On 2010-02-24, at 9:46 PM, Eric Beck wrote:
>
> Out of curiosity, and not speaking just to Joanna, but when people on
> this list talk about "the working class," do they include themselves
> in it? Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but it sounds to me that most people
> think of the working class as something they are not a part of, and so
> I also wonder what exactly people here consider themselves.
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They are likely workers, even if they consider themselves other than that. The great mass of the population is dependent on wages or salaries and on workplace and social benefits, and it's interest lies in improving these forms of income.
On the other hand, the interests of the self-employed who derive their income from profit and of senior managers who rely on stock options and portfolio investments are more directly tied to the profitability of their firms and to rising equity and bond markets, which mostly accounts for their opposition to demands for higher pay and spending on social programs favoured by the working class.
Capitalism's great industrial and political struggles have arisen out of these conflicting workplace and social interests.
There is an intermediate layer of supervisors and lower level managers which has expanded with the growth of large, heirarchical public and private enterprises, whose status is more ambiguous. In many cases, those who direct others also report to others who direct them. This may be true of professional employees on the list.
Advanced capitalist countries outside the US have generally conceded that supervisory functions and interests align more closely to those of workers than employers, and have frequently extended to them the right to form their own unions or to belong to larger ones. Conflicts over whether certain personnel are "employees" eligible to belong to a union or "managers" prohibited from joining one are resolved through negotiations or by labour boards.
Typically, the tests are the extent and impact of decision-making authority in the enterprise, the management and utilization of resources, access to confidential information, and the level at which most regular contact and discussion occurs.
There is also a rapidly growing cohort of so-called "independent contractors", ostensibly self-employed individuals whose conditions are virtually indistinguishable from those of other workers, often the consequence of their employer having laid them off as a pretext to re-engage them as contractors shorn of the union protection and benefits they previously enjoyed.
These divisions now appear less stark than they did during periods of great class conflict. Within this context, also, classes have their own internal income and status hierarchies, conflicts of interest, and varying levels of class consciousness.