Bottom Rungs Research Articles

“When I’m a Human Being”: race, bodies, and power in Disney’s adaptations of “The Frog King or Iron Henry”

In the summer of 2020, Walt Disney Theme Parks announced plans to reimagine the popular attraction “Splash Mountain” in the theme of the 2009 feature-length animated film The Princess and the Frog. As only the third Disney feature-length animated film to showcase Black characters prominently, The Princess and the Frog seems perfectly poised to replace the Song of the South—critiqued for its romanticization of race relations after the American Civil War—in the Disney parks. In this adaptation of “Der Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich” (“The Frog King or Iron Henry”), Walt Disney Animation Studios introduces its first Black princess. While a hardworking, self-starter princess of color is a step towards representation, the film’s portrayal of non-white characters reinforces a hierarchy of race and class which privileges the wealthy white characters while relegating characters of color to the bottom rungs of human society and into non-human bodies. This essay explores the intersection of gender, race, and class in Disney’s adaptations of the classic fairy tale “Der Froschkönig” from the Grimms’ 1812 variation and the plans to reimagine it for Disney theme parks. In conversation with adaptation studies, narrative theory, and feminist theories, this contribution interrogates the underlying messages of prejudice and -isms in The Princess and the Frog that reinforce twentieth- and twenty-first-century prejudices against people of color, women, and the working class, rendering the proposed update of the “Splash Mountain” attraction into a modernization of the problems already recognized in the current ride.

Searching for Job Security and the Consequences of Job Loss

Job loss comes with large present value earnings losses which elude workhorse models of unemployment and labor market policy. I propose a parsimonious model of a frictional labor market in which jobs differ in terms of unemployment risk and workers search off‐ and on‐the‐job. This gives rise to a job ladder with slippery bottom rungs where unemployment spells beget unemployment spells. I allow for human capital to respond to time spent out of work and estimate the framework on German Social Security data. The model captures the joint response of wages, employment, and unemployment risk to job loss which I measure empirically. The key driver of the “unemployment scar” is the loss in job security and its interaction with the evolution of human capital and, in particular, the search for better employment.

“The Best Country in the World”: The Surprising Social Mobility of New York’s Irish-Famine Immigrants

Abstract Historians generally portray the Irish immigrants who came to the United States, fleeing the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century, as hopelessly mired in poverty and hardship due to discrimination, a lack of occupational training, and oversaturated job markets in the East Coast cities where most of them settled. Although the digitization of census data and other records now enables the tracking of nineteenth-century Americans far more accurately than in the past, scholars have not utilized such data to determine whether the Famine Irish were, in fact, trapped on the bottom rungs of the American socioeconomic ladder. The use of a longitudinal database of Famine immigrants who initially settled in New York and Brooklyn indicates that the Famine Irish had far more occupational mobility than previously recognized. Only 25 percent of men ended their working careers in low-wage, unskilled labor; 44 percent ended up in white-collar occupations of one kind or another—primarily running saloons, groceries, and other small businesses.

Mismatch Cycles

This paper studies the cyclical dynamics of skill mismatch and quantifies its impact on labor productivity. We build a tractable directed search model, in which workers differ in skills along multiple dimensions and sort into jobs with heterogeneous skill requirements. Skill mismatch arises because of information frictions and is prolonged by search frictions. Estimated to the United States, the model replicates salient business cycle properties of mismatch. Job transitions in and out of bottom job rungs, combined with career mobility, are key to account for the empirical fit. The model provides a novel narrative for the scarring effect of unemployment.

Reinforcing Exclusions: Caste, Patriarchy and Land Reforms in India

Land reform studies have often found wanting for not paying adequate attention to the close correspondence between land relations, gender and caste; all of them reinforcing each other and State polices extending legitimacy to this complex web of relationships. These complexities betray theorisation on State intervention in property relations that consider land only as an economic asset, overlooking its sociopolitical significance. The article argues that land reforms in India have been designed to protect landed property. The article further argues that the impact on the bottom rungs could be the crucial criteria for the assessment of any land reforms programme in a third-world country. In Indian conditions, Dalits and women constitute these segments.

