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We Are Worth More
Last month a few hundred retail and fast-food workers, from places like Sears, Dunkin’ Donuts, and McDonald’s, walked off their jobs for a rally in downtown Chicago. Carrying signs saying “Fight for...
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The Incredibly Shrinking Working Class? The View from the “Professional” Bubble
In a semi-sympathetic article about unions organizing professional workers, a Chicago Tribune/Los Angeles Times reporter last month provided the following, colossally wrong, picture of American...
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Working-Class Renegades and Loyalists
I never had much time or sympathy for working-class renegades until I read Allison Hurst’s College and the Working Class this summer. Hurst, a sociologist at Furman University, classifies...
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The Lunch Bucket Award
One of my grandsons won the Lunch Bucket Award on his high school football team a couple weeks ago. And his father’s reaction to it and mine surprised me, especially for what it showed about class...
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Jobs and Safety Nets
Teaching macroeconomics with a group of union stewards and local leaders last month, I had just finished explaining the enormous economic stimulus the combination of “food stamps” and unemployment...
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Graduating College is Highly Overrated
That’s the headline I propose for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to attract public attention to its most recent projection of job growth in the next decade. Though a tendentious conclusion from...
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Highway or River?
Is life more like driving on a highway or rafting down a river? Do we choose a destination and then try to find a way to get there? Or do we simply react to the varieties of experience presented to...
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Summer Reading from Working-Class Studies
A cultural anthropologist from the “Southeast Side” of Chicago whose family is still living the half-life of deindustrialization three decades after the mills shut down. A community organizer,...
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The Value of Admitting that Raising the Minimum Wage Could Cost Jobs
A few weeks ago I watched Bill Moyers interview conservative economist Arthur Brooks as he mouthed the Republican talking point that the problem with the minimum wage is that “it hurts the people it’s...
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Our Overeducated Workforce: Who Benefits?
There are two “college jobs” (jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree) for every three “college graduates” (people 25 or older with a bachelor’s degree). What’s more, according to projections by the Bureau...
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Class War in the Tax Code
I know that taxes are a really boring subject, as is talking about billions and trillions of dollars as if any of us could understand such magnitudes. But a one-sided class war is being fought every...
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Stereotyping White Working-Class Voters
Analysis of the Democrats’ 2014 electoral debacle has again turned toward their chronic and worsening “problem with the white working class.” For the most part, pieces like those in Mother Jones,...
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Class War and Sociology
I no longer get as angry as I probably should when I witness middle-class professionals engage in the kind of dismissive class prejudice that Classism Exposed so insightfully reveals almost every week....
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Putnam’s Poignant Folly: Empathetic Blaming
Robert Putnam graduated from high school in 1959 in the small Lake Erie town of Port Clinton, Ohio, and for his widely-praised book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis he revisits some members of...
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Inequality and Democrats
American politicians have an ingenious way to avoid discussing uncomfortable or controversial subjects: they declare that we need to have a discussion! When all sides agree that “we need a discussion...
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Human Tumbleweeds, Insecurity Culture, and the American Working Class
Conservatives, while opposing same-sex marriage, worry a lot about the decline of marriage among lower-income households, the still growing number of single-parent families, and the supposed social and...
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Class War and Tax Policy
If the 2016 Presidential election were to be decided simply on economic policy – which it won’t be – Democrats should win easily. The Trump-Carson clown show aside, even those whom The Economist deems...
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Organizing Miracles
The problem with collective action is you can’t do it on your own. Massive popular collective action emerges from mysterious movements in the Zeitgeist, but it also requires dedicated organizing that...
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Misrepresenting the White Working Class: What the Narrating Class Gets Wrong
Most of the time the white working class is invisible in the U.S. But during elections there is a flurry of attention to this “demographic” among political reporters and operatives, and as a result,...
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Parts and Wholes: Unpacking Reports of White Working-Class Death Rates
The white working class has been getting a lot of attention lately — not just for how they’re voting in primary elections, but also for dying at increasingly high rates. As we might expect, a lot of...
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