Government Job Creation Programs: Lessons from the 1930s and 1940s

Government Job Creation Programs: Lessons from the 1930s and 1940sAuthor(s): Jennifer LongSource: Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Dec., 1999), pp. 903-918Published by: Association for Evolutionary EconomicsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4227506 .

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J JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ISSUES Vol. XXXIII No. 4 December 1999

Government Job Creation Programs-Lessons from the 1930s and 1940s

Jennifer Long

The recent period of relative full employment has diverted the attention of the public, and of economists, from the problems associated with providing enough quality jobs for those who want and need them. But the disappearance of manufacturing jobs and the growth of relatively low-paying, less secure service sector employment has caused much concern about the quality of the jobs currently being created [see, for example, Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Burtless 1990; Lerner 1994; Loveman and Tilly 1988]. An important facet of this apparent full employment composed of arguably worse jobs is that it has facilitated the replacement of welfare with workfare without a need for government-sponsored job creation.1 However, in the debates leading up to the Clinton administration's changes in the welfare programs, and in the literature concerned with the maintenance of full employment across the business cycle, there has been considerable discussion of ways in which the number of jobs can be expanded [see Wray 1998; Gordon 1997].

In this paper, I begin with the assumption that the recent changes in welfare policy, accompanied by the public sentiment that all able-bodied, non-retired adults work in paid employment, will at some point in the future meet the reality of the business cycle and produce a revived interest in how new jobs can be created. It is also reasonable to assume that federal, state, and local governments will need to be involved in that process of job creation. In this paper, I conclude that public acceptance of such government job programs--and thus their success-will depend on the reconciling of the economic need for employment with the need for employment that meets social definitions of proper work. The process of job creation through government programs as it happened some 60 years ago illustrates this connection between public perception of the created jobs and the programs' success.

The author is Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma.

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904 Jennifer Long

All three of the government programs discussed here-the Tennessee Valley Authority, the relief programs of the New Deal such as the Works Progress Ad- ministration, and the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons complex-succeeded in employing people. All did not succeed, however, in attaining the same level of public acceptance. Three factors specifically influenced the perceived success or failure of the job creation programs: the levels of government intervention in the programs; the scope of the projects; and social hierarchies of work, including ideas about gender- and race-appropriate jobs. Programs that succeeded were those with a scope of purpose that helped people overlook their distrust of government involvement in the economy and that created jobs appropriate for the workers according to the social dictates of the day. The programs that did not do this met with less enthusiastic public response.

The Case Study: Knoxville, Tennessee, in the Great Depression

Knoxville, a mid-sized Appalachian city that serves as a regional hub, offers ex- amples of infusions of government money on a large scale that resulted in both direct and indirect employment creation. Direct employment relief came with the New Deal in the 1930s, especially with the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Indi- rect employment came with expenditures for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and, about 10 years later, for the nuclear weapons facilities at Oak Ridge. The inter- esting story is not so much the different levels of employment that resulted from the government programs, but the differing social responses to the programs.

The depression brought unemployment and economic misery to Knoxville, as it did to the rest of the nation. Factory closings hit the city hard, adding to the problems of the manufacturing sector that had been in decline since the 1920s.2 At the onset of the depression, 32 percent3 of the city's work force was still employed in low-grade manufacturing that was sensitive to cyclical activity in the economy [McDonald and Wheeler 1983, 62].

While the depression was closing down factories and throwing workers out of manufacturing jobs, government policy, in response to the depression, was also re- arranging the city's employment structure. Employment in government agencies was definitely not new to Knoxville, as it was, and is, the seat of county government.4 But the extent of the infusion of government employment into the area in the 1930s and 1940s was wider than any seen before. The WPA and similar programs brought direct work relief for hundreds of unemployed people, and federal programs were also bringing money into the city by way of the TVA and the later Oak Ridge nuclear programs headquartered in or near Knoxville. Arguably, the greatest effect of the depression on Knoxville was not the economic misery it brought, but the "rise of the federal government's activities in the area" [Deaderick 1976, 61].



