Masculinity, poverty and work

Masculinity, poverty and work are all highly complex and interrelated concepts, and the subject of intensive scholarly discussion. Masculinity is a contested concept in which competing representations of manhood are embedded in categories of power, such as gender, class and ethnicity (Connell, Reference Connell2005; Hearn, Reference Hearn2004, Reference Hearn2010; Reeser, Reference Reeser2010). These categories are very significant for constructing masculinity as a complex and fragmented phenomenon (Aboim, Reference Aboim2010) and for shaping hegemonic views of masculinity (Khosravi, Reference Khosravi2009). Clearly, dominant constructs of masculinity oppress men who do not conform to local hegemonic ethnic and class views (Kimmel, Reference Kimmel2000).

Besen (Reference Besen2007) identified three strands in academic literature which are relevant to the links between masculinity, poverty and work: the centrality of the breadwinner motive, the role of paid work in preserving male identity and the economic benefits of work. Widespread research documents the breadwinner role as an important component of hegemonic masculinity across industrialised nations (Nelson, Reference Nelson2004; Kimmel et al., Reference Kimmel, Hearn and Connell2005). Studies indicate that working poor men face significant challenges to prove their economic self-sufficiency, which is usually done by means of holding a decent job (Baxandall, Reference Baxandall2004; Crompton, Reference Crompton1999). Hence it is no surprise that in many cultural contexts poverty is a menace to the psychological well-being of men (Anderson et al., Reference Anderson, Kohler and Letiecq2005). Therefore, poverty represents not only economic hardship, but exclusion from the privileges of the dominant gender status, to the point where low-income working men risk falling short of dominant standards of what it means to be a man (Strier, Reference Strier2005, Reference Strier2008; Barker, Reference Barker2005).

Two main shortcomings have characterised the study of masculinity heretofore: a neglect of the plurality of the masculine experience and the consequently discursive, de-contextualised representation of it (Haney and March, Reference Haney and March2003). Accordingly, we should avoid generalisations which are detached from the specific processes in which masculinity is constructed and reconstructed, since different groups of men are positioned very differently in such processes (Connell, Reference Connell2005). Cha and Thebaud (Reference Cha and Thébaud2009) show, in a multilevel study covering twenty-seven countries, how economic changes and institutional arrangements shape men's gender ideologies. Various studies have acknowledged this challenge and showed the impact of local context on the ways in which masculinity, poverty and work are represented (Fodor, Reference Fodor2006; Nonn, Reference Nonn and Arrighi2007). As marginalised persons, impoverished men are innovative survivors with creative strategies (Fuller, Reference Fuller2001; Ramirez, Reference Ramirez2011).

Following this trend and taking into consideration both the multiplicity of the masculine experience and its contextualised nature, this article addresses the social construction of work as portrayed in the accounts of working men living in poverty against the background of a specific Israeli context: a labour market severely fractured along ethnic and cultural lines, with multiple, and very different, representations of masculinity among the different groups in the society.

Masculinity in the Israeli context

Israeli society is highly diverse in terms of social class, culture, ethnicity and religiosity. Gender ideologies, including ideologies of masculinity, reflect this great diversity. Ideologies of manhood and the dominant position of the military in society are deeply interconnected (Ben-Ari and Dardashti, Reference Ben-Ari, Dardashti, Maman, Rosenhek and Ben-Ari2001; Klein, Reference Klein2002; Kaplan, Reference Kaplan2003, Reference Kaplan2007). According to Shor (Reference Shor2008), the Israeli army provides men with a central arena for gender identity self-actualisation. Soldiers in Israel are usually regarded as icons of masculinity for their commitment to the nation and the state (Aloni, Reference Aloni2011; Rozemarin, Reference Rozmarin2011). The ideal of Zionism entails the construction of a new male as opposed to the emasculated Jewish men of the Diaspora (Boyarin, Reference Boyarin1997). Peleg (Reference Peleg2006) and Hollander (Reference Hollander2011) argue that the ideal of a ‘new man’, with its image of rough masculinity, was designed to be a secular male in contrast to the devalued image of the subjugated, religious Jewish male of traditional Diaspora society.

