicity in the social construction of the working poor.

Background

The International Labor Organization documents a constant upward trend in poor working families around the world. In Israel specifically, 19.4 percent of families in general live below the poverty line (Barkali, Gottlieb, and Fruman 2010). According to official Israeli statistics, almost 14 percent of workers live in poverty and in 50 percent of poor families the head of the family is a labor force participant. There is a steady rise in the percentage of poor working families in general and those with one earner in particular (Lewin, Stier, and Caspi-Dror 2008). The demographics of poor families reflect not just the diversity of Israeli society but also the ethnic construction of inequality. The Israeli population consists mainly of Jews and Arabs, the remainder being primarily non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union (Central Bureau of Statistics 2007). The Arab community is an almost separate society, about 85 percent of which lives in separate villages, and only 15 percent in mixed cities. In 2009, 53.5 percent of the Arabs were living in poverty, whereas they represented only 19 percent of the total population. Arab families comprised 35 percent of those living in poverty, and Arab participation in the labor market (52 percent) is far behind that of the Jewish participation. Some 85 percent of Jewish men were employed, but only 73 percent among Arab men were. Moreover, only 8 percent of Arab men work as professionals and technicians, compared with 24 percent of Jews; while 13 percent are unskilled workers, a rate twice as high as that among Jews (OECD 2009). There are considerable differences in wage rates too. In 2007, the average hourly wage of Arab workers was about 70 percent of Jewish workers, the gaps were larger for men than for women: The average hourly wage of Arab men is 60 percent of Jewish male wages and 84 percent with regard to women (OECD 2009). Added to that, most industries in the Arab sector involve hard physical labor and pay very low wages (Jerby and Levi 2000; Kraus and Yonay 2000; Yaish 2001). According to Sharabi (2010) most Arabs depend on the Jewish economy for a living, and work in fields characterized by tough competition, without collective wage agreements. In addition, the unresolved conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the occupied territories, as well as with other Arab countries, has enhanced national and social tensions making the full integration of the Arab citizen into Israeli society as equal citizens even more complicated (Dowty 2005).

Methodology

Constructivism is grounded on relativist ontology, transactional epistemology and hermeneutic, and dialectical methodology (Denzin and Lincoln 2011). This perspective informs our methodology, allowing for deeper understanding of masculinity, work, and poverty as constructions affected by structural forces and national and local contexts (Newman and Massengill 2006; Schwandt 2000). The perspective draws on participants’ everyday experiences to understand the meanings they attach to their lived realities of working men living in poverty (Gergen 1996). This social constructivist theoretical prism highlights reality as a negotiated system of understandings, in which human beings make sense of their acts (Potter 1996). Accordingly, knowledge is always expressed in context in social interaction, with its political, ideological, gender, and cultural influences. A constructivist perspective questions the idea of any final reality and relies on a subjectivist epistemology. Constructivism sees knowledge as a contextualized, permanently changing, and challenged socially shared construction. These constructions disclose underlying values, beliefs, and attitudes deeply embedded in diverse social meanings, affected by power categories like gender, ethnicity, social class, and other social forces. A constructivist-informed theoretical framework suggests that there are many viable ways to interpret data.

Our constructivist view focuses on working men’s meanings of poverty and work, on the ways in which the participants’ social selves are affected by dominant social values of masculinity and on the ways in which in-work poverty is disclosed and justified.

Population

The study population was a convenience sample of twenty Israeli Jewish and Arab citizens, men (adults, custodial parents living with children in the family context, and with one or two parent families), who worked at least six months in the past year, at least twenty or more hours a week, where the main familial income comes from this paid work, whose total income fell below the poverty line (less than 50 percent of the median income). For sampling reasons (Patton 2002), participants were drawn from different cities and villages.

