working class education level

Understanding the Working Class

The working class today is much more complex and diverse than the white, male, manufacturing archetype often evoked in popular narratives

Data Capitalism and Algorithmic Racism

Defining the working class.

Social scientists use 3 common methods to define class—by occupation, income, or education—and there is really no consensus about the “right” way to do it. Michael Zweig, a leading scholar in working-class studies, defines the working class as “people who, when they go to work or when they act as citizens, have comparatively little power or authority. They are the people who do their jobs under more or less close supervision, who have little control over the pace or the content of their work, who aren't the boss of anyone." 1

Using occupational data as the defining criteria, Zweig estimated that the working class makes up just over 60 percent of the labor force. 2 The second way of defining class is by income, which has the benefit of being available in both political and economic data sets. Yet defining the working class by income raises complications because of the wide variation in the cost of living in the United States. An annual income of $45,000 results in a very different standard of living in New York City than it does in Omaha, Nebraska. Incomes are also volatile, subject to changes in employment status or the number of hours worked in the household, making it easy for the same household to move in and out of standard income bands in any given year.

The third way to define class is by educational attainment, which is the definition used in this paper. Education level has the benefit of being consistently collected in both economic and political data sets, but, more importantly, education level is strongly associated with job quality. The reality is that the economic outcomes of individuals who hold bachelor’s degrees and those who don’t have diverged considerably since the late 1970s. While people with bachelor’s degrees experienced real wage growth in the 30 years between 1980 and 2010, incomes among those with only a high school education or some college declined precipitously. Today having a college degree is essential (but no guarantee, of course) to securing a spot among the professional middle class. As unionized manufacturing jobs got sent overseas, the once-blurred lines between occupation and class grew quite sharp. The blue-collar middle class is an endangered species, shrunk to a size that makes it no longer identifiable in national surveys. The downside of using education to define the working class is that education is not a perfect proxy for establishing the power or autonomy one has in the workplace or society—the traditional definition of class. There are definitely well-educated workers who hold menial jobs or jobs that pay low wages, just as there are less well-educated workers who have jobs with great autonomy or power. It is a blunt definition, but in the aggregate it is a reasonably accurate way to distinguish between the working class and the middle class.

In this brief, “working class” is defined as individuals in the labor force who do not have bachelor’s degrees. This includes high school dropouts, high school graduates, people with some college, and associate’s-degree holders. It includes the unemployed, who are counted as still in the labor force as long as they are actively looking for work. Because it is increasingly difficult, and some would argue nearly impossible, to reach the middle class without a bachelor’s degree, the middle class is defined here as workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher. This both distinguishes the types of work performed by the working class and the middle class, and reflects a major distinction in how these different classes of workers earn their pay. Nearly 6 out of 10 workers in America are paid hourly wages, as opposed to annual salaries. 3  And the majority (8 out of every 10) of these hourly workers do not hold a bachelor’s degree. As a result of the divergence in economic fates experienced by those with and without bachelor’s degrees, today’s middle class is overwhelmingly a professional class, comprising workers who get paid annual salaries, work in an office setting, and most assuredly do not have to ask permission to take a bathroom break.

The Demographics of the Working Class

Far too often, the term “working class” is conflated with white and male identities, frequently used as a short-hand to conjure the former archetype of the working class as a white man who works in manufacturing. Of course, the working class has always been more diverse than this stereotype, and that is even more true today (see Chart 1 and Chart 2). As factories shuttered and good jobs for those without college degrees became scarcer, millions more Americans earned bachelor’s and advanced degrees, a process that perversely exacerbated already hardened lines of privilege, with whites earning college degrees at a much greater rate than blacks or Latinos as the cost of college increased substantially over the same time period. As a result, today’s working class is more black and Latino than it was in the industrial era. And it is more female too, as a result of the growing labor force participation of women with children since the 1970s.

As the manufacturing footprint in the working class has shrunk, so has the white male archetype that has historically defined the working class. And as the share of private-sector workers in unions shrank along with those jobs, and working-class jobs became more diffuse and spread across numerous sectors, the idea of a coherent working class has lost its force.

Put simply, the working class shifted from “making stuff” to “serving and caring for people”—a change that carried significant sociological baggage. The long-standing “others” in our society—women and people of color—became a much larger share of the non-college-educated workforce. And their marginalized status in our society carried over into the working class, making it easier to overlook and devalue their work. The racial and gender diversity of today’s working class facilitates its invisibility in two important ways. First, a unifying, single archetype of the new working class remains elusive. Would it be a Latina hotel housekeeper? A black home care worker? A white warehouse worker? An Asian cashier? Definitions want to be neat and tidy, but this working class lacks the defining center of gravity that manufacturing provided the old working class. The second way in which the racial and gender diversity of the new working class undercuts its power is by the very fact that it is so disproportionately black, brown, and female—groups long marginalized in our nation’s political and economic spheres.

• The new working class is more racially diverse than it was decades ago, with more than 41 percent comprising African Americans (13 percent), Latinos (22 percent), and Asian Americans (4 percent). It’s even more diverse if we look at the youngest members of the working class, those aged 25 to 34, with people of color comprising 49 percent of the younger working class. 4
• Today, 2 out of 3 non-college-educated women are in the labor force, up from just over half in 1980 (see Chart 3). Meanwhile, non-college-educated men are in the labor force at a lower rate than they were in 1980, down from 9 out of 10 to 8 out of 10.

As the working class becomes more racially diverse with each passing year, addressing issues of economic insecurity will require addressing how gender and racial inequalities are woven together in the class struggle.

The Jobs of the Working Class

The largest sources of jobs for the new working class fall into 4 main groups: retail and food jobs, blue-collar jobs, cubicle jobs, and caring jobs (see Table 1). Many of these jobs exist at the bottom of a long line of contracts and subcontracts, or are staffed by temp agencies, or are part of a franchise system—all forms of hiring that no longer align with existing labor laws written almost a century ago, making this working class more vulnerable to wage theft, unstable schedules and occupational and safety hazards.

• Only 8 percent of the working class holds jobs in the manufacturing sector, down from about 20 percent in 1980. Today 1 out of 5 working-class employees holds a job in the behemoth retail sector and another 1 out of 5 holds a job in the catchall category of professional and related services, a sector that includes the mushrooming health services occupations. 5  Today’s working-class is centered in the service and caring economy, where robust job growth is expected for the foreseeable future.
• Only 4 out of the 15 occupations that will add the most jobs to our economy in the next decade will require a bachelor’s degree. 6
• The 5 occupations that employ the largest number of workers include only 1 clear middle-class job requiring a bachelor’s degree: registered nurse. The rest of America’s largest occupations are retail salespeople, cashiers, food service and prep workers, and janitors. 7

Food and Retail Jobs

Topping the list of the largest source of jobs for the new working class are food and retail positions, employing over 14 million workers. There’s an enduring image of retail and food workers as being high school or college students who cruise through during summers or work after school year-round but then kiss those jobs goodbye once they’ve earned better credentials. But like most stereotypes, this image is far from accurate. Among waiters and waitresses who are aged 25 to 64, a full 8 out of 10 do not have a college degree. Similarly, most retail salespeople don’t have college degrees either: 75 percent. But what about fast-food workers? Aren’t they mostly teenagers? Nothing epitomizes teen jobs more than flipping burgers or working the drive-through for any of the big fast-food companies. Well, it turns out that just 30 percent of fast-food workers are teenagers. Another 30 percent are aged 20 to 24. The rest—40 percent—are 25 or older. 8  And just over one-quarter of fast-food workers are parents who must rely on meager pay and unstable schedules to provide for their children. 9

The reality of retail workers is also quite different from the stereotype. Over half of retail workers are contributing 50 percent or more to their family’s income. 10 And as in fast food, most of these jobs are held by adults without college degrees—defying the notion of a teen-centered workplace.

The Blue Collar Jobs

In the top-10 list of occupations providing the largest number of jobs in our country, 2 of the 10 (laborers/material movers and janitors) could be described as traditional blue-collar work, that is, physical labor done overwhelmingly by men. But unlike 4 decades ago, these jobs aren’t on the assembly line or factory floor. Today 2 million people in the new working class are employed as janitors or cleaners, earning an average hourly wage of $11.95. 11 Nearly 7 out of 10 of these jobs are held by men. About half of them are held by whites, whereas Latinos make up 30 percent, African Americans 16 percent, and Asian Americans 3 percent of the other half. 12 The other big occupation for working-class men today is what’s known as hand laborers and material movers, employing 3.5 million people. 13 This is classic manual labor: moving freight or stock to and from cargo containers, warehouses, and docks. It also includes sanitation workers, who pick up commercial and residential garbage and recycling. The job requires a lot of strength, because most of the lifting and moving is done by hand, not by a machine.

The Cubicle Jobs

The third largest source of jobs for the working class, coming in at over 7.5 million, breaks into 3 large occupational categories: general office clerks, secretaries and administrative assistants, and customer-service representatives. None of these jobs requires more than a high school diploma, though a fair number of college graduates may find themselves doing this kind of work as a way to get their foot in the door. But by and large, these jobs are held by working-class women. They answer phones, file papers, deal with customer complaints, type memos, make copies, order supplies, and basically keep everything in the office running smoothly. These jobs are found in a wide range of settings, from doctors’ offices to technology companies to local bank branches. In fact, despite the prevalence of ATMs, over a half million people work as bank tellers, with a median pay of $11.99. 14 And like fast-food and retail workers, one-third of bank tellers must rely on public assistance such as food stamps and health insurance programs. 15

The Caring Jobs

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, it was not uncommon for white middle-class families to employ a woman of color to help clean the house, prepare meals, and care for children or elders. The legacy of this occupational segregation remains today: the majority of these caring jobs are still done by women of color, with a disproportionate share held by black women. Black women make up a full one-third of nursing assistants and home health aides and one-fifth of personal care aides (compared to about 6.5 percent of the population). Latinas make up 14 percent of nursing assistants and home health aides and close to 20 percent of personal care aides (compared to about 8.5 percent of the population). Taken together, close to 5 million people in our economy are employed as home health aides, personal aides, nursing assistants, and child-care workers, all earning around $9 or $10 an hour. The number of home-care industry jobs has more than tripled since the 1970s and will continue to be one of the largest sources of new jobs in the coming decades, as the baby boomers continue to age. Similarly, as the Millennial generation hits its peak child-bearing years, the demand for child-care workers is also expected to grow rapidly.

The Wages of the Working Class

The median hourly wage of today’s working class is $15.75—a full $1.44 less than in 1980, after adjusting for inflation. 16  Today more than one-third of full-time workers earn less than $15 an hour, and fully 47 percent of all workers earn less than $15 an hour. 17 Close to half of workers making less than $15 per hour are over the age of 35. 18 Looking at the working class as an undifferentiated whole hides very important distinctions by gender, race, and age (see Table 2). Like American society more generally, there’s a hierarchy of earnings. Working-class men still out-earn all other demographic groups in the working class, despite a nearly $5 per hour decline in real wages over the past 3 decades. Today the median hourly wage for working-class men is $17.56, down from $22.04 in 1980. The white working class makes significantly more than any other demographic group, thanks in large part to the higher wages of men. As Table 2 shows, hourly wages for most workers have been stagnant over the past 3 decades, with modest increases for women and only significant declines for men.

An examination of wage trends by race and gender shows the reality of an enduring white and male wage premium (See Chart 4). In 2015 white working-class men earned $4.11 more per hour than black working-class men and $4.17 more than Latino working-class men. White working-class women earned $1.94 more than black working-class women and $2.52 more than working-class Latinas. Across all races, working-class men earned more than working-class women. 19

Women and people of color have made great strides in the past 50 years, but there’s no turning away from the reality that our society is still organized along relatively rigid gender and racial hierarchies. As the quality of the new jobs being created in America continues to deteriorate, the inequities by race and gender are further exacerbated.

Nearly twice as many women as men work in jobs paying wages below the poverty line. In fact, 5 of the most common occupations for women—home health aides, cashiers, maids and household cleaners, waitresses, and personal-care aides—fall into that category, compared to just 2 of the most common jobs for men. 20  With the exception of waitresses, these jobs are either primarily or disproportionately done by women of color.

The Politics of the Working Class

Much has been made of the polarization of American politics, with the conventional split being between Republicans and Democrats. What’s less acknowledged is how much one’s race correlates with being a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or a conservative. Data from American National Election Studies (ANES), the premier source for public opinion on issues, elections, and political participation, shows substantial differences by race in whether someone considers themselves a Democrat, Republican, or independent—and less significant differences by class. Both blacks and Latinos consider themselves Democrats over Republicans by a very large degree. Working-class blacks are almost 3 times as likely as working-class whites to be Democrats, and working-class Latinos are twice as likely to be Democrats as working-class whites.

Working-Class Political Participation

There is no doubt that the United States has a serious voter turnout problem. Over the past 4 decades, turnout in presidential elections has hovered around 60 percent. In 2016, 61 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot. And among that meager percentage, wealthier and white voters show up in greater numbers than others. In 2016, 48 percent of people with incomes below $30,000 voted, compared to 78 percent of people with incomes above $100,000. And contrary to popular perception, voters with incomes below $30,000 overwhelming cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, by 53 percent to 40 percent.

Since 1972, the difference in the policy preferences of voters and nonvoters about government’s role in our society have widened, with voters much more aligned with conservative preferences and nonvoters more aligned with progressive policy preferences. Missing voters, who are more likely to be low-income, are more liberal on questions of redistribution in particular, specifically on the need for government to provide jobs, services, and health care.

Politicians focus their campaigns, and all of their polling, on motivating “likely voters” to cast their vote for them. But structural barriers, including burdensome registration procedures, combined with an enthusiasm gap means that the working class is more likely to be missing from the pool of “likely voters.” And so the agenda is set by an electorate that is more white and more affluent than the nation as a whole. This has profound consequences on the types of issues candidates campaign on and what they prioritize once in office. And those decisions have deep implications about the kind of social contract our elected leaders deem appropriate for our country, generation after generation.

Research on turnout and policy outcomes in other countries corroborates the idea that countries with less class bias in voting and higher turnout have more generous social welfare policies. Researchers examining our nation’s depressed levels of voting came to the conclusion that “low turnout offers a potentially compelling explanation why the American welfare state has been so much less responsive to rising market inequality than other welfare states.” A study of 85 democracies found that higher voter turnout leads to higher total revenues, higher government spending, and more generous welfare state spending.

One could conclude from this research that the recent conservative attacks on voting rights, from requiring photo identification to shortening early voting opportunities, both of which dampen turnout among younger, lower-income, and voters of color, are clearly designed to preserve an ideological hegemony that doesn’t reflect the needs of all the people in our democracy.

Who Calls Themselves Working Class?

It’s all too common to hear a political pundit say that most Americans identify as middle class. But it isn’t true. Part of the problem is that many polls don’t even include the option of identifying as “working class,” instead offering only upper, middle, and lower class as options. It turns out that when polls offer “working class” as an option, just as many people self-identify as working class as middle class. The General Social Survey, a long-running public opinion survey, found in 2016 that 47 percent of respondents identified themselves as working class, compared to 41 percent who identified themselves as middle class. Interestingly, black and Latino individuals were much more likely than whites to identify as working class (See Chart 5). 21  Seventy percent of Latinos consider themselves working class, compared to 54 percent of blacks and 41 percent of whites. In fact, in every year since the early 1970s, the percentage of Americans who identify as working class has ranged between 44 and 50 percent (See Chart 6).

• 1 Michael Zweig, ed., What’s Class Got to Do with It? American Society in the Twenty-First Century (New York: ILR Books, 2004), p. 4
• 3 U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers, 2013,” BLS Reports, March 2014. http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2013.pdf.
• 4 Author’s analysis of Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement, U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Data retrieved from IPUMS-CPS: Steven Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 5.0 [machine-readable database] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010).
• 5 Author’s analysis of 1970–2000 Decennial Census, 2011–2012 U.S. Census American Community Survey, U.S. Census Bureau Public Use Microdata retrieved from Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 5.0.
• 6 U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Table 5. Occupations with the Most Job Growth, 2012 and Projected 2022,” December 19, 2013. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.t05.htm.
• 7 U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment and Wages for the Largest and Smallest Occupations, May 2012,” March 29, 2013, https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/retail-salespersons-and-cashiers-were-....
• 8 Janelle Jones and John Schmitt, Slow Progress for Fast-Food Workers, Center for Economic and Policy Research, August 6, 2013. http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/cepr-blog/slow-progress-for-fast-foo....
• 10 The Demographics of the Retail Work Force, Demos, November, 18, 2012. http://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/data_bytes/demographics.png.
• 11 U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Data Tables for Overview of May 2012 Occupational Employment and Wages,” March 29, 2013. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ocwage.pdf.
• 12 Independent analysis of U.S. Census 2012 and 2011 American Community Survey. Data retrieved from IPUMS-USA: Steven Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 5.0 [Machine-readable database] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010).
• 13 Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Data Tables for Overview of May 2012 Occupational Employment and Wages.”
• 14 U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2014–15, Tellers. http://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/tellers.htm.
• 15 Sylvia Allegretto et al., The Public Cost of Low-Wage Jobs in the Banking Industry, UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, October 2014. http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/the-public-cost-of-low-wage-jobs-in-the-....
• 16 Author’s analysis of Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.
• 17 Ben Henry and Allyson Fredericksen, Equity in the Balance: How a Living Wage Could Help Women and People of Color Make Ends Meet,” The Job Gap, November 2014. https://jobgap2013.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/2014jobgapequity1.pdf.
• 18 Irene Tung, Yannet Lathrop, and Paul Sonn, The Growing Movement for $15, National Employment Law Project, April 2015. http://nelp.org/content/uploads/Growing-Movement-for-15-Dollars.pdf.
• 19 Author’s analysis of U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement. Data retrieved from IPUMS-CPS: Steven Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 5.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010.
• 20 Institute for Women’s Policy Research, The Gender Wage Gap.
• 21 Author’s analysis of General Social Surveys, 1972-2014 [machine-readable data file]. Principal Investigator, Tom W. Smith; Co-Principal Investigator, Peter V. Marsden; Co-Principal Investigator, Michael Hout; Sponsored by National Science Foundation.—NORC ed.— Chicago: NORC at the University of Chicago [producer]; Storrs, CT: The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut.

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Working Class Explained: Definition, Compensation, Job Examples

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What Is the Working Class?

"Working class" is a socioeconomic term used to describe persons in a social class marked by jobs that provide low pay, require limited skill, or physical labor. Typically, working-class jobs have reduced education requirements. Unemployed persons or those supported by a social welfare program are often included in the working class.

Key Takeaways

• Working class is a socioeconomic term describing persons in a social class marked by jobs that provide low pay and require limited skill.
• Typically, working-class jobs have reduced education requirements.
• Today, most working-class jobs are found in the services sector and include clerical, retail sales, and low-skill manual labor vocations.

Understanding the Working Class

While "working class" is typically associated with manual labor and limited education, blue collar workers are vital to every economy. Economists in the United States generally define "working class" as adults without a college degree. Many members of the working class are also defined as middle-class. 

Sociologists such as Dennis Gilbert and Joseph Kahl, who was a sociology professor at Cornell University and the author of the 1957 textbook The American Class Structure,   identified the working class as the most populous class in America.

Other sociologists such as William Thompson, Joseph Hickey and James Henslin say the lower middle class is largest. In the class models devised by these sociologists, the working class comprises between 30% to 35% of the population, roughly the same number in the lower middle class. According to Dennis Gilbert, the working class comprises those between the 25th and 55th percentile of society.

Karl Marx described the working class as the "proletariat", and that it was the working class who ultimately created the goods and provided the services that created a society's wealth. Marxists and socialists define the working class as those who have nothing to sell but their labor-power and skills. In that sense, the working class  includes both white and blue-collar workers , manual and menial workers of all types, excluding only individuals who derive their income from business ownership and the labor of others.

Types of Working Class Jobs

Working-class jobs today are quite different than the working-class jobs in the 1950s and 1960s. Americans working in factories and industrial jobs have been on the decline for many years. Today, most working-class jobs are found in the services sector and typically include: 

• Clerical jobs
• Food industry positions
• Retail sales
• Low-skill manual labor vocations
• Low-level white-collar workers

Oftentimes working-class jobs pay less than $15 per hour, and some of those jobs do not include health benefits. In America, the demographics surrounding the working-class population is becoming more diverse. Approximately 59% of the working-class population is comprised of white Americans, down from 88% in the 1940s. African-Americans account for 14% while Hispanics currently represent 21% of the working class in the U.S.   

History of the Working Class in Europe

In feudal Europe, most were part of the laboring class; a group made up of different professions, trades, and occupations. A lawyer, craftsman, and peasant, for example, were all members–neither members of the aristocracy or religious elite. Similar hierarchies existed outside Europe in other pre-industrial societies.

The social position of these laboring classes was viewed as ordained by natural law and common religious belief. Peasants challenged this perception during the German Peasants' War. In the late 18th century, under the influence of the Enlightenment, a changing Europe could not be reconciled with the idea of a changeless god-created social order. Wealthy members of societies at that time tried to keep the working class subdued, claiming moral and ethical superiority.

Joseph Kahl. " The American Class Structure ." Rinehart, 1957.

Center for American Progress Action Fund. " What Everyone Should Know About America’s Diverse Working Class ." Accessed Sep. 3, 2020.

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What Is the Working Class?

