‘The declining political clout of the working class and the concomitant degradation of working-class living standards impacts all of us.’ Photograph: Friedemann Vogel/EPA
No longer shuttered away in a factory, today’s working class is interwoven into nearly every aspect of American society. But we don’t really hear much about it
On May 9, 2018, Tamara Draut writes on The Guardian:
My father was a steelworker, the epitome of the person you likely conjure up when you hear someone described as “working class”. White, male, hard hat and lunch pail, steel-toed boots and a dark blue uniform he’d bring home at the end of every shift and promptly throw in the washing machine. The earthy, sweaty, and metallic smell lingered in the laundry room after he closed the lid.
He taught me how to play basketball, badminton and throw a decent baseball as well as how to fix a flat tire. Most importantly, he gave me the grit and resilience –and some might say, hard-headedness – to make my way from a blue-collar upbringing in Middletown, Ohio, to create a life and career in New York City. My dad was the last generation of working-class heroes – the men who soldered, heaved and secured America’s industrial might in the world, and as a result earned the pride and respect of our nation.
But men like my dad no longer epitomize the working class today.As the manufacturing footprint in the working class has shrunk, so has the white male archetype that has historically defined the working class. Today’s working class is more female and racially diverse – with whites comprising less than 60% of the working class, down from nearly 9 out of 10 in 1970. Similarly, two-thirds of working-class women are in the paid labor market, up from less than half in 1970.
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, facilitating the invisibility and devaluing of their work.
No longer shuttered away in a factory, today’s working class is interwoven into nearly every aspect of our lives. It’s the black woman in a caretaker’s smock wearing special comfort shoes and a name tag above her heart. It’s the white man in a uniform (which he had to pay for) who punches in each day and restocks the shelves of your favorite big-box giant. It’s the Latina home healthcare aide who cares for your mom, the janitor who empties your office wastebasket, the woman who rings up your groceries, and the crew who fix the bumpy freeway you take every day to work.
Yet despite how interwoven this new working class is in our lives, we don’t really know or hear much about it. Its members’ concerns don’t shape the national agenda or top the headlines in major newspapers. Their stories aren’t featured in sitcoms, dramas, or movies. Roseanne got a 21st century reboot, but no such luck for Good Times or Sanford and Son or Alice.
Today, disrespect is baked into working-class jobs in a capitalistic worldview that considers workers as merely costs to be minimized. And that cost-minimization plays out in the form of low pay, miserly benefits, unstable schedules and an overall withholding of dignity by society for their hard and important work.
The declining political clout of the working class and the concomitant degradation of working-class living standards impacts all of us, from pedigreed professional to warehouse worker. Why? Because the philosophy that allows employers to schedule their hourly workers week to week, with little advance notice, is the same philosophy that allows employers to expect their salaried workers to be “on” 24/7, responding to emails and taking conference calls that disrupt family and leisure time.
The policies that stripped away our factories are the same policies that are now yanking professional jobs out of the country. The political hostility toward people who are down on their luck and need help buying food is delivered by the same politicians who drastically cut higher-education funding.
The three biggest threats to the professional middle class are the same culprits behind the degradation of the working class: deregulation, “trickle-down” economics, and antigovernment activism. These forces hit the working class first and hardest, but they inflict plenty of damage on the middle class too.
But forging a new working-class solidarity will require an end to an effective and damaging political strategy: evoking racial anxiety among whites to splinter the working class. From Bacon’s Rebellion to Trump’s Make America Great Again, conservatives have historically pitted struggling white Americans against enslaved and then working-class black Americans to gain political power so they can write the rules in a way that enriches the white and wealthy, and disadvantages struggling people of all races. It is truly a tale as old as time.
But the new working class isn’t sitting on the sidelines. From the Fight For $15 to the Dreamers to Black Lives Matter, movements of, by and for the working class are ascending and winning. In the 2016 elections, voters passed ballot measures raising the minimum wage in Arizona, Colorado, Maine and Washington. The Fight for $15 movement won a $15 minimum wage hike in California, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, SeaTac and Washington DC.
