The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (48 page)

For example, a study by Dhesi and Singh (1989) of economic inequality between

religious caste groups in Delhi, India, in 1970 revealed negligible evidence of

discriminatory earnings differentials for the lowest Hindu caste members despite a wide gap in earnings between them and higher caste members. Their educational levels were so low that they would rarely be direct rivals of members of the higher castes for preferred occupations. In a sense, there was nò`need'' for

upper-caste Hindus to exercise direct discriminatory actions in the labor market toward the lowest-caste members because the latter could not even get in the

game. In contrast, Dhesi and Singh found substantial evidence of discriminatory

differentials in earnings between Sikhs and upper-caste Hindus. Sikhs, unlike

lower-caste Hindus, on average possessed the education levels that would make

them stronger and immediate rivals for the occupations typically held by upper-

caste Hindus.

The endogenous model of discrimination suggests a rich and as yet largely

unexplored research agenda with US data. One way to approach this is to

estimate discriminatory earnings residuals over time and then see if the variation through time can be explained by changing labor market conditions for white

males. Do the discriminatory residuals for blacks become larger when economic

times are harder for whites (and white males in particular)? If so, there would be strong evidence to support the linkage we hypothesize between widening interracial inequality and widening general inequality.

14

Rediscovering Rural America

Bonnie Thornton Dill

Although concern about poverty in the United States has focused attention

primarily on urban neighborhoods where the largest number of poor people

live and where poverty is most visible, poverty in rural communities is severe and connected in many ways to the urban issues that capture attention. For decades,

central cities have been the destination of choice for displaced rural workers

seeking better wages, opportunities, and living conditions. Appalachian coal

miners, black sharecroppers, Native Americans who left the reservations, and

Latino farmworkers flocked to urban America in search of jobs and economic

opportunity. Economic transformations of the past two decades, however, have

created a much more complex flow of human resources.

Sizable numbers of Northern blacks are returning to Southern rural home-

places (Stack, 1996). Latinos are moving from cities to rural communities: in

California they are seeking agricultural work (Allensworth and Rochin, 1996);

in the Midwest they are finding jobs in manufacturing (Green, 1994; Gouveia

and Stull, 1995; Stull et al., 1995; Amato, 1996); in New York they are leaving

cities in search of more affordable rural housing (Fitchen, 1995). At the same

time, educated rural youth continue to leave their home communities and

migrate to cities in search of improved employment opportunities (Pollard and

O'Hare, 1990; Lichter et al., 1995). Some rural communities are experiencing a

growth in newly arrived professionals, vacation home buyers, retirees, and

commuters. The impact on poor women, children, and families who live there,

however, is often mixed (Bradshaw, 1993).

Prolonged economic growth in the USA since 1945 has resulted in a pattern of

bifurcated development in rural areas, with some areas growing and flourishing

and others remaining economically stagnant or declining. This chapter focuses

on the people and communities that have been hardest hit by industrial changes

and contemporary economic restructuring. The stresses in these communities are

Rediscovering Rural America

197

characterized by a decline in resource-based industries, the loss of manufacturing jobs, increases in low-wage service sector work, limited economic development,

precipitous declines in family farms, a steady decrease of small-scale rural

entrepreneurs, a shrinking rural middle class, and a widening gap between

rural and urban income.

Finally, rural areas are also characterized by patterns of long-term, persistent poverty concentrated in particular rural places: the southern black belt, the

Lower Rio Grande Valley, in Appalachia and Native American Indian reserva-

tions in the West and throughout the country. The poverty that has engulfed

these and other communities like them affects the live of hundreds of thousands

of men, women, and especially children.

In this chapter, the term rural is used interchangeably with the term non-

metropolitan. The metropolitan±non-metropolitan distinction refers to termin-

ology developed by the US Office of Management and Budget in 1983.

Metropolitan statistical areas usually include an urbanized area with a popula-

tion nucleus of 50,000 or more, as well as nearby communities or counties that

are economically and socially integrated with that nucleus. Non-metropolitan

counties are not linked with large cities or with communities closely tied to large cities (Duncan, 1992).

Rural poverty is concentrated in the South, where over one-half (53.6 percent)

of the rural poor live (US Department of Agriculture (USDA), 1997). Its rates

also tend to be highest in areas with high proportions of minorities, children,

elderly, the less educated, and workers employed in extractive industries and

government (Lichter and McLaughlin, 1995). Native Americans, blacks, and

Latinos living in rural communities are among the poorest people in the United

States. Their poverty rates are almost three times greater than those of rural non-Hispanic whites (USDA, 1997).

Rural children have a higher risk of poverty than urban children. In 1995, 3.2

million rural children under the age of 18 (22.4 percent) lived in families with incomes below the poverty level (USDA, 1997). Although rural children are

more likely than urban children to live in two parent families with at least one employed adult, 59.9 percent of rural poor children live in single parent families.

And rural family incomes remain at or near the poverty line.

Many of the places where these children and their families live are places that

have had high concentrations of poor people over long periods of time. In 1990,

these long-term, persistently poor counties had an average poverty rate of 28.5

per cent ± a rate more than double that of all other rural counties and many

central cities ± and were home to 30 percent of the rural poor (Summers, 1995).

