When I was in college, I worked on a construction crew, and it did me a lot of good. I developed a lot of respect for the guys I worked with, who worked with their backs and their hands with skills that were far beyond me. Politicians used to talk quite a bit about “the working class,” also known as “blue collar workers.” But no more. Even liberal democrats are pushing policies that are supposed to help “the middle class.”
Part of the problem may be that the working class considers itself middle class. And with good reason: A factory or construction worker may well own his own home, have a car or two, and have other accoutrements once associated with the middle, college-educated class. Such are the wonders of the modern economy. And yet, unemployment, the decline of American industry, stagnant wages, and other economic woes are hitting blue collar workers hard. But hardly anybody is speaking for them or about them anymore.
From Andrew J. Cherlin, The missing working class – The Washington Post:
Lost in the debate over the middle-class tax policies that President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address is the puzzling disappearance from our political language of a once-common term: working class. Suddenly, no one in politics seems willing to use those words, as if calling someone working class were an insult. Their absence makes it harder to discuss measures that might help the large and beleaguered group that this descriptor still fits.
In his State of the Union addresses, Obama has used the term middle class 28 times. But he has never said “working class” except in 2011, when he described Vice President Biden, who was seated behind him, as “a working-class kid from Scranton.” In last month’s address, the president argued that his proposals would benefit “every middle-class and low-income family with young children” — as if there were no one in between. But in fact millions of families fall between the college-educated middle class and the poor. They tend to be headed by people who have a diploma but not a bachelor’s degree: In 2014, among all families with children under age 18, 54 percent were headed by an adult who had the first but not the second.
A generation or two ago, those in this category supported their families by taking the industrial jobs that were plentiful, or by marrying someone who did. Today’s working class, in contrast, competes for the diminishing number of blue-collar jobs that haven’t yet been automated or outsourced. To lump these people together with the college-educated is to create a group that is so broad as to be meaningless.
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