Definition and Examples of Working Class

How does the working class work, diversity in the working class, criticism of the working class, what it means for working-class workers.

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“ Working class ” typically refers to a subsection of the labor force that works in the service or industrial sectors and does not hold a four-year college degree.

Key Takeaways

• While there is no universal definition of “working class,” the term commonly refers to workers in the service sector who hold less than a four-year college degree.
• Historically predominately white and male, the U.S. working class has become increasingly diverse in recent decades.
• Some common challenges the working class may face include wage stagnation, declining worker power, and meeting the rising cost of living.

The term “working class” often typically describes members of the labor force that hold a service-type occupation and do not hold a bachelor’s degree. Common working class occupations include restaurant employees, auto mechanics, construction workers, and other service-type workers.

• Alternate name : Blue-collar workers

Defining the working class is highly subjective and can vary by the analyst. Common indicators of membership in the working class include certain levels of annual household income, net worth, and education. 

For example, let’s say a researcher classifies working-class workers as those who do not hold a college degree and are between the ages of 18 and 64 years old. Sally, who is 33 years old, works as a grocery store clerk, and did not go to college would be considered a member of the working class.

Many analysts use education level as an indicator of membership in the working class since educational credentials typically do not fluctuate as frequently as income . 

For example, two employees may have the same degree and hold the same position within a company. However, one employee may not identify as working class because they have worked for the company for 10 years and make 50% more than the other employee.

Researchers rely on other indicators, such as net worth, the type of job, or how much autonomy an individual holds in their job position, as well.

Generally, the working class works jobs in food and retail, blue-collar work, caregiving, or some type of cubicle position. Some common examples of working-class occupations can include:

• Factory workers
• Restaurant workers
• Nursing home staff
• Automotive professionals
• Delivery services

In 2015, the retail industry employed more working-class adults than the manufacturing, minor, and construction industries combined. That same year, the health care industry also experienced a notable increase in working-class jobs.

The racial diversity makeup of the working class has evolved over the years. Around the 1940s, white workers comprised 88% of the working-class labor force. In 2015, this figure dropped to 58.9%, while African Americans and Hispanic Americans made up 13.7% and 20.9% of the working-class labor force respectively. The number of working-class women also increased, comprising 45.6% of the working class in 2015—it was less than 30% in 1940.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the working class, ages 18 to 64 years old, will become the majority people of color by 2032.

As mentioned, there is no universal definition of the working class. Since education, income, occupation, and other factors can vary by the individual, it can be difficult to accurately measure the size and characteristics of the working class.

Some say retirement can skew the data if the analyst uses education as a working class indicator. A retired American, for example, may have not held a four-year college degree but do not identify as working class because they are not actually working. 

Some analysts may still consider those who do not hold college degrees and are unemployed as part of the working class.

In some cases, researchers may choose to avoid using the term “working class” altogether and instead classify individuals by lower, middle, and upper class.

Working-class workers between the ages of 25 and 54, on average, are more likely to report a concern regarding their financial situation.

Some say wage stagnation is a significant factor that affects the financial health of working-class workers, who may not share in the wealth they generate. The rising cost of living exacerbates these financial concerns among working-class workers.

Some organizations advocate for laws that increase working power by making it easier to unionize in an effort to increase the quality of industrial jobs. More full employment opportunities, increased public employment, and apprenticeships can potentially also ease the struggles of the working class.

Economic Policy Institute. " People of Color Will be a Majority of the American Working Class in 2032 ." Accessed Nov. 29, 2021.

Center for American Progress Action Fund. " What Everyone Should Know About America’s Diverse Working Class ." Nov. 29, 2021. 

Demos. " Understanding the Working Class ." Accessed Nov. 29, 2021.

Class Matters. " Working Definitions ." Accessed Nov. 29, 2021.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Proletariat (Working Class)

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Proletariat (Working Class) by Yunus Kaya LAST REVIEWED: 20 September 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 20 September 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0089

The prevalence of wage labor has been a defining characteristic of modern societies. Following the Industrial Revolution, the people who sold their labor for survival in the newly emerging modern societies were usually labeled as the “working class” or the “proletariat.” Originally used by Romans to label citizens with very little or no property, the term “proletariat” was adopted by Karl Marx to categorize the working class in the newly industrialized European societies, and since then the two terms have been used interchangeably. The initial dominance of industrial work made the working class synonymous with manual work. However, as service-sector employment expanded and the number of people employed in white-collar occupations increased, the definition of “working class” also changed. Today, although there are serious debates and disagreements about the definition of “working class,” or even its very existence, many scholars define the term as comprising people who earn their living through wage labor, who do not own any assets or capital, and who do not possess workplace authority. Over the years, scholars have argued that working classes differ from the rest of the societies they belong to with their politics, culture, family structures, and the conditions they live in. However, it is also not possible to talk about a single and unified working class in any society, as working classes are divided through the lines of gender, race, and ethnicity. Today, working classes all over the world are struggling with the challenges of globalization and new technologies, although the specific challenges they face differ in developed and less developed countries.

Although it is hard to find comprehensive reviews or introductory texts on the working class, a few studies provide insights into the literature on the working class, and they shed light on the contemporary issues and challenges faced by the working classes. For example, Wright 2005 reviews major theoretical approaches to social class in general and the working class in particular. Roberts 1990 compares the literatures on proletariat and peasants and provides a comprehensive review of the literature until 1990. Arnesen 2007 ; Zweig 2012 ; and Mishel, et al. 2009 draw a compelling picture of working-class Americans and the various challenges they face. Bourdieu, et al. 1999 includes analyses of various aspects of the French working class, while Perrucci and Perrucci 2007 debates various effects of the new technologies and the global economy.

Arnesen, Eric, ed. 2007. Encyclopedia of U.S. labor and working-class history . 3 vols. New York: Routledge.

These volumes include more than 650 entries that cover the history of the American working class from the colonial era to the present. They contain articles on a vast number of issues, such as race and ethnicity, gender, slavery, regions, occupations, working-class culture, labor unions, and resistance.

Bourdieu, Pierre, et al. 1999. The weight of the world: Social suffering in contemporary society . Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

Although this is not strictly an analysis of the working class, it reviews and discusses many problems and challenges faced by the working class in France. The authors who contributed to this volume discuss many issues, including racism and discrimination, working-class culture, religion, deindustrialization, and social exclusion. Originally published in 1993 as La misère du monde (Paris: Seuil).

Mishel, Lawrence, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz. 2009. The state of working America: 2008–2009 . Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.

This work is the latest edition of The State of Working America , which has been published biannually by the Economic Policy Institute since 1988. Each volume includes an updated review of issues that are faced by working-class Americans and their families. It provides a comprehensive coverage of variety of issues, such as wages, education, health, and inequality.

Perrucci, Robert, and Carolyn C. Perrucci, eds. 2007. The transformation of work in the new economy: Sociological readings . Los Angeles: Roxbury.

A very helpful source book and comprehensive reader on the new economy and the contemporary challenges faced by all working people, including working classes. The reader is divided into five sections: “Historical Background for the New Economy,” “How Globalization, Technology, and Organization Affect Work,” “The Changing Face of Work,” “Work and Family Connections,” and “Emerging Issues.” Can be used in upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses.

Roberts, Bryan R. 1990. Peasants and proletarians. Annual Review of Sociology 16:353–377.

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.so.16.080190.002033

As an Annual Review article, it provides a comprehensive survey of the literature on the working class. It compares peasants and proletarians with regard to differences between them in political action, social structure, and demographic behavior, and discusses the effects of contemporary changes in economies and labor markets. Also includes references to various important works in the literature.

Wright, Erik Olin, ed. 2005. Approaches to class analysis . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511488900

This edited volume comprises six essays on different theoretical approaches to class analysis, as well as a review essay by the editor. It is a good overview of the different theories in the field, and it can be very helpful in an upper-level undergraduate or a graduate class.

Zweig, Michael. 2012. The working class majority: America’s best kept secret . 2d ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.

A comprehensive and sometimes provocative account of the working class in the United States. It emphasizes the importance of the social class in understanding the social structure and work life in the United States. It discusses many issues, including the underclass, globalization, family, and the role of government. It also includes a useful section labeled “Working Class Resource Guide.”

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What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class

• Joan C. Williams

The reasons for Trump’s win are obvious, if you know where to look.

Pundits and political analysts point to the white working class (WWC) as the voting bloc that tipped the 2016 Presidential Election in Donald Trump’s favor. Did Trump know something about this group that progressives and members of the Republican establishment were not privy to? No, says Joan C. Williams, but he was able to appeal to their values such as straight talk, masculinity, and economic independence, in a way that experienced politicians didn’t consider. Class politics drove the 2016 election, and it was cluelessness about the needs of the WWC that drove Trump’s victory. If Democrats want to connect with this group, they need to consider how economics, geography, and the WWC’s relationship with the classes adjacent to them—the poor and white collar workers—influence their values. Not doing so poses additional risk in an already unpredictable political climate.

My father-in-law grew up eating blood soup. He hated it, whether because of the taste or the humiliation, I never knew. His alcoholic father regularly drank up the family wage, and the family was often short on food money. They were evicted from apartment after apartment.

• Joan C. Williams is a Sullivan Professor of Law at University of California College of the Law, San Francisco and the founding director of Equality Action Center. An expert on social inequality, she is the author of 12 books, including Bias Interrupted: Creating Inclusion for Real and for Good (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021) and White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019). To learn about her evidence-based, metrics-driven approach to eradicating implicit bias in the workplace, visit www.biasinterrupters.org .

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Center for American Progress

What Policymakers Need To Know About Today’s Working Class

The working class works primarily in service-sector jobs and is more racially and ethnically diverse than ever.

Building an Economy for All, Economy, Middle-Class Economics, Raising Working Standards, Worker Rights, Workforce Development +3 More

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Madeline shepherd.

Senior Director, Government Affairs

In this article

Today’s working class is far different than the working class of more than half a century ago, at the height of American manufacturing’s importance in the labor market. 1 Yet widespread misconceptions persist about the people without a four-year college degree who make up the American working class. Throughout the 2016 and 2020 election cycles, the term became, in some circles, nearly synonymous with white workers in manufacturing or skilled trades. 2 A new Center for American Progress analysis reveals that, in fact, today’s working class is more diverse than ever.

According to data from the 2021 American Community Survey (ACS), the current working class largely works in services, particularly retail, health care, food service and accommodation, and building services, though manufacturing and construction remain large employers as well. Black, Hispanic, and other workers of color make up 45 percent of the working class, while non-Hispanic white workers comprise the remaining 55 percent. Nearly half of the working class is women, and 8 percent have disabilities.

These statistics highlight the need for policies to address the challenges that the working class faces in 2023.

The major industrial policies that President Joe Biden has signed into law—the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), and the CHIPS and Science Act—will help provide millions of quality jobs to people without college degrees, as well as help far more women and people of color enter construction and manufacturing jobs. 3 These are vital steps. Yet these policies will need to be properly implemented to ensure they deliver high job quality and access to these jobs for workers from all walks of life. Further, additional policies will be required to more broadly improve working conditions in the service sector.

Pro-worker policymakers must understand the diversity of today’s working class as they craft policies to build an economy that truly works for all workers.

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Defining the working class

This analysis defines the working class as comprising labor force participants who do not have a four-year college degree. It refers to non-working-class respondents as “college-educated,” defining them as individuals in the labor force with at least a four-year college degree or higher levels of education. Income can also be used as a measure of class membership, but it is far more variable by respondents’ age and job status than is education. For more details on the approach used in this analysis, see the Methodology section at the end of this brief.

Some surveys and press accounts rely on self-reported status of class membership, but individual attitudes on this topic are shaped by a number of factors and even change over time. A 2022 Gallup poll found that 46 percent of American adults identified as either “working” or “lower” class, with the rest identifying as “upper,” “upper-middle,” or “middle” class. 4

The majority of America's workers are part of the working class

Prior to the 1990s, the working class constituted more than 90 percent of the labor force. Yet even as rates of college education increased, the working class continued to represent the largest portion of the workforce. 5 In 2021, the working class still made up a majority of the American workforce, totaling 104 million workers. This means that, excluding students and active military members, 62 percent of the adult labor force is made up of members of the working class, while 38 percent of the labor force has at least a four-year college degree. (see Figure 1)

These numbers mean that policies directed toward the working class have an outsize impact on the health of the economy.

The working class is more racially and ethnically diverse than ever

For half a century, the working class has been growing more racially and ethnically diverse, and today, workers of color make up 45 percent of it, while non-Hispanic white workers make up the remaining 55 percent. 6 (see Figure 2) The racial and ethnic diversity of today’s working class, even greater than the Center for American Progress Action Fund found in its 2017 analysis of working class demographics using 2015 data, is the product of a decadeslong shift; in 1970, when the share of people of color in the working class began to accelerate, non-Hispanic white workers made up 85 percent of the working class. 7 This trend is poised to continue, with estimates suggesting that workers of color will make up a majority of the working class in 2032—a full 11 years before the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that people of color will constitute more than 50 percent of the entire population of the United States. 8

Furthermore, as shown in Figure 2, the college-educated labor force is disproportionately white, while Black or African American and Hispanic or Latino workers make up a much larger share of the working class. This is in part the product of decades of discriminatory practices in access to education. 9 Indeed, the growing share of Americans of color among the working class comes as a product of two things: 1) the nationwide gaps in degree attainment between white workers and workers of color 10 and 2) the country itself growing more racially and ethnically diverse, especially as Generation Z, the country’s most racially and ethnically diverse generation, 11 continues to enter the labor force. Immigrants of color currently make up 16.9 percent of the working class. 12

Women make up nearly half of the working class

As shown in Figure 3, women make up 44 percent of the working class. This share has remained relatively consistent for several decades: The 2017 CAP Action analysis found that it had been stable at around 46 percent since roughly the 1990s. 13 The proportion of women in the working class is affected not only by the rate at which women earn college degrees, which has been increasing, 14 but also by women’s labor force participation rate. The COVID-19 pandemic has reduced the number of working-class women in the labor force: Although the overall labor force participation rate for women remains roughly the same as in 2019, the total number of working-class women fell from 42.0 million in 2019 to 40.4 million in 2021. 15 Women have borne especially steep job losses and increased caregiving responsibilities during the pandemic, 16 which contributed to working-class women making a disproportionately high number of exits from the labor market. 17 Occupational segregation, meanwhile, has contributed to fewer women reentering the labor market during the nation’s economic recovery. 18

Decrease in working-class women in the labor force, 2019–2021

Additionally, a divide exists between the jobs held by women and men in the working class. Though jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors make up 10 percent and 12 percent, respectively, of the jobs that working-class people hold, only 8 percent of working-class women are employed in manufacturing, and only 2 percent are employed in construction. Far too often, women in these male-dominated roles still face harassment on the job. 19 Job quality measures that only target manufacturing or construction work, therefore, are insufficient for addressing the needs of women working in service roles, while policymakers nationwide tasked with implementing industrial policies such as the IIJA or the CHIPS and Science Act must ensure the construction and manufacturing jobs those laws create are accessible to women.

Learn more about occupational segregation

Occupational Segregation in America

Mar 29, 2022

Marina Zhavoronkova , Rose Khattar , Mathew Brady

Workers with disabilities are highly represented among the working class

Workers with disabilities make up a larger proportion of the working class than they do the proportion of workers with college degrees. As shown in Figure 4, a total of 8.7 percent of the American working-class labor force has a disability, compared with 4.76 percent of the labor force with four-year college degrees. This represents an increase from 2019, when 7.8 percent of the working class reported having a disability, and is potentially due in part to the disabling effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. 20

According to CAP analysis, 8 million working-class Americans describing themselves as having a disability. (see Methodology) policymakers must ensure that industrial policies create jobs that are accessible to disabled workers. Workers with disabilities already face occupational segregation and other inequities in the workforce and are concentrated in low-paying occupations such as janitors, building cleaners, and personal care aides. 21 So industrial policies must not only raise standards in the industries where disabled workers are currently employed, but also incorporate protections, expand routes to entry, and boost retention for disabled workers in all sectors, while improving access to good jobs. Otherwise, policymakers risk leaving disabled workers behind both in the workforce and on the job. 22

Learn more about the disabling impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 Likely Resulted in 1.2 Million More Disabled People by the End of 2021—Workplaces and Policy Will Need to Adapt

Feb 9, 2022

Lily Roberts , Mia Ives-Rublee , Rose Khattar

Working-class people are more likely to work in retail or to hold service, construction, and manufacturing jobs

Working-class Americans primarily work in different occupations and industries than workers with college degrees. Figure 5 compares the top 10 occupations and industries with the largest numbers of working-class people with the top 10 occupations and industries with the largest numbers of workers who have at least a four-year college degree. Although some industries—especially construction and elementary and secondary school education—are common among both working-class and college-educated workers, members of the working class are far more likely to be employed in retail, accommodation and food service, material moving and truck driving, and building cleaning or other service roles; even in construction, they largely work as laborers. Additionally, home health aides and personal care aides together constitute one of the largest working-class labor forces in the country—more than 1.6 million workers. 23 Overall, the dominance of service-sector roles in the working class has been increasing for decades—with some slowdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic—and will likely only increase in the future. 24

The jobs held by working-class Americans far too often offer low pay, few protections, and insufficient worker voice on the job. Nonunion construction 25 and manufacturing 26 jobs are often low-paying, while other jobs predominant among members of the working class—including in the service sector, 27 food service, 28 health care, 29 retail, 30 and home care 31 —commonly offer low wages, few benefits, and insufficient worker protections. These problems are widespread: While only 17 percent of workers with four-year degrees lack health insurance through their employer or labor union, 37 percent of workers in the working class lack such insurance. Lower job quality worsens economic disparities for the disproportionate numbers of people of color and people with disabilities in the working class, with corresponding impacts on health. 32

Making industrial policy work for the working class

Improving job quality across a wide range of sectors and occupations—including health care, retail, food, and building services, as well construction and manufacturing—is critical to the well-being of the working class.

Although Biden’s signature industrial policy laws include important features to advance job quality for the working class and will create thousands of manufacturing and construction jobs, they need to be properly implemented. Proper implementation will require, among other things, thorough screening of bidders for government projects to ensure capacity and commitment to adopt high-road standards; sufficient agency funding and oversight to monitor and enforce these standards; and empowered community and worker organizations through legally enforceable partnerships, such as community workforce agreements 33 that hold accountable state and local government and private sector recipients. 34

To more broadly enhance job quality and worker power in the service sector, policymakers must go further. This includes passing policies targeted toward specific service-sector occupations, such as proposals to raise standards for home care 35 and child care 36 workers; enacting measures to improve job quality for airport service workers; 37 and expanding to other states the recent California law that aims to improve working conditions in fast food. 38 It also includes supporting policies that increase worker power and raise job quality across the entire economy, such as the Protecting the Right to Organize Act and increases to the minimum wage. 39

The working class today, as ever, is the cornerstone of the American economy, making up a large majority of the workforce yet largely concentrated in lower-paying jobs in the service, retail, and construction sectors. Policies that improve job quality for these workers, and make good jobs accessible to women, workers of color, and workers with disabilities, will therefore bring the greatest benefits to working families. The Biden administration has already taken significant steps forward through the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the IIJA, and the CHIPS and Science Act—three landmark laws that will create quality jobs in American manufacturing and construction. Nevertheless, the share of the working class employed in manufacturing will remain small compared with the share who work in services, and working families are in dire need of policies that set strong standards and empower workers in these occupations. Many policymakers claim to be champions of the working class, but those truly interested in helping must understand this group as it exists and works today in order to ensure all Americans have access to decent, family-supporting jobs.

Methodology

The author relied on 2021 American Community Survey data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau and published by IPUMS-USA. This includes data on demographics, education, and job classifications and allows for an analysis representative of the U.S. population. 40

The author defines a “working-class” person as a member of the labor force—whether currently employed or looking for work—who does not have a four-year college degree. In this analysis, non-working-class respondents are defined as individuals in the labor force with at least a four-year college degree or higher levels of education and are referred to as “college-educated.” The data set was restricted to omit individuals identified as students or members of the military.

One question on the ACS asks respondents to describe whether they are of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin; a second question that lacks these options prompts respondents to indicate their race. As a result, an individual can identify as both Hispanic or Latino as well as a member of any other racial or ethnic group. For this analysis, the author refers to respondents as Hispanic or Latino if they stated that they are of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin in the first question. In the rest of the racial or ethnic groups—white, Black or African American, and other or multiple race—the author included only non-Hispanic respondents to avoid double-counting some respondents.

Disability status was determined from a set of six questions regarding different forms of difficulty because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, including cognitive, physical activity, independent living, self-care, vision, or hearing difficulty. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “Respondents who report anyone of the six disability types are considered to have a disability.” 41 Throughout this analysis, the author refers to these respondents as “workers with a disability” or “disabled workers.”