Data collection

Previous ties developed with social services, community agencies, and governmental organizations usually involved with nonworking populations living in poverty proved to be unproductive in accessing the present research population. Our specific population, working men, proved exceedingly difficult to approach. Numerous requests to employers’ organizations, private employers, welfare and employment services, labor unions, and nongovernmental organizations failed to link us to the target population, suggesting a great disconnect between that group and these entities. Ultimately, the population was recruited through multiple personal contacts in a variety of settings which led us to most participants, who in turn through the snowball effect brought other participants. Data were gathered from in-depth interviews as a framework for self-reporting of meanings that subjects attributed to their own and others’ behaviors, emotions, beliefs, and worldviews (Fontana and Frey 1998; Patton 2002). The interview covered the experience, meanings and impact of poverty, lay theories of causality, perceived strengths and coping strategies, perceptions of support systems and social services, and of wage employment as a means to break the poverty cycle. Additional themes emerged unsolicited. The flexible, semistructured interview method allowed for unique interviewer–interviewee relationships and for ready transition between topics . In order to promote openness and ease with the interviewers, Jewish participants were interviewed by Jewish researchers in Hebrew, and Arab participants by Arab research assistants in Arabic, the interviews were fully transcribed and then translated into Hebrew.

Data Analysis

Data were first analyzed through open coding according to the main emerging themes, then discussed with interviewers and an external discussant, to enhance the rigor of the categories. Next, properties and relationships were defined between categories, findings analyzed, and implications discussed. Selected quotations were then translated into English. Member-checking techniques and group discussion with participants in the study’s last stages tested the trustworthiness of the findings. The findings were discussed with participants and informants, checking the credibility of data.

Findings

The findings are organized according to three broad themes emerging from the data analysis: centrality of work, representations of the workplace, and coping with hardship.

Centrality of Work

One of the most frequently recurring themes in the study refers to the role of work in participants’ lives. Participants confirm the centrality of work for the identity of working men. Aaron, thirty-eight, is a Jewish divorced father of a twelve-year-old girl, defining himself as a working man. He has worked seventeen years after finishing his three years of compulsory Army service. He describes his personal labor history as a continuous and intense saga of workplace changes. At present, he is employed by a manpower subcontractor and reports dismissals from several jobs due to ownership changes, irregular production cycles, or simply cutbacks in the workplace. He lacks professional certification and feels trapped in a dead end, oppressive job. Despite his troubled work history, Aaron still equates work with order and meaning in life:

When you work you feel you have something to live for. Work is satisfaction. I feel I have a framework. I get up early and I have a place to go. I chat with other workers .It is fun. It is completely different to go to the Employment Bureau for an unemployment allowance.

For Aaron, as for all participants despite the ups and downs of their troubled work history, work still provides a meaningful and solid social framework, whereas unemployment is portrayed as disorder, lack of meaning, and despair, an altogether unbearable condition for men.

Nabil is a married Arab, father of four, a security guard in a primary school in his village. His employer is a private manpower company. He has worked since nineteen, receiving no social benefits and an hourly wage. In afternoons, he works at a café to supplement his low income. His response about the meaning of work:

Work is income, discipline, life routine. That means that you understand that life is a serious thing, not a joke, that you take things seriously

For Nabil, as many other men in this study, holding a job means maturity. It implies arriving at work on time, helping to keep order in the school, and being a part of laws and regulations that comprise the world order.

Participants also define work as central to gender identity. Work is part of men’s self-respect, a necessary condition to fulfilling masculine gender conventions. However, working for a minimum wage seriously threatens the sense of successfully meeting gender expectations. Samer, an Arab worker, married, three children, succinctly encapsulates the relation between work and masculine pride:

My neighbor is a physician. My wife feels his status is better than mine and that he is better in everything. She also feels less respect, as do the children. Sometimes I feel that my children are ashamed their father is a construction worker.

Samer’s feelings of lower occupational status vis-à-vis his neighbor exposes the feeble gender status of these working men. His narrative shows how the masculine gender hierarchy is intimately linked to class structure and shares with the interviewer the ultimate male failure—loss of his family’s respect.

