About:

This website works to understand and explain the implicit and actual factors that contributed to changes in the demographics of the labor force throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s. The section entitled “Finn” analyzes the economic policies and emerging technologies that created diametric changes in the workforce between those who held “blue collar” jobs versus those who worked in jobs termed “white collar”. While the section labelled “Gus” attempts to understand the cultural implications and effects that those policies and changing social structures had on individuals by deconstructing two films, Wall Street and Fight Club, so as to understand opinions of work as displayed in the films and create a comparison between the two that tracks any similarities or dissimilarities that occurred.

Our analyzation of economic policy focused primarily on the effects of the Regan, Bush, and Clinton presidencies, the economic ideologies behind each of those presidents, and the major policies that came as a result. Specifically, we examined the NAFTA trade agreement, increased globalization, and the regulation or deregulation of financial markets which had major effects on both the health of the U.S. economy and the creation and destruction of jobs. These policies caused shifts with the U.S., most importantly a stabilization in the size blue-collar workforce and   massive growth in “white-collar” jobs. These changes help to understand the real, physical shifts that were occurring within the United States workforce over the course of these two decades.     

A cultural understanding of the values within the workforce was done through the analyzation of two films, Wall Street and Fight Club. By tracking changing conceptions and attitudes regarding work with the films and then comparing the two one can see how work as perceived in the 1980’s began to change moving into the late 1990’s. The characters within Wall Street choose to engage with the capitalist system in an attempt to acquire wealth and fulfill their consumerist desires. In comparison, the protagonists of Fight Club reject capitalism as a system and actively work to undermine it by engaging in acts of violence and destruction so as to weaken the system but also to restore the masculinity they feel they have lost. 

It is through these two lenses, one based in economic policy as set forth by the executive branch and the other in a cultural analyzation of film, that we one can begin to construct an understanding of what was occurring within the labor force of the United States from the 1980’s, onward. What one sees is not only a distinct change in the types of job individuals are working, but also that perceptions of the capitalist system, with one being that the system is “good” and so is the greed it encourages and the other being that it actively undermines the individual causing a loss of fulfillment with their life and acts to undermine to image of the male.