Government Job Creation Programs 905

The Tennessee VaUley Authority

The Tennessee Valley Authority, begun in 1933, was one of the earliest New Deal programs and immediately became important to Knoxville, which was chosen as the administrative headquarters. The TVA was not meant primarily as an employment relief agency, but as a program that would produce electricity and fertilizer, promote economic development, and tame the flood-prone rivers of the Tennessee Valley with dams. Nevertheless, employment came with the project. So massive was the construction effort (seven dams between 1933 and 1941) that more than 50,000 unskilled workers were needed. By mid-fall after the TVA was an- nounced in April 1933, more than 100,000 job applications were received, about half of which were from local workers [Morgan (no date), 4]. By 1940, some 2,050 people in the Knoxville area were still employed in TVA jobs, even though the bulk of the construction was completed [Knoxville Chamber of Commerce 1945].

The TVA's work force was comprised of mostly local workers who were given primarily manual labor jobs in the construction of the dams [Morgan (no date), 27]. Other unemployed area workers were hired for conservation, economic development, and social programs such as a library service that operated for the surrounding area [Deaderick 1976, 61]. The professional staff of the Knoxville TVA headquarters was composed of people largely from outside the region, in contrast to the local manual laborers. Out of the eight administrative personnel mentioned by name in a Knoxville News-Sentinel profile of the TVA headquarters, only one was from the region ["TVA Headquarters . . ." 1933, C1].

The TVA workers were categorized into jobs that fit the racial and gender lines of the day. The TVA hired few African-American workers, and then only for the most menial of jobs [McDonald and Wheeler 1983, 64]. Employment of women was limited in the TVA because women were excluded from construction work, although the TVA did alter traditional gender roles in an indirect and probably unin- tentional way. The TVA sought to recruit industry into the area with its cheap electrical power in order to provide employment for displaced miners and farmers, but the industries that came to the area were mostly textiles-an industry that tradi- tionally hires large numbers of women. Thus, "by opening work outside of the home to women, industrialization was injecting a disruptive force into the traditional roles held by men and women in the valley" [Schaffer 1984, 348].

The TVA also impacted the employment structure through its acknowledgement of unions. Most of the skilled and semi-skilled workers who built Norris Dam, just north of Knox County, were unionized [Morgan (no date), 30]. In a region that had been marked and would be marked again by coal miners' and textile workers' strug- gles for unionization, this was important government recognition.5



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Responses to the TVA

Knoxville greeted the TVA with celebrations.6 Thousands of people gathered for a parade through downtown Knoxville when the final TVA bill went into effect. The new program was hailed as a success even before ground was broken for the first dam, partly because so many people stood to be helped. Unemployed workers could find construction jobs building dams, and the dams would control floods, which would help in soil conservation, and thus improve agriculture. The Tennessee River would become more navigable, which would increase opportunities for trade. The tamed river would also generate power that would attract industry. The administrative headquarters in downtown Knoxville would have an impact on retail sales. In short, "the coming of the TVA left few economic interests untouched" [Rothrock 1946, 225].

The celebrations, however, preceded any of these advantages, suggesting that at least part of the public responses to the TVA might have been due to the hope it offered. The TVA was the first government program to offer relief to the area, and the mere fact that such a program existed might have provided a light at the end of the tunnel during the depression and restored faith in the region's ability to provide its citizens with livelihoods. As a later newspaper editorial proclaimed, "In the po- tentialities of our hills and valleys, the magnificent TVA program demonstrates what lies ahead" ["If We Be Poorer" 1935, 4].