Differentiating Participation: Identifying and Defining Civic Capacities Used by Latino Immigrants in Participatory Budgeting

Participatory planning has faced challenges engaging predominantly Spanish-speaking immigrants beyond the bottom rungs of Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation. Participating at any level of the ladder requires individual civic skills, or capacities, that are integral to participatory processes. However, the specific skills necessary for collective action are less certain, due in part to a lack of clear definitions and a lack of clarity about how these capacities work in practice. Drawing on two years of data from a participatory budgeting process in an immigrant community in Chicago, Illinois, the authors identify key civic capacities that Spanish-speaking immigrants activated while engaging in civic discourse, and they explore the role these capacities played in moving ideas toward collective decision making. The authors present an organizational schema that aligns the study’s findings of 17 unique civic capacities with capacities identified in the literature as helping participants engage more meaningfully in decision-making processes.

Searching for Job Security and the Consequences of Job Loss

Job loss comes with large present value earnings losses which elude workhorse models of unemployment and labor market policy. I propose a parsimonious model of a frictional labor market in which jobs differ in terms of unemployment risk and workers search off- and on-the-job. This gives rise to a job ladder with slippery bottom rungs where unemployment spells beget unemployment spells. I allow for human capital to respond to time spent out of work and estimate the framework on German Social Security data. The model captures the joint response of wages, employment, and unemployment risk to job loss which I measure empirically. The key driver of the “unemployment scar” is the loss in job security and its interaction with the evolution of human capital.

Inequality in the Time of Corona Virus

Inequality in the Time of Corona Virus

Nancy Atkinson, bacteriologist, winemaker and writer

In the last decades of the twentieth century, biographies of Australian women scientists, and articles and book chapters focusing on women's contributions to science during and after World War II began to emerge. Such works seek to acknowledge and highlight the achievements of women in both industry and academia, and to understand how they managed to pursue and negotiate careers in traditionally male-dominated fields. In the first half of last century, women were well represented, both as students and as staff members at many universities in Australia but, while men climbed the career ladder, the majority of women were 'more or less limited to the bottom rungs'.

Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth Century Origins of American Immigration Policy by Hidetaka Hirota

Reviewed by: Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth Century Origins of American Immigration Policy by Hidetaka Hirota Francis M. Carroll Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth Century Origins of American Immigration Policy by Hidetaka Hirota. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 302. $34.95. Diaspora Studies and immigration are not neglected areas of Irish scholarship. Nevertheless, Hidetaka Hirota has opened up a fascinating discussion on a relatively unexplored element of the subject—the forced return of Irish paupers, vagrants, criminals, and lunatics. In doing so, Hirota has also revised the conventional wisdom about the impact of the so-called Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s and the origins of federal immigration legislation in the 1880s. The accelerating migration of Catholic Irish in the 1830s and 1840s is well understood. These were largely people a few steps up from the bottom rungs of the Irish social and economic ladder—people who chose to seek a better life in the United States or Canada, who could pay their own passage, and who may have had some contacts to help them get settled in the New World. Hirota focuses on assisted emigration arising out of the catastrophe of the Great Famine and continuing economic distress in Ireland. The crisis of the 1840s and 1850s drove large numbers of destitute people off the land and into workhouses, hospitals, prisons, and simply onto the roads. For simple economic reasons, it was more cost-effective for public authorities and large landowners to pay for the transatlantic passage of these people to get them out from under their responsibility. In the course of 1849–50, for example, the Cork workhouse sent almost 3,500 paupers to the United States. The following year the Kerry estates of Lord Lansdowne were cleared of some 1,500 distressed tenants who were sent to America. More were to follow. Drawing on the work of Kirby Miller and Gerard Moran, Hirota estimates that assisted emigration sent between 50,000 and 100,000 tenants and laborers to North America during the famine years. These people arrived destitute in the United States or [End Page 154] Canada. Many immediately went onto the streets begging, into almshouses, or into hospitals, becoming either a public nuisance or wards of the state. Not surprisingly, this situation inflamed the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudices of the settled Protestant communities of the eastern seaboard, who believed that Ireland's and Britain's problems were being dumped on their communities. Hirota draws his evidence from several jurisdictions, but his focus is on Massachusetts and New York, the destination of the largest number of Irish immigrants. The response, of course, was the rise of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish nativism, taking its political form in the shape of the American Party, or the Know-Nothings, in the 1840s and 1850s. In these circumstances, Massachusetts and New York authorities turned back or deported immigrants on the strength of Poor Law legislation that had its origins in colonial times, when local authorities did not need to accept responsibility for people who were not natives of the locale. New York had legislation that simply authorized them to turn back arriving immigrants who were deemed likely to become a public charge. Massachusetts had similar powers but could also deport people who had lived and worked for some years before some personal or economic crisis drove them to seek public assistance. Injured workmen or widows or children born in the United States of Irish parents were no exceptions. Immigration authorities could order the deportation of these people, who had no recourse to appeal procedures or court intervention. By the 1880s, Massachusetts alone had deported as many as 50,000 people back to England or Ireland. (Hirota comments on the irony of the determination of the people of Massachusetts to deport hapless Irish immigrants while at the same time defying the federal Fugitive Slave Laws that required the return of runaway slaves to the southern states.) Assisted emigration was not discontinued by Irish and British authorities until the late 1880s. The Know-Nothing Party collapsed as a political movement in the mid-1850s, but the deportation policies of Massachusetts...