• Alex Rowell, “What Everyone Should Know About America’s Diverse Working Class” (Washington: Center for American Progress Action Fund, 2017), available at https://www.americanprogressaction.org/article/everyone-know-americas-diverse-working-class/ .
• Susan Davis, “Top Republicans Work To Rebrand GOP As Party Of Working Class,” NPR, April 13, 2021, available at https://www.npr.org/2021/04/13/986549868/top-republicans-work-to-rebrand-gop-as-party-of-working-class .
• Aurelia Glass and Karla Walter, “How Biden’s American-Style Industrial Policy Will Create Quality Jobs,” Center for American Progress, October 27, 2022, available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-bidens-american-style-industrial-policy-will-create-quality-jobs/ .
• Jeffrey M. Jones, “Middle-Class Identification Steady in U.S.,” Gallup, May 19, 2022, available at https://news.gallup.com/poll/392708/middle-class-identification-steady.aspx .
• Based on the author’s analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data also published by IPUMS-USA. Steven Ruggles and others, “Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Version 12.0, U.S. Census Data for Social, Economic, and Health Research, 2021 American Community Survey” (Minneapolis: Minnesota Population Center, 2022), available at https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V12.0 .  
• For this analysis, “Hispanic or Latino” workers include all workers who identify as Hispanic or Latino regardless of race; as a result, “white workers” includes only non-Hispanic white workers. For more details on how this analysis differentiates racial and ethnic identities, see the Methodology.
• Rowell, “What Everyone Should Know About America’s Diverse Working Class.”
• Valerie Wilson, “People of color will be a majority of the American working class in 2032” (Washington: Economic Policy Institute, 2016), available at https://www.epi.org/publication/the-changing-demographics-of-americas-working-class/ .
• Marcella Bombardieri, “What the Biden Administration Can Do Now To Make College More Affordable, Accountable, and Racially Just,” Center for American Progress, February 3, 2021, available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/biden-administration-can-now-make-college-affordable-accountable-racially-just/ .
• Marshall Anthony Jr., “Building a College-Educated America Requires Closing Racial Gaps in Attainment,” Center for American Progress, April 6, 2021, available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/building-college-educated-america-requires-closing-racial-gaps-attainment/ .
• Aurelia Glass, “The Closing Gender, Education, and Ideological Divides Behind Gen Z’s Union Movement” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2022), available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-closing-gender-education-and-ideological-divides-behind-gen-zs-union-movement/ .
• This includes all nonwhite or Hispanic respondents born outside of the United States.
• Kim Parker, “What’s behind the growing gap between men and women in college competition?”, Pew Research Center, November 8, 2021, available at https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/08/whats-behind-the-growing-gap-between-men-and-women-in-college-completion/ .
• Based on the author’s analysis of 2019 American Community Survey data, using the same methodology as the 2021 sample.
• Diana Boesch and Shilpa Phadke, “When Women Lose All the Jobs: Essential Actions for a Gender-Equitable Recovery” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2021), available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/women-lose-jobs-essential-actions-gender-equitable-recovery/ .
• Richard Fry, “Some gender disparities widened in the U.S. workforce during the pandemic,” Pew Research Center, January 14, 2022, available at https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/01/14/some-gender-disparities-widened-in-the-u-s-workforce-during-the-pandemic/ .
• Beth Almeida and Bela Salas-Betsch, “Fact Sheet: The State of Women in the Labor Market in 2023” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2023), available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/fact-sheet-the-state-of-women-in-the-labor-market-in-2023/ .
• The Women’s Initiative, “Gender Matters: Women Disproportionately Report Sexual Harassment in Male-Dominated Industries,” Center for American Progress, August 6, 2018, available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gender-matters/ .
• Mia Ives-Rublee, Rose Khattar, and Anona Neal, “Revolutionizing the Workplace: Why Long COVID and the Increase of Disabled Workers Require a New Approach” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2022), available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/revolutionizing-the-workplace-why-long-covid-and-the-increase-of-disabled-workers-require-a-new-approach/ .
• Mia Ives-Rublee, Rose Khattar, and Lily Roberts, “Removing Obstacles for Disabled Workers Would Strengthen the U.S. Labor Market” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2022), available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/removing-obstacles-for-disabled-workers-would-strengthen-the-u-s-labor-market/ .
• While some classification schemes combine home health and personal care aides given the similarity of their work, the Census Bureau classifications used in this analysis splits these occupations into distinct categories; had they been combined, they would have constituted the ninth-most-populous occupation for the working class. See U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics: 31-1120 Home Health and Personal Care Aides,” available at https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes311120.htm (last accessed March 2023).
• Frank Manzo IV and Erik Thorson, “Union Apprenticeships: The Bachelor’s Degrees of the Construction Industry” (La Grange, IL: Illinois Economic Policy Institute, 2021), available at https://illinoisepi.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/ilepi-union-apprentices-equal-college-degrees-final.pdf .
• Aurelia Glass, David Madland, and Karla Walter, “Prevailing Wages Can Build Good Jobs Into America’s Electric Vehicle Industry” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2022), available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/prevailing-wages-can-build-good-jobs-into-americas-electric-vehicle-industry/ .
• Aurelia Glass, David Madland, and Karla Walter, “Raising Wages and Narrowing Pay Gaps With Service Sector Prevailing Wage Laws” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2022), available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/raising-wages-and-narrowing-pay-gaps-with-service-sector-prevailing-wage-laws/ .
• David Madland, “Raising Standards for Fast-Food Workers in California: The Powerful Role of a Sectoral Council” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2021), available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/raising-standards-fast-food-workers-california/ .
• Mignon Duffy, “Why Improving Low-Wage Health Care Jobs Is Critical for Health Equity,” AMA Journal of Ethics 24 (9) 2022: E871–875, available at https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/why-improving-low-wage-health-care-jobs-critical-health-equity/2022-09 .
• Maggie Corser, “Job Quality and Economic Opportunity in Retail: Key Findings from a National Survey of the Retail Workforce” (Washington: Center for Popular Democracy, 2017), available at https://www.populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/DataReport-WebVersion-01-03-18.pdf .
• SEIU 775 and the Center for American Progress, “Higher Pay For Caregivers” (Washington: 2021), available at https://seiu775.org/hazardpayreport/ .
• Abigail R. Barker and Linda Li, “The cumulative impact of health insurance on health status,” Health Services Research 55 (2) (2020): 815–822, available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7518807/ .
• Sharita Gruberg and Karla Walter, “How historic infrastructure investments can benefit women workers,” The Hill , February 21, 2023, available at https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3867722-how-historic-infrastructure-investments-can-benefit-women-workers/ .
• Karla Walter, “Proven State and Local Strategies To Create Good Jobs With IIJA Infrastructure Funds” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2022), available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/proven-state-and-local-strategies-to-create-good-jobs-with-iija-infrastructure-funds/ .
• SEIU and the Center for American Progress, “President Biden’s Home Care Proposal Would Create Massive Job Growth in Every State,” August 17, 2021, available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/president-bidens-home-care-proposal-create-massive-job-growth-every-state/ .
• Anna Lovejoy, “Top 5 Actions Governors Can Take To Address the Child Care Shortage” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2023), available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/top-5-actions-governors-can-take-to-address-the-child-care-shortage/ .
• Karla Walter and Aurelia Glass, “Airport Service Workers Deserve Good Jobs” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2023), available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/airport-service-workers-deserve-good-jobs/ .
• David Madland, “Worker Rights Are Getting a Major Shake Up,” Route Fifty, September 8, 2022, available at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/worker-rights-are-getting-a-major-shake-up/ .
• Richard L. Trumka Protecting the Right to Organize Act of 2023, H.R. 20, 118th Cong., 1st sess. (February 28, 2023), available at https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/20 .
• Ruggles and others, “Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Version 12.0, U.S. Census Data for Social, Economic, and Health Research, 2021 American Community Survey.”
• U.S. Census Bureau, “How Disability Data are Collected from The American Community Survey,” available at https://www.census.gov/topics/health/disability/guidance/data-collection-acs.html (last accessed February 2023).

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In a Class of Their Own: How Working-Class Students Experience University

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Widening participation in higher education has been an enduring key policy concern in most Western countries. As Britain, the USA, Canada and other formerly industrial nations are transforming into post-industrial service economies, high levels of formal education are seen as essential to achieving equity and individual success (Canadian Council on Learning, 2006; Browne Review, 2010). As a consequence, universities have expanded and opened their doors to a new generation of non-traditional students. Young men and women from social backgrounds with no or little history of participation in higher education are called upon to change their educational behaviours and achieve mobility through attending university or other forms of higher education. Young people today are inundated with messages that equate success, both in work and life more generally, with high levels of formal education. Failure, in contrast, is generally associated with an inability to become educated and formally skilled (for critiques of these positions, see Brown et al., 2011; Gillies, 2005). Whether they are in higher education or not, most young people have accepted this pervasive public discourse of success through formal education.

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Lehmann, W. (2013). In a Class of Their Own: How Working-Class Students Experience University. In: Brooks, R., McCormack, M., Bhopal, K. (eds) Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137269881_6

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Report | Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy (PREE)

People of color will be a majority of the American working class in 2032 : What this means for the effort to grow wages and reduce inequality

Report • By Valerie Wilson • June 9, 2016

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What this report finds: People of color will become a majority of the American working class in 2032. This estimate, based on long-term labor force projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and trends in college completion by race and ethnicity, is 11 years sooner than the Census Bureau projection for the overall U.S. population, which becomes “majority-minority” in 2043.

Why this matters: As of 2013, the working class—made up of working people without a college degree—constitutes nearly two-thirds (66.1 percent) of the U.S. civilian labor force between ages 18 and 64. Thus wage stagnation and economic inequality can’t be solved without policies aimed at raising living standards for the working class. Because the working class is increasingly people of color, raising working class living standards will require bridging racial and ethnic divides.

What it means for policy: The best way to advance policies to raise living standards for working people is for diverse groups to recognize that they share more in common than not, and work together toward:

• Full employment
• Equal pay for equal work
• Universal high-quality child care and early childhood education
• Strengthened collective bargaining
• Higher minimum wages
• Voting rights protections
• Reforms to immigration and criminal justice systems

Introduction and findings

According to the latest projections from the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the United States will be “majority-minority” 1 —majority people of color—in 2043. For the working-age population (those between the ages of 18 and 64) the transition takes place in 2039.

The transition to a majority-minority population in 2043 means that although the non-Hispanic white population will remain the largest single group in America, the combined populations of all nonwhite racial and ethnic groups will make up more than half of the U.S. population. The transition is the result of increasing birth rates and net international migration of nonwhites, and the estimated year of its arrival is based on the assumption that current patterns of racial and ethnic self-identification remain constant into the future.

As the current population ages, the older population will remain predominantly non-Hispanic white while the younger population will increasingly be people of color. In 2043, 60.7 percent of people under age 18 will be people of color, while 64.9 percent of those over age 65 will be non-Hispanic white. Given the pervasive impact of race on nearly every aspect of American society, this demographic shift has implications for the future of the American economy, as shaped by the workforce, education, and politics.

While the full realization of a nonwhite majority in the U.S. population is nearly three decades away, there are clear indications that this future reality is quickly taking shape. According to the Census Bureau, the population under age 5 in this country has already reached this milestone, a fact that is reflected in the demographic composition of public schools. The Department of Education projected that the fall of 2014 would mark the first time that children of color outnumbered whites in America’s public elementary and secondary schools (Hussar and Bailey 2014). In politics, Barack Obama’s victories in the 2008 and 2012 elections have been largely attributed to winning the combined minority vote by large margins (Pew Research Center 2012).

As these shifting population demographics converge with patterns of educational attainment, the next majority-minority transition is likely to take place within America’s working class, or among workers with less than a bachelor’s degree. For the foreseeable future, Latinos and African Americans will remain the two largest minority groups in the U.S. By 2043, Latinos will be 26.6 percent of the working-age population while African Americans will be 13.4 percent. 2 This is significant for the demographic transition of the working class because members of these groups are also the least likely to have a four-year college degree. In 2013, 13 percent of Latinos and 21.2 percent of African Americans in the labor force had a bachelor’s degree, compared with 36.7 percent of non-Hispanic whites. 3 Though the Asian American population is projected to grow the fastest over the next 30 years, on average, Asian Americans have the highest rates of college completion in the labor force (59.4 percent in 2013), making them a very small share of the working class. As workers of color grow as a share of the labor force and of the working class, the nature of educational, employment, and wage inequities take on broader meaning for the strength of the American economy.

In this report, I approximate the timing of the working class’s transition to majority-minority based on historical trends in educational attainment and long-term labor force projections by race, ethnicity, gender, and age cohort. I also discuss important economic, social, and political implications of the demographic makeup of this new working class.

Key findings include:

• In 2013, the working class—made up of those with less than a bachelor’s degree—constituted nearly two-thirds (66.1 percent) of the civilian labor force 4 between ages 18 and 64.
• Based on long-term labor force projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and continuation of trends in college completion among different demographic groups, the working class is projected to become majority people of color in 2032. This is 11 years sooner than the Census Bureau projection for the entire population and seven years sooner than the transition for all working-age adults (18 to 64 years old).
• The prime-age working-class cohort, which includes working people between the ages of 25 and 54, is projected to be majority people of color in 2029.
• The age cohort projected to make the earliest transition to majority-minority is the one that includes workers age 25 to 34. These are today’s 18- to 27-year-olds and for them, the projected transition year is 2021.
• Demography is not destiny, but demography will have an impact on the future of the American economy, politics, and social infrastructure. The shape of that destiny is uncertain due to the fluidity of racial and ethnic identity, waning working-class political power, and the potential for multiracial working-class solidarity.
• Wage stagnation is a universal problem for the working class, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender. This is an area of immense common ground, because in order to deal with class inequality (a cause of wage stagnation), we have to deal with racial disparities. At the same time, reducing racial inequality means also addressing class inequality.
• Securing wage growth and greater equality by both class and race calls for sustainable working-class solidarity that supersedes the racial and ethnic tensions present among all groups of people, not just between whites and people of color. Getting to that point requires honesty and a collective reckoning about race, white privilege, and institutional racism, with respect to the costs and benefits to each of us.
• As the United States continues to undergo this demographic shift, we have to think in terms of big structural and policy changes that help to advance greater equality, expand opportunity for all, and yield universal benefits to the economy. This includes empowering workers to secure gainful employment, bargain for higher wages, and achieve racial and gender pay equity; closing gaps in student achievement and access to college; protecting voting rights; and enacting immigration and criminal justice reform.

Working class becomes majority-minority by 2032

The working class, defined here as people with less than a bachelor’s degree, accounts for about two-thirds of the 18- to 64-year-old labor force in the United States. Assuming that rates of college completion by race/ethnicity, gender, and age cohort continue to increase at the same pace they did between 1993 and 2013, the 18- to 64-year-old working class is projected to become majority-minority in 2032 ( Figure A ). For the prime-age working class (25- to 54-year-olds), the transition takes place in 2029 ( Figure B ) with the 25- to 34-year-old cohort reaching this tipping point first in 2021 ( Figure C ). Differences in educational attainment by race and ethnicity first emerge within this last cohort because traditionally, most adults have completed a college degree by age 25.

Working class becomes majority-minority in 2032 : Projected racial/ethnic composition of 18- to 64-year-olds in the labor force with less than a bachelor's degree, 2013–2032

The data below can be saved or copied directly into Excel.

The data underlying the figure.

Note: Line represents demographic transition from the majority (50 percent or more), for white, non-Hispanic, working class.

Source: EPI analysis of educational attainment trends from 1993-2013 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement and Bureau of Labor Statistics' long-term labor force projections for 2005–2050

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Prime-age working class becomes majority-minority in 2029 : Projected racial/ethnic composition of 25- to 54-year-olds in the labor force with less than a bachelor's degree, 2013–2032

Older millennial working class becomes majority-minority in 2021 : Projected racial/ethnic composition of 25- to 34-year-olds in the labor force with less than a bachelor's degree, 2013–2032

Figure D shows the changes in each of the main racial/ethnic group’s share of the working class between 2013 and 2032 and illustrates the changing gender demographics of the working class within each racial or ethnic group. Among working-class people of color, most of the projected growth is coming from men, while women are driving more of the decline among working-class non-Hispanic whites. Although women as a whole are projected to constitute a smaller share of the working class, Latinas will become a larger share of working-class women.

These projections are based on assumptions about patterns of college completion as applied to Census Bureau estimates of population growth and estimates of labor force participation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The extent to which reality differs from any of these assumptions will affect the projected date and the racial, ethnic, or gender composition of the working class at any point in time. However, even if we were to assume that the more rapid increase in college completion rates occurring after 2003 continues, it would have little effect on the projected dates. As Table 1 shows, this alternative assumption had no effect on the transition year for the entire working class, the prime-age working class, and the 25- to 34-year-old working class, but did affect the dates for young (age 18 to 24) and mid-career (age 35 to 44) workers. A more detailed discussion of post-2003 trends in educational attainment and how they affect the projected majority-minority working-class transition dates for each of these cohorts is available in the appendix.

Hispanics and men will drive increase in the browning of the working class : Projected percentage-point change in share of 18- to 64-year-old working class with given racial/ethnicity characteristic, by gender, 2013–2032

Note:  The working class consists of members of the labor force who have less than a bachelor's degree.

Source: EPI analysis of educational attainment trends from 1993–2013 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement and Bureau of Labor Statistics' long-term labor force projections for 2005–2050

Projected "majority-minority" transition year, by age cohort

America’s future workforce and the intersection of race, ethnicity, and class

As the working class transitions to being majority people of color, class inequality and racial inequality will likely become more indistinguishable. Improving the living standards of all working-class Americans while closing racial disparities in employment and wages will depend on how well we seize opportunities to build multiracial, multigendered, and multigenerational coalitions to advance policies that achieve both of these goals. Policies and practices that promote good jobs with living wages and benefits, ensure a strong social safety net, and make high-quality education available to all children regardless of their race, ethnicity, or zip code must be leveraged with those that end employment and pay discrimination, as well as residential segregation.

Unlike the projections that motivated this report, the economic, political, and social implications associated with the demographic transition of the working class don’t fit neatly into a math equation that predicts the world will suddenly be different on a given day. The U.S. population has been undergoing demographic change since this country was founded. Further, the concepts of working class and racial and ethnic identity, upon which this analysis is based, are themselves very fluid. The remainder of this report summarizes some of the challenges ahead for the working class, and why failure to confront them would have real costs for working-class families and the broader economy.

Wage stagnation is the most pressing issue of the working class

As 66.1 percent of the labor force in 2013, people with less than a bachelor’s degree supplied most of the labor and generated much of the demand needed to drive economic growth. Even as educational attainment continues to rise, the working class will remain a majority of the labor force, comprising 57.8 percent by 2032 when people of color are projected to become the majority. Building a strong working class is only possible when workers are able, through broad-based wage growth, to share in the economic prosperity that they help generate. Unfortunately, this has been the exception more than the rule for the last three and a half decades.

Figure E shows that since 1979, median hourly real wage growth has fallen far short of productivity growth—a measure of the potential for pay increases—for all groups of workers (not just those without a bachelor’s degree), regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender. Over this same period, there have been clear differences in wage growth trends of men and women, and of people of color relative to whites. Median wages for white, black, and Hispanic men all fell, with Hispanic men suffering the greatest losses (-9.8 percent). On the other hand, median wages of all women increased, with white women’s wages growing the most (30.2 percent) and Hispanic women’s wages growing the least (8.6 percent). Most of the decline in men’s wages occurred between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s. While men’s and women’s wages grew during the economic boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, for men, these gains were either inadequate to make up for the losses during the previous decade or have since been eroded in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

All workers’ wages—regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity—have failed to rise in tandem with productivity : Hourly median wage growth by gender, race, and ethnicity, compared with economy-wide productivity growth, 1979–2014

Note: Race/ethnicity categories are mutually exclusive (i.e., white non-Hispanic, black non-Hispanic, and Hispanic any race). This figure includes the entire civilian labor force.

Source: EPI analysis of unpublished Total Economy Productivity data from Bureau of Labor Statistics Labor Productivity and Costs program, and Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group microdata

Among men and women, wages for workers of color have grown more slowly than those of whites. As a result, existing pay disparities by race and ethnicity have remained unchanged or widened. Figure F returns to looking at members of the working class, plotting the median hourly wages by gender, race, and ethnicity since 1979, all as a share of white men’s wages. In 2014, median pay ratios for black and Hispanic men were almost exactly the same as they were in 1979. While there’s been improved gender equality in pay over this same period, 40 percent of the narrowing in the gender wage gap occurred because of falling men’s wages (Davis and Gould 2015). At the same time, racial and ethnic pay gaps among women have grown.

Working class median hourly wage ratios, all groups relative to white men

Source: EPI analysis of Current Population Survey public data series

These data show that wage stagnation has been a problem for the entire working class, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender. As such, it is easily the most pressing common issue for an increasingly diverse working class, and solutions for reversing the trend are clearly defined. Wage stagnation can be directly traced to a number of intentional policy decisions on behalf of those with the most income, wealth, and power—decisions that have eroded the leverage of the vast majority of workers while directing most of the gains to the top. Two of the ways this has played out are through declining unionization and an economy for which genuinely full employment has been a rare occurrence (Mishel and Eisenbrey 2015). It is also the case that these factors have affected a larger share of working-class blacks than other groups.

Restoring working-class bargaining power and full employment are universally beneficial, but have the greatest impact on African American workers

The share of private-sector workers covered by a union contract declined from 26 percent in 1970 to 7.4 percent in 2014 (Bivens 2015). Figure G plots the decline in union membership as a share of the total employed by race and ethnicity since 2000. This graph depicts higher rates of unionization among African American workers than other groups, even as union density has declined. This is true in spite of the fact that a majority of the black population resides in southern states where unions are not as strong. Strengthening working-class bargaining power is especially important to African Americans who experience both class inequality and racial inequality.

