On 2010-11-03, at 5:38 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:
> so, just to be clear, children from working class parents are excluded from
> the working class until they get a job themselves...? what if they had a
> job in high school, or have jobs over the summer? does the fact that these
> jobs were prior to college, time-bounded during college, or seemingly
> unlikely to be embedded in a future career mean that they're insufficient to
> include these young people from the working class?
>
> This strikes me as a rather intense form of hyper-materialism that'd exclude
> never- or only-periodically-employed (house)wives of working class men from
> the working class as well as a wide variety of folks who are able to survive
> on sporadic and diverse forms of day labor... not to speak of suggesting
> that non-traditional students who held jobs in their late teens and into
> their twenties (and beyond) fall out of the working class if they start
> full-time schooling.
I'm still satisified with the conventional understanding of a worker as someone who sells his or her labour power to an employer - recognizing that there is some blurring of the boundries in modern economies, where many workers in extensively hierarchical public and private corporations both supervise and are supervised by other employees, where there is increasingly more part-time, casual, and contract employment and lifetime movement between workplace and school, and where apprenticeship training for industrial and service sector jobs is now conducted at the postsecondary level. But there are still means of distinguishing on a case by case basis between who is effectively a worker and who is not, and I'm familiar, as you may be too, with the criteria which are used.
That having been said, if a full-time student or a housewife, or for that matter a self-employed businessman or businesswoman, wants to self-identify as a "worker" in support of working class causes and institutions, I would not discourage them from doing so. I would be all for it. But we need to recognize also that business owners and politicians who are opposed to working class causes will sometimes appropriate the identity to promote class harmony on the basis that "we all of us work for a living, and are equally deserving of what we earn". In the same vein, some habitually describe retirees as retired workers, obscuring that they are no longer tied to the workplace and, as a consequence, may be apt to oppose, as taxpayers and investors, the same improvements in working class standards they previously favoured as being in their self-interest as employees. When retirees do support working class causes, it is as as allies, no longer as workers - either primarily for ideological reasons (as on this list) or because their interest as retirees aligns with those of workers in matters of government spending on medicare and other social programs. The same may be said of students, farmers, small business owners, and others whose primary source of income is not derived from employment.