Gentrification isn’t just taking place in working-class neighborhoods. It’s happening to jobs, too.
[post_ads]Walk around parts of Brooklyn, Portland or Pittsburgh, and you’ll
find stylish cocktail bars, barbers and the occasional butcher shop
staffed by young, college-educated employees. For an affluent segment of
today’s urban economy, these jobs have been revalued from low-status
semi-manual labor to glamorous occupations, says sociologist Richard
Ocejo.
In his new book “Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New
Urban Economy,” Mr. Ocejo examines the forces driving a resurgence of
occupations such as butcher and bartender among young middle-class
urbanites. A similar dynamic is at work with a handful of other jobs,
including craft brewer, bookbinder, furniture maker and fishmonger.
The
Labor Department projects that between 2014 and 2024 the number of
bartenders and barbers in the U.S. will grow 10%, while butchers will
see a 5% increase, compared with a 7% job growth for all occupations
over the same period. Median pay for these jobs was less than $30,000 a
year in 2016.
Millennials are drawn to these occupations, in part, as a reaction to
“the ephemerality of the digital age,” says Mr. Ocejo, a sociology
professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the City
University of New York Graduate Center.
Distinct from many of
today’s most vaunted jobs in fields like information technology and
financial services, these trades “are based in using your hands, with
actual tools and materials, to provide a tangible concrete product,” he
says.
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To attract young people with college degrees and other
options in the labor market, jobs usually have an element of performance
to them, Mr. Ocejo says. In most of the careers he studied for “Masters
of Craft,” workers interact closely with customers, often in a public
setting where their skill and knowledge can be admired. That’s why some
manual positions like electrician and plumber are unlikely to experience
the same “revalorization,” he says.
Unlike real-estate gentrification, where the arrival of more affluent
people displaces lower-income residents in a neighborhood, hipsters
generally aren’t displacing workers at more conventional businesses in
the same industry, Mr. Ocejo says.
A trendy whole-animal butcher
isn’t pushing out the local butcher shop, he says, since it likely
“closed a long time ago when the Italians moved out.” And it isn’t
hurting the halal butchers in the neighborhood either, since those shops
serve a different clientele.
“They’ve created a niche that
didn’t exist before, and they’re operating along parallel but very, very
separate paths” with pre-existing businesses, Mr. Ocejo says.
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But
with aesthetics playing such a key role in the craft-business
ideal—from bartenders with suspenders and handlebar mustaches to
tattooed butchers carving an unusual cut of meat—Mr. Ocejo says the jobs
tend to attract people from similar cultural backgrounds, creating a
barrier for others.
“It’s very difficult if you are from a
working-class background or a minority to get one of these jobs, which
would give you higher wages, networking opportunities and more
interesting work,” he says. “That’s a challenge for these companies: to
become more inclusive and not just hire people who look like them or are
part of their social network.”
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