Work has a strong presence in participants’ self-definition. Ephraim, a Jewish participant, married and father of a son, works for a manpower corporation in an industrial warehouse on a temporary basis, for the minimum wage. Ephraim’s wife was dismissed from her part-time job. He also defines himself as a working person:

I would never take any help from the State.… I am a working person … even while unemployed I wouldn’t dare ask for welfare assistance. My wife gets some assistance from the welfare services.

Ephraim’s self-definition as a working person distances him from the nonworking, welfare-dependent people, even from his unemployed wife, and places him as a working independent man in the domain of the normative society, thus rejecting any association with public welfare which to him is equated with being assisted, a feminine space. Ephraim, like other participants in the study, finds difficulties resolving the contradiction between their class status as poor and their class and gender identity as workers and men.

Tomer, thirty-nine, is a Jewish divorced father of two, a truck driver. For him, life is work—the link to sanity:

Work is a matter of good feeling, being self- sufficient. You are not a burden to society or to your parents. Work is an essential part of life. Some people go crazy without work. Without a job, I would fly off the handle.

Tomer defines himself as a common man. For him, as for most participants in the study, transcending ethnic differences, the formula for a normative masculinity is work and family. Findings show the vital centrality of work for participants’ lives and identity and question the idea that in-work poverty maybe the result of a postindustrial decay in the work ethics. Men in poverty still see work as the axis of their existence, a vital component of their threatened masculinities.

Nonetheless, among these similarities the study also found some differences between Jews’ and Arabs’ views of the meaning of work. For example, Jewish men tended to portray work in psychological terms, work as an indispensable part of men’s psychological well-being, whereas Arab participants take a more instrumental view of work, work as the only tangible way an Arab man can sustain a family.

Boaz, married, thirty, working full time in a company as a logistical support worker, exemplifies the centrality of work for psychological sanity among Jewish workers. Boaz reflects on unemployment periods:

Even then I never ever went to the unemployment office to collect unemployment insurance. I have always desired to work and have been a working man. Without work, I am simply not the same person.

Boaz depends completely on work for his emotional survival. Even when unemployed and in need, the idea of getting unemployment insurance allowances is intolerable. By rejecting his legitimate entitlement to enjoy unemployment rights, in a stoic virile way he prefers to face unemployment without financial assistance. In this gendered way, Boaz and many other participants in the study protect their sense of self and identity as men and workers. Employment, even as a member of the working poor, imbues participants with a sense of security.

Sahid, married, an Arab construction worker, further illustrates Arab participants’ more instrumental representation of work. Sahid reports what work means to him:

I don’t work for personal satisfaction. Work is just the source of income to provide for a family. I love my job but if offered a better paying job, I would change it. I don’t buy into the idea of “belonging” to a job.

Sahid as many other Arab interviewees hold a very concrete construction of work, framed out of necessity and detached from any psychological meaning. As vividly stated by other Arab participant, work belongs to the domain of men’ duties: “I don’t feel any satisfaction in work. It’s something you have to do.” A further ethnic difference is the definition of a respectable job. All define a respectable job as one with fair, decent, just pay. However, the Arab participants’ construction of a respectable job incorporates another significant and recurrent theme: autonomy. Amin, married, an Arab participant, employed six years in a restaurant owned by Jewish owners, explains the meaning of a respectable job:

A decent job is a job in which you are happy to come to in the morning. First and foremost, nobody is above you. The worker is his own boss. He is an independent person. My dream is to be independent.

For Arab participants, some degree of labor autonomy is an essential component in their views of a respectable job. Whereas Jewish workers long for working benefits, wage and job security, Arab participants’ yearning for autonomy seems to reflect their sense of oppression, dependency, and lack of opportunities in a highly segmented and discriminatory labor market. Mohamed, a fifty-four-year-old worker, father of seven, describes in his own words the meaning of being an employee:

“It’s getting up at 4 am …working in the sun, standing on your feet hours, feeling discrimination, no boss to protect you, just the State and its taxes and laws”