An analysis of injuries to front-end loader operators during ingress and egress

Slips, trips, and falls from mobile mining equipment have been documented for decades. However, little research has been conducted to determine the events precipitating these incidents during ingress or egress. This study examined slips, trips, and falls sustained during ingress or egress from front-end loaders to determine the frequencies of factors that may contribute to injuries. Non-fatal injuries, when getting on or off of front-end wheel loaders specifically, were identified, coded, and analyzed from the Mine Safety and Health Administration's accidents, injuries, and illnesses database. Overall trends, events that precipitated the injury, injuries sustained, contributing factors, location of the individual, and equipment characteristics were analyzed. More incidents occurred during egress (63%); and egress is believed to be more hazardous than ingress. Foot slips were the most common event that precipitated the incident and the leading cause of these was contaminants on the equipment. Misstep, loss of footing, and step on/in related incidents were more common during egress and are likely due to the operator's reduced visibility when descending a ladder facing the equipment, limiting their ability to detect hazards. Egress also makes an operator less capable of avoiding unsafe ground conditions as indicated by the significant number of step on/in injuries occurring on the ground during egress. Most of the front-end loaders associated with the incidents were found to have bottom rungs with flexible rails, which may also increase fall risk during egress due to inconsistent rung heights and lengthy transition areas from the ground, through the flexible-railed rungs, to the rungs with rigid rails. Recommendations are provided to reduce the risk for slips, trips, and falls from mobile mining equipment.

Regulation and Income Inequality: The Regressive Effects of Entry Regulations

We examine the relationship between entry regulations and income inequality. Entry regulations increase the cost of legally starting a business relative to the alternatives — working for someone else, entering illegally, or exiting the labor force. We hypothesize that such regulations may cause greater income inequality, because entrepreneurs at the bottom rungs of the income distribution may have relatively greater difficulty surmounting costly barriers to entry. Combining entry regulations data from the World Bank Doing Business Index with various measures of income inequality, including Gini coefficients and income shares, we examine a pooled cross-section of 175 countries and find that countries with more stringent entry regulations tend to experience higher levels of income inequality. An increase by one standard deviation in the number of procedures required to start a new business is associated with a 1.5 percent increase in the Gini coefficient and a 5.6 percent increase in the share of income going to the top 10 percent of earners. Although we cannot eliminate the possibility of reverse causality, we are unaware of any theory that posits that income inequality causes entry regulations. We therefore offer several simple recommendations designed to minimize regulations’ adverse effect on income inequality.

