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

What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class
Joan C. Williams
NOVEMBER 10, 2016
   

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.

He dropped out of school in eighth grade to help support the family. Eventually he got a good, steady job he truly hated, as an inspector in a factory that made those machines that measure humidity levels in museums. He tried to open several businesses on the side but none worked, so he kept that job for 38 years. He rose from poverty to a middle-class life: the car, the house, two kids in Catholic school, the wife who worked only part-time. He worked incessantly. He had two jobs in addition to his full-time position, one doing yard work for a local magnate and another hauling trash to the dump.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he read The Wall Street Journal and voted Republican. He was a man before his time: a blue-collar white man who thought the union was a bunch of jokers who took your money and never gave you anything in return. Starting in 1970, many blue-collar whites followed his example. This week, their candidate won the presidency.

For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap.

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.

Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,” an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals. Clinton’s clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she’s a two-faced phony.

Manly dignity is a big deal for working-class men, and they’re not feeling that they have it. Trump promises a world free of political correctness and a return to an earlier era, when men were men and women knew their place. It’s comfort food for high-school-educated guys who could have been my father-in-law if they’d been born 30 years earlier. Today they feel like losers — or did until they met Trump.

Manly dignity is a big deal for most men. So is breadwinner status: Many still measure masculinity by the size of a paycheck. White working-class men’s wages hit the skids in the 1970s and took another body blow during the Great Recession. Look, I wish manliness worked differently. But most men, like most women, seek to fulfill the ideals they’ve grown up with. For many blue-collar men, all they’re asking for is basic human dignity (male varietal). Trump promises to deliver it.

The Democrats’ solution? Last week the New York Times published an article advising men with high-school educations to take pink-collar jobs. Talk about insensitivity. Elite men, you will notice, are not flooding into traditionally feminine work. To recommend that for WWC men just fuels class anger.

Isn’t what happened to Clinton unfair? Of course it is. It is unfair that she wasn’t a plausible candidate until she was so overqualified she was suddenly unqualified due to past mistakes. It is unfair that Clinton is called a “nasty woman” while Trump is seen as a real man. It’s unfair that Clinton only did so well in the first debate because she wrapped her candidacy in a shimmy of femininity. When she returned to attack mode, it was the right thing for a presidential candidate to do but the wrong thing for a woman to do. The election shows that sexism retains a deeper hold that most imagined. But women don’t stand together: WWC women voted for Trump over Clinton by a whopping 28-point margin — 62% to 34%. If they’d split 50-50, she would have won.


Class trumps gender, and it’s driving American politics. Policy makers of both parties — but particularly Democrats if they are to regain their majorities — need to remember five major points.

Understand That Working Class Means Middle Class, Not Poor
The terminology here can be confusing. When progressives talk about the working class, typically they mean the poor. But the poor, in the bottom 30% of American families, are very different from Americans who are literally in the middle: the middle 50% of families whose median income was $64,000 in 2008. That is the true “middle class,” and they call themselves either “middle class” or “working class.”

“The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class,” a friend just wrote me. A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. WWC men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree. Trump promises that. I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.

Understand Working-Class Resentment of the Poor
Remember when President Obama sold Obamacare by pointing out that it delivered health care to 20 million people? Just another program that taxed the middle class to help the poor, said the WWC, and in some cases that’s proved true: The poor got health insurance while some Americans just a notch richer saw their premiums rise.

Progressives have lavished attention on the poor for over a century. That (combined with other factors) led to social programs targeting them. Means-tested programs that help the poor but exclude the middle may keep costs and tax rates lower, but they are a recipe for class conflict. Example: 28.3% of poor families receive child-care subsidies, which are largely nonexistent for the middle class. So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from Macy’s. My sister-in-law was livid.

J.D. Vance’s much-heralded Hillbilly Elegy captures this resentment. Hard-living families like that of Vance’s mother live alongside settled families like that of his biological father. While the hard-living succumb to despair, drugs, or alcohol, settled families keep to the straight and narrow, like my parents-in-law, who owned their home and sent both sons to college. To accomplish that, they lived a life of rigorous thrift and self-discipline. Vance’s book passes harsh judgment on his hard-living relatives, which is not uncommon among settled families who kept their nose clean through sheer force of will. This is a second source of resentment against the poor.