Mohamed embodies the State as a threatening and alien presence, a predatory entity in the lives of Arab workers. Given the subordination and discrimination he sees in Arab workers’ lives, after many years in the labor market Mohamed finally decided to become an independent merchant and opened a small furniture shop in his village. Even though the shop barely provides for a minimal income for his family, he persists as for him, working independently means:

Living with respect. Although starting the shop was taking a chance, I thank God. Being independent means that you can, that you are able. Look at the simple fact that I open and close the shop at the hour I decide. Nobody can tell me do this, do that … ”

Mohamed worked for many years as a hired worker in a Jewish-owned carpentry workshop. He sees his previous work experience as a form of slavery, equating salaried employment with physical exploitation and humiliating conditions. Independence means liberation from labor market discrimination.

In summation, work is central to both Jewish and Arab participants and is always represented as antagonistic to the menace of unemployment. Work means order, maturity, and responsibility and represents a crucial component of male identity even if work trajectories show discontinuity and uncertainty. Even with these central similarities, the study found some differences between ethnicity as well. Whereas for the Jews, work is a central component of psychological well-being, Arab men viewed it more instrumentally, a matter of necessity, defining a decent job as one offering autonomy. This yearns for independence seem to express their desire for emancipation from the double (class and national) oppression that characterizes their experiences in the context of what they sensed as a highly ethnocentric and classist society, a class and national oppression that seems to defeat their fragile and subordinated masculine identity.

Representation of the Workplace

Participants portrayed the workplace in multiple, contradictory images. It was benevolently represented as offering security, protection, and stability but also seen as a site of domination and oppression.

Dan, a thirty-one-year-old married Jewish worker with one daughter, is employed on the production line of a mattress factory. His representation of his work environment reveals this dual construction:

I like to work. At 13 I’d be in school until noon and then at 2 o’clock. I went to a factory that employed children and worked there. I loved it. I liked being self-sufficient. I never took even a shekel from my parents. I liked being busy, not fooling around. But employers today are arrogant. There are so many unemployed out there that they (employers) know we need the job, so they can do whatever they want with us.

Dan experiences his superiors’ behavior as aggressive and condescending. He illustrates the dual view of a workplace that simultaneously inspires security and dependency, self-sufficiency, and vulnerability. Participants see the labor market not as the free interplay of supply and demand but as a highly oppressive domain, a site in which they are forced to sell their work for the minimum wage acceptable, where workers may be subject to arbitrary wage cuts and delayed payments and labor laws not enforced. Dan states:

The owners retained part of our salaries for pension fund deposits, but never deposited the money.

The theme of distrust and alienation between workers and management recurs, depicting an oppressive and arbitrary work environment.

Wahid, an Arab father of four sons aged ten to sixteen is married and works in the vegetable section of a supermarket belonging to a large corporation. He feels highly satisfied in his position that requires multiple abilities and receives retirement and vacation benefits. Yet Wahid experiences that the corporation doesn’t respect him:

You can be the best worker and have excellent results, but if you make a mistake … they start yelling. They make you feel awful. It doesn’t seem worthwhile to make any effort,

Wahid’s sense of alienation from “bosses” was shared by many other participants, who see their employers or organizational superiors as a distant and remote presence. Wahid points up the distance between employees and managers:

My relationship with the boss is “Good morning… good morning”… formal courtesies, nothing more.

Participants represent the working poor workplace as one which exposes their class and gender vulnerabilities, and hence is the arena of a shameful daily masculine defeat. These accounts show that regardless of ethnicity, most participants work for minimal wages, which, they say, barely cover basic needs such as food, water, electricity, or housing expenses. Added to this, many asserted that basic labor laws are not totally enforced. A truck driver declared that his boss ordered him to drive fifteen hours a day, risking his own and others lives on the road. Another expressed indignation over salaries arbitrarily reduced by 20 percent. Most participants in the study work in jobs without workers union representation.

