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"Working class in the United States"
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Sleeping giant : the untapped economic and political power of America's new working class
\"It's not your father's working class anymore. It's more female, more diverse racially, and it doesn't wear Carhartt's and a hard hat anymore. Sleeping Giant is the first major examination of this dynamic and increasingly activist class and the role it will play in our political and economic future. What does \"working class\" mean in today's America? Today's workers don't just man the assembly lines. They watch our children and aging parents, park our cars, screen our luggage, clean our offices and hotel rooms, cook our take-out meals and stock our store shelves. And they are blacker, browner, and more female than the old working class. They are not as organized, in terms of their unions and political clout, but they are demographically powerful and are awakening to that power. The new working class is indeed a \"sleeping giant,\" and Tamara Draut will blend up-close-and-personal individual narratives with historical background and sophisticated analysis to explain how they are about to change America for the better\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Bridging the Divide
In Bridging the
Divide , Jack Metzgar attempts to determine
the differences between working-class and middle-class cultures in
the United States. Drawing on a wide range of
multidisciplinary sources, Metzgar writes as a now middle-class
professional with a working-class upbringing, explaining the
various ways the two cultures conflict and complement each other,
illustrated by his own lived experiences.
Set in a historical framework that reflects on how both class
cultures developed, adapted, and survived through decades of
historical circumstances, Metzgar challenges professional
middle-class views of both the working-class and themselves. In the
end, he argues for the creation of a cross-class coalition of what
he calls \"standard-issue professionals\" with both hard-living and
settled-living working people and outlines some policies that could
help promote such a unification if the two groups had a better
understanding of their differences and how to use those differences
to their advantage.
Bridging the Divide mixes personal stories and
theoretical concepts to give us a compelling look inside the
current complex position of the working-class in American culture
and a view of what it could be in the future.
eBook
Class Reunion
Noted scholar Lois Weis first visited the town of \"Freeway\" in her 1990 book, Working Class Without Work. In that book we met the students and teachers of Freeway's high school to understand how these working-class folks made sense of their lives. Now, fifteen years later, Weis has gone back to Freeway for Class Reunion. This time her focus is on the now grown-up students who are, for the most part, still working class and now struggling to survive the challenges of the global economy.
Class Reunion is a rare and valuable longitudinal ethnographic study that provides powerful, provocative insight into how the lives of these men and women have changed over the last two decades--and what their prospects might be for the future.
Lois Weis is Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of several books including The Unknown City , Beyond Black and White , Off White and Working Class without Work.
eBook
Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865-1920
Michael K. Rosenow investigates working people's beliefs, rituals of dying, and the politics of death by honing in on three overarching questions: How did workers, their families, and their communities experience death? Did various identities of class, race, gender, and religion coalesce to form distinct cultures of death for working people? And how did people's attitudes toward death reflect notions of who mattered in U.S. society?
Drawing from an eclectic array of sources ranging from Andrew Carnegie to grave markers in Chicago's potter's field, Rosenow portrays the complex political, social, and cultural relationships that fueled the United States' industrial ascent. The result is an undertaking that adds emotional depth to existing history while challenging our understanding of modes of cultural transmission.
eBook
Failure by Design
InFailure by Design, the Economic Policy Institute's Josh Bivens takes a step back from the acclaimed State of Working America series, building on its wealth of data to relate a compelling narrative of the U.S. economy's struggle to emerge from the Great Recession of 2008. Bivens explains the causes and impact on working Americans of the most catastrophic economic policy failure since the 1920s.
As outlined clearly here, economic growth since the late 1970s has been slow and inequitably distributed, largely as a result of poor policy choices. These choices only got worse in the 2000s, leading to an anemic economic expansion. What growth we did see in the economy was fueled by staggering increases in private-sector debt and a housing bubble that artificially inflated wealth by trillions of dollars. As had been predicted, the bursting of the housing bubble had disastrous consequences for the broader economy, spurring a financial crisis and a rise in joblessness that dwarfed those resulting from any recession since the Great Depression. The fallout from the Great Recession makes it near certain that there will be yet another lost decade of income growth for typical families, whose incomes had not been boosted by the previous decade's sluggish and localized economic expansion.
