What working class?

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 20^th 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.