Direct Employment Programs of the New Deal

The jobs provided for the unemployed through agencies such as the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the later WPA were similar to those of the TVA in that most involved manual labor. The CWA employed about 4,200 city and county men on road projects in December 1933, as well as in projects to build park structures, storm sewers, prison buildings, and schools ["Women Still Out of CWA . . ." 1933, 1]. In October of 1935, 325 men were employed on seven county and city WPA projects, out of the 2,994 employment slots the WPA allotted for Knoxville ["WPA to Give . . ." 1935, 10].7 Those work projects included school repairs and construction, road and sidewalk work, creek maintenance, library repairs, and a survey of the University of Tennessee campus ["WPA to Give . . ." 1935, 10]. The WPA also put local women to work in sewing projects [City Council Minute Book 15, Sept. 3, 1935, 537] and local artists and writers to work on histories and guidebooks ["Job- less Artists May Eat . . ." 1935, 1].

Such employment was not radically different from what might have been expected from private firms at the time, as the gender and racial distribution of employment in the programs matched that of Knoxville in general. Men were, for the most part, employed as manual laborers by relief programs. Women could not work




construction jobs in any federal employment program, and when they were assigned work, the jobs mirrored work they might do at home or in apparel factories: sewing, clerking, nursing, teaching, and serving as social workers. In CWA jobs, women drew about half the pay that men received ["Women Still Out . . ." 1933, 1]. Racial segregation was evident as well: in 1934 "not one black laborer was listed on the payrolls of the CWA, a fact that led some to protest that the CWA was con- sciously discriminating against Negro job seekers" [McDonald and Wheeler 1983, 64].

Responses to the Programs

As welcome and familiar as the work was, the WPA met with resistance. The Knoxville community certainly had its doubts about the "realness" and usefulness of the WPA work--misgivings most obviously tied into doubts about the desired level of government involvement. Each announcement of new employment from the CWA and WPA was met with applause from the Knoxville News-Sentinel, but the newspaper also

hoped that before another winter private industry can absorb the bulk of these needy and that the states and communities can make themselves solvent enough . . . to assume their share of relief. The federal government cannot carry the entire nation's relief burden indefinitely ["Begin Actual Construc- tion at Norris Dam" 1933, 1].

The farm-to-market road projects provide a good example of the controversy over government involvement in employment decisions and of the concerns that those decisions were made for the wrong reasons.8 Construction of farm-to-market roads was slow to take place in Knoxville because local officials were reluctant to sign the state contracts giving project administration to the state and federal governments while much of the cost remained a local responsibility. The Knox County Road Superintendent claimed that it was the "city officials [who] are on the ground. They know the complaints and they know whether a road is needed or whether building the road would just be paying off a political debt" ["Road Boards Take . . ." 1935, 1]. Such charges of federal coercion and "make work" were common for the WPA and tarnished the programs' receptions by the community.

The Oak Ridge Nuclear Program

World War II took much of the burden off of the federal relief agencies to provide employment, but the nuclear program set up in nearby Oak Ridge was federal government, war-led employment relief on a grand scale for Knoxville. The infu-



908 Jennifer Long

sion of federal money began in the early 1940s and brought by far the most jobs into the area of all the government programs. The federal government began buying land in Oak Ridge, which is about 20 miles from Knoxville, in 1942, in part because of the resources offered by the TVA in the region [Howard 1992, 54]. The government expected that the nuclear weapons facility would employ about 8,000 workers, but more than 90,000 workers would eventually hold jobs there, in what almost overnight became Tennessee's fifth largest city [Howard 1992, 51, 54].

Production of bomb-grade uranium began on January 17, 1944, and the work was definitely different than anything the TVA or the WPA had offered to the area. The separation of bomb-grade uranium from the ore had never been done before on this scale anywhere, let alone in Knoxville. But the Oak Ridge jobs were similar to the TVA and WPA jobs in an important way: most of the jobs held by local workers were manual labor jobs. The scientific personnel, who had come from such places as the universities of Chicago, Berkeley, and Columbia, were separated from the local construction and production workers to the extent that most of the on-site hous- ing was allotted to scientists only at the exclusion of plant workers [Cox 1987, 268; Sparrow 1987, 48]. The educational divide was very evident; some estimates put the number of Ph.D.s in Oak Ridge in 1946 at 300, while the average county resident at the time had seven years of education [Cox 1987, 269].

