kelley wrote: [snip]
> This powerless status is perhaps best described negatively: the powerless
> lack the authority, status and sense of self that professionals tend to
> have. The status privilege of professionals has three aspects, the lack of
> which produces oppression for non-professionals.
>
> First, ...being a professional usually requires a college education [snip]
>
> Second,...most (professionals) exercise considerable day to day work
> autonomy. ... Non-professionals, otoh, lack autonomy, and in both their
> working and consumer/client lives often stand under the authority of
> professionals. [snip]
>
> Third, the privileges of the professional extend beyond the workplace to a
> whole way of life. I call this way of life "respectability." [snip]
>
> from justice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Marion young.
This is interesting. And perhaps it could extend to ground an account of several sub-categories in the population.
First, the mass of the police (who in my class analysis are declassed). They suffer all the powerlessness described above, and perhaps in an even more intense form than many. And yet they are granted immense power which they do not possess in their own right nor, to some extent, even legally in their official status (e.g., the power to inflict torture, the power to commit murder without real fear of penalty). I don't know how if at all this set of conditions gets reflected, distorted, ignored in (for example) the many police dramas in the history of tv.
Second, a special subcategory of the working class who are denied, often by their own fellow workers, the status of workers: the many working supervisors who are (often in their own eyes, and sometimes officially as in the distinction between exempt and non-exempt workers) declared management. The great bulk of people in this category receive very little financial or "career" advantage from their position, have no real power over their lives, but like the police are given an arbitrary power over the lives of others. (Unlike the police, it is not intrinsic to their positions but strictly an arbitrary classification.) The Normal Illinois Fire Dept Strike (in which the entire department was jailed) was over the (eventually successful) demand of the union which included captains and lieutenants that the latter be classified as workers and not as management. The captains and lieutenants went to jail along with the rest.
Carrol