However, far from being a monolithic entity, Israeli masculinity is highly fragmented. For example, in the ultra-Orthodox community the ideal of successful maleness diverges completely from the hegemonic view (Hakak, Reference Hakak2003, Reference Hakak2005). Despite the fact that it is a highly patriarchal community, the ultra-Orthodox ideal of manhood is based on devotion to Torah study, providing for one's family, restraint, self-control, rationality and sagacity (Goldberg and Yassour-Borochowitz, Reference Goldberg and Yassour-Borochowitz2009). In the same way that the ultra-Orthodox ideal of masculinity differs from the secular one, immigrant men in Israel also have to confront their own cultural conceptions of masculinity in light of new images of masculinity in the host society (Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport, Reference Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport2003). This negotiation between competing images of masculinity takes place in the midst of the immigration process which is interpreted by many immigrant men as a test, a threat to their own masculinity (Strier and Roer-Strier, Reference Strier, Roer-Strier and Lamb2010).

Finally, the Arab Israeli citizens’ masculine identity offers another expression of the contested and fragmented nature of masculinity in Israel. Studies 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 Israeli citizenship. Notwithstanding some important benefits that accrue to them as citizens, they are subjected to structural discrimination which exacerbates a self-devaluated masculine identity (Kanaaneh, Reference Kanaaneh2005; Sa'ar and Yahia-Younes, Reference Sa'ar and Yahya-Younis2008).

In addition to the ethnic and religious divide in Israeli masculinity, the widening socio-economic divide that characterises Israeli society propels the creation of class-based counter narratives of masculinity. According to Sasson-Levy (Reference Sasson-Levy2003), for low-income and non-hegemonic cultural groups the construction of masculinity is ridden with conflicts and inner contradictions. These have been sharpened due to social inequality which has linked gendered images of masculinity to economic success (Strier, Reference Strier2005, Reference Strier2008; Sa'ar, Reference Sa'ar2009).

Secular Jews

Waged work is a vital and central foundation of participants’ lives and identities, providing a sense of order, routine and organisation. Aaron, thirty-eight, is a divorced father of a twelve-year-old daughter, and defines himself as a ‘working man’. Having worked for seventeen years after his three years of compulsory army service, he describes his personal labour history as a continuous saga of workplace changes. At present, he is employed by a manpower subcontractor and reports dismissals from several jobs due to ownership changes, production cycles or simply cutbacks. He lacks professional certification and feels trapped. Despite his troubled work history, Aaron still equates work with order and meaning:

For Aaron, work provides a meaningful social framework whereas unemployment is disorder, lack of meaning and despair, an unbearable condition.

Work is constitutive of men's identity and has a strong presence in participants’ self-definition. Ephraim, married and father of a son, is employed on a temporary basis at an industrial warehouse, through a manpower agency; he earns a minimum wage. Ephraim's wife was dismissed from her part time job. Ephraim, like Aaron, defines himself and his identity as a ‘working person’:

Ephraim's self-definition as a working person distances him from the ‘non-working’ and places him in normative society, allowing him to reject any association with public welfare. Employment, even as a member of the working poor, provides a sense of safety. Participants depend completely on work for their emotional survival. Even when unemployed and in need, the idea of collecting welfare appears intolerable. Ephraim, like other men in the study, finds difficulties reconciling the inherent contradiction between his class status as poor and his identity as a working man.

Waged work is central to participants and is always contrasted with the menace of unemployment. Work means order, maturity and responsibility, and represents a crucial component of Jewish secular male identity even if work trajectories show discontinuity and uncertainty.

However, participants also see the labour market not as the free play 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, where workers may be subject to arbitrary wage cuts and delayed payments and labour laws go unenforced. As Ephraim stated:

Secular Jewish participants experience their situation as a traumatic loss, probably loss of the hope of upward class mobility or even the illusion of full integration within a stable and respected Israeli working class. There is also a sense of betrayal. Ami, a worker who, like other participants, served long periods of military service, expresses his deep sense of disappointment with the State. Despite the fact that they risk their lives for the security of the country, the State has left them behind:

Ami reflects the sense of other Jewish secular participants who see their poor working conditions and low social status as an unanticipated reality.