The Efficacy of Public Education as a Means of Social Mobility for the Indigenous Tribal Populations of Rural India

India is home to a diverse number of indigenous tribal groups collectively known as the ‘adivasis’. As part of a tribal development strategy, the Indian government extended the public school system to serve rural tribal areas. This qualitative study explores the efficacy of the rural school system as a means of promoting social mobility among the Santal, Birhor, Kharia, and Lodha tribes located in the state of West Bengal, India. The findings indicate that rural schools have poor facilities, lack resources, and offer environments that are not conducive to academic success by the majority of tribal students. The research also reveals how the challenges faced by tribal children in rural schools are exacerbated because of a lack of cultural competency on the part of education professionals who design and deliver the curriculum. Thus the schools largely fail in preparing tribal students for even the bottom rungs of the Indian labour market.

Voices of Resilience from the Bottom Rungs: The Stories of Three Elementary Core French Teachers in Ontario

Voices of Resilience from the Bottom Rungs: The Stories of Three Elementary Core French Teachers in Ontario

Policing Norwegian Welfare: Disciplining and Differentiating within the Bottom Rungs

Policing is a disciplining means for using welfare services to govern welfare recipients towards a desired behaviour or goal. We apply Foucault’s (1977) definition of institutional discipline as a means for exploring how the distinctions made by state and local welfare authorities in Norway when policing recipients may take shape according to normative perceptions of ethnicity and deservingness. More particularly, we explore the regulating understandings and activities linked to the inclusion and exclusion of eligibility to welfare benefits and services and the form of the services offered. Our focus lies at the point of entry from the lowest tier of Norwegian welfare benefits (social assistance) into two semi-parallel and higher tiers promising more (higher benefits, better services). The tiers are represented by programmes that share aims, yet differ in reach: the 2004 Introduction Programme and the 2007 Qualification Programme. The Introduction Programme is an activation programme targeted at immigrants and refugees newly arrived to Norway. Its aim is to strengthen opportunities to participate in society and labour market, as well as to promote economic independence. The Qualification Programme is an activation programme that was explicitly modelled after the Introduction Programme, yet whose target group reaches more broadly to include long-term recipients of social assistance and those whose work ability is severely lowered. While both programmes have been premised on the need to transform participants from a status of passive welfare benefit recipients to active participants in qualifying measures and society, the target groups vary and it is this contrast that is our point of focus. We contrast the two policies at two ‘moments’ in the policy cycle: (1) policy framing (public and policymaker understandings/assumptions concerning the target group, the location of accountability for the marginal position of the policy recipient and the policy’s political/social goals); and (2) the shaping and formative structure of these policies (how the relevant policies came into existence and what they look like).

Social and regional variations in health status and health behaviours among Swiss young adults

To provide nationwide data on health status and health behaviours among young adults in Switzerland, and to illustrate social and regional variations. Data came from the Swiss Federal Surveys of Adolescents, conducted in 2010/11. The sample consisted of 32,424 young men and 1,467 young women. We used logistic regression models to examine patterns of social inequality for three measures of health status and three measures of health behaviour. Among men, lower self-rated health, overweight and lower physical fitness levels were associated with lower educational and fewer financial resources. Patterns were similar among young women. Unfavourable self-rated health (odds ratio [OR]: men 0.83, women 0.75) and overweight (OR: men 0.84, women 0.85; p >0.05) were less common in the French- than in the German-language region. Low physical fitness was more common in the French- than in the German-language region. In both sexes, daily smoking was associated with fewer educational resources, and physical inactivity was associated with lower educational and fewer financial resources. Males from the Italian-language region were three times more likely to be physically inactive than their German-speaking counterparts (OR 2.95). Risk drinking was more widespread among males in the French- than in the German-speaking language region (OR 1.47). Striking social and moderate regional differences exist in health status and health behaviours among young Swiss males and females. The current findings offer new empirical evidence on social determinants of health in Switzerland and suggest education, material resources and regional conditions to be addressed in public health practice and in more focused future research.