Unionization higher among blacks, even as union density has declined : Union membership as a share of total employment, by race and ethnicity, 2000–2014

In the brief period between 1995 and 2000 when overall unemployment averaged 4 percent for two solid years, median hourly wages rose with productivity (roughly 2 percent, annually). During this period of full employment, median wages of black workers also grew slightly faster than those of white workers (Wilson 2015). After 2000, all progress on full employment and wage growth came to a halt, and was eventually undone through the Great Recession. Figure H shows that in 2014, working-class unemployment rates were still above prerecession (2007) rates, and nowhere near the exceptionally low rates of 2000. The black unemployment rate has consistently been several percentage points higher than the rates of all other groups—both in periods of expansion and recession—but as unemployment rates rose during the Great Recession, the differences between all groups grew. These gaps remained wider in 2014 than in 2007, before the recession.

Working class unemployment rates still exceed prerecession (2007) rate after 7 years : Unemployment rate of 18- to 64-year-olds in the labor force with less than a bachelor's degree, by race and ethnicity, 2000–2014

Note:   Shaded areas denote recessions.

Source: EPI analysis of the Current Population Survey public data series

Full employment is as important to narrowing these unemployment gaps as it is to lowering overall unemployment. On average, the black unemployment rate changes by about 2 percentage points for every 1 percentage-point change in the national rate (Wilson 2015), when unemployment rises as well as when it falls. However, one of the most sobering illustrations of persistent racial disparity in unemployment is shown in Figure I, which provides a cross-section of black and white unemployment rates by educational attainment in 2014. Based on this graph, even the most educated working-class blacks face higher unemployment rates (8.9 percent) than the least educated working-class whites (7.8 percent). This means that simply providing more education to people of color will not remedy persistent racial disparities in unemployment.

Even the most educated working-class blacks face higher joblessness : Unemployment rate of 18- to 64-year-olds in the labor force with less than a bachelor's degree, by highest level of educational attainment and race/ethnicity, 2014

As people of color grow as a share of the labor force and working class, there is increased opportunity to reduce racial disparities in wages and employment. Of the 50.6 million total job openings expected over the 2012–2022 decade, 67.2 percent are projected to come from replacement needs as older, predominantly white workers retire (Richards and Terkanian 2013). Nearly two-thirds of all job openings are expected to be in occupations that require less than a postsecondary education, in other words, working-class jobs. Since the emerging cohort of workers who will be competing for these jobs is more racially and ethnically diverse than those retiring, it’s reasonable to expect that people of color will fill an increased share of these positions.

Major investments in children and bold structural reforms that close gaps in student achievement and college access will yield major long-term payoffs

The fact that the majority of future job openings won’t require a college degree doesn’t minimize the importance of expanding access to and completion of college for all students who desire to continue their education beyond high school. Parents of all socioeconomic backgrounds aspire to send their children to college and this is a solid working-class value as well. Making this goal equally attainable requires leveling of financial barriers and eliminating inequities in academic preparation based on race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. In fact, eliminating student achievement gaps is essential to building a highly productive workforce, regardless of how many of those workers choose to attend college.

Those who will be the majority people-of-color working class in 2032 include today’s elementary, middle, and high school students and young adults. Therefore, the accessibility and affordability of college is more than an aspirational goal of working-class parents. Rather, the size and demographic composition of the future working class—those without a bachelor’s degree—are directly related to college access and college completion trends. These outcomes are influenced by academic preparation, family income, and wealth. Unfortunately, the majority of African American and Hispanic students enter kindergarten in highly segregated schools where nearly half of their peers live in poverty. On average, students in these heavily minority, high poverty schools are less prepared when they start kindergarten in the fall and make less progress (relative to the average) over the course of the year than those in low poverty schools (Garcia and Weiss 2014). It is imperative that the nation invests more in the future of its workforce by making it a priority to provide high-quality education for all children at all levels. This includes sizable public investments in early childhood education (including high-quality pre-kindergarten) to allow all children to begin their formal schooling years with similar levels of preparation. The long-term benefits of such investments are universal, resulting in an increasingly productive workforce that will boost economic growth and provide budgetary savings at the state and federal levels (Bivens et al. 2016).

In addition to academic preparation, racial and ethnic differences in family income and wealth pose another set of challenges for college affordability. Disinvestment of public dollars in higher education has resulted in more of a market-based system of funding higher education that contributes to rising tuition. This has made college less affordable for families with limited wealth. The fact that these changes are taking place as children of color represent a growing share of the school-aged population has serious implications, for example increased student debt, delaying or forgoing college altogether, and lower rates of completion among people of color.

Solutions to these challenges require bold structural reform rather than incremental changes. Given that the segregated nature of schools and unequal distribution of resources follows from the segregated nature of neighborhoods—by race, ethnicity, and poverty concentration—reforms to education policy will be most effective if accompanied by reforms to housing policy (Rothstein 2014). Other recommendations include severing the tie between local tax revenues and funding for public schools, or at a minimum, investing a larger share of state and local budgets in schools and jobs in racially and economically segregated communities rather than in jails and other systems of punishment.

Bridging the racial generation gap to build working-class economic security is a win-win

Ironically, as the current working class retires—contributing to the boost in future job openings for workers without a college degree—this also presents a risk of underinvestment in youth and schools. The coming racial and ethnic generation gap will require balancing the interests of a younger, poorer, more racially and ethnically diverse population and those of an older, wealthier, predominantly white population. This ethnic generation gap to be navigated is at the heart of Evenwel v. Abbott. In December 2015, the Supreme Court heard arguments for altering the long-standing principle of “one person, one vote” and substituting voting-age citizens for total population when drawing legislative districts within states. This is significant given the changing demographics of our country, because whites are, and will continue to be for some time, a much larger majority among older voting-age citizens than among the population as a whole.

Despite these political tensions, older workers and retirees have a stake in working-class issues and racial equity. As the demographic transition of the working class continues, people of color will be a larger share of those supporting the Social Security and Medicare systems, providing the services used by the aging population and creating the demand that drives the economy. That means the tax revenues used to pay benefits will be increasingly drawn from the wages of nonwhite workers. Higher working-class wages strengthen these critical safety net programs and the overall economy. Higher wages are also important in attracting and retaining greater numbers of highly qualified workers to deliver critical services.

There are clear motivations for taking a proactive approach to strengthening the working class in all the ways that have been described. It is less clear whether the changing demographics of the working class present an opportunity that can be seized to accomplish that goal. The answer to that question pivots on the intersection of race, racial identity, class, and politics.

Racial identity is not a fixed concept

Sociologists have noted how definitions of white and nonwhite changed as once-excluded minorities such as Irish, Italian, and Jewish peoples assimilated into the mainstream, thus retaining a white majority as population demographics neared a tipping point. In an article in The American Prospect , Richard Alba argues that more recent immigrants and children of ethnically and racially mixed families could follow a similar path. Nearly 40 percent of infants of mixed race/ethnicity have one white and one Hispanic parent. This is significant because the demographic shift of the population and working class hinges on the projected growth of the Hispanic population, which the Census Bureau assumes will continue to identify as such in perpetuity, regardless of multiracial births. While racial identity tends to be less fluid for biracial people with one black parent (most self-identify or are identified by others as black), this is not the case among individuals of mixed Hispanic-white or Asian-white family background (Liebler et al. 2014).

Protecting voting rights of people of color is critical to restoring the economic bargaining power of the working class

Even if the assumed norms of racial identity hold, there is little evidence that a future working class that is majority people of color will have any more power in the workforce than the current working class. That’s because the reality of big money politics threatens the political bargaining power of the working class. During the 2012 elections, big business outspent unions by a margin of 57-to-1 (Draut 2016). This imbalance of political and economic power has led many working-class voters to disengage from the political process, but for different reasons. People of color are less likely to vote because of obstacles, whereas whites are less likely to vote due to cynicism or frustration with the economic and political elite. Regardless of the reasons for disengagement, the result has been a pool of voters who tend to be more educated and more conservative on economic issues than nonvoters (Leighley and Nagler 2014). While there may be different reasons for disengagement among whites and people of color, protecting the voting rights of people of color is a solution that addresses both problems. That’s because effectively counterbalancing the voting power of the economic and political elite requires a greater number of voters aligned with the economic interests of the working class. These voters are among the growing ranks of working-class people of color—the same populations affected by laws that suppress voter participation by requiring specific forms of identification, limiting the times available to vote, or lifetime disenfranchisement of formerly incarcerated citizens.

Recommendations for overcoming these challenges include systemic changes such as mandatory voting and restoring the Voting Rights Act, as well as tactical changes to the way in which voter engagement has traditionally been done. Advocates are working to find ways to organize around issues rather than candidates, build political power in communities of color that is led by those communities, and build a lasting political infrastructure rather than relying on a “drop-in” model of politics that operates only every four years.

Establishing multiracial working-class solidarity to advance racial and class equality presents opportunities as well as challenges

Since class identity has often been racialized, one of the greatest challenges to rebuilding the economic power of the working class lies in establishing multiracial solidarity on a national scale. Getting to that point requires honesty and a collective reckoning about race, white privilege, and institutional racism, with respect to the costs and benefits to each of us. Workers without a college degree were once able to provide a comfortable middle-class lifestyle on a union factory job. Draut (2016) argues that this was possible in part because most of those workers were white men who benefited from an entire social contract that had been written with them in mind. Once the civil rights movement began expanding equal opportunity to African Americans and blurring the old racial lines, new lines were drawn. Ian Haney Lopez (2015) refers to the implicitly race-coded language used by Reagan in the 1980s to redraw these lines—by vilifying people on government assistance and labeling them as “takers”—as dog-whistle politics. This was also the beginning of the antiunion backlash that continues today. Recently, Friedrichs v. California Teacher’s Association (CTA) threatened to deal a major blow to public-sector collective bargaining until a deadlocked vote of 4 to 4 by the Supreme Court, following the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia, upheld a lower court’s decision to allow public-sector unions to collect fees from nonunion members who benefit from collective bargaining and union representation. Had the Supreme Court ruled against CTA, it would have drastically weakened the middle class, especially among blacks who are disproportionately employed in the public sector. Though the threat of this particular case has been neutralized, future challenges are expected once the Supreme Court vacancy has been filled.

Advancing policies that address persistent racial disparities while also tackling class inequality will require abandoning the zero-sum mindset that says one group’s set of issues is totally distinct from and in direct competition with another’s. Overcoming this trap begins with defining a broader view of how all the issues are related. For example, there is a connection between the political, economic, and social disempowerment of black and brown communities embodied in the remarkably similar rise in mass incarceration during the 1980s and 1990s and deportations during the 1990s and 2000s ( Figure J ). To begin with, both trends can be traced to policy decisions, the burdens of which have been disproportionately born by black and Latino men and their families. Raphael and Stoll (2013) find that most of the growth in the prison population can be accounted for by society’s choice for tough-on-crime policies (e.g., determinate sentencing, truth-in-sentencing laws, limiting discretionary parole boards, etc.) resulting in more individuals—committing less serious offenses—being sentenced to serve time, and longer prison sentences. These policies have most affected black and Hispanic men, particularly those without a college degree. For example, in 1979, a black man faced a 13.4 percent chance of being admitted to a state or federal prison during his lifetime, compared with a 6 percent chance for a Hispanic man and a 2.5 percent chance for a white man. By 2001, these probabilities had grown to a 32.2 percent for black men, 17.2 percent chance for Hispanic men, and 5.9 percent for white men (Cox 2015).

Connection between disempowerment of blacks via mass incarceration and Latinos via deportations

Rate of imprisonment in state or federal correctional facilities, 1925–2011.

Total removal of non-U.S. citizens out of the country, 1925–2013

Note:  Removals are the compulsory and confirmed movement of an inadmissible or deportable alien out of the United States based on an order of removal. An alien who is removed has administrative or criminal consequences placed on subsequent reentry owing to the fact of the removal.

Source:  Imprisonment figures are calculations from Cox (2015), using data from Minor-Harper (1986) and Carson and Mulako-Wangota (2013); immigration figures are EPI analysis of data from the Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics

Similarly, the rapid rise in deportations was preceded by the passage of two 1996 laws: the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). These laws made individuals eligible for deportation, based on nearly any criminal offense, regardless of severity; eliminated judicial review of aggravated felony cases, and instituted mandatory detention of immigrants awaiting deportation proceedings. Ninety-eight percent of deportees are from Latin America and the Caribbean, 88 percent are men, and half of all deportations are on the grounds of criminal violations (Golash-Boza 2015). Golash-Boza (2015) further argues that immigration law enforcement serves the aims of global capitalism, making labor a disposable commodity and laborers powerless. This also has contributed to the suppression of working-class wages.

Opportunities to find common ground don’t stop with issues of social justice and civil rights that most directly impact African Americans and Latinos. As has already been stated, there is great commonality across race, ethnicity, and gender on economic issues such as wage stagnation. Unfortunately, as working-class families have come under increased economic pressure over the last 15 years, the result has not been greater racial and ethnic cohesion behind policies that can improve their lot. Divisions persist in spite of the data, which suggests that in order to deal with the common economic challenges, we have to deal with racial disparities and vice versa. The fact is working-class whites can’t blame people of color as the cause of their economic hardships any more than people of color can dismiss the economic frustrations of working-class whites as insignificant. As Figure E showed, the lack of median wage growth among white men did not translate into higher wages for black or Hispanic men, and declining median wages among black and Hispanic men were not offset by excessive wage growth among white men at the median. As a larger share of working-class jobs have shifted from making things to serving and caring for people, working-class whites are occupying more of the low-wage jobs that have traditionally been undervalued and disproportionately filled by women and people of color. So, not only do these workers share the experience of inadequate wages, but increasingly they’re working side by side in the same low-paying jobs.

Demography does not determine destiny, but will play a major role in shaping it

As we anticipate the demographic transition of the working class, one phrase seems especially appropriate—“demography is not destiny.” On one hand it is true that simply having more people in the working class who identify as something other than white doesn’t guarantee greater racial equity. On the other, demography will have an impact on the future of the American economy, politics, and social infrastructure. The shape of that destiny is what’s at stake. There are those who seek to stoke fears about this transition or frame it as a threat to white America for political gain. However, it is important to remember that the same special interest groups that fund the opposition to policies such as the minimum wage and paid sick leave, and that support efforts to undermine collective bargaining power, are often the same ones aligned with support of voter suppression tactics that limit voting among people of color, low-income individuals, students, seniors, and people with disabilities (Lafer 2013, Keyes et al. 2012, Weiser and Opsal 2014). The best way to advance the needed economic policies is for diverse groups to recognize that they share more in common than not and work together to achieve their overlapping and intersecting agendas. As simple as it may sound, that task is much easier said than done because it requires challenging and dismantling generations-old structures that were created to segregate people and establish a predetermined system of winners and losers on the basis of race. Historically, racism has created the sharpest social and economic divisions between whites and blacks, but it is also naïve to assume a collective identity that unifies the numerous and widely diverse constituencies conveniently referred to as minorities or people of color. In other words, there is work to do in tearing down stereotypes and building trust among all groups of people, not just between whites and people of color. It will take a considerable amount of ongoing effort to shift the dominant narrative from one that divides the masses to one that creates a new world of possibilities that benefits all of us. The only certain thing is that issues of race and ethnicity will become more central and will need to be confronted head on.

About the author

Valerie Wilson  is director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy (PREE), a nationally recognized source for expert reports and policy analyses on the economic condition of America’s people of color. Prior to joining EPI, Wilson was an economist and vice president of research at the National Urban League Washington Bureau, where she was responsible for planning and directing the bureau’s research agenda. She has written extensively on various issues impacting economic inequality in the United States—including employment and training, income and wealth disparities, access to higher education, and social insurance—and has also appeared in print, television, and radio media. She has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the participants of the EPI PREE Roundtable Convening on the Changing Demographics of America’s Working Class for their feedback on the issue of the changing working class, which has economic implications but also social and political components. In December 2015, EPI convened a diverse group of 21 people representing labor, civil rights, service, research, and community organizations for a candid discussion of the opportunities and challenges presented by a changing working class. While all the participants shared a commitment to racial, social, and economic justice, views about if and how the demographic shift of the working class would affect those objectives were not unanimous. What was clear is that addressing class and racial inequality will require big structural changes that are likely to be met with opposition from those outside of, and even within, the working class. Advancing these changes requires solidarity among an increasingly racially and ethnically diverse working class, a goal which presents its own set of challenges.

Methodology for estimating the year when the working class becomes majority people of color

In order to approximate the year in which the share of non-Hispanic whites in the working class falls below 50 percent, I apply projected changes in educational attainment to long-term labor force projections by race, ethnicity, gender, and age cohort. This process begins with using historical data on educational attainment from the 1993–2013 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC) 5 to calculate a group-specific average annual change in the percent of the civilian noninstitutionalized labor force (employed and unemployed) with less than a bachelor’s degree for each race/ethnicity-gender-age category. 6 This average annual change is then used to linearly interpolate the percentage with less than a bachelor’s degree for 2014 and beyond. These projected rates of educational attainment are then multiplied by each group’s projected labor force numbers in each year to estimate the group’s share of the working class. 7

The most recent long-term labor force projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) cover the years 2005 to 2050 and are based on the 2004 Interim National Population Projections of the Census Bureau with the 2000 Census as the population base (Toossi 2006). Since the Census Bureau’s 2004 population projections predicted a later date for the majority-minority transition than the 2012 population projections, the projected working class transition years estimated from these numbers may be more conservative than 2012 population projections (with a 2010 Census population base) would indicate. The long-term labor force projections used in this paper also predate the 2007 recession, which has taken a severe toll on labor force participation for all groups. Because BLS releases 10-year labor force projections every other year (more frequently than longer-term projections), I was able to compare pre- and post-2007 labor force projections. Based on a comparison of the 2005–2050 long-term labor force projections and the latest 10-year labor force projections for 2014–2024 8 , I determined that the racial composition of the labor force for years included in both sets of projections remains relatively unchanged despite differences in the size of the labor force. 9 Since the racial composition, and not the magnitude, of the labor force is most relevant for the estimates presented in this report, the use of prerecession projections should have a negligible effect on the results.

Alternative assumptions about college completion rates

Alternative assumptions about the rate of change in the educational attainment used to define the working class are based on the annual change for 2003 to 2013. This period is chosen as an alternative because average rates of college completion increased more quickly after 2003 as different age, race/ethnicity, and gender groups experienced sharp increases in their educational attainment.

Two age cohorts—18- to 24-year-olds and 35- to 44-year-olds—experienced an acceleration of college completion rates (or faster decline in the share of people with less than a bachelor’s degree) between 2003 and 2013 than during the previous ten years, while rates slowed or stayed the same for other age groups. Within these cohorts, changes have occurred at different rates for different groups. The current demographic composition of these cohorts, combined with variation in rates of attainment across groups, determines the date at which the majority-minority transition occurs.

Appendix Figure A shows the average annual percentage-point change in the share of the labor force with less than a bachelor’s degree under the baseline education assumption (from 1993 to 2013) and under the alternative education assumption (from 2003 to 2013). The analysis is presented for each of the demographic groups of 18- to 24-year-olds. The shares for non-Hispanic white and Asian men have declined more rapidly than other groups from 2003 to 2013, but since Asians are a very small share of the 18- to 24-year-old working class (2.9 percent), most of the impact on the transition date comes through increased college completion for whites, who are currently 60.7 percent of the working class in that age group. Depending on how quickly non-Hispanic whites in this age group continue to exit the working class, I project that the youngest working-class cohort will transition to majority-minority between 2031 and 2034.

College completion rates have also increased more quickly for 35- to 44-year-olds during the most recent decade as enrollment of nontraditional students has increased by over 30 percent 10 (Hussar and Bailey 2014). Again, the changes that have the largest impact happened among non-Hispanic whites who make up 57.5 percent of this working-class cohort, although African American women (7.3 percent of working class) and Asian women (1.7 percent of working class) and men (1.9 percent of working class) in this age group have also seen notable gains in college completion in the last 10 years ( Appendix Figure B ). Based on the progression of these educational attainment trends, this working-class cohort will become majority-minority between 2029 and 2031.

Annual change in share of 18- to 24-year-olds with less than bachelor's degree under alternative education attainment assumptions, by race/ethnicity, and gender

Source:  EPI analysis of educational attainment trends from 1993–2013 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement by age, gender, race, and ethnicity

Annual change in share of 35- to 44-year-olds with less than a bachelor's degree under alternative education attainment assumptions, by race/ethnicity and gender

1. The Census Bureau defines minorities as anyone outside of the single-race, non-Hispanic white population.

2. Author’s calculations based on analysis of 2012 Census population projections data.

3. Author’s calculations based on analysis of CPS ASEC microdata.

4. The civilian labor force is defined as people who have jobs or are seeking work, are at least 16 years old, and are not serving in the military or institutionalized.

5. CPS ASEC is the source of annual Census estimates of educational attainment in the population.

6. This process follows the cohort-component method used by Cheeseman Day and Bauman (2000) to project educational attainment for the population.

7. Only four mutually exclusive single-race and ethnic groups can be uniquely identified in the BLS labor force projections data: non-Hispanic whites, African Americans, Asians, and Hispanic whites. As a result, only these four groups are included in these calculations. Ninety-three percent of respondents of Hispanic origin report white as their race. The remaining 7 percent are distributed across the African American, Asian, and “All Other” race categories. “All Other” includes those of multiple racial origin, American Indian and Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders.