Immigrants

According to these participants, the migration process was followed by much tension, confusion and disorientation. Migration meant losing control, dependency, lack of economic security – all issues that generated much anxiety. In the midst of their changing realities, work means much more than a source of income for immigrant men; it is the centre of their identity, the bridgehead into the new land, a point of reference in the uncertainty, an existential anchor. The migratory process intensified the men's predisposition to define themselves by their work. By their accounts, immigrant men weigh their success as men in terms of job success. Finding a job means being counted as men in the new land, successfully entering the main arena of male competition – namely, the local labour market. Haunted by internal and external insecurity, these men eagerly look for a job. Alex, a Jewish immigrant from the former Soviet Union, works in a coffee shop and patisserie for the minimum wage. For Alex, as for the other immigrants in the study, getting and keeping a job regardless of low remuneration, precarious working conditions or lack of benefits, is a high priority requiring total concentration, a matter of life or death:

According to Alex, the primary responsibility of an immigrant father is to get a job and keep it. Like many other immigrant participants, he sees an immigrant father without a job as a ‘lost man’. Alex's identity as an immigrant working man is of someone who is carrying out the immigration process successfully. The price is total immersion in the work sphere.

Men experience the migratory process as a test not totally devoid of gender meanings. Finding and maintaining work is seen as the ultimate gender test, the audition, as it were, in which their challenged masculinities are tested.

Despite their low family income, these participants opt to minimise their economic distress, which seems to be a way to protect their challenged role as successful breadwinners. They tend to idealise their economic status, to highlight the quality of life achieved by many sacrifices and to distance themselves from the ‘other’ poor. Shimon, an Ethiopian immigrant thirty years old, is employed in a youth educational institution for Jewish Ethiopian teenagers:

Shimon, like other immigrants in the study, chooses to divorce himself from the poor and adopt a middle-class identity. This is completely at variance with their present, gloomy economic reality. It expresses not just the classic immigrant dream and an optimistic, naive trust in upward class mobility, even in an increasingly unequal society like Israel, it also manifests an idealised class-based gender identity that suppresses fears of a possible and colossal masculine failure – namely, the likelihood of being poor in the new land.

Despite their tendency to obscure their family economic hardship, participants were not totally unaware of widening social gaps in Israel. Vladimir, a thirty-two-year-old immigrant from the former Soviet Union, father of one child and employed as a driver, agrees with other participants that government policies are responsible for the lack of social mobility:

Vladimir may be discussing his own doubts about being able to provide his child with the means needed in the increasingly expensive higher education system, or reflecting on his own experience, which has left him out of the mainstream of the host society. He narrates his account alternatively in the first, second and third person, a technique that helps minimise the pain of his emasculated identity loss as he faces the inequalities of the social system impinging on himself and his son. He has structural explanations for the increasingly non-egalitarian social system in Israel, but like other immigrant men in the study – experienced lone warriors who successfully overcame the migratory process – he fully believes in personal agency. However, he is also aware of the possibility of failure, of giving up, of recognising that finally, despite heroic endeavors and sacrifices, you face a gender and class failure – namely, the concrete possibility of being poor, in other words, ‘nobody’.

Ultra-Orthodox

The emergent theme in the ultra-Orthodox group is religiosity. Waged work is instrumental to the religious way of life for the family and appears to be dissociated from additional social meanings. David, father of six, is employed by a manpower agency as a security guard in an ultra-Orthodox primary school. He is happy with his work because he likes children but does not attribute any significance to it beyond providing the needed a monthly income:

David and the others in his group attribute a narrow, instrumental and diminished meaning to waged work. For ultra-Orthodox men, educated for sacred studies and deliberately undereducated for work life, economic work is for physical existence only, whereas the real meaning of work is metaphysical: to serve God (avodat haShem).

In the practical, worldly sense work is a source of physical and psychological burnout for these participants. However, they do link the worldly and ‘other worldly’ significance of work to their engendered and cultural ultra-Orthodox identities as men and fathers. Men in the study found the main significance of their work in providing their children with a religious education that ensures the continuity of ultra-Orthodoxy. Baruch, father of three, explains his decision to leave the kolel for the labour market:

Baruch construes the meaning of waged work through the prism of his class, culture and gender, with its intertwined and sometimes conflicting realities. Like most ultra-Orthodox men, he was raised to devote his life to sacred study. Nonetheless, he sees economic hardship as a real threat to his children's well-being and even to his family's religious continuity. Under the burden of class constraints and against his will, he decided to leave his sacred studies, contradicting gender and cultural scripts. But Baruch compensates for this by means of his new interpretation of the meaning of work, one more compatible with his class, gender and cultural identities: work is a way to preserve a religious home.