All told, what began as a scrappy band of fast food workers walking off their jobs in New York City in 2013 has won over $62bn in raises for 19 million workers, according to the National Employment Law Project.
The working class has had a boot on its neck for three decades. While it has borne the brunt of the assault on workers’ rights, all of America has suffered as a result. That’s why the concerns and aspirations of this new working class must be the starting point for rewriting our economic rules. That means putting the needs of America’s wage earners—black, brown, white, immigrant, male and female—at the center of our politics, not invisible in the margins.
Gary Reber Comments:
My dad exemplified the working class in the 1950s-1970s. He worked at McCall Corporation running the large automated printing presses that printed top-line magazines, such as McCall’s Magazine, as well as other prime magazines. McCall’s published fiction by well-known authors.
My dad took me to the large Ohio plant several times as a young boy. I observed that for the most part the men were pressing buttons to start and stop or pause machines, performing maintenance, and overseeing that the print run was properly functioning. My dad was among the workers doing those jobs.
But the bulk of the production was performed by the vast machines that actually printed, then conveyed for final bundling, boxing and delivery to trucks for national distribution.
I also visited other manufacturers in the area as a boy and teenager where I observed tremendous machines as the primary means of production.
I have carried this experience with me my whole life.
My mother worked in testing administration at the University of Dayton.
My mom and dad, and my sister and I lived in a modest two-bedroom brick house, bought by my parents. When my sister was born, my parents modeled the upstairs attic into a bedroom for me, thus making our home a three-bedroom house. That room, which covered the whole width and depth of the house, became my sanctuary and my music room for my passion for jazz and hi-fi components to reproduce.
My parents worked hard. They rarely ate out except for pizza and beer on the weekends with their friends and at ballrooms, where they would take me to see the big bands of the era. We were able to take vacations every year to visit relatives in the midwest and west and sometimes just a destination, such as Florida or South Carolina. They always drove the single family car, and never flew.
So, I know what it is to be brought up by hard working parents. They expected me to get a job following college (not become an entrepreneur or capital owner).
I too, starting as a 12-year-old, worked delivering the morning and evening editions of the dominant city newspaper on my paper route. I also worked assisting a man who delivered by truck, in the very early morning hours, bakery products of the major bakery; and in high school I worked as a butcher assistant in a local grocery store, a bag boy at a grocery store, a lifeguard and the caddy for the municipal golf course pro during the summers and at times a professional musician.
During this time I saved my earnings to realize my main goal of one day buying a new Mustang and more hi-fi components. I was not alone, as my friends also were working and saving.
I achieved good enough grades in high school to be awarded a scholarship to a five-year undergraduate/graduate course co-op university — the University of Cincinnati — majoring in urban planning, political science, economics, sociology and architecture. The scholarship paid for my tuition. I worked to save money to spend on living expenses during the academic quarters — two academic quarters and two work experience quarters during each year. During the work quarters there were assignments for essays. I was fortunate to secure jobs in San Francisco in planning and economic development (although in those days it was termed city and urban or regional planning). My parents also contributed significantly to my needed expenses while I lived on campus at the university. While on my work quarters I also took graduate courses at the University of California, Berkeley.
Following my undergraduate/graduate graduation in 1966, I was awarded two full fellowships, but had to choose between doctorate studies in Germany (Fulbright Scholarship) or Sweden (Thord-Gray Fellowship). I chose Sweden and lived and studied for nearly two years at two universities in Stockholm, getting around on a red Vespa motor scooter. During off-time, I traveled extensively throughout Scandinavia and Europe via train.
