“We Had the Help of So Many People”: Reciprocity and the Work of Survival in Deindustrializing Pittsburgh

As industrial employment declined steeply in Pittsburgh between 1960 and 1980, working-class people had to turn to one another. Local networks of kin, neighbors, coethnics, and coreligionists were a critical resource in stretching the factory wage far enough where it remained and replacing it when it was gone. These networks were shock absorbers for the ordinary crises of working-class life—layoff, strike, eviction, illness, and old age. This paper examines the daily operation of these networks, which required premiums of labor in return for indemnities of support. This work was radically gendered: the maintenance of these networks was almost exclusively the unwaged labor of women. It was also racialized. The forms of social insecurity that these systems of mutual aid mitigated began sooner and worsened faster for African-Americans, resulting in a less formalized network of support. The system of reciprocity maintained by black women flowed directly between people and families; among working-class white people, the pool of mutual aid had time to collect into institutions such as churches and hospitals, which then disbursed it.

By the 1970s, however, economic pressure on these networks became too much to absorb. The institutional nodes of mutual aid—daycares, nursing homes, and hospitals especially—began to require significant state aid. Increasingly, they became active agents of social support, rather than mere sites for its distribution. What had been a grassroots system of reciprocity among women became a labor market; the organizations that women’s unpaid work had maintained turned into their employers. These employers, hospitals and nursing homes in particular, absorbed black women into the lower reaches of their employment structures, while white women transitioned from volunteers to more racially privileged jobs. In this way, this paper argues, the very strategies by which working-class people sought to survive deindustrialization laid the groundwork for the postindustrial low-wage labor market.