Other books that get at this are Hard Living on Clay Street (1972) and Working-Class Heroes (2003).

Understand How Class Divisions Have Translated into Geography
The best advice I’ve seen so far for Democrats is the recommendation that hipsters move to Iowa. Class conflict now closely tracks the urban-rural divide. In the huge red plains between the thin blue coasts, shockingly high numbers of working-class men are unemployed or on disability, fueling a wave of despair deaths in the form of the opioid epidemic.

Vast rural areas are withering away, leaving trails of pain. When did you hear any American politician talk about that? Never.

Jennifer Sherman’s Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t (2009) covers this well.

If You Want to Connect with White Working-Class Voters, Place Economics at the Center
“The white working class is just so stupid. Don’t they realize Republicans just use them every four years, and then screw them?” I have heard some version of this over and over again, and it’s actually a sentiment the WWC agrees with, which is why they rejected the Republican establishment this year. But to them, the Democrats are no better.

Both parties have supported free-trade deals because of the net positive GDP gains, overlooking the blue-collar workers who lost work as jobs left for Mexico or Vietnam. These are precisely the voters in the crucial swing states of Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that Democrats have so long ignored. Excuse me. Who’s stupid?

One key message is that trade deals are far more expensive than we’ve treated them, because sustained job development and training programs need to be counted as part of their costs.


At a deeper level, both parties need an economic program that can deliver middle-class jobs. Republicans have one: Unleash American business. Democrats? They remain obsessed with cultural issues. I fully understand why transgender bathrooms are important, but I also understand why progressives’ obsession with prioritizing cultural issues infuriates many Americans whose chief concerns are economic.

Back when blue-collar voters used to be solidly Democratic (1930–1970), good jobs were at the core of the progressive agenda. A modern industrial policy would follow Germany’s path. (Want really good scissors? Buy German.) Massive funding is needed for community college programs linked with local businesses to train workers for well-paying new economy jobs. Clinton mentioned this approach, along with 600,000 other policy suggestions. She did not stress it.

Avoid the Temptation to Write Off Blue-Collar Resentment as Racism
Economic resentment has fueled racial anxiety that, in some Trump supporters (and Trump himself), bleeds into open racism. But to write off WWC anger as nothing more than racism is intellectual comfort food, and it is dangerous.

National debates about policing are fueling class tensions today in precisely the same way they did in the 1970s, when college kids derided policemen as “pigs.” This is a recipe for class conflict. Being in the police is one of the few good jobs open to Americans without a college education. Police get solid wages, great benefits, and a respected place in their communities. For elites to write them off as racists is a telling example of how, although race- and sex-based insults are no longer acceptable in polite society, class-based insults still are.

I do not defend police who kill citizens for selling cigarettes. But the current demonization of the police underestimates the difficulty of ending police violence against communities of color. Police need to make split-second decisions in life-threatening situations. I don’t. If I had to, I might make some poor decisions too.

Saying this is so unpopular that I risk making myself a pariah among my friends on the left coast. But the biggest risk today for me and other Americans is continued class cluelessness. If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the consequences could turn dangerous.

In 2010, while on a book tour for Reshaping the Work-Family Debate, I gave a talk about all of this at the Harvard Kennedy School. The woman who ran the speaker series, a major Democratic operative, liked my talk. “You are saying exactly what the Democrats need to hear,” she mused, “and they’ll never listen.” I hope now they will.


Joan C. Williams is Distinguished Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Center of WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.


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Avigdor Marranazo 6 minutes ago

This election left the contempt of the Left for the American worker in stark relief. Not that it was especially discrete heretofore, but the "deplorables" comment, along with the Wikileaks revelations made it obvious to all who "had eyes to see and ears to hear". This contempt has its roots in cultural Marxism, which decided 70 years ago to "elect a new people for the West" when they were unable to win the war of ideas due to Westerners' being shielded by nationalism, Christianity and racial pride.