Gender and race also divided the work in Oak Ridge, although the traditional gender roles for work-but not racial roles-were altered more in Oak Ridge than by the WPA or the TVA simply because of the newness of the jobs open to women there. Many women held traditional clerical jobs in Oak Ridge, but the majority of the calutron (the machines that separated the U-235 from the raw uranium) opera- tors were local women [Larson 1987, 194]. The gender roles of the day still existed in Oak Ridge, however. Few women were employed as scientists or engineers, and female heads of households needed special permission to rent houses in the facility and could not have their first names printed on checks at the local bank [Bolling 1987, 61-62; Cox 1987, 267]. African-Americans, as in the TVA and in the WPA, were employed mostly in janitorial and domestic jobs [Steeles 1987, 200].

Responses to the Oak Ridge Project

Production of bomb-grade uranium began in 1944, but details of the exact nature of the work and jobs only became known after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hi- roshima in 1945. Even the Oak Ridge workers themselves were not told the full extent or meaning of the work they did. Some workers were under the impression that their jobs produced nothing at all ["Facts and Figures on CEW" 1945, 5]. Such a view is understandable in light of the work process at the complex: massive amounts of energy and raw materials went in, but no observable product (or at least no product that the workers could recognize) came out.




With such secrecy prevailing, uncovering concurrent opinions about the nature and value of the work at Oak Ridge is difficult. The one thing observers in Knoxville did know was that a large number of workers were filing into the area, and "wonder and speculation accompanied the appearance in the newspapers of huge advertisements for laborers, teachers, skilled craftsmen, clerical workers, police- men, etc. But it all ended with speculation and wonderment; no one knew anything" ["Facts and Figures on CEW" 1945, 5]. The wonderment and acceptance was no doubt connected to the excitement of the war effort. Once the suspicion "held by some people as late as August 1944 that [Oak Ridge] was another New Deal experi- ment, probably socialistic in nature, not a war effort at all" [Jackson and Johnson 1973, 236] was put aside, working in Oak Ridge was seen as "the patriotic thing to do" [Carey 1987, 216].

Explanations for the Differences in Perception

All three of these economic programs made an impact on the employment of local workers, but all met with different receptions. People celebrated the TVA as the beginning of a new era of economic prosperity for the region and accepted the work in Oak Ridge as part of the patriotic war effort, even though the nature of the work was not well known. The WPA and CWA, on the other hand, were seen as necessary evils to tide the city over until normal times returned. The crucial differences in the programs that help to explain the different perceptions fall into three categories: the levels of government involvement, the scope of the projects, and how the jobs fit into the accepted social structure. The social hierarchies of work that were in place also affected the gender and racial stratification of the jobs, which in turn affected the acceptability of the programs.

Levels of Government Involvement

The level of government involvement provides one part of the explanation for the different responses that these programs met. The familiar clash of government programs with capitalist ideals is related to what Nancy Rose calls a "fundamental contradiction in production on work relief projects," which arises

because production in the private sector is based on the logic of the market, i.e., production and investment are primarily determined by expected rates of profit. In contrast, production-for-use [as in the WPA and CWA] is based on criteria of human needs. Thus, capitalist charges of unfair competition from the production-for-use projects reflect both their fear that they could di- rectly lose sales as a result of government production, and their concern that



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these projects could cause people to question the rationale of basing production decisions on profit instead of needs [Rose 1988, 48].

Day-to-day government involvement in employment was most direct in the New Deal relief agencies, and those programs met with the most resistance from businesses concerned about their own production and from citizens concerned about the effects of the programs on people's work ethics. Charges of federal coercion, as in the farm-to-market road programs, were mixed with doubts about the "realness" of the work-charges of "boondoggles" and patronage work were common to the WPA.