Following my doctorate studies in economic development, I returned to San Francisco and during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s to live. I became a political economist and economic justice advocate. During that period I co-founded the advocacy-consulting firm Agenda 2000 Incorporated with my mentors Louis O. Kelso and John W. Dyckman. Norman G. Kurland, who now heads the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org), later joined Agenda 2000.
Agenda 2000’s offices were located in the Trans America building within Kelso’s law offices. John Dyckman, who was Professor and Chairman of the Graduate School of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley was President. Under Dyckman I taught binary economics at Berkeley. I also founded the advocacy Institute for the Pursuit of Economic Justice. During that time I wrote numerous articles.
Throughout the Agenda 2000 years, I was a guest lecture at universities throughout the United States, England, and Europe, espousing binary economics and democratized, broadened individual productive capital ownership.
In 1974, I was a candidate for the United States Congress, running on an economic justice platform (see http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/?p=336). The year prior I testified before Congress on tax reform (see http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/?p=6641).
In the 1980s and 1990s, I founded a concert video production company and music production company, Reber Productions, and a magazine publishing company, WSR Publishing (Widescreen Review & Custom Home Theatre Design and Ultimate Home Design), which I have owned to this day, while continuing to be an advocate for economic justice by writing and publishing articles and commentary. As an extension of Widescreen Review, I design and build one of the finest custom home theatres in the country, which was used as the magazine’s reference system. As an extension of Ultimate Home Design, I designed and built the Optimum Performance Home, perhaps one of the “greenest” LEED Platinum Homes ever created (see http://www.ultimatehomedesign.com/oph/uhd03oph03.pdf)
All this work experience was based on an upbringing in a lower middle-class environment, wherein I experienced the challenges of working families.
My parents were strictly workers. They really knew little or nothing about capital asset investments, and never taught me anything about the subject. They did not own any stock. They saved and relied on the equity in their home and pensions for their retirement. My friends’ parents lived similarly.
I made a point to study how goods, products and services were being produced over the years since I was first exposed by my dad to how magazines were printed. The production process has always fascinated me.
Reading Kelso’s books, while in doctorate studies in Sweden (the epitome of the social welfare state) were enlightening to me and a stark contrast to the teachings of one of my professors, Gunnar Myrdal, who is the acknowledged father of the Swedish social welfare state philosophy. While Myrdal saw as the solution to economic inequality creating human labor work, even make-work, if necessary (never broadening productive capital ownership), I, after reading Kelso, became convinced that instead of focusing on creating jobs as the sole solution to economic inequality we should be focusing on creating productive capital (wealth-creating, income-producing asset) owners simultaneously with the economy’s growth. In doing so, the end result would be that citizens would become empowered as owners to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens, thus reversing current global trends where all citizens will eventually become dependent for their economic well-being on the State and whatever elites control the coercive powers of government,, using job dependency, the police, the law courts, the prisons, the tax system and so on as their means to control.
In simple terms, binary economics recognizes that there are two independent factors of production: humans (labor workers who contribute manual, intellectual, creative and entrepreneurial work) and non-human physical capital (productive land; structures; infrastructure; tools; machines; robotics; computer processing and apps; artificial intelligence; certain intangibles that have the characters of property, such as patents and trade or firm names and the like, which are owned by people individually or in association with others). Fundamentally, economic value is created through human and non-human contributions.
Kelso was a leading corporate tax and financial lawyer, and political economist based in San Francisco and the author of The Capitalist Manifesto (Random House 1958), The New Capitalists (Random House 1961), Two-Factor Theory: The Economics Of Reality (Random House, 1967), and later Democracy And Economic Power: Extending The ESOP Revolution Through Binary Economics (Ballinger Publishing Company, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1986; reprinted University Press of America, Lanham Maryland, 1991). The first two books were co-authored with Mortimer J. Adler, President of the Institute for Philosophical Research, former professor of the Philosophy of Law at the University of Chicago, and author of The Idea Of Freedom. Kelso’s latter two books were co-authored by Patricia Hetter Kelso, his collaborator and wife since 1963. The four books present Kelso’s theory of binary economics (or the economics of reality), which describes labor and physical capital as independently productive and the financial tools for democratizing productive capital ownership in a private-property, free-market economy where most products are exponentially made by physical capital. For more reading visit www.kelsoinstitute.com. Free downloads of The Capitalist Manifesto and The New Capitalists are available at http://www.kelsoinstitute.org/pdf/cm-entire.pdfand http://www.kelsoinstitute.org/pdf/nc-entire.pdf, respectively.