8. Toossi (2015) includes the 2014–2024 10-year labor force projections.

9. These comparisons are available from the author upon request.

10. Author’s calculations based on analysis of Hussar and Bailey (2014, Table 21).

Bivens, Josh. 2015. “ Remarks by Josh Bivens on Why It Is Too Soon for the Fed to Slow the Economy .” Working Economics (Economic Policy Institute blog), December 15.

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Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement microdata. Various years. Survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics [machine-readable microdata file]. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau.

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Hussar, William J., and Tabitha M. Bailey. 2014. Projections of Education Statistics to 2022 (NCES 2014-051) . U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 33.

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See related work on Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy (PREE)

See more work by Valerie Wilson

Field Notes

The educated working class.

My brother joined a Maoist political party in college in the early ’70s and was sent to work in an auto plant. He was supposed to convert the workers there to Marxism-Leninism but instead he was converted to an industrial working-class culture that included country music, hard drinking, and pot smoking. He found this to be more conducive to his own proclivities than the precepts of the Little Red Book. Like many students in the ’60s and ’70s, he had been radicalized by the student movement, the civil rights movement, and the anti-Vietnam War movement. The inequality and injustices that generation of students witnessed and experienced led many of them to the anti-capitalist ideas of various schools of socialism and Marxism. Some sought to spread these ideas to the working class in order to foment a revolution against capital that they imagined could restructure the society to the benefit of all. The students saw themselves as separate from the working class. Their conception of the working class was mainly the factory worker, the miner, the truck driver—the industrial workers who fought the great labor battles of the first half of the 20th century. They visualized themselves bringing their radical ideas to these blue-collar industrial workers and raising their consciousness, awakening them to the inequities of capitalism.

While the auto workers, coal miners, and construction workers had no interest in revolution, the student movement, increasingly radicalized throughout the 1960s, became more revolutionary, reaching its apex in the massive student strike of May 1970 that spread from college campuses to community colleges to high schools and resulted in the cancellation of classes for the remainder of the school year. Four million students walked out of school. The leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other radical organizations, however, did not see in this the spark of the revolution they wanted. Students, they thought, were powerless against the capitalists without the support of the working class. Corporate leaders at the time, however, were shaken by the massive student movement and the talk of revolution. In 1971, Life magazine published photos of the aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871, with the hundreds of corpses of the defeated communards lying in the streets. With their long hair and beards they looked very much like the radical students of the 1970s. The message seemed to be a warning to the American students. The ruling class needn’t have worried, though. The movement began to dissipate soon after that, as SDS and the revolutionary parties split into rival factions like the Weathermen, who called for a violent uprising, while others looked to send their members into factories and communities to organize. Most of the students returned to their classes in the fall or went back after a few years to finish their degrees. What was for some of them a brief flirtation with revolution mostly dissipated with graduation and their entry into the workforce.

The student movement of the ’60s and ’70s was portrayed by the media as a middle-class phenomenon, a revolt of privileged suburban youth against the conformity of their parents’ generation. But this was a time of vast expansion of higher education, with the entry into college of many who were the first of their generation to attend and many who were the sons and daughters of working-class parents. No matter their class background, however, college students for the most part thought of themselves as middle-class by virtue of their education.

For the first half of the 20th century, a college education was largely reserved for the wealthy, but the post-war boom brought changes to American higher education. Government assistance programs like the GI Bill and federal student loan programs allowed for a great expansion of college enrollment. A college degree was seen as a ticket to a good-paying job and a rise in social standing. Things changed again, though, as the post-war economic boom came to an end. By the 1970s the trajectory of upward mobility was no longer guaranteed by the possession of a degree and by the 1980s the era of the educated underclass had begun.

In The Educated Underclass: Students and the Promise of Social Mobility , Gary Roth leads us through this history and, with thorough research, exposes the numerous myths and misconceptions that abound in the connections between education, class, and upward mobility. His goal is to show that a recreation of the working class is taking place as expanded numbers of college students enter into the world of work.

He has used his experiences as a college instructor and administrator to focus on the changing conditions in American higher education over the past 50 years, tracking the social mobility of graduates over that period. It is a timely subject for today’s world, where many recent graduates find themselves unemployed, or working at jobs for which a degree is not necessary—what Roth refers to as the underemployed. The promise that a college degree would be a ticket to a good job and a career has proven for many to be a hollow one that has left them stuck in unfulfilling low-paying jobs and saddled with student debt. Roth investigates this myth in depth, unravelling the complexities in the relationship between higher education and social mobility.

A lot of research has been done on income inequality, so there is a considerable amount of data on intergenerational mobility based on income and wealth. Using tables that divide the population into quintiles, Roth shows that a large proportion of the upper and lower income brackets show no movement from one generation to the next. With a college degree, the chances of moving up from the lowest rung do increase somewhat; while at the top income bracket, where many more actually earn a bachelor's degree, the chances of remaining in the top are substantially improved. But the degree only helps to compensate for the headwinds that prevail against those from the lower income bracket, while those at the top have the tailwind of their family financial and cultural capital to aid them. As Roth points out, “earning a bachelor’s degree does not level the playing field for children from families at opposite ends of the income spectrum.”

In an expanding economy like that of the few decades following World War II all sectors of the population could experience upward mobility, but in the stagnating economy that followed for the next 50 years only the top 20 percent showed any significant gains in income while the top one percent saw an increased income of close to 200 percent. This is the world into which college students graduate today, a work environment where only the upper strata have seen more than a minuscule gain over the last half century. On top of this, many are saddled with burdensome student debt. Over half of all college students finance their education using loans, and for those in the lowest fifth income bracket this is often the only way to pay for what amounts to 50 to 100 percent of their family’s income for a four year public college. As Roth points out, however, the reality of the student debt crisis is not reflected in the amount of individual debt. Wealthier families are more likely to send their children to more selective schools, whence they are better able to get into graduate school or post-college professional programs. Although they might emerge with a debt as large as $40,000 or more, they are more able to find good-paying jobs allowing them to pay back their loans far more easily than a low-income student with a $5,000 debt from a less selective four-year or two-year college. Those students are more likely to have trouble making their payments or to default on their loans, causing problems with credit down the road. If they dropped out before graduation, which is far more common in students from the lower income brackets, they will find it difficult to return to finish their degree. Student debt, which was once seen as a means to upward mobility, has now become an impediment to it.

Since the 1990s the number of graduates with four-year degrees working in jobs where a college degree is not a requirement has been increasing, while the quality of these jobs has been decreasing. In the new gig economy recent graduates often find themselves accepting low wages and part-time work. These underemployed now make up a large part of the work force constituted by all college graduates (30 to 35 percent). As Gary Roth writes: “Most people have rather out-of-date images of social mobility, in which people’s lives improve gradually but steadily over long periods of time due to a combination of decent salaries and stable employment. This image no longer fits reality.” The reality now is that a college degree is more likely a hedge against spiraling further down the income scale, as college graduates replace non-graduates in these low paying jobs. This in turn makes it more difficult for the non-graduates to find any work at all. Whereas once college students took union factory jobs like my brother did, with the goal of educating and radicalizing their co-workers, now they might consider themselves lucky to get such a job.

Through all of this analysis, Roth does not lose sight of what he sees as his primary task, to show how the fate of college students is tied to the overall dynamics of the economic system. As the capitalist world economy stagnates, opportunities diminish, competition for the better jobs increases, and, as always, those who start out higher on the social scale are better able to advance or at least to hold their own while the others struggle to avoid precarity. The education system thus is primarily a “mechanism to maintain social position from one generation to the next.” Those at the top tend to stay there while the rest struggle to keep from falling below the level of their parents. It is their class position as future wage earners that unites them with each other and with other members of the working class despite the social stratification that takes place during the sorting and winnowing out of the education process. It is the popular conception of class as social stratification, based on income, education level, and family background, that divides them from each other within a vast “middle class” and separates them from the sociological categories of the “upper” and “lower classes.”

Roth recognizes the difference between class as a theoretical construct, as used by Marx to explain the dynamics of the capitalist system, and the sociological and popular idea of class based on income and wealth. The former unites a large swath of the population in the category of those who depend on wages to survive, the working class, while the latter separates the population into an infinite number of divisions according to their access to consumer goods and services:

Material things separate people and make them unequal economically, people who otherwise are uniquely diverse in their individuality and who also share a similar fate vis-a-vis society at large. A focus on class emphasizes those aspects of social reality that people have in common, such as the dependence on employment and laboring activity, whereas difference and differences are stressed by the social sciences.

Roth set out to explain “the role of education within these two realms of equality and inequality,” with the aim of showing that a large working class is reemerging. The term “working class” has fallen out of common use, replaced by the three-level view of class: the upper class of the very wealthy, the lower class of the very poor, and the vast middle class of everybody else. Some of Roth’s students, he tells us, never heard of the working class until they got to college, but thought of themselves as middle-class despite wide disparities within that group in family wealth and education. With so many college graduates underemployed, they now find themselves in the same position as the traditional working class, their degree no longer granting them any type of privileged position. The sociological division into income strata becomes less relevant, while the concept of class as a social power relationship is more pertinent to their situation.

The working class is international in nature, just as capital is supranational, as it flows across state boundaries in its worldwide reach. In the first quarter of the 21st century we are witnessing a rise in nationalism akin to that which took hold of the world in the first half of the last century. In 1914 a powerful working-class movement for social and political power was fractured by nationalism, as the socialist parties of Europe broke from each other. Against the pleas of many of their members and their own rhetoric of international solidarity, they supported their national governments’ entry into World War I, a war in which the workers of all the countries of Europe and the wider world slaughtered each other in vast numbers. Then, after the devastation caused by that war and the economic collapse of the Great Depression, the super-nationalistic movement of fascism arose to counter the revolutionary response of the working classes. It is no coincidence that we are now witnessing another proliferation of authoritarian nationalist movements throughout the world at a time of increasing economic difficulty and stagnating working-class living standards. Nationalism is the glue that binds the working class to the capitalist class in what is promoted as their common interest, at the same time dividing them from other members of their class.

In the current crisis of the capitalist world order manifested in a stagnating world economy propped up by infusions of government spending, with massive youth unemployment, the rise of authoritarianism and constant war, all exacerbated by the developing climate apocalypse, hope for salvation rests on the working people of the world becoming conscious of their common interest in wresting control of human social organization from the blind power of capital and the wealthy overseers who do its bidding. College students, who once saw themselves as separate from the working class but who nevertheless often played a role in the social movements that arose throughout the 20th century and beyond, are no longer separated from that class by their education but form the new educated working class. As such they have an important role to play in any new movement of working people. As Gary Roth writes in the close of this book: “For college students to find the working class, they need merely to glance in a mirror.” The educated underclass may be over-educated for the jobs that are available to them but they have the education necessary for a post-capitalist future world of sustainability and equality.

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• Labor and Working Class History x

African Americans in the Great Depression and New Deal  

Mary-elizabeth b. murphy, publication history:.

For African Americans, the Great Depression and the New Deal (1929–1940) marked a transformative era and laid the groundwork for the postwar black freedom struggle in the United States. The outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929 caused widespread suffering and despair in black communities across the country as women and men faced staggering rates of unemployment and poverty. Once Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), a Democrat, was inaugurated as president in 1933, he launched a “New Deal” of ambitious government programs to lift the United States out of the economic crisis. Most African Americans were skeptical about benefiting from the New Deal, and racial discrimination remained rampant. However, a cohort of black advisors and activists critiqued these government programs for excluding African Americans and enacted some reforms. At the grassroots level, black workers pressed for expanded employment opportunities and joined new labor unions to fight for economic rights. As the New Deal progressed a sea change swept over black politics. Many black voters switched their allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic Party, waged more militant campaigns for racial justice, and joined interracial and leftist coalitions. African Americans also challenged entrenched cultural stereotypes through photography, theater, and oral histories to illuminate the realities of black life in the United States. By 1940, African Americans now wielded an arsenal of protest tactics and were marching on a path toward full citizenship rights, which remains an always evolving process.

American Film since 1945  

Joshua gleich.

Over the past seventy years, the American film industry has transformed from mass-producing movies to producing a limited number of massive blockbuster movies on a global scale. Hollywood film studios have moved from independent companies to divisions of media conglomerates. Theatrical attendance for American audiences has plummeted since the mid-1940s; nonetheless, American films have never been more profitable. In 1945, American films could only be viewed in theaters; now they are available in myriad forms of home viewing. Throughout, Hollywood has continued to dominate global cinema, although film and now video production reaches Americans in many other forms, from home videos to educational films. Amid declining attendance, the Supreme Court in 1948 forced the major studios to sell off their theaters. Hollywood studios instead focused their power on distribution, limiting the supply of films and focusing on expensive productions to sell on an individual basis to theaters. Growing production costs and changing audiences caused wild fluctuations in profits, leading to an industry-wide recession in the late 1960s. The studios emerged under new corporate ownership and honed their blockbuster strategy, releasing “high concept” films widely on the heels of television marketing campaigns. New technologies such as cable and VCRs offered new windows for Hollywood movies beyond theatrical release, reducing the risks of blockbuster production. Deregulation through the 1980s and 1990s allowed for the “Big Six” media conglomerates to join film, theaters, networks, publishing, and other related media outlets under one corporate umbrella. This has expanded the scale and stability of Hollywood revenue while reducing the number and diversity of Hollywood films, as conglomerates focus on film franchises that can thrive on various digital media. Technological change has also lowered the cost of non-Hollywood films and thus encouraged a range of alternative forms of filmmaking, distribution, and exhibition.

American Labor and the Working Day  

Philipp reick.

From the first local strikes in the late 18th century to the massive eight-hour movement that shook the country a century later, the length of the working day has been one of the most contentious issues in the history of American labor. Organized workers have fought for shorter hours for various reasons. If they were to be good citizens, workers needed time to follow the news and attend political rallies, to visit lectures and museums, and to perform civic duties. Shorter-hour activists also defended worktime reduction as a tool for moral betterment. Workers needed time to attend religious services and be involved in religious associations, to become better spouses and parents, and to refine their customs and manners through exposure to literature, music, and the arts. Trade unions also promoted shorter hours as sound economic policy. Especially when joblessness was rampant, unionists argued that shorter working days would help distribute available work more evenly among the workforce. During times of economic growth, they shifted the focus to productivity and consumption, arguing that well-rested workers not only performed better, but also had the time to purchase and enjoy the products and services they helped create. As organized labor tended to give preference to full employment and consumption over further working time reductions in the aftermath of the New Deal, the hour issue took a backseat in the second half of the 20th century. It reentered the debate, however, in the late 2000s when high-tech and knowledge industries started to experiment with compressed workweek models. Given the widespread experience of remote work and temporary working time reductions during the Covid-19 pandemic, the question of how much time Americans should, must, and want to spend at work is likely to remain in the focus of public attention.

American Labor and Working-Class History, 1900–1945  

Jeffrey helgeson.

Early 20th century American labor and working-class history is a subfield of American social history that focuses attention on the complex lives of working people in a rapidly changing global political and economic system. Once focused closely on institutional dynamics in the workplace and electoral politics, labor history has expanded and refined its approach to include questions about the families, communities, identities, and cultures workers have developed over time. With a critical eye on the limits of liberal capitalism and democracy for workers’ welfare, labor historians explore individual and collective struggles against exclusion from opportunity, as well as accommodation to political and economic contexts defined by rapid and volatile growth and deep inequality. Particularly important are the ways that workers both defined and were defined by differences of race, gender, ethnicity, class, and place. Individual workers and organized groups of working Americans both transformed and were transformed by the main struggles of the industrial era, including conflicts over the place of former slaves and their descendants in the United States, mass immigration and migrations, technological change, new management and business models, the development of a consumer economy, the rise of a more active federal government, and the evolution of popular culture. The period between 1896 and 1945 saw a crucial transition in the labor and working-class history of the United States. At its outset, Americans were working many more hours a day than the eight for which they had fought hard in the late 19th century. On average, Americans labored fifty-four to sixty-three hours per week in dangerous working conditions (approximately 35,000 workers died in accidents annually at the turn of the century). By 1920, half of all Americans lived in growing urban neighborhoods, and for many of them chronic unemployment, poverty, and deep social divides had become a regular part of life. Workers had little power in either the Democratic or Republican party. They faced a legal system that gave them no rights at work but the right to quit, judges who took the side of employers in the labor market by issuing thousands of injunctions against even nonviolent workers’ organizing, and vigilantes and police forces that did not hesitate to repress dissent violently. The ranks of organized labor were shrinking in the years before the economy began to recover in 1897. Dreams of a more democratic alternative to wage labor and corporate-dominated capitalism had been all but destroyed. Workers struggled to find their place in an emerging consumer-oriented culture that assumed everyone ought to strive for the often unattainable, and not necessarily desirable, marks of middle-class respectability. Yet American labor emerged from World War II with the main sectors of the industrial economy organized, with greater earning potential than any previous generation of American workers, and with unprecedented power as an organized interest group that could appeal to the federal government to promote its welfare. Though American workers as a whole had made no grand challenge to the nation’s basic corporate-centered political economy in the preceding four and one-half decades, they entered the postwar world with a greater level of power, and a bigger share in the proceeds of a booming economy, than anyone could have imagined in 1896. The labor and working-class history of the United States between 1900 and 1945, then, is the story of how working-class individuals, families, and communities—members of an extremely diverse American working class—managed to carve out positions of political, economic, and cultural influence, even as they remained divided among themselves, dependent upon corporate power, and increasingly invested in a individualistic, competitive, acquisitive culture.

America’s Wars on Poverty and the Building of the Welfare State  

David torstensson.

On January 5, 2014—the fiftieth anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s launch of the War on Poverty—the New York Times asked a panel of opinion leaders a simple question: “Does the U.S. Need Another War on Poverty?” While the answers varied, all the invited debaters accepted the martial premise of the question—that a war on poverty had been fought and that eliminating poverty was, without a doubt, a “fight,” or a “battle.” Yet the debate over the manner—martial or not—by which the federal government and public policy has dealt with the issue of poverty in the United States is still very much an open-ended one. The evolution and development of the postwar American welfare state is a story not only of a number of “wars,” or individual political initiatives, against poverty, but also about the growth of institutions within and outside government that seek to address, alleviate, and eliminate poverty and its concomitant social ills. It is a complex and at times messy story, interwoven with the wider historical trajectory of this period: civil rights, the rise and fall of a “Cold War consensus,” the emergence of a counterculture, the Vietnam War, the credibility gap, the rise of conservatism, the end of “welfare,” and the emergence of compassionate conservatism. Mirroring the broader organization of the American political system, with a relatively weak center of power and delegated authority and decision-making in fifty states, the welfare model has developed and grown over decades. Policies viewed in one era as unmitigated failures have instead over time evolved and become part of the fabric of the welfare state.

Antebellum U.S. Labor Markets  

Joshua l. rosenbloom.

The United States economy underwent major transformations between American independence and the Civil War through rapid population growth, the development of manufacturing, the onset of modern economic growth, increasing urbanization, the rapid spread of settlement into the trans-Appalachian west, and the rise of European immigration. These decades were also characterized by an increasing sectional conflict between free and slave states that culminated in 1861 in Southern secession from the Union and a bloody and destructive Civil War. Labor markets were central to each of these developments, directing the reallocation of labor between sectors and regions, channeling a growing population into productive employment, and shaping the growing North–South division within the country. Put differently, labor markets influenced the pace and character of economic development in the antebellum United States. On the one hand, the responsiveness of labor markets to economic shocks helped promote economic growth; on the other, imperfections in labor market responses to these shocks significantly affected the character and development of the national economy.

Appalachian War on Poverty and the Working Class  

Jessica wilkerson.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced an unconditional “war on poverty.” On one of his first publicity tours promoting his antipoverty legislation, he traveled to cities and towns in Appalachia, which would become crucial areas for promoting and implementing the legislation. Johnson soon signed the Economic Opportunity Act, a piece of legislation that provided a structure for communities to institute antipoverty programs, from vocational services to early childhood education programs, and encouraged the creation of new initiatives. In 1965, Johnson signed the Appalachian Regional Development Act, making Appalachia the only region targeted by federal antipoverty legislation, through the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission. The Appalachian War on Poverty can be described as a set of policies created by governmental agencies, but also crucial to it was a series of community movements and campaigns, led by working-class people, that responded to antipoverty policies. When the War on Poverty began, the language of policymakers suggested that people living below the poverty line would be served by the programs. But as the antipoverty programs expanded and more local people became involved, they spoke openly and in political terms about poverty as a working-class issue. They drew attention to the politics of class in the region, where elites and absentee landowners became wealthy on the backs of working people. They demanded meaningful participation in shaping the War on Poverty in their communities, and, increasingly, when they used the term “poor people,” they did so as a collective class identity—working people who were poor due to a rigged economy. While many public officials focused on economic development policies, men and women living in the region began organizing around issues ranging from surface mining to labor rights and responding to poor living and working conditions. Taking advantage of federal antipoverty resources and the spirit of change that animated the 1960s, working-class Appalachians would help to shape the antipoverty programs at the local and regional level, creating a movement in the process. They did so as they organized around issues—including the environment, occupational safety, health, and welfare rights—and as they used antipoverty programs as a platform to address the systemic inequalities that plagued many of their communities.

Arab Labor Migration in the Americas, 1880–1930  

Stacy d. fahrenthold.