Whereas a shared feeling between both groups concerned the contradictory air of the workplace, a main difference between Jewish and Arab participants was seen relating to causality theories. Jewish participants construe their experiences as part of the Israeli trend to privatize and deunionize the labor market, seeing recent government policies as lacking social sensitivity and placing their hardship within the social shift toward a neoliberal economy. Shay, a Jewish thirty-five-year-old, married participant, father of three, describes his workplace:

I work without social benefits. I work six days a week, sometimes even in the weekend. I have a shameful, minimal wage, salary. Half of it covers the mortgage of the house. We never get our payment at time. We are neither allowed to have a workers’ representation. Well, it is not unusual in Israel. It was the same in my past jobs

Albert, forty-five-year-old Jewish participant, stresses the structural nature of their oppression:

Employers sometimes secure our benefits. Governments protect employers and disrespect workers’ rights

Arab participants, explain their working conditions as yet another form of ethnic discrimination which in their experience is the main systemic barrier to success in the labor market. Musa, a married Arab fisherman from a seaside village, father of five, explains:

I learned to be a professional lifeguard—sea and pool—and tried to get a job. The Employment Bureau sent me to Hadera, Caesarea, Or Akiva (Jewish towns). There were opportunities but I never got an offer, if you take my meaning. Then I understood that if I want work I’ll be sent to the filthiest, most disgusting jobs. Being a lifeguard is a terrible responsibility. I have the certificate and I passed the tests; first aid and all. Then, I understood that actually I have nothing but the sea.

Musa claims systemic discrimination against Arabs, implying that Israeli labor markets favor Jews and overlooks Arab citizens. His narrative depicts their working lives in poverty as ethnic discrimination.

As said, both groups portray a dualistic view of the workplace. On one hand, it is a source of security but on the other hand it exposes them to domination. Participants described many situations where employers ignored the basic labor rights, distant relations between workers and employers, and a general sense of precariousness. However, there were some differences between Jews and Arabs. Jews seem to have shared memories of a former workplace environment where workers were more respected, social rights enforced and relations with employers were more human. Their narratives convey grief over the perception that they are viewed today, in the context of the Israeli market-based society as dispensable and their presence in the workplace is currently experienced as transitory and conditioned.

Shimon, a former representative of the Histadrut, the General Workers’ Union, conveys the shift from a more regulated labor market to the new, neoliberal Israel economy:

Once, workers used to know their employers personally. Today, the working place is impersonal, companies change ownership without workers’ participation or consent. Once, there was more solidarity between the bosses and the workers…

Contrarily, Arabs seem to recall no such ideal past. For them, the labor market has always meant hard physical labor, low wages, and insecurity. Whereas the Jewish workers’ dream is to return to an idealized just and secure labor market, their Arab counterparts fantasize about a secure, independent job where they are their own bosses.

Hardship and Coping

Many of the narratives conveyed various images of economic deprivation and their requisite coping mechanisms. Both Arab and Jews describe lives of austerity, sacrifice and permanent scarcity, and multiple instances of distress highlighting harsh living conditions. Their failure as providers is confronted with extreme sacrifice and self-denial. Walid, an Arab married worker, illustrates:

We, my wife and I constantly deny our own needs. We give up certain foods, clothes. When I go to Tel Aviv I don’t put food in my mouth the entire day. We buy clothes maybe once in three years

Walid, like many other participants, confesses to unbearable difficulties in paying utility bills, mortgages, and taxes. In chronic financial deficit, life is an unremitting effort to make ends meet.

Housing is a recurrent theme among the Jews. Ami, divorced, cannot afford rent, so shares a rented house with a friend. He lives in constant fear of being evicted. Other participants shared his fear of inability to keep up with mortgage payments. Ami says:

I bought the house in 1992. After five years, things messed up. I was fired. I couldn’t find new job. I stopped paying the monthly mortgage payment. They sent the police.

Ami faces worsening debt and predicted failure on a path to nowhere. In a routine of despair, Ami vainly seeks respite in his efforts to make ends meet. Similar to Ami, other participants describe lack of money for basic needs like food, toilet paper, diapers, and utility bills.