Accusations of inappropriate government involvement in the region's employment through Oak Ridge and TVA were not as strong as those aimed at the WPA. Some of the avoidance of criticism was due to conscious efforts; for example, the TVA forbade employment to depend on anything but skill qualifications in an at- tempt to avoid the claims of political patronage work that plagued the WPA. The few eyebrows these programs did raise-suspicions that Oak Ridge was simply a clever disguise for more "make-work" like the WPA-perhaps tell more about the negative feelings aimed at the WPA than about the acceptability of the Oak Ridge project.

Neither the TVA nor the Oak Ridge project was administered by private industry, however, and should have been subject to the same doubts about inappropriate government involvement that haunted the WPA. The production of electricity and fertilizer by the TVA, more so than the production of weapons at Oak Ridge, was clearly work that was mirrored by the private sector. The welcome reception these programs received might have been linked to the perception that the government was running them in a "private industry way," even though neither was private industry. But the fact that neither was a private enterprise suggests that other factors played into their success.

Scope of the Projects

Part of the willingness to accept the TVA and Oak Ridge as less a matter of charitable relief and more as valued employment opportunities may be explained by the scope of the projects. The TVA, the New Deal employment programs, and Oak Ridge were aimed at very different ends. The WPA and CWA were short-term, emergency measures to put unemployed workers back in jobs during an economic crisis, with employment as the end as well as the means of the programs. Both the TVA and Oak Ridge, however, had larger goals, and employment was a means to those ends, not an end in itself. The TVA was to be an economic development agency for the Tennessee Valley, bring electricity and new industry, and Oak Ridge was built for the specific purpose of building nuclear bombs for the war effort.




These grand goals clearly did not go unnoticed by Knoxvillians. They were of course concerned about reducing unemployment, but mistrust of government programs such as the WPA, aimed overtly at providing jobs, overrode that concern. Thus, the combination of program goals and level of government involvement (or at least the perceived level of involvement) appears to be a powerful one with implications for the acceptability of government employment programs.

Social Hierarchies of Work

Besides the perceived level of government involvement, the social hierarchy of the work itself contributes to the different responses. Ideas of work and employment are deeply embedded in a social context that determines which jobs will be accepted as legitimate means of earning livings, which jobs will be more highly valued-in terms of prestige or monetary compensation-than others, and who in society is en- titled to do certain work. Because work is so clearly a "social product [that] cannot be understood apart from group values, from social perceptions of what constitutes worthwhile and meaningful behavior" [Braude 1975, 17], the work done in government programs must be placed into its appropriate social hierarchy.

Classification systems, either formal or informal, often arise to catalog the relative importance of jobs. The hierarchy was made explicit by the WPA's 12-tiered classification system that was used to stratify jobs according to the type of worker. The inclusion of parts of a known world into the classification system reinforces the degree to which job classifications will reflect the structure of the culture. Relative power relationships will be revealed, as the people in power will, in all likelihood, be the ones writing the classifications. The cultural values implicit in the systems mean not only that the powerful occupations will likely get top billing, but that deeper ideas of what work is-and what kinds of work should be rewarded-are revealed as well.

The WPA classifications included: professional and technical workers; managers and officials; office workers; salesmen; skilled construction workers and foremen; skilled manufacturing workers and foremen; semiskilled construction workers; semiskilled manufacturing workers; unskilled laborers; domestic workers; farm op- erators and laborers; and inexperienced workers [Hauser 1938, 821, 824]. The very order of the listing reveals much about the social valuation of work. The fact that the occupations listed first generally held the highest prestige is not surprising, as the order in which the occupations are listed could reflect the social value assigned to each job as well as the skills, education, and pay that accompany the jobs. Most of the jobs offered to Knoxvillians by the WPA-manual labor, mostly unskilled- fell into the lower ranks.

