Inspired to start a user discussion based on this episode of On Point: "Who's really working class in America?" https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2026/08/31/working-class-in-america-economy
(The episode was okay, not super interesting if you've already thought about it before, but might be worth a listen if the topic interests you.)
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Let's bring out our inner critical theorist and discuss:
What does it mean to be working class? Who is in the working class? Why does it matter?
An easy answer is that working class is the labor class, not the "capital class"; i.e., the people who own the firms for whom the labor works. But this is muddled today, when many people who rely on their own labor also accumulate wealth through their property and investments. Is there a line for "rely on their own labor"? Don't lifestyle choices matter?
Traditionally and culturally, "working class" has been used to describe workers who do difficult and dirty labor. But there are many people who work desk jobs–including college educated people–who feel more economically and financially akin to the non-college-educated "cultural working class" because they are also burdened. Especially now that in many places it is even more difficult to acquire property.
Why does it matter? The political and policy discussion often centers around class as a propaganda or program target. When politicians and policy makers talk about the working class, it helps to know what they mean. For instance, we talk a lot about social security here, which is a program that specifically targets people who work–the funding comes directly from salary and is paid to people who spent much of their life on salary… but as many of us know, a lot of the payouts are not exactly going to people who are financially burdened. (Of course, it is a lifeline for many others.)
So what do you think? Who is in the working class? How much does it help or hurt to think about class like this? (I'm inclined to think about policy in terms of class, so I find these thought exercises helpful–but not everyone does!) What do you think are the major implications, if any?
Posted by hypsignathus
10 Comments
It’s me. I’m the working class, a humble r/neoliberal user.
If you have to keep going to your job to “work” in order to keep your life moving forward then you are working class.
Edit:
The obvious contrapositive:
**If you are not working class, then you don’t have to keep going to your job to “work” in order to keep your life moving forward.**
The working class are the people who earn median or below median wages while working either for themselves, or sell their labour for someone else. Hard to be working class if you make millions, or live comfortably better than the average person does
Working class should not include office desk workers making more than like $70K. When working class means people who work or are married to someone who works you’re describing way too many people for the label to actually mean anything. Not having a college degree would be an easy but not exactly perfect definition.
But politicians live for this vague kind of language where they stand for the “working class” when that mean basically everyone who isn’t generationally wealthy. People also like to see themselves as oppressed/not wealthy even if they’re making more than 80% of people in the country and 98% of people in the world. So I don’t think lawyers and engineers and accountants identifying as working class is going anywhere.
The main issue in the US is the amorphous all-inclusive nature of “middle class” where effectively everyone is middle class. Then “working class” or “upper middle class” and such has to jump in with foggy delineation to refer to the general directionality of the two ends.
I think introducing the UK middle class under the name “professional class” could do a lot to help it out. Which gets at the white collar/blue collar distinction and the non-monetary social capital/class inheritance stuff that a term like “first-gen” is dissuading against.
It would be fine if working class or the broad middle class just meant “everyone not in the professional class” in terms of the people who don’t have the prestige pathways or general social inheritance on what and how to do all the fancy things. Though you could get more specific if necessary, but I don’t know if people in North America at least really see themselves as particularly divided or culturally grouped in a class more specific than that.
And to some degree that’s a good thing. A rejection of the Old World class systems and everyone seeing themselves as equal-ish even when that’s not true in really important ways to understand is still a more egalitarian cultural environment.
Everyone that makes up to $5000 more a year than the speaker, for any given speaker.
It’s vibe-based, depending on the present company and the state of the economy.
There’s the Bourgeoises class who own some means of production and don’t have to labor if they don’t want to.
There’s the Petite Bourgeoises who own some means of production but can’t afford not to work it themselves.
There’s the Professional-Managerial class who have some complex skill that makes their labor really hard to replace.
There’s the Working class, everyone else. They own no means of production, nor do they have some valuable skill to bring to market. They work for whatever they can get.
The concept of the professional-managerial class makes the rest of the class framing work. Without it, yeah you get weird conclusions that 98% of people are “working class”.
People at or below what I make are working class
>Who is in the working class
Hell if I know. If was forced to make a definition, though:
I would define it as working-age and the nonworking children of Americans making below the 30th-40th percentile COL-adjusted national wage or making a combined household income below the same level for a household of their size, without large amounts of savings or likely future prospects for career/wage advancement, as well as old people who used to count as part of that.
I’m making 3/5ths of median wage in my area, for example but I wouldn’t consider myself ‘working class’, just a grad student temporarily making a reasonably low wage.
In the US ‘Working class’ tends to mean ‘the broad class of people in the country that I think are most deserving of help’ in actual practice, so I’d rather use the term to refer to people who, from a utilitarian view, are statistically much more likely to be in need of and greatly benefit from aid.