Along with these similarities, the study found differences in hardship accounts that apparently relate to ethnicity. Jewish participants experience their situation as a traumatic loss, probably loss of the illusion of class mobility or even of accommodation within a stable Israeli working class. There is also a sense of betrayal. Ami continues:

I enlisted in Golani (an elite unit), during a military emergency. I served 31 days in the war in Lebanon and was decorated. After three years I was discharged with an honorable mention. I gave to the State and the State can’t give back?

Ami reflects the sense of other Jewish participants who see their working conditions as an unanticipated reality. They refer more often to the harmful impact of their situation on physical and emotional health, and to housing problems, which probably relates to different lifestyles. Whereas Arabs still live in villages within extended families, Jews lack that safety net and affordable housing is a constant anxiety. Some admitted that they still live with their parents, or share a house with friends during work transitions or even permanently.

With all their anguish and frustration, narratives also illustrate coping strategies. Mohamed, a married Arab worker, juggles expenditures on food and clothes:

We don’t buy in Israel. We go to Jenin (a West Bank town)…Prices are half what they are in Israel, We buy everything there—food, clothes, pencils, notebooks. Here we just pay bills, and not always on time. God helps us

Mohamed trusts in God’s help but performs multiple earthly strategies to make his ends meet. A recurring image presented is that of “standing on your own feet,” that seems to symbolize resilience. Samer, when asked the source of his strength, says:

I can tell you that I am still standing on my feet. My situation is not stable, but I still haven’t reached a situation where my wife left me, or we lost our home…

For Samer standing on your feet is, despite all life’s difficulties, retaining a man’s main assets: his family and his home. Ramy, a divorced Jewish participant similarly describes coping with life in an economic situation that locks him into a permanent state of psychological alert:

I live with that sense all the time. I barely sleep at night. However, at the last minute I always manage to save myself. Not once, several times.

Ramy lives in a state of psychological withdrawal. Abandoned by his wife and deserted by friends, he suffered severe physical injuries and underwent knee replacement surgery. However, he also recalls that he, against all odds, still remains on his feet:

I still exist, I still live, I stand on my own two feet. They think they are clever (friends who left him). I told them, you wouldn’t have survived what I went through. You would have fallen. It takes a lot of strength to get through.

As with many of the Jewish participants, Ramy finds solace in the fact that he has not collapsed, that against all odds, he is still alive. Similarly, Shabi, a married Jewish participant, when asked whether he is proud of himself, answers:

I am proud of myself because I am still on my feet. Despite all the difficulties I am still on my feet. What else can I be proud of when I cannot feed my family by myself, when I don’t have a home of my own? Being on my feet means I still get up every morning.

Musa, the Arab fisherman metaphorically describes his personal coping style. As with many other participants, his children seem to be his main source of resilience.

I live like an ant. Every day I manage to work for the winter …. I sell my day’s catch for 100 shekels, sometimes even less, then save some money for the winter …. I spend a lot of time with my children, I try to teach them about life’s hardships, to live within their means. I have to teach the hard way. I have no choice if I want to stay here, close to the sea

The children and the sea, Musa’s real passions, bring resilience. An ant’s life is the price that he willingly pays for living as an autonomous man, close to the sea and to his children.

Participants’ accounts of hardship and coping within both the Arab and Jewish men’s experiences portray a life of sacrifice and permanent struggle which goes far beyond the working sphere. A life of work in the shadow of poverty becomes a test to preserve their wounded masculinities by finally defying the labor market commodification and dehumanization of the workforce by standing on their own feet.