Faith plays a significant role in the ultra-Orthodox construction of the meaning of work. Israel, father of six, cooks in a community soup kitchen and explains the role of divine providence:

According to Israel's perception, life, including economic life, is beyond our control. Work, it follows, is also under divine control. Therefore individuals who serve God should conform and see the positive side, view their cup as ‘half full’.

Arabs

Arab participants also define waged work as central to gender identity. Work is part of a man's self-respect, a necessary condition for the fulfilment of masculine gender conventions. Nabil is married and a father of four, a security guard in a primary school in his village, employed by a private manpower company. He has worked since he was nineteen, receiving no social benefits and an hourly wage. Afternoon work at a café supplements his low salary. Here is his response about the meaning of work:

For Nabil, a job proves maturity. It means arriving at work on time, helping to keep order in the school, being a part of laws and regulations that comprise the world order. He views himself not only as a worker, but also as a social control agent. This self-image balances his devaluated self-concept, as working for a minimum wage seriously threatens the sense of successfully meeting gender expectations.

Samer, another Arab worker, clearly states the relation between waged work and pride:

Samer's feelings of lower occupational status vis-à-vis his neighbour exposes his frail gender status. His narrative shows that the masculine gender hierarchy is intimately linked to class structure. He shares with his interviewer his experience of the ultimate failure – loss of his family's respect.

Sa'id, a construction worker, further illustrates Arab participants’ instrumental representation of work. He is highly skilled and experienced, having worked since he was very young. Sa'id reports what work means to him:

Another Arab interviewee stated, ‘I don't feel any satisfaction at work. It's something you have to do.’ Arab participants, like many others in the study define a respectable job as one with decent pay.

Interestingly, Arabs incorporate another aspect: autonomy. Amin, employed for six years in a restaurant owned by Jews explains the meaning of a decent job:

For Arab participants, some degree of labour autonomy is essential to defining a job as decent. Arab participants’ yearning for autonomy seems to reflect their sense of dependency and lack of opportunities in a highly segmented labour market. It is also the result of being in a menial job and part of a minority group. Mohamed, fifty-four, and father of seven, describes what it means to be an employee:

In view of the subordination and discrimination he sees in Arab workers’ lives, Mohamed became an independent merchant and opened a small furniture shop. While it cannot provide a decent living, for him, working independently has a value far beyond financial security:

Mohamed worked for many years as an employee in a Jewish-owned carpentry shop. He sees his previous work experience as a form of slavery. He equates paid employment with physical exploitation and inhuman conditions. Independence means liberation from labour market discrimination.

Participants present a workplace that exposes their vulnerability, and hence is the arena of shameful daily defeat. Arab participants explain their working conditions as yet another form of ethnic discrimination that is the main systemic barrier to success in the labour market. Adel, a father of five and an Arab fisherman from a seaside village, explains:

Adel claims systemic discrimination against Arabs, implying that Israeli law helps only the Jews and overlooks the needs of Arab citizens. His narrative depicts their working lives in poverty as ethnic discrimination.

Unlike many secular Israelis, Arabs seem to recall no idealised past. For them, the labour market has always meant hard physical labour, low wages and insecurity. Their fantasy is independence. As in the other groups, a recurring image is that of ‘standing on your own feet’, symbolising resilience. Samer when asked the source of his strength, says:

For Samer, standing on your feet is, despite all life's difficulties, retaining a man's main assets: his wife and his home. Adel, the Arab fisherman metaphorically describes his personal coping style. As for many other participants, his children seem to be main source of resilience:

The children and the sea, Adel'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. Arab participants describe lives of austerity, sacrifice and permanent scarcity, and instances of distress highlighting harsh living conditions. Their failure as providers is compensated by a sense of the importance of extreme sacrifice and self-denial.