Winter break: a time for overdosing on holiday food, getting into senseless arguments with relatives and zoning out to premium cable during odd hours of the day. Although my winter break consisted of all of these things, as I rode back to D.C. on Megabus, I also realized that my time off from college life had actually served a deeper, more important purpose—one that involved reexamining opportunity distribution as well as the value of the working class in our modern culture.
My time between the fall and spring semesters consisted of waiting tables for 30-40 hours a week. After every shift, I’d arrive home with the stench of fried food and the restaurant’s daily special emanating from my stained work uniform.
At that point, all I could really bring myself to do was put on sweatpants and heat up leftover pasta. Unlike a typical Friday night at AU, where I would be heading out to some sort of party, all I could do at the end of a long work week was direct my attention to a National Geographic special before my utter exhaustion caused me to doze off right on the living room couch to the narrator’s monotonous voice.
Regardless of the cyclical fatigue, I was ultimately grateful for the four weeks I worked in the restaurant.
Despite its financial benefits for a college student with an inability to save money, I also discovered a priceless value in manual labor that had little to do with how much I made in tips.
I often found manual labor to be more fulfilling than writing scholarly essays. My job put me more in touch with the realities of paycheck-to-paycheck living and other such truths we seek to avoid (and may never have to face due to our relatively privileged financial circumstances).
In our modern societal conception of manual labor, this type of work is often undervalued and even denigrated due to its perceived non-intellectual nature.
Thus, given the social stigma attached to manual work and the to people who generally do it, I found myself wondering what truly differentiates the people that I encounter in the college environment and those that I have come to know while waiting tables in a restaurant.
All too often, there is a multilayer correlation drawn between low-skilled jobs, lower social class and lower intellectual capacity or potential.
Yet the more I observed my work environment and drew comparisons to college life, the more I realized that the people holding these positions (e.g., cooks, waitresses or dishwashers) could just have easily been in a position of privilege, living the comparatively carefree college life.
It seemed that their positions were more so a result of our social structure and its corresponding hierarchical stigmatization.
Bill Clinton touched on this theme during his brief visit to our campus.
Essentially, Clinton stated that, while intelligence is equally distributed in our society, opportunity is not. It left me wondering, what gives any of us here at AU the right to have both?
Despite the long shifts and workweeks, I realized I was merely a tourist worker in the working class world. I was only immersed in it for a brief period before I got to return to the familiar college routine, which I began to view as a suspension of reality after high school. Furthermore, I realized that many choose college as a sort of escape route away from the working class world.
I wondered, why has the working class become something to avoid or be ashamed of?
It appears that the combined effects of our current economic system and the media portrayals of the working class and manual labor have created this social stigma.
Despite our attempts to avoid it, due to our underlying fear of social mobility’s lack of existence, the working class lies at the core of our society.
When focused and fully actualized, the working class’s labor power holds enormous weight in dictating policy and the way our economic system will work.
Ultimately, I believe it remains our duty, as students and evolving intellectuals to contribute to maintaining this core and becoming a part of the solution towards correcting this unbalanced opportunity equation.
Mana Aliabadi is a freshman in SPA.
