The day after Donald Trump’s election those pundits who align themselves with the Democratic Party began wringing their hands about how “we” (meaning
they) had ignored and disparaged the “white working class.” Apparently these columnists and talking
heads had only recently discovered the fact that some white people in the
United States work for an hourly wage.
They read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly
Elegy and realized that the people who they previously thought of (if they thought of them at all!) only to mock as
inbred oxy addicts, might actually be real human beings with families and lives
and aspirations. So this “white
working class” phrase appeared as an honorable shorthand for the people that
Hillary Clinton and her neoliberal allies had driven from the Democratic Party and into the camp of the Republicans.
I don’t like the phrase, "white working class" but I thought it would go away. Now, though, four months have passed and
people are still using it without reflection. I would like to make a few suggestions about what
saying “white working class” reveals and about what it hides.
Why call it a “class”?
In his 1963 The Making
of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson set out immediately in his
preface to struggle with the meaning of that word. He described it as a “historical phenomenon”, writing:
I do not see class as a
‘structure’, nor even as a ‘category’, but as something which in fact happens
(and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.
And he continued this thought by arguing that a class only
exists in relationship with some other class:
Class happens when some men [sic], as a
result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the
identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men
whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.
A working “class” doesn’t exist, then, as a range of income. It doesn’t exist because some people
work all their lives to enrich others.
It exists because people become conscious of the similarities of their
lives, and of the differences in the lives of their exploiters.
You might say that an American working class existed in the
mid-1930’s when miners, auto workers, steel workers, rubber workers, textile
workers, dockworkers, and truck drivers were all struggling against their
employers, the police, and armed thugs for recognition of their unions. You might say that an American working
class existed in the years between the Panic of 1873 and the First World War when private
detective agencies unleashed a reign of terror on worker organizations with the
support of the courts, the National Guard, and the United States Army. But could you say that today? Where would you find working people who understand themselves as a class?
Union membership rates peaked in the United
States over sixty years ago, in 1955. At that time, 40% of
private sector wage workers (excluding agriculture and construction) were union
members. Today, private sector
union membership (including
construction) is down to 6%!
If, as Thompson wrote, class is a historical phenomenon, then it seems
clear that the working class is now a phenomenon of our past. Even where there are still
manufacturing unions, in this last election cycle the union leadership bemoaned their lack of political influence
over their members. Today those workers
treat their unions as they would their insurance companies: guardians in case
of calamity, but not important parts of their identity in society.
Why call it “working”?
It is not just the unions that have been shrinking. Even the industrial sectors that once provided the members
of those unions -- of that past working class -- have declined in terms of employment. Some of these industries have
automated. Some have moved to
other, lower-wage countries. Coal,
as an extreme example, has lost workers both because natural gas is cheaper and
because the operators simply use heavy equipment to remove the mountains instead
of mining underground.
In 1923, there
were over 860,000 coal miners in the United States. Last year less than 10% that number were employed, about
81,000. And don’t blame Obama
or environmental regulations, blame gas fracking. Coal jobs actually increased through Obama's first term. Steel, too used to be a huge employer of American industrial workers. In 1974 there
were still half
a million steel workers in this country. Last year there were only 87,000. A large part of this loss is due to automation,
but the per capita demand for steel is down, too. Worldwide, the last quarter of the twentieth century saw a
decline in steel industry employment of one-and-a-half million!
Why point to declining employment in particular industries? Because those are the jobs that led people to identify themselves as a working class. Working in those jobs –
as opposed to fast food or retail
– helped people understand that they were a class. And they are gone.
Why call it “white”?
This bothers me most of all. I reject this notion that anybody other than a
white man requires a qualifying adjective, that the default American is a white
man. If you picture a “worker” do
you see a white man with a hard hat and a tool belt? What about the mostly-immigrant women who – in their thousands
– spent last night cleaning your office and today cleaning your hotel
room? What about the mostly
Mexicans and Central Americans who harvested the food you ate today? What about the vast majority of
construction workers today who may have a tool belt but are probably not white
and are probably not provided with any safety equipment whatsoever?
Let's return to the notion of “class” that I identified earlier with conscious and active
union membership. Among all
American workers today, African American workers are more likely to be
union members than are white workers.
Moreover, that picture – white man with a hard hat – didn’t apply in the heyday of the United Steel Workers or United Mine Workers, either. In southern West Virginia in the first
third of the 20th century, a quarter of all coal miners
were Black. In the Alabama
coal fields African Americans were more than half of the miners. Nationwide, the 55,000
Black coal miners in 1930 were disproportionally concentrated in the most
dangerous underground
jobs. Were these the people
you pictured when I said “worker”?
The same thing was true in the steel industry. In 1964, 25% of all union steelworkers
were African American, although, again, Black workers were disproportionally
concentrated in the hottest, most dangerous parts of the mills, where the
molten steel was poured. And,
significantly, despite their numbers on the mill floor and in the union, no Black steel worker had yet been elected a national officer of the USW by 1964.
Which brings up the other side of this question. How many unions were formed explicitly
to exclude Black and Brown workers? That was certainly the practice of
unions in the skilled trades, including the building trades, right up through
the 1970’s. In the big steel mills Black workers had to fight their own union in order to secure
transfers to more desirable jobs.
Workers at Sparrow’s Point in Baltimore sued the USW, not the company, to make plant-wide
seniority the basis for transfers.
The category “worker” has
no color, certainly not white. And
in the United States our unions are not necessarily class organizations when color comes into the
picture.
Why the Democratic Party?
This entire discussion begins with the questionable notion that the
Democratic Party is a progressive organization, the home of working
people. I will say that the
Democratic Party has been quicker than the Republican Party to support equal
rights for LGBTQ folk. I will say
that the Democratic Party has been quicker to embrace legalization for
marijuana. I will say that
Democrats have been slower to attack the science of climate change. (Although I am not certain about
Democrats and the science of vaccination.) But I also know that Democrats have been as enthusiastic
about the prison-industrial complex as Republicans. Bill Clinton’s omnibus crime bill led to a huge increase in
mass incarceration. I know that
Democrats have been just as responsible as Republicans for the neoliberal
reforms that have enriched the poor and impoverished the many. Oh, and I am a teacher. Democrats and Republicans were happy
collaborators in the education “reforms” that pushed for school privatization,
more testing, and demonizing teachers.
So if we believe that workers, white or otherwise, belong in a
progressive party, why would we imagine that it would be the Democrats?
I suppose editorial writers and other political pundits
have to traffic in unexamined phrases, otherwise they would be clarifying and
qualifying all the time. Instead,
they can refer to “Islamists” and “evangelicals” and “the Left” in ways that
have no meaning at all or – at least – that elide and conflate meanings. But this endless discussion of a “white
working class” serves to make most American workers invisible. It also obscures the fact that another
class, the monopoly capitalists, have waged a unilateral class war against
American workers for the last 35 years.
And the monopoly capitalists are winning.