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working class

Thursday 25th of April 2024

2016 Presidential election Ironically, for many of them [working-class whites], the America that they hope the president-elect can make great again is from an era in which unions were strong and incomes more equal, the mid-20th-century period that economists call the Great Compression. It was a time when the ancestors of today's Trump voters voted routinely for economic progressives, despised conservative Republicans and largely trusted the federal government to do right by them. Michael Kazin, Wall Street Journal, November 12–13, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
2016 Presidential election Most white  working-class people voted for Donald Trump and the through line that you find is whiteness, not class and not gender. It's not like he only got men; he got a majority of white women too. So if you look at categories of white people you find Trump being dominant among them, in part because of the appeal he made, but also in part because the Republican Party has effectively become in this country the party of white people. Ta-Nehisi Coates © 2017 Kwiple.com
Abortion To women like myself, they [abortion rights] are the bare minimum of human rights. To working-class women, who often see motherhood, not work, as the key source of social honor, obsession with abortion rights among well-off women is selfish, exemplifying lack of an adequate devotion to family. Seen in this light, opposition to abortion rights becomes, for high-school educated women, a way of claiming social honor. Joan C. Williams, The Guardian, August 23, 2017 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Bullshitters say The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Donald Trump © 2019 Kwiple.com
By the numbers Marriage has become a mark of status, increasingly the preserve of the wealthy and educated. Today, 26% of poor, 39% of working-class, and 56% of middle- and upper-class adults aged 18 to 55 are married, according to research by Opportunity America and the American Enterprise Institute. This compares with 51%, 57% and 65% respectively in 1990. The Guardian, October 7, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
California Lakewood exists because at a given time in a different economy it seemed an efficient idea to provide population density for the mall and a labor pool for the Douglas plant. There are a lot of places like Lakewood in California. They were California's mill towns, breeder towns for the boom. When times were good and there was money to spread around, these were the towns that proved Marx wrong, that managed to increase the proletariat and simultaneously, by calling it middle class, to co-opt it. Joan Didion, “Trouble in Lakewood” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Class [In] a recent employment study … sociologists Lauren A. Rivera and Andras Tilcsik sent 316 law firms résumés with identical and impressive work and academic credentials, but different cues about social class. The study found that men who listed hobbies like sailing and listening to classical music had a callback rate 12 times higher than those of men who signaled working-class origins, by mentioning country music, for example. Joan C. Williams, New York Times, May 28, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus [A] kind of pandemic caste system is rapidly developing: the rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy, stretched to the limit by the demands of work and parenting, if there is even work to be had. New York Times, March 27, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Dead-in-the-heads say A secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, PA, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week … she said [that] will more than cover her Costco membership for a year. Paul Ryan, 11:51 AM - Feb 2018, extolling the munificent benefits bestowed on ordinary workers by the tax reform bill he championed  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Democratic Party Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people's concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened pro- fessional class, a “creative class” that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn't need to listen to them any longer. Thomas Frank, Rendevous with Oblivion © 2018 Kwiple.com
Democrats The Democrats came to think of themselves not as the voice of working class people at all but as a sort of coming together of the learned and the virtuous. Thomas Frank, The People, No © 2020 Kwiple.com
Economics Many economic policies that have had painful consequences for working-class Americans probably exist because white-collar Americans are the ones calling the shots. Nicholas Carnes, White-Collar Government © 2019 Kwiple.com
Elites say Why'd they ever vote for Trump? © 2018 Kwiple.com
Families American working-class families experience a level of instability unseen elsewhere in the world. Consider, for instance, mom's revolving door of father figures. No other country experiences anything like this. In France, the percentage of children exposed to three or more maternal partners is 0.5 percent—about one in two hundred. The second highest share is 2.6 percent, in Sweden, or about one in forty. In the United States, the figure is a shocking 8.2 percent — about one in twelve — and the figure is even higher in the working class. J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy © 2016 Kwiple.com
Families Chaos begets chaos. Instability begets instability. Welcome to family life for the American hillbilly. J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy © 2016 Kwiple.com
Government For decades we have attacked it, redirected it, outsourced it, and filled it with incompetents and cronies. Yes, it still works well enough when we need it to blow up some small country, but those branches of it designed to help out Americans of “lower socioeconomic status,” as the scientists would put it, are now bare. Thomas Frank, Rendevous with Oblivion © 2018 Kwiple.com
Government Wise rulers know that the best way to defeat opposition is to win over its leaders; England was slow to learn that, in an industrial society, this means appropriating and educating the able children of the lower classes when they are still young. But eventually the rulers did learn; in a competitive world they had to. Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy  © 2021 Kwiple.com
Healthcare – One recent study shows that, between 1970 and 2016, the earnings that laborers received fell twenty-one per cent. But their total compensation, taken to in- clude the cost of their benefits (in particu- lar, health care), rose sixty-eight per cent. Increases in health-care costs have devoured take-home pay for those below median income. At the same time, the system practically begs employers to reduce the number of less skilled workers they hire, by outsoourcing or automating their positions. Atul Gawande, New Yorker, March 16, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Immigration When natives have lots of children of their own, immigrants look like reinforcements. When natives have few children, immigrants look like replacements. No wonder that, according to a 2016 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic, nearly half of white working-class Americans agree with this statement: “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” David Frum, The Atlantic, April 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Income growth I'll tell you a story. In 1981, when I was in college, I worked as a casual dockworker, a teamster job. I made $13.13 an hour. My mom knew the terminal manager. I could call him up and get two-day weekend shifts. You know, favored. I went back there five years ago. You know what they started me at? Ten-fifty. Thirty ’effin years later! It's bullshit. Prnnsylvania construction worker quoted in The Gilded Rage, by ALexander Zaitchik © 2016 Kwiple.com
