> Thus people who make their living by selling thier labor power
> include both a supermarket clerks, janitors, waiters etc, as well
> as software engineers, teachers, doctors, analysts etc. However
> these groups are popularly considered two different 'classes' - the
> 'working' class' and the 'yuppie' class. Another popular
> misconception is that "working class" includes every poor person
> regardless of his relation to work and production (i.e. workers as
> well as lumpen, homeless, criminals etc. Many populists and
> "activistists" (as Doug and Liza aptly labeled them) hold a noble-
> savage notion of class that relies almost exlcusively on cultural
> identities associated with low socio-economic status and exclude
> professionnals and middle class.
>
> Since these notions are pretty popular, I tried simply to say that
> "organizing working class" today does not mean "rabble
> rousing" (which was the case in the past), but organizing most of
> the middle class, professionals, technicians, sales people,
> knowledge workers, government employees, and the dreaded "yuppies."
Among the overlapping categories that you listed, the only sector
that's relatively well organized in America are government
employees. According to the BLS, "About 36 percent of government
workers were union members in 2004, compared with about 8 percent of
workers in private-sector industries" (at <http://www.bls.gov/
news.release/union2.nr0.htm>). That is a huge gap. When the only
stronghold of organized labor becomes workers whose wages and
benefits directly depend on tax dollars, which in turn depend on
profits produced by the work of unorganized workers, organized labor
has a big political and economic problem at hand.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>