The poverty of these communities is the result of years of disinvestment. In some places, it represents the continuation of patterns of subsistence that resulted from the mechanization of agriculture and natural resource production generations

earlier. In other cases it reflects a legacy of racial segregation and disenfranchise-ment (Swanson et al., 1995). In still other cases, it is the result of more recent structural transformations in the manufacturing and service sectors accompanied by slow economic growth and high unemployment. In most places today, it is

the result of the intersection of several of these factors.

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Bonnie Thornton Dill

Links between children, families, and communities are vital to understanding

and addressing poverty in rural America. This chapter seeks to provide a frame-

work for beginning to understand rural poverty ± specifically the poverty of rural children, women and families, and communities.

Rural Economies in the 1980s and 1990s: the Effects of

Restructuring

Despite popular imagery, rural communities today are not organized primarily

around family farms and agricultural production. In fact, fewer than one-third

of the jobs in rural communities are in any way related to agriculture. The

other two-thirds of rural workers are employed in the manufacturing or ser-

vice-producing sectors of the economy (Pulver, 1995). The result is that rural

economies were as deeply affected by global economic restructuring of the

past two decades as were urban economies. Beginning in the late 1970s, rural

communities experienced an accelerated loss of farms and farm jobs, a loss

of factory work and jobs in natural resource extraction (such as mining,

forestry, and fishing), and a growth in low-paid service jobs (Gorham, 1992).

Thus, while rural workers were more likely to be employed than urban

workers, low wages combined with low levels of transfer benefits kept many

rural workers below or near the poverty level (Adams and Duncan, 1992;

Tickamyer, 1992).

The income gap between urban and rural workers increased in the 1980s as

a result of economic restructuring. Rural areas particularly hard hit by restructuring were those whose economies were not diverse but were structured

around one or two industries. Additionally, restructuring had a significant

impact in rural communities because service sector growth generated mostly

low-tech, low-wage jobs. The 1980s ushered in another pattern in rural com-

munities. The flight of industries and people from the snowbelt to the sun-

belt meant that some rural communities experienced considerable economic

growth, while others declined (Bradshaw, 1993). According to a report by

the Economic Research Service of the USDA (1997), rural economies have

benefited from the economic expansion of the 1990s, in that they have experi-

enced slightly greater employment growth and wage gain than urban areas as a

whole.

Despite these encouraging signs, however, rural communities still lag far

behind urban ones. For example, rural median household income is only about

77 percent of that of urban areas, and for black households and female-headed

households rural income is only half the rural median. The poverty rate for rural children has remained virtually unchanged, in part because rural workers are

still more likely to receive wages that either maintain their family in poverty or lift them only slightly above the poverty line (USDA, 1997, p. 5). In fact, rural communities may still be distinguished from urban ones by several basic

features:

Rediscovering Rural America

199

. higher poverty rates;

. more long-term, persistent poverty;

. less spatial concentration of poor people;

. fewer of the behavioral patterns associated with concentrated urban

poverty;

. people of color are poorer than both their urban counterparts and their

non-Hispanic white rural neighbors.

Explanations of Rural Poverty

In explaining rural poverty there are two approaches in the recent literature. One approach is examining the opportunity structures of rural places, through the

study of the historical and contemporary patterns of economic and social orga-

nization. The second approach is assessing the human capital resources of rural

people, through analyzing education, work experience, family structure, and

cultural patterns.

In providing an overview of rural poverty in the 1980s, Deavers and Hoppe

(1992) state unequivocally that its causes involve an underinvestment in both the human capital of rural people and the economic structure of rural places, which

relied heavily on low-skilled, low-paid manufacturing jobs. Tickamyer (1992)

focuses her research on the structure of labor markets, arguing that ``people are often poor because there are limited opportunities to work and receive wages

in their own labor market'' (p. 55). Based on her analysis, race and gender

differences were more likely a result of differences in the opportunities for

work within various labor markets than of the characteristics of the people

themselves.

Lichter et al. (1993) find that although individual rural workers have human

capital deficits in education, cognitive skills, and work experience, they receive fewer economic rewards than their urban counterparts for the work experience

and education that they do have. Lichter and Costanzo (1987; see also Shapiro,

1989) show that non-metropolitan poverty levels are higher than metropolitan

poverty levels, regardless of education, and that at each educational level non-

metropolitan rates of underemployment and unemployment exceed metro rates.

Rural communities offer low returns to human capital because rural labor

markets are characterized by a proportionately higher share of jobs in periphery or competitive industries, low rates of worker unionization, a lack of diversity of employment opportunities, and high levels of occupational and industrial segregation by race and gender in geographically and socially isolated locations

(Summers et al., 1993).

Living in rural communities increases the likelihood of experiencing long-term

poverty. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data from 1967 to 1985,

Adams and Duncan (1992) examined long-term poverty in metropolitan and

non-metropolitan areas and found that, in contrast to the long-term urban poor,

rural people who experienced long-term poverty had higher labor force partici-

pation rates. Low earnings, low transfer benefits, a large gender gap in wage

200

Bonnie Thornton Dill

rates, and a growth in the number of female-headed families are some of the

factors which suggest that labor market strategies alone will not raise wages

sufficiently to end rural poverty.

Lichter and McLaughlin (1995) sought to examine the impact of deindustrial-

ization and the shift to a low-wage service economy on rural communities