Who's Working Class? Me? You? Anybody?

The American political conversation these days seems to have deleted "working class" as a term representing a broad swath of the American people. We hear about "the wealthy." We hear about "the middle class." We hear reference made to "the poor." But what happened to "the working class"?

First of all, be it known that I personally am not working class. I'm solidly middle class, verging on upper middle class.

Since I'm retired, I don't actually "work." But I used to work. I was a computer systems analyst for the federal government. That made me what the smart set today call a "knowledge worker," meaning that everything I produced was a product of my brain. I didn't actually make things. But I did make certain "things" — specifically, computers — work better. The tools of my trade were items of knowledge that I held in my head, not tangible things I held in my hands.

Plus, I had a college degree ... in addition to, of course, my high school diploma.

My parents both came from families that were borderline working class. Dad's dad was a baker, except when there was no work to be found in that field, in which case he farmed some and scuffled some more. Mom's dad did a lot of scuffling, since his college education in a theological seminary was as a lay preacher, not a lucrative field by any means. After he decided his scuffling days were done, he became a (non-union) crane operator in a railroad roundhouse.

You could call both of my parents' families working class ... but in my estimation the better description would be lower middle class.

The working class proper used to include "blue-collar" workers who labored in factories with their hands. In the early twentieth century most of those salt-of-the-earth Americans were organized into unions. The unions fought for the rights of "labor" and often won ... at the expense of what was known derisively as "management."

Nowadays, if you factor out teachers' unions and those of other public-sector workers, unions in general are nowhere near as big or as powerful as they once were. And my granddad, the locomotive crane operator, got his working-class, ostensibly blue-collar job as a strikebreaker, I'm told.

Moreover, my investigations of the history of one of my favorite types of music, country music, have shown me that the term "working class" is customarily applied by scholars to its principal original audience, white Southerners who had more callouses on their hands than dollar bills in their pockets. These folks, often farmers, were never unionized. In fact, they hated unions.

A lot of those folks moved from the country and its nearby small towns to the big city, and after their standard of living rose with generally rising American prosperity in the years following World War II, they (or their children) moved to the suburbs. Today, those formerly "working class" families would probably say they're lower middle class or just plain middle class.

Yet it seems to me that it matters much that there is still a working class in America, composed of people doing various types of manual labor, producing "goods" rather than "services," doing so in factories, on farms, in mines, and in many other places.

It's important not to lose focus on those Americans because in today's economy it's downright hard, if not impossible, for them to move up the economic ladder, as earlier generations were able to do.

They typically don't have a college degree, and many lack a high-school diploma. Almost seventy years ago, at the end of WWII, that didn't matter much, for returning servicemen could go back to school on the G.I. Bill of Rights and climb the ladder that way. A decade or so earlier, during the Great Depression, the New Deal and the union movement offered ways of improving people's material circumstances. So for several decades of the twentieth century, climbing the ladder of success was quite possible for members of America's working class.

That's not the case today.

I'm reading Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith. It describes how the period from the mid-1940s, just after WWII, to the mid-1970s was a golden age for American prosperity, with people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder moving steadily up while the wealthy did all right, too. But after the middle of the 1970s, business interests began wielding unprecedented political power. The result was that for the last nearly 40 years the gains made by the economy as a whole have been hogged by the well-to-do, not shared with the workers who were, thanks to all sorts of increased efficiencies, producing ever more goods and services.

A lot of the working class became middle class in the three decades after WWII. But in the last three or four decades, the working class has stagnated. The sad result has been that we don't even talk about the working class any more.