The Capitalist Manifesto was a critique of Karl Marx’s attack on “capitalism,” who like all collectivists, thought the way to restore justice is to attack the market system and abolish the institution of “private property” in the ownership of productive capital. Kelso and Adler defined “economic justice” in a way that provides universal access to future capital ownership opportunities for EVERY child, woman, and man, without wealth redistribution. That is, reform the tax and monetary system to enable every child, woman, and man to purchase capital on pure credit collateralized with capital credit insurance, and pay for it out of the future earnings of the capital itself. This is the smart means to acquire capital, which wealthy people fully understand and use to accumulate capital wealth.
Kelso’s invention of the leveraged Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) was a first step away from the injustices of both monopoly capitalism and all forms of collectivism. He offered a JUST, third way in which everyone controls his or her life, and safeguards liberty, by having private property in capital.
While the author of the article I am commenting on praises the Fight For $15, the Dreamers, and Black Lives Matter movements by and for the working class, and advocates putting the needs of America’s wage earners—black, brown, white, immigrant, male and female—at the center of our politics (all worthy concerns), nowhere is there advocacy for individual empowerment and greater earnings through empowering these wage-only earners to become productive capital owners.
The lesson here is that our political representatives, the media, and academia are failing to addresses the core of the economic inequality problem — concentrated physical capital ownership among a tiny wealthy capital ownership class who has created and controls a system of monopoly capitalism. Instead of advocating and focusing on solutions that will broaden individual capital ownership in a growing economy that can support general affluence for EVERY citizen, the focus is always on people needing to work, job creation, government jobs, minimum wage boosts, or forms of income redistribution such as a universal basic income. They ignore the glaring reality that none of those actions will change the composition of the narrow ownership of productive capital, even though they may succeed in taking from those who are productive by means of their property ownership in productive capital and their wage and salary earnings and redistributing to those who are propertyless and need more income.
The reality is the rich are rich because they are productive capital owners, not because of their labor, which in every human is limited. As should be easily observed, technological change makes tools, machines, structures, and processes ever more productive while leaving human productiveness largely unchanged (our human abilities are limited by physical strength and brain power — and relatively constant). Industries are always changing, evolving and innovating. The result is that primary distribution through the free-market economy, whose distributive principle is “to each according to his production,” delivers progressively more market-sourced income to capital owners and progressively less to workers who make their contribution through labor.
While in a pre-industrial society labor was the principal factor in the creation of wealth, in today’s world that is no longer the case, nor in the future, as the human input is exponentially being replaced by the non-human factor and tectonic shifts in the technologies of production — productive physical capital. So we should be asking ‘who owns today’s capital?’ and ‘who should own future capital?’ We should be focused on creating universal productive capital ownership.
The solutions that can empower EVERY child, woman, and man to become productive capital owners can be found in the following references:
The Agenda of The JUST Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-basic-principles-of-economic-and-social-justice-by-norman-g-kurland/, http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/jtw-graphicoverview-2014.pdf and http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-a-new-vision-for-providing-hope-justice-and-economic-empowerment/.
Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice.
The enactment of the proposed Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act and Economic Empowerment Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/. And The Capital Homestead Act brochure, pdf print version at http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/C-CHAflyer_1018101.pdf and Capital Homestead Accounts (CHAs) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/capital-homestead-accounts-chas/
Fo an overview, see my article “Economic Democracy And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/?p=11.