Manual labor plays a dual role in the hierarchy of work. On one level, manual labor is "honest work" and a socially accepted way to earn a livelihood. On the



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other hand, manual labor is on the bottom of the social hierarchy of work, as it has less social status than the non-manual work usually associated with professionals or skilled workers. While manual labor may be difficult to perform, other difficult jobs may have very little manual labor involved. A doctor or stockbroker may not sweat as much as a farmer or a steel mill worker, but it cannot be argued that those jobs are "easy" or that the doctor and stockbroker do not need complicated skills. What emerges is a dual definition of worthwhile work. Worthwhile work is defined by physical labor, and a person sitting in an office is somehow not working as hard as a worker on the shop floor is. But, at the same time, worthwhile work is also defined by the skills and training necessary to perform it, and highly skilled-and thus highly valued-jobs may involve no manual labor. It thus appears that while "manual labor" can translate to "hard work," it does not necessarily translate to "desirable work."

The employment programs of the New Deal put many Knoxvillians to work building roads and schools, and that work was well within the accepted boundaries of a job. But at the same time, these jobs were not welcomed without reservation because, among other reasons, the jobs carried little social prestige. Thus, while the Knoxville community had its doubts about the "realness" and usefulness of the WPA work-misgivings tied into concerns about the desirable level of government involvement-the nature of the work itself may have contributed to the opinions about the program.

Oak Ridge and TVA also hired local manual laborers, but these agencies also employed many professional and scientific workers as well. While the higher regard attached to Oak Ridge and TVA by area residents is understandable in light of the social valuation of jobs, most of the higher-valued jobs were not held by local em- ployees, but by outside professionals. Thus, the odd fact is that there was approval for programs that created high-paying jobs for outsiders-who would have almost certainly been employed in any event-but less excitement about jobs created for local residents who needed the work. After all, the TVA and Oak Ridge projects provided essentially the same types of jobs to area workers as the WPA did, yet they yielded different responses from the community.

All three programs involved manual labor jobs and because of the place of such work on the social ladder of jobs, similar reactions to the programs might be expected. The positive response elicited by the TVA and Oak Ridge thus illustrates the complex process of social valuation of work: the reception of manual labor jobs was tempered by the existence of higher prestige jobs even though these jobs were awarded to outsiders. Furthermore, the process of socially valuing employment programs involved the evaluation of government interaction with the private sector. Oak Ridge and TVA escaped the suspicion that met the WPA on this front, probably because of the wider scope of these programs.




Gender and Race

The social hierarchy of work also stratifies appropriate work by race and gender, and any analysis of hierarchies of work must take this into account. The hierarchies of work in place during the employment programs of the 1930s and 1940s were no different in that the programs primarily benefited white men. Women were excluded from all TVA construction work and were assigned "women's work," such as sewing and teaching, by the WPA. Women did "new" work-work they had never been allowed to perform before-in Oak Ridge, operating the calutrons. But many of the jobs in Oak Ridge were new, and women's "new" work was in its "old" place near the bottom of the hierarchy of "new" jobs. Racial minorities were allowed only the most menial of jobs in all three employment programs.

Margo Anderson [1994, 7] has cautioned that formal work hierarchies "were designed to organize, classify, and evaluate the work of men in the market economy and are most useful when so used"; the thought can easily pertain to race as well as gender. Informal ideas of work-social norms as to which jobs are appropriate for which people-are just as powerful in shaping employment outcomes. In the case of the TVA, WPA, and Oak Ridge projects, jobs were primarily for men, and the best jobs were reserved for white men.