In its broad narrative of how the economy has failed to deliver for most Americans over much of the past three decades,Failure by Designalso offers compelling graphical evidence on jobs, incomes, wages, and other measures of economic well-being most relevant to low- and middle-income workers. Josh Bivens tracks these trends carefully, giving a lesson in economic history that is readable yet rigorous in its analysis. Intended as both a stand-alone volume and a companion to the newState of Working Americawebsite that presents all of the data underlying this cogent analysis,Failure by Designwill become required reading as a road map to the economic problems that confront working Americans.
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Class Unknown
Since the Gilded Age, social scientists, middle-class reformers, and writers have left the comforts of their offices to \"pass\" as steel workers, coal miners, assembly-line laborers, waitresses, hoboes, and other working and poor people in an attempt to gain a fuller and more authentic understanding of the lives of the working class and the poor. In this first, sweeping study of undercover investigations of work and poverty in America, award-winning historian Mark Pittenger examines how intellectuals were shaped by their experiences with the poor, and how despite their sympathy toward working-class people, they unintentionally helped to develop the contemporary concept of a degraded and \"other\" American underclass. While contributing to our understanding of the history of American social thought,Class Unknownoffers a new perspective on contemporary debates over how we understand and represent our own society and its class divisions.
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American Railroad Labor and the Genesis of the New Deal, 1919-1935
American historians tend to believe that labor activism was moribund in the years between the First World War and the New Deal. Jon Huibregtse challenges this perspective in his examination of the railroad unions of the time, arguing that not only were they active, but that they made a big difference in American Labor practices by helping to set legal precedents.
Huibregtse explains how efforts by the Plumb Plan League and the Railroad Labor Executive Association created the Railroad Labor Act, its amendments, and the Railroad Retirement Act. These laws became models for the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act. Unfortunately, the significant contributions of the railroad laws are, more often than not, overlooked when the NLRA or Social Security are discussed.
Offering a new perspective on labor unions in the 1920s, Huibregtse describes how the railroad unions created a model for union activism that workers' organizations followed for the next two decades.
eBook
The Working Class Majority
In the second edition of his essential book-which incorporates vital new information and new material on immigration, race, gender, and the social crisis following 2008-Michael Zweig warns that by allowing the working class to disappear into categories of \"middle class\" or \"consumers,\" we also allow those with the dominant power, capitalists, to vanish among the rich. Economic relations then appear as comparisons of income or lifestyle rather than as what they truly are-contests of power, at work and in the larger society.
eBook
Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States?
Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development, and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society. Tackling this debate head-on, Robin Archer puts forward a new explanation for why there is no American labor party--an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about \"American exceptionalism\" is untenable.
Conventional explanations rely on comparison with Europe. Archer challenges these explanations by comparing the United States with its most similar New World counterpart--Australia. This comparison is particularly revealing, not only because the United States and Australia share many fundamental historical, political, and social characteristics, but also because Australian unions established a labor party in the late nineteenth century, just when American unions, against a common backdrop of industrial defeat and depression, came closest to doing something similar.
Archer examines each of the factors that could help explain the American outcome, and his systematic comparison yields unexpected conclusions. He argues that prosperity, democracy, liberalism, and racial hostility often promoted the very changes they are said to have obstructed. And he shows that it was not these characteristics that left the United States without a labor party, but, rather, the powerful impact of repression, religion, and political sectarianism.
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Moving working families forward
Even as our political system remains deeply divided between right and left, there is a clear yearning for a more moderate third way that navigates an intermediate position to address the most pressing issues facing the United States today. Moving Working Families Forward points to a Third Way between liberals and conservatives, combining a commitment to government expenditures that enhance the incomes of working families while recognizing that concerns for program effectiveness, individual responsibility, and underutilization of market incentives are justified. While conservatives often propose economic incentives to promote desirable behavior, and liberals are often aghast at these policies, Third Way advocates take a more flexible position.Robert Cherry and Robert Lerman provide the context to understand the distinctive qualities of Third Way policies, focusing on seven areas that substantially affect working families: immigration, race and gender earnings disparities, education, housing, strengthening partnerships, and federal taxes. Balancing quantitative empirical studies with voices of working class people who are affected by the policies being discussed, they argue that, in each of these areas, Third Way policies are superior compared to those proposed by the right and the left, offering an engaging and important perspective on how public policies should be changed. A timely approach, Moving Working Families Forward makes policy recommendations that are both practical and transformative.
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