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说句真心话，美国只有华尔街，高科技企业的工作高些，还有职位高的CXO, 医生，律师。其他的行业工资不高，加州本小镇的公立学校老师起薪4万五，去掉些税，再出去租房，估计也没有多少了。在加州一年半，儿子中学校长换了5个， 学区的学监花了1年找到，不到8一个月又把人家赶走了，还给人家1年的工资。哎！

回复 2楼kelly_y_chen 的帖子

我看过有文章讲，加州教师工资偏低是因为加州税收/加州太多吃福利/加州人口等原因造成的。另外，加州房价等生活成本高，教师收入就更显得低了。

我们乡下这里老师工资不算低，教师职位起薪5万多，一般老师7万年薪总有的，高中老师的工资更高些。一年只工作九个月啊！这里教师职位要等空位的，老的不退休，新的进不来，年轻老师要做supply teacher等空位。而比起加州，我们这里房价便宜得很。不过，虽然房价低，但房产税高，这样学区收入就高。近几年新屋开工一直增加，学区税收又多进账了。

你在弯曲吗？那里有最著名的Palo Alto High & Gunn High啊，这两个学校老师工资不会低的吧。

这篇阅读理解太难了，考不及格了

回复 3楼pp_dream 的帖子

俺在便宜的东湾，听说南湾的老师印度人多

回复 5楼kelly_y_chen 的帖子

听我同学说弯曲的老师课外收入颇丰:P
别说加州了，就连我们隔壁的新泽西，老师课外收入也是大大的。听住在新泽西的同学和同事都有提到老师下了课就走，因为他们有学校以外的兼职。

我们乡下这里没有补课市场，而新泽西/加州/扭腰等补课市场好大，大家都很拼啊。

回复 6楼pp_dream 的帖子

听同学说新泽西的一个台湾人办的SAT补习中心收费已高达9千多刀（32次课程，每次300刀），太牛了！

回复 6楼pp_dream 的帖子

是的，超不多50刀一小时吧。一般补课，不是SAT。

[quote]原帖由 [i]pp_dream[/i] 于 2017-1-14 03:30 发表 [url=http://ww123.net/redirect.php?goto=findpost&pid=9854430&ptid=4889218][img]http://ww123.net/images/common/back.gif[/img][/url]
听同学说新泽西的一个台湾人办的SAT补习中心收费已高达9千多刀（32次课程，每次300刀），太牛了！ [/quote]

这家我知道，前两年帮朋友小孩去咨询过，很拽的，有入学要求，不是给钱就收的，所以能拍胸脯保证质量:lol

回复 2楼kelly_y_chen 的帖子

学监的工资很高的，我们原来的学区不算很好，都有40万，对口高中都快4千人了，按理应该再建一个，但老说缺钱，敢情钞票全发给当官的了:@

回复 10楼桃之夭夭也 的帖子

这么高薪啊！

回复 9楼桃之夭夭也 的帖子

这是什么机构啊？告诉我机构名称吧，因为我同学就是不告诉我。

去年下半年，我给我女儿找了个补习SAT英文的老师，是位大学教授，老中。以前曾经找过本地的老师给她辅导过几次英文，但效果不好就没继续。
英文我是文盲，不能指望我能帮忙，所以想想还是请老师的好。七拐八拐找到这位大学老师，是网上上课，没有车马奔波比较适合我们。我女儿一上课才知道居然有一百号人上这位老师的课，老师一周上两次课，每次课每人60刀。好了，算算老师的收入吧:P

回复 10楼桃之夭夭也 的帖子

俺这里学监年薪25万

[quote]原帖由 [i]pp_dream[/i] 于 2017-1-17 11:22 发表 [url=http://ww123.net/redirect.php?goto=findpost&pid=9854583&ptid=4889218][img]http://ww123.net/images/common/back.gif[/img][/url]
这是什么机构啊？告诉我机构名称吧，因为我同学就是不告诉我。 [/quote]

