The Subtle Effects of Job Class on Relationships

What's a "normal" social schedule? A friend and I were chatting about this yesterday. Many of my friends are only able to have a social life on the weekends, whereas my friend insisted that most of his friends hang out weekday evenings and occasionally on the weekends. Additionally, many of my friends tend to plan in advance, scheduling social engagements at least a week or two or more ahead of time - it's the only way to make sure they happen. His friends, on the other hand, usually did stuff more spontaneously - they'd call up or text friends to see who wanted to do something that night or the next day.

When we dug deeper, we realized that most of the friends I was referring to worked at places like Microsoft or Boeing, or were lawyers or funders or government workers whereas his friends were mostly in the service industry (bartenders, bouncers, wait staff). Corporate workers and professionals tend to work Monday through Friday and get weekends off (and many of my friends actually work a lot of overtime on the week days they do work), so weekends are the best time to enjoy their social life. Whereas those who work in the service industry often have schedules that are all-over the map. They don't often have the luxury of planning their life in advance because they may only get their work schedule a week or two at a time.

My friend and I rarely talk about class, but we quickly realized that it was specifically because of job class that there was such a distinction between our different sets of friends. What I find fascinating is that we both grew up in middle class environments and started life out with very similar economic backgrounds, but as adults we made very different life choices - mostly due to differences in academic and career pursuits we ended up with very different circles of friends. And while these distinctions are often quite subtle, the fact is, the types of jobs we hold in this country have a huge impact on not only our actual income and therefore economic status, but also on how we're perceived in this society, and in our behaviors themselves. In fact, sometimes regardless of actual income (there are some who work in blue collar jobs who actually make more money that those in professional positions), we often attribute different class distinctions on people based on their profession alone. Professors, surgeons, lawyers, corporate managers, etc. are perceived very differently from custodians, baristas and beauticians.

If true happiness is about following your passion and spending your life working in a profession because you enjoy the work, yet our society still judges different professions based on a basically classist lens, then we still have a long way to go in achieving true equity.