Between 1880 and 1924, an estimated half million Arab migrants left the Ottoman Empire to live and work in the Americas. Responding to new economic forces linking the Mediterranean and Atlantic capitalist economies to one another, Arab migrants entered the manufacturing industries of the settler societies they inhabited, including industrial textiles, small-scale commerce (peddling), heavy machining, and migrant services associated with continued immigration from the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire enacted few policies to halt emigration from Syria, Mount Lebanon, and Palestine, instead facilitating a remittance economy that enhanced the emerging cash economies of the Arab world. After 1920, the French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon moved to limit new migration to the Americas, working together with increasingly restrictive immigration regimes in the United States, Argentina, and Brazil to halt Arab labor immigration. Using informal archives, the Arab American press, and the records of diasporic mutual aid and philanthropic societies, new research in Arab American migration illustrates how migrants managed a transnational labor economy and confronted challenges presented by American nativism, travel restriction, and interwar deportations.

Asian American Activism  

Vivian truong.

Activism is a defining element of Asian American history. Throughout most of their presence in the United States, Asian Americans have engaged in organized resistance even in the face of violent exclusion and repression. These long histories of activism challenge prevailing notions of the political silence of Asian Americans, which have persisted since the rise of the model minority narrative in the mid-20th century. Examining Asian American history through the lens of activism shows how Asian Americans were not simply acted upon, but were agents in forging their own histories. In the century after the first substantial waves of migration in the 1850s, Asian Americans protested labor conditions, fought for full citizenship rights, and led efforts to liberate their homelands from colonial rule. Activism has been a key part of determining who Asian Americans are—indeed, the term “Asian American” itself was coined in the 1960s as a radical political identity in a movement against racism and imperialism. In the decades since the Asian American movement, “Asian America” has become larger and more diverse. Contemporary Asian American activism reflects the expansiveness and heterogeneity of Asian American communities.

Autoworkers and Their Unions  

Daniel clark.

Since the introduction of “Fordism” in the early 1910s, which emphasized technological improvements and maximizing productive efficiency, US autoworkers have struggled with repetitive, exhausting, often dangerous jobs. Yet beginning with Ford’s Five Dollar Day, introduced in 1914, auto jobs have also provided higher pay than most other wage work, attracting hundreds of thousands of people, especially to Detroit, Michigan, through the 1920s, and again from World War II until the mid-1950s. Successful unionization campaigns by the United Auto Workers (UAW) in the 1930s and early 1940s resulted in contracts that guaranteed particular wage increases, reduced the power of foremen, and created a process for resolving workplace conflicts. In the late 1940s and early 1950s UAW president Walter Reuther negotiated generous medical benefits and pensions for autoworkers. The volatility of the auto industry, however, often brought layoffs that undermined economic security. By the 1950s overproduction and automation contributed heavily to instability for autoworkers. The UAW officially supported racial and gender equality, but realities in auto plants and the makeup of union leadership often belied those principles. Beginning in the 1970s US autoworkers faced disruptions caused by high oil prices, foreign competition, and outsourcing to Mexico. Contract concessions at unionized plants began in the late 1970s and continued into the 2000s. By the end of the 20th century, many American autoworkers did not belong to the UAW because they were employed by foreign automakers, who built factories in the United States and successfully opposed unionization. For good reason, autoworkers who survived the industry’s turbulence and were able to retire with guaranteed pensions and medical care look back fondly on all that they gained from working in the industry under UAW contracts. Countless others left auto work permanently and often reluctantly in periodic massive layoffs and the continuous loss of jobs from automation.

The Bracero Program/“Guest Worker” Programs  

Ana elizabeth rosas.

On August 4, 1942, the Mexican and US governments launched the binational guest worker program most commonly known as the Bracero Program. An estimated 5 million Mexican men between the ages of nineteen and forty-five separated from their families for three to nine-month cycles at a time, depending on the duration of their labor contract, in anticipation of earning the prevailing US wage this program had promised them. They labored in US agriculture, railroad construction, and forestry with hardly any employment protections or rights in place to support themselves or the families they had left behind in Mexico. The inhumane configuration and implementation of this program prevented most of these men and their families from meeting this goal. Instead, the labor exploitation and alienation that characterized this guest worker program and their program participation paved the way for fragile transnational family relationships. The Bracero Program grew over the course of its twenty-two-year existence, and despite its negative consequences, Mexican men and their families could not afford to settle for unemployment in Mexico nor pass up US employment opportunities of any sort. The Mexican and US governments’ persistently negligent management of the program coupled with their conveniently selective acknowledgment of the severity of the plight of Mexican women and men consistently required Mexican men and their families to shoulder the full extent of the program’s exploitative conditions and terms.

Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Movement  

Matt garcia.

In September 1962, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) held its first convention in Fresno, California, initiating a multiracial movement that would result in the creation of United Farm Workers (UFW) and the first contracts for farm workers in the state of California. Led by Cesar Chavez, the union contributed a number of innovations to the art of social protest, including the most successful consumer boycott in the history of the United States. Chavez welcomed contributions from numerous ethnic and racial groups, men and women, young and old. For a time, the UFW was the realization of Martin Luther King Jr.’s beloved community—people from different backgrounds coming together to create a socially just world. During the 1970s, Chavez struggled to maintain the momentum created by the boycott as the state of California became more involved in adjudicating labor disputes under the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA). Although Chavez and the UFW ultimately failed to establish a permanent, national union, their successes and strategies continue to influence movements for farm worker justice today.

Ann Durkin Keating

Chicago is a city shaped by industrial capitalism. Before 1848, it was a small commercial outpost in Potawatomi country, and then it expanded with the US economy between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. Between 1848 and 1929, Chicago grew from under 30,000 to more than 3 million, fueled by the construction of railroads, warehouses, and factories. Working-class immigrants built their own neighborhoods around industrial sites and along railroads, while a downtown dominated by skyscrapers emerged to serve the needs of corporate clients. Since 1929, Chicago remained an industrial powerhouse and magnet for Black and Latino migrants, even as its economic growth depended more and more on commerce and the service industry.

Child Migrants in 20th-Century America  

Ivón padilla-rodríguez.

Child migration has garnered widespread media coverage in the 21st century, becoming a central topic of national political discourse and immigration policymaking. Contemporary surges of child migrants are part of a much longer history of migration to the United States. In the first half of the 20th century, millions of European and Asian child migrants passed through immigration inspection stations in the New York harbor and San Francisco Bay. Even though some accompanied and unaccompanied European child migrants experienced detention at Ellis Island, most were processed and admitted into the United States fairly quickly in the early 20th century. Few of the European child migrants were deported from Ellis Island. Predominantly accompanied Chinese and Japanese child migrants, however, like Latin American and Caribbean migrants in recent years, were more frequently subjected to family separation, abuse, detention, and deportation at Angel Island. Once inside the United States, both European and Asian children struggled to overcome poverty, labor exploitation, educational inequity, the attitudes of hostile officials, and public health problems. After World War II, Korean refugee “orphans” came to the United States under the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 and the Immigration and Nationality Act. European, Cuban, and Indochinese refugee children were admitted into the United States through a series of ad hoc programs and temporary legislation until the 1980 Refugee Act created a permanent mechanism for the admission of refugee and unaccompanied children. Exclusionary immigration laws, the hardening of US international boundaries, and the United States preference for refugees who fled Communist regimes made unlawful entry the only option for thousands of accompanied and unaccompanied Mexican, Central American, and Haitian children in the second half of the 20th century. Black and brown migrant and asylum-seeking children were forced to endure educational deprivation, labor trafficking, mandatory detention, deportation, and deadly abuse by US authorities and employers at US borders and inside the country.

Cold War in the American Working Class  

Rosemary feurer.

The US working class and the institutional labor movement was shaped by anticommunism. Anticommunism preceded the founding of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, and this early history affected the later experience. It reinforced conservative positions on union issues even in the period before the Cold War, and forged the alliances that influenced the labor movement’s direction, including the campaign to organize the South, the methods and structures of unions, and US labor’s foreign policy positions. While the Communist Party of the USA (CP) was a hierarchical organization straitjacketed by an allegiance to the Soviet Union, the unions it fostered cultivated radical democratic methods, while anticommunism often justified opposition to militancy and obstructed progressive policies. In the hottest moments of the postwar development of domestic anticommunism, unions and their members were vilified and purged from the labor movement, forced to take loyalty oaths, and fired for their association with the CP. The Cold War in the working class removed critical perspectives on capitalism, reinforced a moderate and conservative labor officialdom, and led to conformity with the state on foreign policy issues.

Communism and the Labor Movement  

Randi storch.

Communist activists took a strong interest in American trade unions from the 1920s through the 1950s and played an important role in shaping the nature of the American union movement. Initial communist trade union activism drew upon radical labor traditions that preceded the formation of the American Communist Party (CPUSA). Early communist trade unionists experimented with different types of structures to organize unorganized workers. They also struggled with international communist factionalism. Communist trade unionists were most effective during the Great Depression and World War II. In those years, communist activists helped build the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and bring industrial unionism to previously unorganized workers. Throughout the history of communist involvement in the US labor movement, international communist policy guided general organizing strategies. Shifts in international policy, such as the announcement of a Soviet non-aggression pact with Germany, proved politically difficult to navigate on the local level. Yet, Left-led unions proved to be more democratically run and focused on racial and gender equality than many of those without communist influence. Their leadership supported social justice and militant action. The Cold War years witnessed CIO purges of Left-led unions and federal investigations and arrests of communist trade unionists. Repression from both within and without the labor movement as well as the CPUSA’s own internal policy battles ultimately ended communist trade unionists’ widespread influence on American trade unions.

Communist Party USA, 1919 to 1957  

James r. barrett.

The largest and most important revolutionary socialist organization in US history, the Communist Party USA was always a minority influence. It reached considerable size and influence, however, during the Great Depression and World War II years when it followed the more open line associated with the term “Popular Front.” In these years communists were much more flexible in their strategies and relations with other groups, though the party remained a hierarchical vanguard organization. It grew from a largely isolated sect dominated by unskilled and unemployed immigrant men in the 1920s to a socially diverse movement of nearly 100,000 based heavily on American born men and women from the working and professional classes by the late 1930s and during World War II, exerting considerable influence in the labor movement and American cultural life. In these years, the Communist Party helped to build the industrial union movement, advanced the cause of African American civil rights, and laid the foundation for the postwar feminist movement. But the party was always prone to abrupt changes in line and vulnerable to attack as a sinister outside force because of its close adherence to Soviet policies and goals. Several factors contributed to its catastrophic decline in the 1950s: the increasingly antagonistic Cold War struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States; an unprecedented attack from employers and government at various levels—criminal cases and imprisonment, deportation, and blacklisting; and within the party itself, a turn back toward a more dogmatic version of Marxism-Leninism and a heightened atmosphere of factional conflict and purges.

Patricia Evridge Hill

From its origins in the 1840s, Dallas developed quickly into a prosperous market town. After acquiring two railroads in the 1870s, the city became the commercial and financial center of North Central Texas. Early urban development featured competition and cooperation between the city’s business leadership, women’s groups, and coalitions formed by Populists, socialists, and organized labor. Notably, the city’s African Americans were marginalized economically and excluded from civic affairs. By the end of the 1930s, city building became more exclusive even for the white population. A new generation of business leaders threatened by disputes over Progressive Era social reforms and city planning, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and attempts to organize industrial workers used its control of local media, at-large elections, and repression to dominate civic affairs until the 1970s.

The Department Store  

Traci parker.

Department stores were the epicenter of American consumption and modernity in the late 19th and through the 20th century. Between 1846 and 1860 store merchants and commercial impresarios remade dry goods stores and small apparel shops into department stores—downtown emporiums that departmentalized its vast inventory and offered copious services and amenities. Their ascendance corresponded with increased urbanization, immigration, industrialization, and the mass production of machine-made wares. Urbanization and industrialization also helped to birth a new White middle class who were eager to spend their money on material comforts and leisure activities. And department stores provided them with a place where they could do so. Stores sold shoppers an astounding array of high-quality, stylish merchandise including clothing, furniture, radios, sporting equipment, musical instruments, luggage, silverware, china, and books. They also provided an array of services and amenities, including public telephones, postal services, shopping assistance, free delivery, telephone-order and mail-order departments, barber shops, hair salons, hospitals and dental offices, radio departments, shoe-shining stands, wedding gift registries and wedding secretary services, tearooms, and restaurants. Stores enthroned consumption as the route to democracy and citizenship, inviting everybody—regardless of race, gender, age, and class—to enter, browse, and purchase material goods. They were major employers of white-collar workers and functioned as a new public space for women as workers and consumers. The 20th century brought rapid and significant changes and challenges. Department stores weathered economic crises; two world wars; new and intense competition from neighborhood, chain, and discount stores; and labor and civil rights protests that threatened to damage their image and displace them as the nation’s top retailers. They experienced cutbacks, consolidated services, and declining sales during the Great Depression, played an essential role in the war effort, and contended with the Office of Price Administration’s Emergency Price Control Act during the Second World War. In the postwar era, they opened branch locations in suburban neighborhoods where their preferred clientele—the White middle class—now resided and shaped the development and proliferation of shopping centers. They hastened the decline of downtown shopping as a result. The last three decades of the 20th century witnessed a wave of department store closures, mergers, and acquisitions because of changing consumer behaviors, shifts in the retail landscape, and evolving market dynamics. Department stores would continue to suffer into the 21st century as online retailing exploded.

Ryan S. Pettengill

From its earliest origins through the 21st century, Detroit was a capitalist venture that was tied to the global economy. Throughout the pre-Columbian period, Detroit served as a meeting point where a diverse confederation of Native Americans came together to conduct business and diplomacy. Later, the city became a contested territorial holding that the Western imperial powers of France, Spain, Great Britain, and the United States fought over, as it represented a critical gateway that opened up trade to the central and western regions of North America. Between 1835 and 1929, capitalists built wharfs, railroad lines, factories, warehouses, and other forms of industrial infrastructure, attracting throngs of working-class job seekers and causing Detroit’s population to boom from approximately 1,100 in 1819 to more than one million in 1930. The population peaked at nearly two million in 1950 and, by 2020, it had declined to approximately 700,000. Detroit’s history might be thought of in three distinct periods: a pre-Columbian period where the region consisted of a preindustrial space that was occupied by Anishinaabeg peoples, later to be claimed by European colonists; a long industrial era in which businessmen, such as Henry Ford, centralized production within the city; and a slow period of economic decline as the city struggled to adapt to different trends in a global economy. As Detroit entered the 21st century, the city faced a declining population, rising budget deficits, and a crumbling infrastructure. Still, as several multinational corporations based their operations out of Detroit, the city remained a capitalist venture fundamentally tied to the global economy.

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date: 02 September 2024

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How the Diploma Divide Is Remaking American Politics

Education is at the heart of this country’s many divisions..

Blue America is an increasingly wealthy and well-educated place.

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Americans without college degrees were more likely than university graduates to vote Democratic. But that gap began narrowing in the late 1960s before finally flipping in 2004 .

John F. Kennedy lost college-educated voters by a two-to-one margin yet won the presidency thanks to overwhelming support among white voters without a degree. Sixty years later, our second Catholic president charted a much different path to the White House, losing non-college-educated whites by a two-to-one margin while securing 60 percent of the college-educated vote. The latest New York Times /Siena poll of the 2022 midterms showed this pattern holding firm, with Democrats winning 55 percent of voters with bachelor’s degrees but only 39 percent of those without.

A more educated Democratic coalition is, naturally, a more affluent one. In every presidential election from 1948 to 2012, white voters in the top 5 percent of America’s income distribution were more Republican than those in the bottom 95 percent. Now, the opposite is true: Among America’s white majority, the rich voted to the left of the middle class and the poor in 2016 and 2020, while the poor voted to the right of the middle class and the rich.

In political-science parlance, the collapse of the New Deal–era alignment — in which voters’ income levels strongly predicted their partisan preference — is often referred to as “class dealignment.” The increasing tendency for politics to divide voters along educational lines, meanwhile, is known as “education polarization.”

There are worse things for a political coalition to be than affluent or educated. Professionals vote and donate at higher rates than blue-collar workers. But college graduates also comprise a minority of the electorate — and an underrepresented minority at that. America’s electoral institutions all give disproportionate influence to parts of the country with low levels of educational attainment. And this is especially true of the Senate . Therefore, if the coalitional trends of the past half-century continue unabated — and Democrats keep gaining college-educated votes at the expense of working-class ones — the party will find itself locked out of federal power. Put differently, such a development would put an increasingly authoritarian GOP on the glide path to political dominance.

And unless education polarization is substantially reversed , progressives are likely to continue seeing their reform ambitions pared back sharply by Congress’s upper chamber, even when Democrats manage to control it.

These realities have generated a lively intra-Democratic debate over the causes and implications of class dealignment. To some pundits , consultants, and data journalists , the phenomenon’s fundamental cause is the cultural divide between educated professionals and the working class. In their telling, college graduates in general — and Democratic college graduates in particular — tend to have different social values, cultural sensibilities, and issue priorities than the median non-college-educated voter. As the New York Times ’s Nate Cohn puts the point, college graduates tend to be more cosmopolitan and culturally liberal, report higher levels of social trust, and are more likely to “attribute racial inequality, crime, and poverty to complex structural and systemic problems” rather than “individualist and parochial explanations.”

What’s more, since blue America’s journalists, politicians, and activists are overwhelmingly college graduates, highly educated liberals exert disproportionate influence over their party’s actions and identity. Therefore, as the Democrats’ well-credentialed wing has swelled, the party’s image and ideological positioning have grown more reflective of the professional class’s distinct tastes — and thus less appealing to the electorate’s working-class majority.

This theory does not sit well with all Democratic journalists, politicians, and activists. Some deny the existence of a diploma divide on cultural values, while others insist on its limited political salience. Many progressives attribute class dealignment to America’s pathological racial politics and/or the Democrats’ failures of economic governance . In this account, the New Deal coalition was unmade by a combination of a backlash to Black Americans’ growing prominence in Democratic politics and the Democratic Party’s failures to prevent its former working-class base from suffering decades of stagnant living standards and declining life expectancy .

An appreciation of these developments is surely indispensable for understanding class dealignment in the United States. But they don’t tell the whole story. Education polarization is not merely an American phenomenon; it is a defining feature of contemporary politics in nearly every western democracy . It is therefore unlikely that our nation’s white-supremacist history can fully explain the development. And though center-left parties throughout the West have shared some common failings, these inadequacies cannot tell us why many working-class voters have not merely dropped out of politics but rather begun voting for parties even more indifferent to their material interests.

In my view, education polarization cannot be understood without a recognition of the values divide between educated professionals and working people in the aggregate. That divide is rooted in each class’s disparate ways of life, economic imperatives, socialization experiences, and levels of material security. By itself, the emergence of this gap might not have been sufficient to trigger class dealignment, but its adverse political implications have been greatly exacerbated by the past half-century of inequitable growth, civic decline, and media fragmentation.

The college-educated population has distinct ideological tendencies and psychological sensibilities.

Educated professionals tend to be more socially liberal than the general public. In fact, the correlation between high levels of educational attainment and social liberalism is among the most robust in political science. As early as the 1950s, researchers documented the tendency of college graduates to espouse more progressive views than the general public on civil liberties and gender roles. In the decades since, as the political scientist Elizabeth Simon writes , this correlation has held up with “remarkable geographical and temporal consistency.” Across national boundaries and generations, voters with college degrees have been more likely than those without to support legal abortion, LGBTQ+ causes, the rights of racial minorities, and expansive immigration. They are also more likely to hold “post-material” policy priorities — which is to say, to prioritize issues concerning individual autonomy, cultural values, and big-picture social goals above those concerning one’s immediate material and physical security. This penchant is perhaps best illustrated by the highly educated’s distinctively strong support for environmental causes, even in cases when ecological preservation comes at a cost to economic growth.

Underlying these disparate policy preferences are distinct psychological profiles. The college educated are more likely to espouse moral values and attitudes associated with the personality trait “ openness to experience .” High “openness” individuals are attracted to novelty, skeptical of traditional authority, and prize personal freedom and cultural diversity. “Closed” individuals, by contrast, have an aversion to the unfamiliar and are therefore attracted to moral principles that promote certainty, order, and security. Virtually all human beings fall somewhere between these two ideal types. But the college educated as a whole are closer to the “open” end of the continuum than the general public is.

All of these distinctions between more- and less-educated voters are probabilistic, not absolute. There are Catholic theocrats with Harvard Ph.D.’s and anarchists who dropped out of high school. A nation the size of the U.S. is surely home to many millions of working-class social liberals and well-educated reactionaries. Political attitudes do not proceed automatically from any demographic characteristic, class position, or psychological trait. At the individual level, ideology is shaped by myriad historical inheritances and social experiences.

And yet, if people can come by socially liberal, “high openness” politics from any walk of life, they are much more likely to do so if that walk cuts across a college campus. (And, of course, they are even more likely to harbor this distinct psychological and ideological profile if they graduate from college and then choose to become professionally involved in Democratic politics.)

The path to the professional class veers left.

There are a few theoretical explanations for this. One holds that spending your late adolescence on a college campus tends to socialize you into cultural liberalism: Through some combination of increased exposure to people from a variety of geographic backgrounds, or the iconoclastic ethos of a liberal-arts education, or the predominantly left-of-center university faculty , or the substantive content of curricula, people tend to leave college with a more cosmopolitan and “open” worldview than they had upon entering.