Discussion

This qualitative study examined the poverty experience among Jewish and Arab working men, exploring and comparing the centrality of work, representations of the workplace, manifestations of hardship and coping. The findings show that participants still consider work the anchor of their lives (Lamont 2000). These findings confirm previous studies that show the high importance of work for the Israeli population (Harpaz and Meshoulam 2010). Work means order, maturity, and responsibility, a crucial component of male identity and psychological well-being. Work is always represented against the menacing shadows of dismissal and unemployment, seen as the source of chaos, shame, and emptiness. Despite recognizing work as a positive variable, the participants narrate their work trajectories as sagas of change fraught with discontinuity and uncertainty. Low wages is a recurring theme, transcending ethnic differences, a decent job is construed as one offering some security and stability, covering at least basic needs like food, housing, and the utility bills. But also revealed in participant’s responses are substantial differences between Jewish and Arab views of the meaning of work. Jewish men see work as a self-evident demand, willingly accepted in order to meet gender conventions and expectations. In contrast to this “natural,” essentialist view of work, Arab participants see it as less intentional, purposeful, and self-evident, and experience work as an external reality and an enforced element of existence. Whereas Jewish participants’ main desire is for a remunerative, steady job, Arabs fantasize about some degree of autonomy, which would bring a sense of dignity to their work life (Cleavland 2005). This desire for autonomy and respect may reflect their existence within an ethnically, nationally discriminated minority.

Findings reveal contradictory images of the workplace. It is both the site where most participants’ aspirations and desires are projected and mobilized—and a domain of oppression and exploitation where their deepest vulnerability is exposed. Feelings of alienation and of estrangement from management run high. This breach dividing worker, workplace, and employer seems to reflect deep changes in the local labor market related to broader trends like privatization, deunionization, and globalization that have transformed the labor market worldwide. They are the result of new employment patterns like subcontracting, and new production modes such as outsourcing and relocation of the workplace. These changes deepen the rupture between worker and workplace, increasing workforce insecurity as reflected in participants’ own voices. All have an ambivalent workplace experience that supersedes ethnic difference. These experiences seem to reflect significant changes which have occurred in employment relations in Israel during the decades of neoliberal policies (Harpaz and Meshoulam 2010). But there are also notable differences. Jewish participants experience the work domain with a sense of loss, since free market premises make them easy to relocate or dismiss and vulnerable to a threatened future (Simmons 2009). Their accounts of loss recall a time, idealized or not, when employer–employee relations were closer, more humane, or simply more just.

By contrast, Arab participants seem free from idealized pictures of bygone employer–employee solidarity, possibly due to their specific national condition. Clearly, then, Jews and Arabs, having different collective histories, have different collective memories. For the Jews, the past recalls a lost class solidarity, for the Arabs, their silenced ethnic and national history.

Participants tersely describe circumstances in which low salaries barely cover minimal needs. Their life stories tell of an anguished existence, a Sisyphean effort to meet unpaid bills and anticipate the next financial catastrophe. Minimal wages mean impossible choices like buying food or paying the mortgage, health care expenses, or school fees. These hardship chronicles raise serious questions as to general views of work as the remedy for poverty. The foregoing self-reports show that under certain market circumstances, work is not the promised exit from poverty but rather a main holding area. In the new Israel labor market, work and poverty as reflected in our subjects’ experiences are two perfectly compatible concepts.

Nevertheless, participants do not use the poverty concept to describe their personal or family situation. Their views are still embedded in a discourse totally denying the idea that a working person should suffer the fate of the poor.

Even with the intergroup similarities, the study found significant ethnic differences in explaining hardship. The Jewish narrative is one of traumatic disappointment and betrayal. This sense of betrayal stems from their unwritten contract with the State, a Jewish State wherein they met obligations like serving in the army, fighting wars and joining Israel’s productive workforce, and yet were abandoned to their class fate. By contrast, the Arab narrative is one of collective resilience. Despite their hardships, there is no element of disappointment. Arab men, as part of a national minority in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict appear to have been without illusions of a promising future, and therefore free of the trauma of status loss that characterizes the Jewish narrative. For Arab participants, their situation is simply another proof that they suffer discrimination as an excluded national minority (Sharabi 2010).