名字一下子想不起来了，现在记忆力不太好，我找找，找到了告诉你

回复 15楼桃之夭夭也 的帖子

随便Google了一下，你看是这个吗？

[url]https://www.c2educate.com/locations/edison-nj-sat-tutoring/[/url]


想留个线索，万一我娃需要呢。

回复 16楼pp_dream 的帖子

你要不要让女儿看看act？比较一下SAT和ACT哪个更对路子？听说ACT更合适偏理的孩子。朋友孩子PSAT 考得不好，当机立断不试SAT，就考了act 。很多大学对这两种都接受。那孩子EA哈佛录取了（标准考试不是重要因素，但选ACT显然没问题）。

我们这边乡下，没有补习风气，但我怀疑英文应试补习是否靠谱值得。

回复 17楼Ageji_Mom 的帖子

:handshake

太多考试了，不想太折腾:L

我女儿去年下半年开始参加的那个英文补习主要是写作，据她自己说那位特凶的教授讲授的东西还是有帮助的，跟学校里教的不一样，给了她不同的思路。具体对标化考试有多少用也不知道。

这个月孩子其实没时间参加每周的课程，只好要来录像等她考完试以后再补看。我只管掏钱呗，反正就是花钱买个心安，谁让我是文盲呢:L

[quote]原帖由 [i]pp_dream[/i] 于 2017-1-19 01:09 发表 [url=http://ww123.net/redirect.php?goto=findpost&pid=9854718&ptid=4889218][img]http://ww123.net/images/common/back.gif[/img][/url]
随便Google了一下，你看是这个吗？

[url]https://www.c2educate.com/locations/edison-nj-sat-tutoring/[/url]


想留个线索，万一我娃需要呢。 [/quote]

不是这个

回复 20楼桃之夭夭也 的帖子

:handshake

我再去问问吧~

没必要过度解读，Trump有点运气。
美国的大选像钟摆一样，每8或10年换一个方向。
现在正在向右摆，就像8年前向左摆一样。
再说Cliton的popular voters还领先2百万张，换个Sanders来做候选人的话还不知道鹿死谁手呢。
这样也好，参众总都是GOP,至少可以做点事

回复 18楼pp_dream 的帖子

其实没有想像中的折腾。一般public library (town or county)都有准备标准考试的书，sat和act都有。两种风格不同，你借书回来让孩子瞄一眼，看看哪种对自己的路子，只考一种。我前面说过的孩子和我儿子一样，都是不愿意为应试花时间准备的那种。

回复 19楼pp_dream 的帖子

我比较想捍卫你的钱袋子…

那个网上老师教那么多的孩子，有时间评点小孩写的东西吗？

其实图书馆也有各种写作（包括sat写作）的书。

如果真想要tutor ,何妨再发掘local资源（教师记者之类）。我看我这边有朋友请老师上门教2个小孩，小孩写的东西还可以讨论，老师引导孩子相互评点。小孩有伴也不那么boring。朋友请的老师和孩子什么都聊，象mentor 一样。

[[i] 本帖最后由 Ageji_Mom 于 2017-1-22 23:28 编辑 [/i]]

回复 23楼Ageji_Mom 的帖子

谢谢！我会跟我女儿商量。

她上学期间完全没时间准备SAT或ACT，对付GPA和课外活动就已经精疲力竭了:L
PSAT考得还不算太差，1460 out of 1520，数学丢分比英文丢分严重，要补的不光是英文，还有数学:Q 不过，这些都等放暑假了再打算吧~

网上找的这位教授是老中，算是比较负责的了。我一直觉得老米不负责，肯定有很多负责的老米，但我不知道到哪里找，所以不如找老中，老中教授至少非常严格。文章他都批改标注的，我每次都收到他的回馈，这点他还是靠谱的。
我女儿上学期间每月的课程其实她都是混事，我知道。本月她有考试和网球比赛，下月还有网球比赛，所以我的钱一定是白付了。白付的钱很多，网球一个月大约一千刀，其实也是白付的，呵呵。无所谓了，付了才心安啊:$