A few words of introduction:
Welcome to Working Class Weekly
The current situation world wide has prompted me to revive this blog that began in 2010 just after the "Great Recession" in the United States.
Perhaps you get your information on the economy from academics, economists, politicians and the like, but rarely from the working class--the people on the front lines of the economy and without whom the economy would collapse.
We had a brief look at their significance during the COVID crisis. People cheered "Essential Workers". After the dusts settled, that quickly went away but the anger of much of the working class did not. We then went back to "the middle class". That didn't make a lot of us feel better either. You will hear more about that below.
We are a diverse bunch of people but there is an unrest that is becoming evident around the world.
So, Blue Collar 101--the nuts and bolts of our economic system. Straight from the front lines. Enjoy!
The posts below go backward in time to 2010 to 2011.
Check them out and the next series of posts will be "A Time Line of the United States Front Line Workers from 1978 to the Present."
Who is the "Middle Class" Anyway?: December 2010 The politicians and pundits nowadays speak about the "middle class". Where did the working class go?
This term paints us all with the same brush. The politicians and pundits hope to cast their nets as widely as possible and draw us all in around their vision and their ideology.
The reality is that that amorphous "middle class" as they characterize it is a widely diverse group of people facing a wide variety of economic conditions and challenges from elders to youth, disabled and able-bodied, the fairly well off to the constantly struggling. We are divided by race, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference, ....
The attempt is to bring us along.
I like the term "working class" for the vast majority of us.
Why? Because that is who we are--that is what we do-work--production--and our position in society as workers most closely and accurately defines our relationship to the economic system. And the economic system more than any other single factor, other than the geography and political system, influences the life that any person on earth lives.
I built my first house when I was eight. It was my great uncle's house. He was the brains behind it but everyone we could find who could swing a hammer played some role. My mother's brother did the wiring and one of my Dad's friends did the plumbing. They were not paid for their labor--we did the same thing for them when the time came.
All the men had their regular jobs and then worked on their houses or someone else's house after work or on weekends.
The women worked pretty much all of the time housekeeping or raising children. Some were also employed. This was back "in the day"--in the post WWII boom in the USA--and the division of work between men and women was different than it is today, when it takes two employed people to even come close to owning a house here in the USA.
The first job that I can remember was following my grandfather around the garden as he turned it over--by hand--in the spring. My job was to pick up worms to use for trout fishing and put them in coffee cans. I learned to pay attention to things and to be methodical. I admired my grandfather's strength even though he seemed very old to me.
He grew up a farm boy with nine siblings and knew everything one needed to know about tending a garden. He had shoveled coal into the steam boilers on the freight trains and knew how to handle a shovel or a garden spade. When he stood on the ground he was planted into the earth like an oak. He looked like he belonged there.
Nowadays the trend is to call all workers "Middle Class". Bill Clinton was the first President I can remember who was sort of in love with calling us the "Middle Class". A few times he did talk about the working class, but the "Middle Class" has generally been more popular among our politicians and leaders because it makes it sound like everyone is making it, that everyone is doing well.
I think this is an allusion. I don't know if it is intentional or just the way the disconnection of those that facilitate our economic system perceive things. So the language of economics and class just drift that way.
By world standards I, as a citizen of the USA am doing well. I should not be complaining. But on the scale of things here in the USA I am right out there on the front lines. Many of my friends are looking up to the bottom of the "middle". I have been a front-line worker for 30 years. 16 in production work and 14 in the service industry. Such a change is the trend in the USA today and I am right with it. As is often the case that change cost me $2.50 in hourly pay. The cost of living, of holding a job, doesn't always match up to our wages.
I like the word "Working Class" better than "Middle Class" to describe me and the people I work with. We get paid for the direct production of goods or services. The economy goes up, we work; the economy goes down, we don't work.
I like to say: If capitalism hiccups we know it. The stock market takes a dive and the next week we may have fewer hours. Some weeks or months later we feel the layoffs. The words "Middle Class" are used to lump us all together and I think they are meant to blur some important distinction, to make us feel like we have some status or some control over our lives but sooner or later that wears off.
Sadly, I think it also puts a greater distance between us and the poor, despite the fact that during that decade of jobless recoveries it was said that nearly half of us were two weeks without a paycheck away from poverty.
There is a subtle or sometimes not so subtle idea that if you fail in this society it is your fault. As I said above these ups and downs are not the fault of any working class or poor person. It is a necessity of the system that there be unemployment in order to keep wages low. I like to listen to economists. They pretty consistently think that 4% unemployment is idea to keep our system in business. Hhmm. At one point they were tossing around 5% as a possible ideal. Sure that would drop wages and fuel the production for a while but then there is the problem of who will they sell their wares or services to? Racism is a cloud drifting through this quagmire. It is easy for burdened white folks to scorn those who are still trying to rise from the effects of slavery, the Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
Maybe the scorn for the poor, is a generational thing. My generation grew up with parents of the Great Depression. It was tough for everyone. My Mom knew a woman whose husband was one of those Wall Street guys who threw himself out of a window. She had no skills other than Mom of four children and house keeper--not to denigrate that--it was just that she had no skills that paid money.
She was clever though. She went to the library and picked out some books on fortune telling. It was a time that people were scared and looking for some hope and in this tourist town there were lots of people who were hoping to know what would happen and a fortune teller was as close as you could come to a therapist.
One side of my family barely made it through. Family issues, pneumonia before the era of antibiotics and other issues almost did them in. I asked once to my Mom, "Were you poor?"
She said, "I suppose we were but then again everybody was (not quite true). We got by. People helped each other. If you needed a quart of milk maybe your neighbor had extra. r if they needed flour maybe you could give them some."
At least in my family and in the culture of that time there was pride in being poor, being resilient, clever. There were songs we sang lauding poor people "Oh, we ain't got a barrel of money, maybe we're ragged and funny but we travel along singing a song, side by side.
When we first got a TV, a favorite show was "Leave It to Beaver". Beaver was a young boy and walking along a railroad track he came along a raggedy man sitting aside the track. They talked for a while and innocently he asked the guy, "What do you do for work?" The actor was great. His expression showed he was fighting with his shame and then he got control of his emotions, thought for a minute, and said, "I am a philosopher."
Beaver asked "What is a philosopher?". The tramp says, "It is someone who thinks about things." Beaver was impressed and decided that that was a great thing to be. He told his Mom that he had met a philosopher and could he come to dinner. She said yes and so it was.
I miss that. It is very painful to me to see how the working class has been turned against the poor. I did not see this coming and I feel sad about the hard edge in our society now.
I have not given up. Apparently that gene has been passed on to me. The classes in Sunday school enforced what I saw in my family. I am very pleased with them and myself and all of the people around me despite our differences. I learned that there is something good about not caring very much about the idea of people being "better" or "worse."