But participants’ accounts disclose resourceful coping strategies: living on a minimum budget, lowering basic needs to the level of extreme austerity, endlessly juggling bills, and above all, remaining on one’s feet. Children’s well-being too is a motivational tool and a source of strength crossing ethnic divides, although Jews and Arabs cope in significantly different ways. Whereas the Jewish discourse is one of individual resilience, the Arab narrative relates to family and possibly to cultural and gender factors. Men depend on work to successfully construct their masculinity according to such criteria. Work is central because it is the only way to meet the demands that gender and cultural norms impose on men. While both Arab and Jewish societies are strongly family oriented, their similarity is mediated by different cultural orientations, the more individualistic Jewish society as opposed to the more collectivist Arab one. Significantly, the hard fact that their father is a poor working man tends to undermine the Jewish family, whereas there is no trace of this in the Arab testimonies. The difference must also be understood through a gender perspective. Dominant masculinities are usually associated with power, never with poverty. Poor men, therefore, risk falling short of dominant standards of what it means to be a man. With the growth of upper-class Jewish society and pauperization of the working class, successful masculinity is ever more linked to economic success. Hence, despite Israel’s egalitarian ethos, the ultimate test of a man’s masculinity is being a good provider, meaning that the increasing gap between rich and poor seriously challenges the masculine image of the low-income Jewish worker. Arabs may be protected by their very exclusion from the hierarchies of masculinity in Israeli society. The family-coping mode too seems to expose men less to assessment of masculinity by income criteria. In addition, the collective Arab discourse of resilience shields working men from that sense of emasculation that typically affects men in poverty in other cultural and political settings.

Participants’ theories of causality are found to be very similar, both groups offering structural theories. They see Israel as a society where relations have become cruel, its labor force exploited, labor laws ignored, and workers’ rights systematically transgressed. Whereas the Jews interpret this as class oppression, Arabs construe it as a national discrimination. Moreover, findings show a gap between the study population and the social services. Despite all hardships, most poor workers avoid the idea of welfare. Preserving a gender and working identity is incompatible with their image of welfare recipients.

The study shows the labor market in its duality as the site of the search for economic, social, and psychological well-being—and the place that produces and perpetuates inequality. The labor market is the background against which working men project their desires and hopes, and simultaneously it is the arena of class and gender defeat. These findings challenge the current views regarding participation in the labor market per se as a way to eradicate poverty. Under present conditions, the market does not promote social mobility. Notwithstanding, work is still meaningful and the motivation to work seems high.

Findings indicate the presence of gender and ethnic categories in the construction of working poverty. We argue that working men construct and enact meaning to their lives according to gender conceptions and the context in which their ethnic and national identities and realities are embedded. The conceptualized relation between poverty, gender and employment implies the need to challenge atomistic, out of context views of social life. Our theoretical constructivist analysis frame illustrates that the relation between poverty, masculinity, and employment belongs in a gender, cultural, and national context in which the construction of the working poor is negotiated and recreated.

Implications for Interventions, Social Services and Policies

The study indicates the need to address the ethnic, cultural, and social heterogeneity of this group (Fogel 2007). Interventions and social services should be sensitive to the ethnic diversity of working men living in poverty, and cognizant of different views of gender among this population. Social services should seek to offer services that fit the characteristics of this population in terms of its gender and working identity.

Social policies must consider the magnitude of the group and revise the current views of work as a way to combat poverty. Programs that condition welfare rights on working should recognize that moving people into the labor market will not reduce poverty. Without deep structural changes, these programs merely transfer poverty from one sphere to another, and are a ruse to reduce welfare rolls. Necessary structural changes include government regulation of labor relations, a decent minimal wage, actively enforcing labor laws and social benefit payments, increased protection of workers’ rights that include the right to organize and to strike, and also protecting vulnerable cultural, ethic, and national minorities against workplace discrimination.

Limitations of the Study

Qualitative studies are based on a small number of participants and are local in character, so that generalization of findings to the general population or other contexts is limited. However, findings of this study were discussed with many informants, including representatives of governmental and nongovernmental agencies, labor union representatives, and the participants themselves, enhancing the relevance, authenticity, rigor, and trustworthiness of our procedures and findings. Future studies should include a quantitative survey to corroborate our findings across a representative sample of the working population.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article was based on a study funded by the National Insurance Institute (Israel).

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