Proving this theory is difficult since doing so requires controlling for selection effects. Who goes to college is not determined by random chance. The subset of young people who have the interests, aptitudes, and opportunities necessary for pursuing higher education have distinct characteristics long before they show up on campus. Some social scientists contend that such “selection effects” entirely explain the distinct political tendencies of college graduates. After all, the “high openness” personality trait is associated with higher IQs and more interest in academics. So perhaps attending college doesn’t lead people to develop culturally liberal sensibilities so much as developing culturally liberal sensibilities leads people to go to college.

Some research has tried to account for this possibility. Political scientists in the United Kingdom have managed to control for the preadult views and backgrounds of college graduates by exploiting surveys that tracked the same respondents through adolescence and into adulthood. Two recent analyses of such data have found that the college experience does seem to directly increase a person’s likelihood of becoming more socially liberal in their 20s than they were in their teens.

A separate study from the U.S. sought to control for the effects of familial background and childhood experiences by examining the disparate “sociopolitical” attitudes of sibling pairs in which one went to college while the other did not. It found that attending college was associated with greater “support for civil liberties and egalitarian gender-role beliefs.”

Other recent research , however, suggests that even these study designs may fail to control for all of the background factors that bias college attendees toward liberal views before they arrive on campus. So we have some good evidence that attending college directly makes people more culturally liberal, but that evidence is not entirely conclusive.

Yet if one posits that higher education does not produce social liberals but merely attracts them, a big theoretical problem remains: Why has the population of social liberals increased in tandem with that of college graduates?

The proportion of millennials who endorse left-wing views on issues of race, gender, immigration , and the environment is higher than the proportion of boomers who do so. And such views are more prevalent within the baby-boom generation than they were among the Silent Generation. This cannot be explained merely as a consequence of America’s burgeoning racial diversity, since similar generational patterns have been observed in European nations with lower rates of ethnic change. But the trend is consistent with another component of demographic drift: Each successive generation has had a higher proportion of college graduates than its predecessor. Between 1950 and 2019, the percentage of U.S. adults with bachelor’s degrees increased from 4 percent to 33 percent.  

Perhaps rising college attendance did not directly cause the “high-openness,” post-material, culturally progressive proportion of the population to swell. But then, what did?

One possibility is that, even if mass college attendance does not directly promote the development of “high openness” values, the mass white-collar economy does. If socially liberal values are well suited to the demands and lifeways inherent to professional employment in a globally integrated economy, then, as such employment expands, we would expect a larger share of the population to adopt socially liberal values. And there is indeed reason to think the professional vocation lends itself to social liberalism.

Entering the professional class often requires not only a four-year degree, but also, a stint in graduate school or a protracted period of overwork and undercompensation at the lowest ranks of one’s field. This gives the class’s aspirants a greater incentive to postpone procreation until later in life than the median worker. That in turn may give them a heightened incentive to favor abortion rights and liberal sexual mores.

The demands of the professional career may influence value formation in other ways. As a team of political scientists from Harvard and the University of Bonn argued in a 2020 paper , underlying the ideological divide between social liberals and conservatives may be a divergence in degrees of “moral universalism,” i.e., “the extent to which people’s altruism and trust remain constant as social distance increases.” Conservatives tend to feel stronger obligations than liberals to their own kin and neighbors and their religious, ethnic, and racial groups. Liberals, by contrast, tend to spread their altruism and trust thinner across a wider sphere of humanity; they are less compelled by the particularist obligations of inherited group loyalties and more apt to espouse a universalist ethos in which all individuals are of equal moral concern, irrespective of their group attachments.

Given that pursuing a professional career often requires leaving one’s native community and entering meritocratic institutions that are ideologically and legally committed to the principle that group identities matter less than individual aptitudes, the professional vocation may favor the development of a morally universalistic outlook — and thus more progressive views on questions of anti-discrimination and weaker identification with inherited group identities.

Further, in a globalized era, white-collar workers will often need to work with colleagues on other continents and contemplate social and economic developments in far-flung places. This may encourage both existing and aspiring professionals to develop more cosmopolitan outlooks.

Critically, parents who are themselves professionals — or who aspire for their children to secure a place in the educated, white-collar labor force — may seek to inculcate these values in their kids from a young age. For example, my own parents sent me to a magnet elementary school where students were taught Japanese starting in kindergarten. This curriculum was designed to appeal to parents concerned with their children’s capacity to thrive in the increasingly interconnected (and, in the early 1990s American imagination, increasingly Japanese-dominated) economy of tomorrow.

In this way, the expansion of the white-collar sector may increase the prevalence of “high-openness” cosmopolitan traits and values among rising generations long before they arrive on campus.

More material security, more social liberalism.

Ronald Inglehart’s theory of “ cultural evolution ” provides a third, complementary explanation for both the growing prevalence of social liberalism over the past half-century and for that ideology’s disproportionate popularity among the college educated.

In Inglehart’s account, people who experience material security in youth tend to develop distinctive values and preferences from those who do not: If childhood teaches you to take your basic material needs for granted, you’re more likely to develop culturally progressive values and post-material policy priorities.

Inglehart first formulated this theory in 1971 to explain the emerging cultural gap between the baby boomers and their parents. He noted that among western generations born before World War II, very large percentages had known hunger at some point in their formative years. The Silent Generation, for its part, had come of age in an era of economic depression and world wars. Inglehart argued that such pervasive material and physical insecurity was unfavorable soil for social liberalism: Under conditions of scarcity, human beings have a strong inclination to defer to established authority and tradition, to distrust out-groups, and to prize order and material security above self-expression and individual autonomy.

But westerners born into the postwar boom encountered a very different world from the Depression-wracked, war-torn one of their parents, let alone the cruel and unforgiving one encountered by common agriculturalists since time immemorial. Their world was one of rapid and widespread income growth. And these unprecedentedly prosperous conditions engendered a shift in the postwar generation’s values: When the boomers reached maturity, an exceptionally large share of the cohort evinced post-material priorities and espoused tolerance for out-groups, support for gender equality, concern for the environment, and antipathy for social hierarchies.

Since this transformation in values wasn’t rooted merely in the passage of time — but rather in the experience of abundance — it did not impact all social classes equally. Educated professionals are disproportionately likely to have had stable, middle-class childhoods. Thus, across the West, the post-material minority was disproportionately composed of college graduates in general and elite ones in particular. As Inglehart reported in 1981 , “among those less than 35 years old with jobs that lead to top management and top civil-service posts, Post-Materialists outnumber Materialists decisively: their numerical preponderance here is even greater than it is among students.”  

As with most big-picture models of political development, Inglehart’s theory is reductive and vulnerable to myriad objections. But his core premise — that, all else being equal, material abundance favors social liberalism while scarcity favors the opposite — has much to recommend it. As the World Values Survey has demonstrated, a nation’s degree of social liberalism (a.k.a. “self-expression values”) tightly correlates with its per-capita income. Meanwhile, as nations become wealthier, each successive generation tends to become more socially liberal than the previous one.

Critically, the World Values Survey data does not show an ineluctable movement toward ever-greater levels of social liberalism. Rather, when nations backslide economically, their populations’ progressivism declines. In the West, recessions have tended to reduce the prevalence of post-material values and increase support for xenophobic parties. But the relationship between material security and cultural liberalism is demonstrated most starkly by the experience of ex-communist states, many of which suffered a devastating collapse in living standards following the Soviet Union’s fall. In Russia and much of Eastern Europe, popular support for culturally progressive values plummeted around 1990 and has remained depressed ever since.

Inglehart’s theory offers real insights. As an account of education polarization, however, it presents a bit of a puzzle: If material security is the key driver of social liberalism, why have culture wars bifurcated electorates along lines of education instead of income? Put differently: Despite the material security provided by a high salary, when one controls for educational attainment, having a high income remains strongly associated with voting for conservatives.

One way to resolve this tension is to stipulate that the first two theories of education polarization we examined are also right: While material security is conducive to social liberalism, the college experience and demands of professional-class vocations are perhaps even more so. Thus, high-income voters who did not go to college will tend to be less socially liberal than those who did.

Separately, earning a high income is strongly associated with holding conservative views on fiscal policy. Therefore, even if the experience of material security biases high-income voters toward left-of-center views on cultural issues, their interest in low taxes may nevertheless compel them to vote for right-wing parties.

Voters with high levels of education but low incomes, meanwhile, are very often children of the middle class who made dumb career choices like, say, going into journalism. Such voters’ class backgrounds would theoretically bias them toward a socially liberal orientation, while their meager earnings would give them little reason to value conservative fiscal policy. Perhaps for this reason, “ high-education low-income voters ” are among the most reliably left-wing throughout the western world.

In any case, whatever qualifications and revisions we would wish to make to Inglehart’s theory, one can’t deny its prescience. In 1971, Inglehart forecast that intergenerational value change would redraw the lines of political conflict throughout the West. In his telling, the emergence of a novel value orientation that was disproportionately popular with influential elites would naturally shift the terrain of political conflict. And it would do so in a manner that undermined materialist, class-based voting: If conventional debates over income distribution pulled at the affluent right and the working-class left, the emerging cultural disputes pulled each in the opposite direction.

This proved to be, in the words of Gabriel Almond, “one of the few examples of successful prediction in political science.”

When the culture wars moved to the center of politics, the college educated moved left.

Whether we attribute the social liberalism of college graduates to their experiences on campus, their class’s incentive structures, their relative material security, or a combination of all three, a common set of predictions about western political development follows.

First, we would expect to see the political salience of cultural conflicts start to increase in the 1960s and ’70s as educated professionals became a mass force in western politics. Second, relatedly, we would expect that the historic correlation between having a college degree and voting for the right would start gradually eroding around the same time, owing to the heightened prominence of social issues.

Finally, we would expect education polarization to be most pronounced in countries where (1) economic development is most advanced (and thus the professional sector is most expansive) and (2) left-wing and right-wing parties are most sharply divided on cultural questions.

In their paper “Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,” Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty confirm all of these expectations.

The paper analyzes nearly every manifesto (a.k.a. “platform”) put forward by left-wing and right-wing parties in the past 300 elections. As anticipated by Inglehart, the researchers found that right-wing and left-wing parties began to develop distinct positions on “sociocultural” issues in the 1970s and that these distinctions grew steadily more profound over the ensuing 50 years. Thus, the salience of cultural issues did indeed increase just as college graduates became an electorally significant demographic.

As cultural conflict became more prominent, educated professionals became more left-wing. Controlling for other variables, in the mid-20th century, having a college diploma made one more likely to vote for parties of the right. By 2020, in virtually all of the western democracies, this relationship had inverted.

Some popular narratives attribute this realignment to discrete historical events, such as the Cold War’s end, China’s entry into the WTO, or the 2008 crash. But the data show no sudden reversal in education’s political significance. Instead, the authors write, the West saw “a very progressive, continuous reversal of educational divides, which unfolded decades before any of these events took place and has carried on uninterruptedly until today.” This finding is consistent with the notion that class dealignment is driven by gradual changes in western societies’ demographic and economic characteristics, such as the steady expansion of the professional class.

The paper provides further support for the notion that education polarization is a by-product of economic development: The three democracies where college-educated voters have not moved sharply to the left in recent decades — Ireland, Portugal, and Spain — are all relative latecomers to industrialization.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the authors established a strong correlation between “sociocultural polarization” — the degree to which right-wing and left-wing parties emphasize sharply divergent cultural positions — and education polarization. In other words: Countries where parties are highly polarized on social issues tend to have electorates that are highly polarized along educational lines.

It seems reasonable then to conclude (1) that there really is a cultural divide between educated professionals and the working class in the aggregate and (2) that this gap has been a key driver of class dealignment. Indeed, if we accept the reality of the diploma divide, then an increase of education-based voting over the past 50 years would seem almost inevitable: If you have two social groups with distinct cultural values and one group goes from being 4 percent of the electorate to 35 percent of it, debates about those values will probably become more politically prominent.

And of course, mass higher education wasn’t the only force increasing the salience of social conflict in the West over the past half-century. If economic development increased the popularity of “post-material” values, it also made it easier for marginalized groups to contest traditional hierarchies. As job opportunities for women expanded, they became less dependent on the patriarchal family for material security and thus were more liable to challenge it. As racial minorities secured a foothold in the middle class, they had more resources with which to fight discrimination.

And yet, if an increase in sociocultural polarization — and thus in education polarization — is a foregone conclusion, the magnitude of these shifts can’t be attributed to the existence of cultural divides alone.

Rather, transformations in the economic, civic, and media landscapes of western society since the 1970s have increased the salience and severity of the diploma divide.

When the postwar bargain collapsed, the center-left failed to secure workers a new deal.

To polarize an electorate around cultural conflicts rooted in education, you don’t just need to increase the salience of social issues. You also need to reduce the salience of material disputes rooted in class. Alas, the economic developments of the past 50 years managed to do both.

The class-based alignment that defined western politics in the mid-20th century emerged from a particular set of economic conditions. In the early stages of industrialization, various factors had heightened the class consciousness of wage laborers. Such workers frequently lived in densely settled, class-segregated neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity of large labor-intensive plants. This close proximity cultivated solidarity, as divisions between the laborer’s working and social worlds were few. And the vast scale of industrial enterprises abetted organizing drives, as trade unions could rapidly gain scale by winning over a single shop.

By encouraging their members to view politics through the lens of class and forcing political elites to reckon with workers’ demands, strong trade unions helped to keep questions of income distribution and workers’ rights at the center of political debate and the forefront of voters’ minds. In so doing, they also helped to win western workers in general — and white male ones in particular — unprecedented shares of national income.

But this bargain between business and labor had always been contingent on robust growth. In the postwar era of rising productivity, it was possible for profits and wages to increase in tandem. But in the 1970s, western economies came under stress. Rising energy costs and global competition thinned profit margins, rendering business owners more hostile to labor’s demands both within the shop and in politics. Stagflation — the simultaneous appearance of high unemployment and high inflation — gave an opening to right-wing critics of the postwar order, who argued that the welfare state and pro-labor macroeconomic policies had sapped productivity.

Meanwhile, various long-term economic trends began undermining industrial unionism. Automation inevitably reduced the labor intensity of factories in the West. The advent of the shipping container eased the logistical burdens of globalizing production, while the industrialization of low-wage developing countries increased the incentives for doing so. Separately, as western consumers grew more affluent, they began spending less of their income on durable goods and more on services like health care (one needs only so many toasters, but the human desire for greater longevity and physical well-being is nigh-insatiable). These developments reduced both the economic leverage and the political weight of industrial workers. And since western service sectors had lower rates of unionization, deindustrialization weakened organized labor.

All this presented center-left parties with a difficult challenge. In the face of deindustrialization, an increasingly anti-labor corporate sector, an increasingly conservative economic discourse, an embattled union movement, and a globalizing economy, such parties needed to formulate new models for achieving shared prosperity. And they had to do so while managing rising cultural tensions within their coalitions.

They largely failed.

Countering the postindustrial economy’s tendencies toward inequality would have required radical reforms. Absent policies promoting the unionization of the service sector, deindustrialization inevitably weakened labor. Absent drastic changes in the allocation of posttax income, automation and globalization redistributed economic gains away from “low skill” workers and toward the most productive — or well-situated — professionals, executives, and entrepreneurs.

The United States had more power than any western nation to standardize such reforms and establish a relatively egalitarian postindustrial model. Yet the Democratic Party could muster neither the political will nor the imagination to do so. Instead, under Jimmy Carter, it acquiesced to various policies that reinforced the postindustrial economy’s tendencies toward inequality, while outsourcing key questions of economic management to financial markets and the Federal Reserve. The Reagan administration took this inegalitarian and depoliticized model of economic governance to new extremes. And to highly varying degrees, its inequitable and market-fundamentalist creed influenced the policies of future U.S. administrations and other western governments.

As a result, the past five decades witnessed a great divergence in the economic fortunes of workers with and without college diplomas, while the western working class (a.k.a. the “lower middle class”) became the primary “losers” of globalization .

The center-left parties’ failures to avert a decline in the economic security and status of ordinary workers discredited them with much of their traditional base. And their failure to reinvigorate organized labor undermined the primary institutions that politicize workers into a progressive worldview. These shortcomings, combined with the market’s increasingly dominant role in economic management, reduced the political salience of left-right divides on economic policy. This in turn gave socially conservative working-class voters fewer reasons to vote for center-left parties and gave affluent social liberals fewer reasons to oppose them. In western nations where organized labor remains relatively strong (such as Norway, Sweden, and Finland), education polarization has been relatively mild, while in those countries where it is exceptionally weak (such as the United States), the phenomenon has been especially pronounced.

Finally, the divergent economic fortunes of workers and professionals might have abetted education polarization in one other way: Given that experiencing abundance encourages social liberalism — while experiencing scarcity discourages it — the past half-century of inequitable growth might have deepened cultural divisions between workers with degrees and those without.

The professionalization of civil society estranged the left from its working-class base.

While the evolution of western economies increased the class distance between college graduates and other workers, the evolution of western civil societies increased the social distance between each group.

Back in the mid-20th century, the college educated still constituted a tiny minority of western populations, while mass-membership institutions — from trade unions to fraternal organizations to political parties — still dominated civic life. In that context, an educated professional who wished to exercise political influence often needed to join a local chapter of a cross-class civic association or political party and win election to a leadership position within that organization by securing the confidence of its membership.

That changed once educated professionals became a mass constituency in their own right. As the college-educated population ballooned and concentrated itself within urban centers, it became easier for interest groups to swing elections and pressure lawmakers without securing working-class support. At the same time, the proliferation of “knowledge workers” set off an arms race between interest and advocacy groups looking to influence national legislation and election outcomes. Job opportunities for civic-minded professionals in think tanks, nonprofits, and foundations proliferated. And thanks to growing pools of philanthropic money and the advent of direct-mail fundraising, these organizations could sustain themselves without recruiting an active mass membership.

Thus, the professional’s path to political influence dramatically changed. Instead of working one’s way up through close-knit local groups — and bending them toward one’s political goals through persuasion — professionals could join (or donate to) nationally oriented advocacy groups already aligned with their preferences, which could then advance their policy aims by providing legislators with expert guidance and influencing public opinion through media debates.

As the political scientist Theda Skocpol demonstrates in her book Diminished Democracy , college graduates began defecting from mass-membership civic organizations in the 1970s, in an exodus that helped precipitate their broader decline.

Combined with the descent of organized labor, the collapse of mass participation in civic groups and political parties untethered the broad left from working-class constituencies. As foundation-funded NGOs displaced trade unions in the progressive firmament, left-wing parties became less directly accountable to their less-educated supporters. This made such parties more liable to embrace the preferences and priorities of educated professionals over those of the median working-class voter.

Meanwhile, in the absence of a thriving civic culture, voters became increasingly reliant on the mass media for their political information.

Today’s media landscape is fertile terrain for right-wing populism.

The dominant media technology of the mid-20th century — broadcast television — favored oligopoly. Given the exorbitant costs of mounting a national television network in that era, the medium was dominated by a small number of networks, each with an incentive to appeal to a broad audience. This discouraged news networks from cultivating cultural controversy while empowering them to establish a broadly shared information environment.

Cable and the internet have molded a radically different media landscape. Today, news outlets compete in a hypersaturated attentional market that encourages both audience specialization and sensationalism. In a world where consumers have abundant infotainment options, voters who read at a graduate-school level and those who read at an eighth-grade level are unlikely to favor the same content. And the same is true of voters with liberal and conservative sensibilities — especially since the collapse of a common media ecosystem leads ideologues to occupy disparate factual universes. The extraordinary nature of today’s media ecology is well illustrated by this chart from Martin Gurri’s book, The Revolt of the Public :

This information explosion abets education polarization for straightforward reasons: Since the college educated and non-college educated have distinct tastes in media, in a highly competitive attentional market, they will patronize different outlets and accept divergent facts.

Further, in the specific economic and social context we’ve been examining, the modern media environment is fertile terrain for reactionary entrepreneurs who wish to cultivate grievance against the professional elite. After all, as we’ve seen, that elite (1) subscribes to some values that most working-class people reject, (2) commandeers a wildly disproportionate share of national income and economic status, and (3) dominates the leadership of major political parties and civic groups to an unprecedented degree.

The political efficacy of such right-wing “populist” programming has been repeatedly demonstrated. Studies have found that exposure to Fox News increases Republican vote share and that the expansion of broadband internet into rural areas leads to higher levels of partisan hostility and lower levels of ticket splitting (i.e., more ideologically consistent voting) as culturally conservative voters gain access to more ideologically oriented national news reporting, commentary, and forums.

What is to be done?

The idea that education polarization arises from deep structural tendencies in western society may inspire a sense of powerlessness. And the notion that it emerges in part from a cultural divide between professionals and working people may invite ideological discomfort, at least among well-educated liberals.

But the fact that some center-left parties have managed to retain more working-class support than others suggests that the Democrats have the capacity to broaden (or narrow) their coalition. Separately, the fact that college-educated liberals have distinct social values does not require us to forfeit them.

The commentators most keen to acknowledge the class dimensions of the culture wars typically aim to discredit the left by doing so. Right-wing polemicists often suggest that progressives’ supposedly compassionate social preferences are mere alibis for advancing the professional class’s material interests. But such arguments are almost invariably weak. Progressive social views may be consonant with professional-class interests, but they typically represent attempts to universalize widely held ideals of freedom and equality. The college educated’s cosmopolitan inclinations are also adaptive for a world that is unprecedentedly interconnected and interdependent and in which population asymmetries between the rich and developing worlds create opportunities for mutual gain through migration , if only xenophobia can be overcome. And of course, in an era of climate change, the professional class’s strong concern for the environment is more than justified.