Structure and Mobility in a Delhi Slum: 1988–2013

Slums constitute the fastest-growing segment of most developing countries today. Their weight in the economy as well as politics of these regions is also likely to grow with time. The need to understand the changing economic profile and patterns of mobility inside slums of the twenty-first century through intensive longitudinal studies, along with macro surveys of their demography and livelihood patterns, is thus obvious. The present article draws upon my engagement, since 1988, with a Delhi slum called Aradhaknagar to present an outline of shifts in the occupational, income and assets profile of the community based on surveys, personal interviews and group discussions within Aradhaknagar and on comparisons with six other slum reports, from different cities of India, over the same broad period. While a small improvement in the living standards of both formal and informal sector employees is discerned in wages and assets held by concerned families since 1988, spiralling inflation seems to have hurt many informal sector workers in recent years. The article closes with an analysis of factors which seem to pull down workers trying to struggle around the bottom rungs of the urban social ladder and those that help in their efforts, occasionally.

Challenging inequality in Australian schools: Gonski and beyond

In this paper I look at the most recent policy attempt to address the intractable issue of inequality in Australian schools, the Review of Funding for Schooling Final Report (2011), colloquially known as the ‘Gonski Report’, or simply ‘Gonski’. I highlight its important insights and some of its analytical limitations. I show how a fixation on sector-by-sector (government, Catholic and independent) analysis and disputation distracts from layers of disadvantage and advantage across all sectors, while also acknowledging that there is a disproportionate concentration of disadvantage in the government sector which must thus be properly funded. I illustrate how socio-educational advantage (SEA) and disadvantage are compounded and how the social segregation between schools on the top and bottom rungs is manifest and with associated problems. As implied throughout, systemic relational analysis, which recognises that educational advantage and disadvantage are mutually constituted is a diagnostic necessity which is absent in the Gonski Report and which thus led it to focus on disadvantaged schools rather than on the systemic relationships that also contribute to disadvantage. It is thus rather timid in its recommendations. Even so, I argue, it deserves support because the problems it identifies and seeks to address are dire.

Urban Workers’ Leisure Culture and the ‘Public Sphere’: A Study of the Transformation of the Workers’ Cultural Palace in Reform-Era China

This article looks into urban Chinese working-class leisure culture through a case study of the transformed Workers’ Cultural Palace in Zhengzhou in Henan province. Making timely and engaging contribution to the discussion on changing working-class subjectivities in post-Mao China, the author investigates Zhengzhou workers’ cultural and communicative activities, including songs, dramas and political discussions in an urban space. The case study provides hints of a re-politicized space which constitutes a public sphere, attended by the working class, of free discussion on class inequalities and related issues. In the emergent public sphere inhabited by urban workers, class consciousness is nurtured as distinct from the Chinese middle class. The findings point to contested public spheres in China’s increasingly class-divided society and the return of class politics at the bottom rungs, taking issue with seemingly conventional wisdom purporting to declare the end of class in practical Chinese politics and scholarly Chinese studies.

Creating an opportunity society

Americans believe economic opportunity is as fundamental a right as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. More concerned about a level playing field for all, they worry less about the growing income and wealth disparity in our country. Creating an Opportunity Society examines economic opportunity in the United States and explores how to create more of it, particularly for those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill propose a concrete agenda for increasing opportunity that is cost effective, consistent with American values, and focuses on improving the lives of the young and the disadvantaged. They emphasize individual responsibility as an indispensable basis for successful policies and programs. The authors recommend a three-pronged approach to create more opportunity in America: * Increase education for children and youth at the preschool, K-12, and postsecondary levels * Encourage and support work among adults * Reduce the number of out-of-wedlock births while increasing the share of children reared by their married parents With concern for the federal deficit in mind, Haskins and Sawhill argue for reallocating existing resources, especially from the affluent elderly to disadvantaged children and their families. The authors are optimistic that a judicious use of the nation's resources can level the playing field and produce more opportunity for all. Creating an Opportunity Society offers the most complete summary available of the facts and the factors that contribute to economic opportunity. It looks at the poor, the middle class, and the rich, providing deep background data on how each group has fared in recent decades. Unfortunately, only the rich have made substantial progress, making this book a timely guide forward for anyone interested in what we can do as a society to improve the prospects for our less-advantaged families and fellow citizens.