This stratification of jobs by race and gender suggests two possibilities. Govern- ment programs that targeted women and minorities were not introduced because they would not have been successful in terms of public opinion, or these workers were not included in the programs because they were not perceived as valuable workers. The first possibility suggests an understanding of social hierarchy of work by the program managers. The second suggests that program designers held the same social ideas about work as the rest of the nation did. The second explanation seems more likely, although both have implications for the more recent work-to- welfare programs. Women dominate the welfare rolls, and minorities are often as- sumed to dominate the rolls as well [see, e.g., Rubin 1994; Hacker 1995], making these groups especially vulnerable to government employment programs that might exclude them purposively or unintentionally.

Conclusions

Public responses to the TVA, the direct employment programs of the 1930s, and the project in Oak Ridge present a contradiction. The WPA employed local people in manual labor. This program met with resistance and charges of "make work," even though the work followed social conventions about gender- and race-appropriate work. TVA also employed local people in mostly manual construction jobs, but little resistance was encountered. It was in Oak Ridge that "new" work was created, even though the exact nature of the activities there was not known for some years.



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The acceptance of this new kind of work in a highly secretive government program, the questioning of the validity of traditional, understood types of work in the WPA, and the acceptance of similar jobs in the TVA seem backwards. It might be expected that known jobs filled by local people would have been most acceptable and that unknown work done by people who came from outside the region would have met suspicion and disapproval. At the very least, it seems reasonable to expect that all three programs would have encountered the same level of suspicion because of the level of government involvement. That they did not leads to some conclusions about what kinds of government employment programs might be popular today: programs that pay attention to the social ideas of work and the myth of laissez-faire capitalism, which is embedded in the social ideas of what appropriate work is.

Government Involvement and Program Scopes

The TVA and Oak Ridge projects succeeded, in terms of public opinion, while the WPA failed, because of a successful spin of the myth that the private sector, not the government, should provide jobs. Knoxvillians were willing to forget that Oak Ridge and the TVA were indeed government employment programs because they fulfilled another requirement included in the social valuation of work: jobs should serve some useful purpose besides employment. The perception that WPA work was shaped by politics and not by genuine need played into that definition of work, as did the excitement about the "war work" of Oak Ridge and the economic development plans at TVA. Although employment, as a means of earning a livelihood, may very well be a laudable end in and of itself, the experience with these three programs suggests that more is needed for public acceptance.

Social Ideas of Work

That work of questionable outcome met with resistance illustrates the power of socially constructed ideas of work. The TVA, WPA, and Oak Ridge experiences suggest that another facet of socially constructed ideas of work is also critical to the success or failure of government employment programs: what kinds of workers are allowed to legitimately perform what kinds of work. In the 1930s and 1940s, women and minority workers were relegated to jobs-in both the private labor market and in government employment programs-that were deemed appropriate: manual labor jobs for minority men and work for women that mirrored household chores.

Although women and racial minorities in Knoxville are no longer constrained by law or strict social custom to any one type of job, they are still concentrated in jobs not much different from those they were allowed in the 1930s and 1940s govern-




ment programs. This concentration suggests what kinds of work might be socially acceptable for them to hold in future employment programs. Racial minorities are relatively overrepresented in private household work, machine operating and service occupations, as are women. The concentration of racial minorities as household workers is pronounced relative to both the ratio for women in that occupation and to all the other ratios as well. Both groups similarly constitute a lower percentage of executive and precision production workers than all workers do as a whole. Impor- tant differences in the occupations frequented by the two groups are apparent as well. Women are overrepresented in professional specialty and clerical occupations while racial minorities are underrepresented; women are more concentrated as sales workers than are minorities; and in the technician, handler, and protective services occupations, racial minorities are overrepresented, while women are underrepresented [Long 1997].

In general, however, a pattern emerges of women and racial minorities clustered in occupations at the lower-paying and lower-prestige end of both the manufacturing and service occupations. This pattern suggests the social hierarchy of work built into employment structures, and that a higher degree of acceptance might accompany employment programs that direct women and minorities into low-status jobs. It must also be noted that because government is part of the dynamic institutional structure of society, government employment programs not only reflect social attitudes, but also have the ability to alter social perceptions about appropriate work. If a goal of employment programs is to provide workers-women and minorities included- with well-paying and secure jobs, then the programs must challenge the conven- tional job roles assigned to these workers.

