Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America

235 Pages·2016·2.01 MB·English

by  Tamara Draut

Also by Tamara Draut
Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings
Can’t Get Ahead

FOR MY DAD
Servants, laborers and workmen of different kinds make up the far
greater part of every political society. But what improves the
circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an
inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing
and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor
and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe
and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share
of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well
fed, clothed and lodged.
—Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776
Contents
Cover
Also by Tamara Draut
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE The Bargain-Basement Economy
CHAPTER TWO The New Indignity of Work
CHAPTER THREE Meet the New Populists
CHAPTER FOUR The Great Power Shift
CHAPTER FIVE The Legacy of Exclusion
CHAPTER SIX The Privilege of Visibility
CHAPTER SEVEN The Sleeping Giant Stirs
CHAPTER EIGHT A Better Deal
The Blueprint for a Better Deal
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
Introduction
My father died a few short months after the city of Detroit declared bankruptcy.
He 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 was
America’s hero, the brawny backbone of American prosperity and a broad
middle class the likes of which the world had never seen. These were 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.
That working class is dead, Detroit’s bankruptcy a blunt symbol of its ultimate
demise.
But the working class is not dead.
It’s just different. 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 store. It’s the Latina
home health 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 enough 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. The words “working class” have been scrubbed
from our social and political lexicon, rendering invisible the millions of workers
who buttress the middle class at best and straddle poverty at worst.
But attention must be paid to the new working class. Our lives—all of our
lives—would grind to a halt if the working class waged a general strike. Its sheer
scale in size and diverse demographics will shape the future of American
politics. And our nation’s prosperity will be defined by whether we address its
members’ declining living standards.
It was in the spring of 2013 that this new working class introduced itself to the
world with coordinated walkouts of fast-food workers in major cities across the
country. This took place just a few months before the cradle of our once blue-
collar nation went bankrupt. But the old blue-collar nation typically paid its
workers hourly wages of $17 or more. The fast-food workers—who clock in to
one of the largest occupations in America today—were protesting wages that
hover around $8 an hour. What began as a movement among fast-food workers
has since mushroomed into a major worker justice movement known as the Fight
for $15, in which home-care workers, airport workers, adjunct professors, retail
workers, and fast-food workers have all come together to fight for better wages
and working conditions. It is the tip of the spear of the Sleeping Giant, staking a
claim and fertilizing the seeds of a new working-class solidarity.
In just a few short years, the Fight for $15 has been able to claim significant
victories, from consciousness-raising to policy changes in red states and blue
states. In the 2014 elections, voters in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South
Dakota passed ballot measures to raise their states’ minimum wage.1 And voters
in San Francisco approved a $15 minimum wage increase, matching Seattle’s
groundbreaking increase. In 2015, Los Angeles joined the list of cities raising
the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
For working-class people who aren’t engaged directly in the growing chorus
of workers taking to the streets, the movement brings attention to their needs and
struggles. But as important, the movement emphasizes the dignity and value of
their jobs. I’ve interviewed people all across this country, from the Bible Belt to
the East Coast, from the Rust Belt to the Pacific Northwest, and one of the most
common grievances they express is the lack of respect they experience in the
workplace, and in our society more broadly. Whatever their job, the individuals I
talked to described their work as meaningful and embedded with purpose, yet
they also told me about the disrespect they get on the job from their bosses and
in society from politicians.
For LaShawn* and Michelle, who in many ways typify the new working class,
their work is deeply gratifying. The African American couple, both in their late
thirties, have been married for twelve years and live on the outskirts of Atlanta.
LaShawn is a commercial sanitation driver, emptying Dumpsters at restaurants,
apartment complexes, and local businesses for $16.10 an hour. Michelle is a
certified nursing assistant (CNA), providing care for the elderly in their homes.
She recently switched jobs and now works as a supervisor, earning $9 an hour
for overseeing a staff of CNAs and ensuring that each client receives the best
possible care. They both grew up in Atlanta and are now raising their own
children there. They love their jobs, deriving true personal satisfaction and pride
from their work. Driving a garbage truck is a childhood dream come true for
LaShawn, who always had a passion for trucks and sees his job “as getting to
play with this big machine and getting paid for it.” Yet as we got further into the
conversation, it became clear that his pride finds little reciprocation from
management. In LaShawn’s case, workers are often clocked out by management
to avoid paying overtime, even though they’re still working—a practice known
as wage theft, which is increasingly common in today’s working-class jobs. To
get close to forty hours, Michelle used to work seven days a week, a pace she
maintained for three and a half years before taking her current position. Paying
their monthly bills is a challenge, and often credit cards fill in the gap when cash
is short. Asked what they’d do if they were paid more, LaShawn said they’d
“actually be able to take a check and pay rent and have money set aside to buy
groceries. Right now, the way our checks are, you have to make a conscious
decision: If I don’t pay this bill, I can take that money and put it toward
groceries.” LaShawn also mentioned that he’d like to have the money to treat his
kids and wife to a dinner out or a night at the movies. But he doesn’t think our
nation’s elected officials are much concerned about his family’s dreams and
struggles. “It feels like the working class are the lepers of society. Needed to
carry out the economy, to hold it and make it strong, but disregarded when it
comes to our needs,” he told me.
As LaShawn and Michelle’s story illustrates, gone are the generous pensions,
health insurance coverage, and paid vacations that characterized the working-
class jobs of the industrial era. Today’s service-sector serfs are fighting for the
most basic of job perks: a decent paycheck, a stable schedule with enough hours,
and paid time off when they or their children are sick. The new working class
has jobs, but those jobs no longer provide a livelihood. Let that sink in. A job no
longer provides a livelihood for the working class. No matter how you define
“working class”—as individuals without bachelor’s degrees, as people who get
paid by the hour, or as workers who aren’t managers or supervisors—its
members constitute the majority of American workers and even American
adults.
Defining the New Working Class
Social scientists use three common methods to define class—by occupation,
income, or education—and there is really no consensus about the “right” way to
do it. Michael Zweig, a leading scholar in working-class studies, defines the
working class as “people who, when they go to work or when they act as
citizens, have comparatively little power or authority. They are the people who
do their jobs under more or less close supervision, who have little control over
the pace or the content of their work, who aren’t the boss of anyone.”
Using occupational data as the defining criteria, Zweig estimated that the
working class makes up just over 60 percent of the labor force.2 The weakness of
using occupational data to define class is that most political surveys do not
capture the occupation of the respondent, making it impossible to ensure
consistency in research that draws upon both economic and political data sets, as
I do in this book.
The second way of defining class is by income, which has the benefit of being
available in both political and economic data sets. Yet defining the working class
by income raises complications because of the wide variation in the cost of
living in the United States. An annual income of $45,000 results in a very
different standard of living in New York City than it does in Omaha, Nebraska.
Incomes are also volatile, subject to changes in employment status or the number
of hours worked in the household, making it easy for the same household to
move in and out of standard income bands in any given year.
The third way to define class is by educational attainment, which is how I’ve
defined the working class in this book. Education level has the benefit of being
consistently collected in both economic and political data sets, but, more
important, education level is strongly associated with job quality. The reality is
that the economic outcomes of individuals who hold bachelor’s degrees and
those who don’t have diverged considerably since the late 1970s. While people
with bachelor’s degrees experienced real wage growth in the thirty years
between 1980 and 2010, incomes among those with only a high school education
or some college declined precipitously. Today having a college degree is
essential (but no guarantee, of course) to securing a spot among the professional
middle class. As unionized manufacturing jobs got sent overseas, the once