Who is Working Class?
A few solutions to an unsolvable problem
It’s often said that everyone in America thinks they’re middle class. That’s certainly an exaggeration, though it’s true that most Americans see themselves as middle class: per Gallup, 54% of Americans identify as such (including the hard-to-define label of “upper-middle class”). Very few like to put themselves on the extreme ends of the spectrum: a mere 2% call themselves “upper class” while 12% self-identify as “lower class.”
But this still leaves nearly a third of Americans who don’t identify with any of these social rungs. The remainder, 31% of Americans, self-identify as working class. But this doesn’t tell the full story: a poll from Pew Research shows that 54% of Americans believe that “working class” describes them well. Most likely, many of the respondents in the Gallup poll identified as working class and middle or lower class—but, given the choice, many decided to commit themselves to one of those rungs of the social ladder instead of sticking with the “working” label.
Perhaps more than anything, it seems like the average American just wants to be normal. People don’t like to be on either extreme. If calling yourself “upper class” feels presumptive or calling yourself “lower class” feels shameful, “middle class” is a great middle ground.
The real question, then, is what normal actually means. Is “normal” the middle class, or is “normal” the working class? How should we divide these two if we should at all, and how should we root our definition?
More than a particular place in society, it seems like we’re often inclined to define the working class by a particular kind of work. We think of manufacturing, contract work, trucking, and so on—even as our economy increasingly moves towards service work, many people still seem hesitant to put waiters and baristas in the same class as steelworkers.
It’s likely no coincidence that the prototypical example of the working class happens to be the population of some of the United States’ biggest swing states (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania). If Nevada and Hawaii were the two most crucial states in a presidential election, I imagine we’d see plenty said about how workers in the tourism industry are the real representatives of the modern working class.
Any intuitive or cultural definition of the working class is likely to fall into these cultural biases and blindspots. Statistics, meanwhile, remain ambiguous at best: though they might give us certain defined income brackets, it’s clear that self-identification and income analysis can’t set these cultural barriers on their own.
Perhaps it’d be useful to take a historical perspective here, looking at some predecessors of the modern American class system. Throughout the Middle Ages, much of Europe also used a three-tiered class hierarchy (though it’s not perfectly analogous to the system we have today). Rather than the income-based split we have today, this medieval system split the country into three separate “estates”: clergy, nobility, and commoners. Traditionally, the clergy was regarded as the first estate, the nobility as the second, and the commoners as the third.
There were some complications to this system, of course. There were wealthy peasants and poor nobles. There were merchants who earned their way into nobility, though it seems that losing noble status entirely was incredibly rare if it happened at all. Social mobility
While our modern system is flexible and allows for plenty of leeway in self-identification, this system was rigid and objective: you had one social status and were largely expected to stay that way for life (though nobody was born as clergy, of course).
This system was meant to represent the different levels of honor afforded to each part of society: members of the church were (at least in theory) the most honored and important, with the nobility coming second and the peasantry sitting in last. There’s no clear analogy between these medieval concepts and modern society. The Enlightenment values of the American Revolution only left a few vestiges of this system in our culture. Whatever “honor culture” we have is much harder to pin down than this—and, if anything, it seems like we’re largely inclined to honor the working class over the upper class.
Today’s class system seems to have a much more linear relationship with wealth. We don’t really think of poor members of the upper class or rich members of the lower class—though the working class might be a bit more complicated. There are rich plumbers and electricians. These seem like prime examples of working-class jobs, yet it seems to go against some other key parts of intuition.
If it is just wealth that defines this group, then it’s hard to say where the working class starts and the middle class ends. There’s a classic paradox in philosophy, the Sorites paradox. It begins like this: one grain of sand is not a heap, nor are two grains of sand stacked together. The same goes for three grains, four, five, six, and so on. But we know that enough sand together is still a heap—nobody can reasonably deny that heaps exist. The question, then, is where this arbitrary cutoff would be: exactly how much sand do you need for a heap?
By my estimation, the answer is that there is no arbitrary cutoff: there’s not an exact number where the grains become a heap. Looking for one is an exercise in futility.
Trying to create perfectly neat cutoffs for classes is similarly futile. Someone making $99,999 a year and someone making $100,000 a year can’t reasonably be split into separate classes, even if $100,000 is a convenient cutoff. Any attempt to create this sort of precise definition is going to lead to an arbitrary and unsatisfying number.
Putting aside intuitions, history, and wealth as sources for a definition, there is one more major perspective on the definition of the working class, though it’s certainly controversial: dividing the economic classes between those who must sell labor and those who own the businesses, a perspective most famously taken by Karl Marx.
Marx defined his working class (the “proletariat”) as those people whose only means of supporting themselves was selling their labor. While a businessman or a member of the nobility (these groups combined would account for most of Marx’s “bourgeoisie”) can live off valuable assets—perhaps in the form of company stock, land, or even just significant savings—a working man has nothing valuable enough to live off of other than the hours in his day and the sweat on his brow.
To this end, Marx’s working class was made up of wage laborers and salaried workers. The business owners, aristocrats, and investors who could afford to pay others to do their work sat in a class above them. Even small-business owners, often included in modern definitions of the working class, were regarded as part of this owning class (Marx labeled them the “petite bourgeoisie”).
Of course, most people’s hesitation with accepting this definition won’t be a disagreement with the specifics of where to divide wage laborers vs. petite bourgeoisie. Instead, it’s a disagreement with Marx’s overarching take that history is defined as a struggle between these proletarians against the bourgeoisie, with the inevitable end as Marx sees it being total control of the economy by the workers alone. Even if this definition of the working class is convincing, it’s likely difficult for the average person (especially the average American) to embrace a Marxist perspective on the question.
Still, I don’t think we should dismiss it simply on the merit or demerit of its most famous advocate. We should certainly consider each person’s relationship with the buying and selling of labor in trying to create such a definition: ignoring this fact won’t help us get closer to the truth.
At a certain level, this question might just be unanswerable. For as much as “working class” is a status or an economic position, it’s also a culture and a form of self-identification. Is there any perfect definition of working class? Could we find a set of conditions that applies to every single working class person without excluding anyone who belongs in this group?
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his late career spent much of his time opposed to precisely this sort of thinking. Such a “perfect definition,” he argued, doesn’t really exist for anything in normal language use. We don’t have a checklist of conditions going through our minds when we use a term like “working class.” Rather than its usage being determined by its meaning, its meaning is determined by its use. We apply definitions retroactively after seeing how the term gains a normal kind of use.
Rather than finding any precise definition of the working class, we might have to accept that the imprecision is just a feature of any term like this. Finding a definition at all might be impossible. The only thing we can find is a picture of how we’re meant to use such a term.
This is not a question that can be answered in 1500 words or so, though I hope that this has offered some perspective on the problem. It’s clear that for many people, being working class is a key point of identity. Something so key to so many people’s self-image demands some greater introspection and consideration—I hope I’ve offered at least a bit.