The current employment structure is of course different from that of the 1930s and 1940s not only because racial and gender discrimination is illegal, but also because of the shift from manufacturing to service jobs. But there is still a hierarchy of work, and the low-status service jobs of today bear remarkable similarities to the manual work that was the bread and butter of the New Deal programs. Knoxvillians considered manual labor jobs appropriate for unemployed workers but also hoped that private firms would soon make the government employment programs unneces- sary. But the people of Knoxville also gave simultaneous acceptance to government jobs for workers from outside the region-at least in part because these jobs were of high social status, embedded in larger program goals.

This experience suggests that employment programs built around jobs low in the social hierarchy of work-manual labor in the 1930s and service jobs today-may encounter resistance. However, there is a crucial difference between depression era attitudes toward work relief and current perceptions. In the 1930s, a wide cross-section of people were taking low-status government jobs simply because so many were unemployed. Today, "workfare" jobs are reserved for those people who already oc- cupy the lower rungs of the social ladder because of the American perception that



916 Jennifer Long

government relief work is a form of undeserved charity. Thus, low-status jobs for the unemployed or welfare recipients may seem appropriate to the rest of Ameri- cans.

The experience of government-provided employment 60 years ago thus offers some suggestions for what acceptable government work program will include: some valuable outcome from the work other than the jobs themselves; at least the perception that the program is being run like private enterprise; and, most importantly, jobs that conform to the socially determined hierarchy of work. But this list simulta- neously presents a problem. Even if such a work program is accepted by most Americans, as the new workfare program appears to be, it will do little to help the job recipients eam a decent living. Any socially "appropriate" jobs are likely to be of low social status and thus low paying. What remains to be reconciled are the goals that an employment program should have-decent jobs for those without them-with social opinion that resists government aid for those perceived to be un- worthy of high-status jobs. The success of the TVA and Oak Ridge projects-in both providing jobs in time of need and garnering public acclaim--suggests that the two can be balanced if the public is convinced a larger need is being met through the jobs. The current model of workfare is certainly not capable of that reconciliation, and any government job creation program can only be improved by taking the cultural perceptions of work into consideration.

Notes

1. The Clinton administration's welfare reforms are "designed to encourage businesses to hire welfare recipients" [Warner 1997, 8]. While the current tight labor market means that businesses are more than happy to tap this pool of labor, the wisdom of relying solely on private business to transform welfare recipients into employed workers is questionable at best [Melcher 1997, 42]. What happens to business enthusiasm for the programs when the business cycle turns down or when the most employable people are gone from welfare rolls remains to be seen. For more on the Clinton administration's business-based welfare programs, see Warner [1997], Clinton [1997], and Andelman [1995].

2. Whereas 43 percent of total Knoxville employment was in manufacturing in 1920, a little more than 39 percent of workers were in this sector in 1930 [Knoxville Chamber of Com- merce 1939, VI-2].

3. Calculated from data in Historical Statistics of the United States [U.S. Census Bureau 1960].

4. Knoxville was also the seat of state government until Nashville became the capitol city in 1817.

5. The General Textile Strike of 1934, for example, affected textile plants in Knoxville and the surrounding area.

6. The TVA was not popular with all Tennessee residents. The landowners whose homes would be flooded by the building of dams and the local power companies were not entirely enthused about the project.

7. Knoxville was also allotted 646 employment slots for women. 8. See Minton [1979] for detailed information about the farm-to-market road projects.




9. The "service" category does not include the higher-paying service jobs such as professional, technical, or administrative jobs that are listed in separate categories, but instead includes jobs, such as food service, that have the characteristics of stereotypical "bad" service jobs.

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Documents

Government Job Creation Programs: Lessons from the 1930s and 1940s