Nevertheless, professional-class progressives must recognize that our social values are not entirely unrelated to our class position. They are not an automatic by-product of affluence and erudition, nor the exclusive property of the privileged. But humans living in rich, industrialized nations are considerably more likely to harbor these values than those in poor, agrarian ones. And Americans who had the privilege of spending their late adolescence at institutions of higher learning are more likely to embrace social liberalism than those who did not.

The practical implications of this insight are debatable. It is plausible that Democrats may be able to gain working-class vote share by moderating on some social issues. But the precise electoral payoff of any single concession to popular opinion is deeply uncertain. Voters’ conceptions of each party’s ideological positioning are often informed less by policy details than by partisan stereotypes. And the substantive costs of moderation — both for the welfare of vulnerable constituencies and the long-term health of the progressive project — can be profound. At various points in the past half-century, it might have been tactically wise for Democrats to distance themselves from the demands of organized labor. But strategically, sacrificing the health of a key partisan institution to the exigencies of a single election cycle is deeply unwise. Meanwhile, in the U.S. context, the “mainstream” right has staked out some cultural positions that are profoundly unpopular with all social classes . In 2022, it is very much in the Democratic Party’s interest to increase the political salience of abortion rights.

In any case, exactly how Democrats should balance the necessity of keeping the GOP out of power with the imperative to advocate for progressive issue positions is something on which earnest liberals can disagree.

The case for progressives to be more cognizant of the diploma divide when formulating our messaging and policy priorities, however, seems clearer.

Education polarization can be self-reinforcing. As left-wing civic life has drifted away from mass-membership institutions and toward the ideologically self-selecting circles of academia, nonprofits, and the media, the left’s sensitivity to the imperatives of majoritarian politics has dulled. In some respects, the incentives for gaining status and esteem within left-wing subcultures are diametrically opposed to the requirements of coalition building. In the realm of social media, it can be advantageous to make one’s policy ideas sound more radical and/or threatening to popular values than they actually are. Thus, proposals for drastically reforming flawed yet popular institutions are marketed as plans for their “abolition,” while some advocates for reproductive rights insist that they are not merely “pro-choice” but “ pro-abortion ” (as though their objective were not to maximize bodily autonomy but rather the incidence of abortion itself, a cause that would seemingly require limiting access to contraception).

Meanwhile, the rhetoric necessary for cogently theorizing social problems within academia — and that fit for effectively selling policy reforms to a mass audience — is quite different. Political-science research indicates that theoretical abstractions tend to leave most voters cold. Even an abstraction as accessible as “inequality” resonates less with ordinary people than simply saying that the rich have too much money . Yet Democratic politicians have nevertheless taken to peppering their speeches with abstract academic terms such as structural racism .

Relatedly, in the world of nonprofits, policy wonks are often encouraged to foreground the racial implications of race-neutral redistributive policies that disproportionately benefit nonwhite constituencies. Although it is important for policy design to account for any latent racial biases in universal programs, there is reason to believe that, in a democracy with a 70 percent white electorate and widespread racial resentment, it is unwise for Democratic politicians to suggest that broadly beneficial programs primarily aid minority groups.

On the level of priority setting, it seems important for college-educated liberals to be conscious of the fact that “post-material” concerns resonate more with us than with the general public. This is especially relevant for climate strategy. Poll results and election outcomes both indicate that working-class voters are far more sensitive to the threat of rising energy prices than to that of climate change. Given that reality, the most politically viable approach to reducing emissions is likely to expedite the development and deployment of clean-energy technologies rather than deterring energy consumption through higher prices. In practice, this means prioritizing the build-out of green infrastructure over the obstruction of fossil-fuel extraction.

Of course, narrowing the social distance between college-educated liberals and working people would be even better than merely finessing it. The burgeoning unionization of white-collar professions and the growing prominence of downwardly mobile college graduates in working-class labor struggles are both encouraging developments on this front. Whatever Democrats can do to facilitate labor organizing and increase access to higher education will simultaneously advance social justice and improve the party’s long-term electoral prospects.

Finally, the correlation between material security and social liberalism underscores the urgency of progressive economic reform. Shared prosperity can be restored only by increasing the social wage of ordinary workers through some combination of unionization, sectoral bargaining, wage subsidies, and social-welfare expansion. To some extent, this represents a chicken-and-egg problem: Radical economic reforms may be a necessary precondition for the emergence of a broad progressive majority, yet a broad progressive majority is itself a precondition for radical reform.

Nevertheless, in wealthy, deep-blue states such as New York and California, Democrats have the majorities necessary for establishing a progressive economic model. At the moment, artificial constraints on the housing supply , clean-energy production, and other forms of development are sapping blue states’ economic potential . If such constraints could be overcome, the resulting economic gains would simultaneously increase working people’s living standards and render state-level social-welfare programs easier to finance. Perhaps the starting point for such a political revolution is for more-affluent social liberals to recognize that their affinity for exclusionary housing policies and aversion to taxation undermines their cultural values.

Our understanding of education polarization remains provisional. And all proposals for addressing it remain open to debate. The laws of political science are more conjectural than those of physics, and even perfect insight into political reality cannot settle disputes rooted in ideology.

But effective political engagement requires unblinkered vision. The Democratic Party’s declining support among working-class voters is a serious problem. If Democrats consider only ideologically convenient explanations for that problem, our intellectual comfort may come at the price of political power.

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Quickonomics

Working Class

Definition of working class.

The working class refers to a social class made up of individuals who primarily earn income through manual labor. This class typically includes individuals who work in blue-collar jobs, such as manufacturing, construction, or service industries. They often have lower levels of education and usually have less control over their work compared to higher social classes.

Let’s consider a factory worker named Sarah. Sarah works on an assembly line, performing repetitive tasks to manufacture goods. She earns an hourly wage and typically works a set schedule. Her job does not require a high level of education, but it provides her with a stable income to support herself and her family.

Sarah’s job in the factory is physically demanding and often involves long hours of standing and repetitive motions. Her work environment may not have the same level of autonomy or decision-making power as those in higher social classes. However, Sarah’s income from her job is essential for meeting her basic needs and maintaining a certain standard of living.

Why the Working Class Matters

The working class plays a crucial role in society and the economy. They provide the necessary labor for many industries and contribute to the production and distribution of goods and services. Their work is often the backbone of essential sectors, such as manufacturing and infrastructure.

Understanding the working class and their needs is important for policymakers and society as a whole. Their wages, working conditions, and access to healthcare and education can significantly impact their quality of life. Recognizing their contributions and addressing their concerns can lead to more equitable and inclusive societies. Additionally, supporting the working class can help foster economic stability and reduce inequality by ensuring fair wages and opportunities for advancement.

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Social Class in the United States

Learning objectives.

• Distinguish objective and subjective measures of social class.
• Discuss whether the United States has much vertical social mobility.

Most sociologists define social class as a grouping based on similar social factors like wealth, income, education, and occupation. These factors affect how much power and prestige a person has. Social stratification reflects an unequal distribution of resources. In most cases, having more money means having more power or more opportunities. There is a surprising amount of disagreement among sociologists on the number of social classes in the United States and even on how to measure social class membership. We first look at the measurement issue and then discuss the number and types of classes sociologists have delineated.

Measuring Social Class

We can measure social class either objectively or subjectively . If we choose the objective method, we classify people according to one or more criteria, such as their occupation, education, and/or income. The researcher is the one who decides which social class people are in based on where they stand in regard to these variables. If we choose the subjective method, we ask people what class they think they are in. For example, the General Social Survey asks, “If you were asked to use one of four names for your social class, which would you say you belong in: the lower class, the working class, the middle class, or the upper class?” Figure 8.3 “Subjective Social Class Membership” depicts responses to this question. The trouble with such a subjective measure is that some people say they are in a social class that differs from what objective criteria might indicate they are in. This problem leads most sociologists to favor objective measures of social class when they study stratification in American society.

Figure 8.3 Subjective Social Class Membership

Source: Data from General Social Survey, 2008.

Yet even here there is disagreement between functionalist theorists and conflict theorists on which objective measures to use. Functionalist sociologists rely on measures of socioeconomic status (SES) , such as education, income, and occupation, to determine someone’s social class. Sometimes one of these three variables is used by itself to measure social class, and sometimes two or all three of the variables are combined (in ways that need not concern us) to measure social class. When occupation is used, sociologists often rely on standard measures of occupational prestige. Since the late 1940s, national surveys have asked Americans to rate the prestige of dozens of occupations, and their ratings are averaged together to yield prestige scores for the occupations (Hodge, Siegel, & Rossi, 1964). Over the years these scores have been relatively stable. Here are some average prestige scores for various occupations: physician, 86; college professor, 74; elementary school teacher, 64; letter carrier, 47; garbage collector, 28; and janitor, 22.

Despite SES’s usefulness, conflict sociologists prefer different, though still objective, measures of social class that take into account ownership of the means of production and other dynamics of the workplace. These measures are closer to what Marx meant by the concept of class throughout his work, and they take into account the many types of occupations and workplace structures that he could not have envisioned when he was writing during the 19th century.

For example, corporations have many upper-level managers who do not own the means of production but still determine the activities of workers under them. They thus do not fit neatly into either of Marx’s two major classes, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Recognizing these problems, conflict sociologists delineate social class on the basis of several factors, including the ownership of the means of production, the degree of autonomy workers enjoy in their jobs, and whether they supervise other workers or are supervised themselves (Wright, 2000).

The American Class Structure

As should be evident, it is not easy to determine how many social classes exist in the United States. Over the decades, sociologists have outlined as many as six or seven social classes based on such things as, once again, education, occupation, and income, but also on lifestyle, the schools people’s children attend, a family’s reputation in the community, how “old” or “new” people’s wealth is, and so forth (Coleman & Rainwater, 1978; Warner & Lunt, 1941). For the sake of clarity, we will limit ourselves to the four social classes included in Figure 8.3 “Subjective Social Class Membership” : the upper class, the middle class, the working class, and the lower class. Although subcategories exist within some of these broad categories, they still capture the most important differences in the American class structure (Gilbert, 2011). The annual income categories listed for each class are admittedly somewhat arbitrary but are based on the percentage of households above or below a specific income level.

The Upper Class

The upper class is considered the top, and only the powerful elite get to see the view from there. In the United States, people with extreme wealth make up 1 percent of the population, and they own one-third of the country’s wealth (Beeghley 2008).

The upper class in the United States consists of about 1% of all households and possesses much wealth, power, and influence.

Steven Martin – Highland Park Mansion – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Money provides not just access to material goods, but also access to a lot of power. As corporate leaders, members of the upper class make decisions that affect the job status of millions of people. As media owners, they influence the collective identity of the nation. They run the major network television stations, radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and sports franchises. As board members of the most influential colleges and universities, they influence cultural attitudes and values. As philanthropists, they establish foundations to support social causes they believe in. As campaign contributors, they sway politicians and fund campaigns, sometimes to protect their own economic interests.

U.S. society has historically distinguished between “old money” (inherited wealth passed from one generation to the next) and “new money” (wealth you have earned and built yourself). While both types may have equal net worth, they have traditionally held different social standings. People of old money, firmly situated in the upper class for generations, have held high prestige. Their families have socialized them to know the customs, norms, and expectations that come with wealth. Often, the very wealthy don’t work for wages. Some study business or become lawyers in order to manage the family fortune. Others, such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, capitalize on being a rich socialite and transform that into celebrity status, flaunting a wealthy lifestyle.

However, new-money members of the upper class are not oriented to the customs and mores of the elite. They haven’t gone to the most exclusive schools. They have not established old-money social ties. People with new money might flaunt their wealth, buying sports cars and mansions, but they might still exhibit behaviors attributed to the middle and lower classes.

The Middle Class

Many people consider themselves middle class, but there are differing ideas about what that means. People with annual incomes of $150,000 call themselves middle class, as do people who annually earn $30,000. That helps explain why, in the United States, the middle class is broken into upper and lower subcategories. Upper-middle-class people tend to hold bachelor’s and postgraduate degrees. They’ve studied subjects such as business, management, law, or medicine. Lower-middle-class members hold bachelor’s degrees from four-year colleges or associate’s degrees from two-year community or technical colleges.

The upper-middle class in the United States consists of about 4.4% of all households, with incomes ranging from $150,000 to $199,000.

Alyson Hurt – Back Porch – CC BY-NC 2.0.

Comfort is a key concept to the middle class. Middle-class people work hard and live fairly comfortable lives. Upper-middle-class people tend to pursue careers that earn comfortable incomes. They provide their families with large homes and nice cars. They may go skiing or boating on vacation. Their children receive high-quality education and healthcare (Gilbert 2010).

In the lower middle class, people hold jobs supervised by members of the upper middle class. They fill technical, lower-level management or administrative support positions. Compared to lower-class work, lower-middle-class jobs carry more prestige and come with slightly higher paychecks. With these incomes, people can afford a decent, mainstream lifestyle, but they struggle to maintain it. They generally don’t have enough income to build significant savings. In addition, their grip on class status is more precarious than in the upper tiers of the class system. When budgets are tight, lower-middle-class people are often the ones to lose their jobs.

The Working Class

The working class in the United States consists of about 25% of all households, whose members work in blue-collar jobs and less skilled clerical positions.

Lisa Risager – Ebeltoft – CC BY-SA 2.0.

Working-class households generally work in blue-collar jobs such as factory work, construction, restaurant serving, and less skilled clerical positions. People in the working class typically do not have 4-year college degrees, and some do not have high school degrees. Although most are not living in official poverty, their financial situation is very uncomfortable. A single large medical bill or expensive car repair would be almost impossible to pay without going into considerable debt. Working-class families are far less likely than their wealthier counterparts to own their own homes or to send their children to college. Many of them live at risk for unemployment as their companies downsize by laying off workers even in good times, and hundreds of thousands began to be laid off when the U.S. recession began in 2008.

The Lower Class

The lower class or poor in the United States constitute about 25% of all households. Many poor individuals lack high school degrees and are unemployed or employed only part time.

Chris Hunkeler – Trailer Homes – CC BY-SA 2.0.

Although lower class is a common term, many observers prefer a less-negative sounding term like the poor, which is used here. Just like the middle and upper classes, the lower class can be divided into subsets: the working class, the working poor, and the underclass. Compared to the lower middle class, lower-class people have less of an educational background and earn smaller incomes. They work jobs that require little prior skill or experience and often do routine tasks under close supervision.

The working poor have unskilled, low-paying employment. However, their jobs rarely offer benefits such as healthcare or retirement planning, and their positions are often seasonal or temporary. They work as sharecroppers, migrant farm workers, house cleaners, and day laborers. Some are high school dropouts. Some are illiterate, unable to read job ads.

How can people work full-time and still be poor? Even working full-time, millions of the working poor earn incomes too meager to support a family. Minimum wage varies from state to state, but in many states it is approaching $8.00 per hour (Department of Labor 2014). At that rate, working 40 hours a week earns $320. That comes to $16,640 a year, before tax and deductions. Even for a single person, the pay is low. A married couple with children will have a hard time covering expenses.

The underclass is the United States’ lowest tier. Members of the underclass live mainly in inner cities. Many are unemployed or underemployed. Those who do hold jobs typically perform menial tasks for little pay. Some of the underclass are homeless. For many, welfare systems provide a much-needed support through food assistance, medical care, housing, and the like.

We will discuss the poor further when we focus later in this chapter on inequality and poverty in the United States.

Social Mobility

Social mobility refers to the ability to change positions within a social stratification system. When people improve or diminish their economic status in a way that affects social class, they experience social mobility.

Individuals can experience upward or downward social mobility for a variety of reasons. Upward mobility refers to an increase—or upward shift—in social class. In the United States, people applaud the rags-to-riches achievements of celebrities like Oprah Winfrey or LeBron James. But the truth is that relative to the overall population, the number of people who rise from poverty to wealth is very small. Still, upward mobility is not only about becoming rich and famous. In the United States, people who earn a college degree, get a job promotion, or marry someone with a good income may move up socially. In contrast, downward mobility indicates a lowering of one’s social class. Some people move downward because of business setbacks, unemployment, or illness. Dropping out of school, losing a job, or getting a divorce may result in a loss of income or status and, therefore, downward social mobility.

Nazareth College – Commencement 2013 – CC BY 2.0.

A key vehicle for upward mobility is formal education. Regardless of the socioeconomic status of our parents, we are much more likely to end up in a high-paying job if we attain a college degree or, increasingly, a graduate or professional degree. Figure 8.4 “Education and Median Earnings of Year-Round, Full-Time Workers, 2007” vividly shows the difference that education makes for Americans’ median annual incomes. Notice, however, that for a given level of education, men’s incomes are greater than women’s. Figure 8.4 “Education and Median Earnings of Year-Round, Full-Time Workers, 2007” thus suggests that the payoff of education is higher for men than for women, and many studies support this conclusion (Green & Ferber, 2008). The reasons for this gender difference are complex and will be discussed further in Chapter 11 “Gender and Gender Inequality” . To the extent vertical social mobility exists in the United States, then, it is higher for men than for women and higher for whites than for people of color.

Figure 8.4 Education and Median Earnings of Year-Round, Full-Time Workers, 2007

Source: Data from U.S. Census Bureau. (2010). Statistical abstract of the United States: 2010 . Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab .

It is not uncommon for different generations of a family to belong to varying social classes. This is known as intergenerational mobility . For example, an upper-class executive may have parents who belonged to the middle class. In turn, those parents may have been raised in the lower class. Patterns of intergenerational mobility can reflect long-term societal changes.

Similarly, intragenerational mobility refers to changes in a person’s social mobility over the course of his or her lifetime. For example, the wealth and prestige experienced by one person may be quite different from that of his or her siblings.

Structural mobility happens when societal changes enable a whole group of people to move up or down the social class ladder. Structural mobility is attributable to changes in society as a whole, not individual changes. In the first half of the twentieth century, industrialization expanded the U.S. economy, raising the standard of living and leading to upward structural mobility. In today’s work economy, the recent recession and the outsourcing of jobs overseas have contributed to high unemployment rates. Many people have experienced economic setbacks, creating a wave of downward structural mobility.

When analyzing the trends and movements in social mobility, sociologists consider all modes of mobility. Scholars recognize that mobility is not as common or easy to achieve as many people think. In fact, some consider social mobility a myth. The American Dream does exist, but it is much more likely to remain only a dream unless we come from advantaged backgrounds. In fact, there is less vertical mobility in the United States than in other Western democracies. As a recent analysis summarized the evidence, “There is considerably more mobility in most of the other developed economies of Europe and Scandinavia than in the United States” (Mishel, Bernstein, & Shierholz, 2009, p. 108).

Key Takeaways

• Several ways of measuring social class exist. Functionalist and conflict sociologists disagree on which objective criteria to use in measuring social class. Subjective measures of social class, which rely on people rating their own social class, may lack some validity.
• Sociologists disagree on the number of social classes in the United States, but a common view is that the United States has four classes: upper, middle, working, and lower. Further variations exist within the upper and middle classes.
• The United States has some vertical social mobility, but not as much as several nations in Western Europe.

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Coleman, R. P., & Rainwater, L. (1978). Social standing in America . New York, NY: Basic Books.

Gilbert, D. (2011). The American class structure in an age of growing inequality (8th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

Green, C. A., & Ferber, M. A. (2008). The long-term impact of labor market interruptions: How crucial is timing? Review of Social Economy, 66 , 351–379.

Hodge, R. W., Siegel, P., & Rossi, P. (1964). Occupational prestige in the United States, 1925–63. American Journal of Sociology, 70 , 286–302.

Mishel, L., Bernstein, J., & Shierholz, H. (2009). The state of working America 2008/2009 . Ithaca, NY: ILR Press [An imprint of Cornell University Press].

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Wright, E. O. (2000). Class counts: Comparative studies in class analysis . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Introduction to Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Research Employment, Fatherhood & Family, Mental Health, Black Boys & Men

The state of working class men, media contact: [email protected].

Working class men in America need help. While the shift to a knowledge-based economy has blessed the more highly educated with strong and rising wages, working class men face dwindling job prospects, stagnant wages, and declining health. These challenges have been intensifying for decades but have now reached a point of crisis.

This report outlines the current state of America’s working class men and describes recent trends in the key areas of employment, earnings, health, and family.

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Working class men face alarmingly high risks of dying young, particularly from “deaths of despair” such as suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths. They are also more vulnerable to other health challenges, including workplace injuries and chronic diseases. Young working class men (aged 25 to 34) are more likely to die than middle-aged non-working class men (aged 45 to 54).

Employment rates for working class men have significantly declined over the past four decades. Black working class men have persistently faced the greatest hurdles in the labor market, while white working class men have experienced the most dramatic recent declines in employment rates. Meanwhile, wages for working class men have been stagnant.

Marriage and family formation rates have declined significantly among working class men. Social isolation is on the rise, with fewer close friendships and weakened social bonds, contributing to a deeper sense of loneliness and disconnection. In the past there was hardly any class gap in marriage and family-formation. Today there is a huge one.

At the American Institute for Boys and Men we are committed to shedding light on these issues, and working for solutions. As we continue our research and advocacy, we invite you to follow along, stay informed, and join us in the effort to create a brighter future for working class men and their families.

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