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STUDENT AUTHOR
Laboring Under the Digital Divide
Let them eat laptops.
One can imagine Bill Clinton muttering this as he signed the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) on that summer’s
day in 1996. While the piece of legislation ended welfare “as we knew it”
for the
unemployed, it also signaled the shocks that the entire US working class would be
expected to absorb in the “new economy.” For workers, the new economy means never-
ending layoffs and ever-expanding temporary and part-time work, in bust and boom
years. Compounding problems is the drop in living standards brought about by three
decades of falling real wages. In the late 1990s wages started to recover but only to their
average value in 1980 (Herman, 1999). Meanwhile, the wealthiest got even wealthier.
But according to boosters of welfare “reform” and cheerleaders of the “new economy,”
workers can pick themselves up by their bootstraps or their Internet connections, as it
were. For new computer technologies and the IT sector promise to raise productivity and
living standards. And even if computers do not make one rich, new economy techno-
optimists reason, they can make one a living and eliminate welfare “dependency.” As
Newt Gingrich said in defense of an earlier version of the welfare reduction legislation,
“if there were five Steve Jobses or one Bill Gates in Harlem, the entire nature of the
community would change” (Gingrich, 1995, p. 80).
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Convention