Participation in politics The shortage of people from the working class in our legislatures and the overrepresentation of white-collar Americans means that tax policies are more regressive, business regulations are more probusiness, and social safety net programs are thinner. Who wins and who loses in this country depends in large part on who governs. Nicholas Carnes, White-collar Government © 2019 Kwiple.com
Political inequality [T]he unequal social class makeup of our political institutions affects who wins and who loses in the policy-making process. Like ordinary Americans, lawmakers from different classes tend to think, vote, and advocate differently on economic issues. The numerical underrepresentation of the working class in our legislatures consequenly skews economic policy- making toward outcomes that are more in line with what more privileged Americans want. Nicholas Carnes, White-Collar Government © 2019 Kwiple.com
Populism Cultural change and the economic decline of the working classes increased disaffection. But the financial crisis opened the door to a populist surge. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, June 28, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Populism What does he think Trump has that the others lacked, I ask? The short answer is that Trump understood that that America's “aspirational” working class had become “desperational”. Edward Luce, from his interview with Anthony Scaramucci © 2018 Kwiple.com
Republicans say Pit working-class constituencies against each other white vs. black latin vs. both rural vs. urban employed vs. unemployed unionized vs. non-unionized private-sector vs. public-sector native-born vs. immigrant religious vs. secular young vs. old © 2017 Kwiple.com
Selfie I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is is the family tradition— their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family. J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy © 2016 Kwiple.com
Selfie  That minimum wage job saved our house – and more important, it saved our family. Elizabeth Warren, on her mother's first job, at Sears, after her father could no longer work due to a heart attack © 2019 Kwiple.com
State of the union The poor state of so many Americans is in part a product of plutocratic politics: a relentless and systematic devotion to the interests of the very rich. … a politics of low taxes, low social spending and high inequality is sustainable in a universal suffrage democracy only with a mixture of propaganda in favour of “trickle down” economics, splitting the less well off on cultural and racial lines, ruthless gerry- mandering and outright voter suppression. All this has indeed happened. These are the politics of “pluto-populism” or of “greed and grievance”. They have been stunningly successful in making Republicans attractive to many in the white working class. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 2018/07/17 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Trucking Every move the trucker makes is tracked by a computer. We have logs we need to keep every time we stop, pull over, and take a leak. The truck's speed, braking, acceleration is all recorded. This is not a cowboy on the open range. This is more like 1984 than 1894. Finn Murphy, The Guardian, October 10, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
White-collar government Because our legislatures are so imbalanced along social class lines, the opinions of the blue-collar workers who make up a majority of the population are all but excluded from this process. The views lawmakers refine and enlarge are not those of the public: they are those of white-collar Americans. Nicholas Carnes, White-Collar Government © 2019 Kwiple.com
Working class If even just half a percent of working-class Americans had what it takes to govern, there would be there would be enough qualified blue-collar workers to fill every seat in Congress and every seat on every state legislature more than forty times over  — with enough savvy workers left over to run a few thousand city councils. Nicholas Carnes,White-Collar Government © 2019 Kwiple.com
Working class Mr Trump promises a burst of infra- structure spending, regressive tax cuts, protectionism, cuts in federal spending and radical deregulation. A big rise in infrastructure spending would indeed help construction workers. But little else in these plans would help the working class. Overall, his plans might indeed generate a brief economic surge. But the longer-term consequences are likely to be grim, not least for his angry, but fooled, supporters. Next time, they might be even angrier. Where that might lead is terrifying. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, November 16, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Working class Twentieth-century socialism assumed that the working class was crucial to the economy, and socialist thinkers tried to teach the proletariat how to translate its immense economic power into political clout. In the twenty-first century, if the masses lose their economic value they might have to struggle against irrelevance rather than exploitation. Yuval Noah Harari, Nature, October 19, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Working class We call [our customers] Alice. It's an acronym standing for Asset-Limited, Income-Constrained, Employed. Jeff Weiss, CEO of DFC Global, a payday lender, 2011 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Working class What's the difference between what you do and driving a bus? Donald Trump, to his older brother, Fred Trump, Jr., who quit the family real estate business to become an airline pilot, which paid too little to ever become really rich © 2016 Kwiple.com
Working class The working class has moved from making stuff to serving people. Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism © 2017 Kwiple.com
Working-class whites Not all of the white working class struggles. I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores and social pressures. My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. My mother and, increasingly, the entire neighborhood embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful. J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy © 2016 Kwiple.com
Working-class whites The [white working class] fantasy is to become an order-giver rather than an order-taker. Trump is an order-giver. That's the brilliance of “You're fired!” Joan C. Williams, Financial Times, May 13-14, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
 
Working-class women You won't get very far as a poor woman without believing you are equal to men. The result of that belief is unlikely to be a leaning in, Sandberg's possibly sound advice to middle- and upper-class women seeking to claim the spoils enjoyed by the men in their offices and homes. A poor woman's better solution is often to turn around and walk away from a hopelessly patriarchal situation that she cannot possibly mend with her limited cultural capital. Sarah Smarsh, The Guardian, June 25, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com