I'm a marxist of the Groucho sort (place smiley face here)...
B. Rosser may have been lister who posted comment about private sector workers resenting academic tenure (apology if attribution in incorrect, I accidentally deleted post and recalling from memory)...questions arising about tenure should be reframed - not why do we (I teach at a community college in central FL) have this protection and others do not, but why doesn't everyone have tenure (or some equivalent)...
'middle-class' is often used, rarely defined (and poorly when it is) and generally assumed...
"When I say that teachers have a contradictory class location, I am not implying that they are by definition within the middle classes, or that they are in an ambiguous position somehow 'between' the classes. Instead, along with [Erik Olin] Wright, I am saying that it is wise to think of them as located simultaneously in two classes. They thus share the interests of the petty bourgeoisie and the working class. Hence, when there is a fiscal crisis in which many teachers are faced with worsening working conditions, layoffs, and even months without being paid - as has been the case in a number of urban areas in the United States - and when their labor is restructured so that they lose control, it is possible that those contradictory interests will move closer to those of other workers and people of color who have historically been faced with the use of similar procedures by capital and the state." (from Michael Apple, _Teachers& Texts_, p. 32)
anybody want to deny the proletarianization of academic labor?... Michael Hoover