"More than half the U.S. population 25 and over in 2000 (52 percent) had completed at least some college education" ("Educational Attainment: 2000," August 2003, <http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-24.pdf>). The younger you are, the more likely you are to have college experience: "The rate of completion of some college was 58 percent among those in the 25- to 29-year age group" ("Educational Attainment: 2000," August 2003, <http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-24.pdf>). Given these facts, it's time to consider colleges and universities as working-class institutions, without putting blue-collar workers (some of whom work on campuses as janitors, food workers, clerical workers, etc.) who have no college education on the political back burner. Because of the declining weight of mass production factories in the US economy, colleges and universities -- along with elementary, middle, and high schools -- are among the few remaining institutions where you can still find working-class youths _en masse_. It's still important to organize workers at points of production, but the points of production have become increasingly fragmented (due for instance to the rise of mini mills, deregulation, outsourcing, offshoring, etc.), so it's also important to organize workers at other working-class institutions as well as in working-class neighborhoods.
T Fast tfast at yorku.ca, Wed Feb 23 13:58:19 PST 2005:
>Where the author of the article errors I think is by not recognizing
>that many of those he labels as urban liberals are in fact children
>of working class parents.
More importantly, the majority of children of working-class parents who go to work and live in cities are still very much working-class, whether they become more liberal or conservative politically than their parents. Depending on the kinds of jobs they get, children of working-class parents who earn college degrees may receive lower lifetime disposable incomes (earnings, pensions, Social Security, health care benefits, etc. adjusted for inflation) than their parents, especially if their parents had good union jobs. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>