The Working Class Majority

America's Best Kept Secret, Second Edition

Michael Zweig

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780801464782
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

In the second edition of his essential book—which incorporates vital new information and new material on immigration, race, gender, and the social crisis following 2008—Michael Zweig warns that by allowing the working class to disappear into categories of "middle class" or "consumers, " we also allow those with the dominant power, capitalists, to vanish among the rich. Economic relations then appear as comparisons of income or lifestyle rather than as what they truly are—contests of power, at work and in the larger society.

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THE CLASS STRUCTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

What Are Classes?

I first learned about class growing up in Detroit and its suburbs. Long before I knew what classes were, I experienced them. Before I had the words and concepts, I saw for myself profound differences in different parts of town.

I went to grade school and junior high in Detroit with the children of autoworkers. For high school, my classmates were children of top auto executives in suburban Bloomfield Hills. My parents had found a house in one of the first subdivisions in the area, a corner of one of the finest public school districts in Michigan, where huge estates stood in sharp contrast to the housing I had known before. Other differences soon emerged. The auto plants closed on the first day of deer hunting season so thousands of workers could head into the woods of northern Michigan, but fathers in Bloomfield Hills took their kids hunting for moose in northern Canada or on safari to Africa. A high school boy I knew in Detroit who killed an old woman was put away, but a small group of my new classmates who beat a truck driver to death by the side of the road on a lark received barely two weeks’ social probation at school. Whether we are aware of it or not, even when we don’t have the words to explain it, the American experience is an experience of intense class difference.

A population as large and diverse as ours contains many divides. In recent decades, we have arrived at better understandings of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, helping us to make progress toward overcoming discrimination. But as public awareness of these issues has developed, knowledge of class differences has all but disappeared.

It wasn’t always so. At the end of the nineteenth and far into the twentieth century, newspapers were filled with stories of pitched class struggle. General strikes. The army called out to put down rebellious workers. Mass picketing and factory occupations in the course of union organizing drives. In cartoons, fat capitalist plutocrats with cigars in their mouths and dollar signs for eyes were denounced as enemies of ordinary people.

More recently, the general view has been that class, if it ever was important, is a thing of the past. No one argues that capitalism is a thing of the past, of course. Instead, we often hear that the relative decline of manufacturing and the tremendous growth of service industries have changed the basic facts of life in capitalist society. The relative decline of blue-collar factory employment and the rise of white-collar service jobs is supposed to show that the working class is history. The fact that we no longer see pitched battles between masses of workers and squads of armed goons hired by a company to kill union organizers is taken as proof that class struggle is over, that we’ve outgrown that sordid past. In short, the conventional wisdom is that postindustrial society is not industrial society.

True. But also not true. Life in the United States today is dramatically different from life thirty or sixty or a hundred years ago; many of the changes do correspond with changes in the economy. Yet much remains the same. A call-center worker today can tell you stories of speed-up and harassment by supervisors that equal anything reported by her grandfather who worked on the auto assembly line. And both are just as adamant about union representation. A temp services bookkeeper today is as subject to the whims of his employer as was the garment worker at the turn of the twentieth century. The political power of the economic elite today is at least as great as it was in the 1920s, and perhaps even greater since it is less effectively challenged by other class interests. And while service jobs have certainly grown as a share of the labor force, nearly two million more people were working to produce non-agricultural goods (in mining, manufacturing, and construction) in 1998 than in 1970, over twenty-five million people.1 By 2007, before the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, goods-producing employment had fallen to just over twenty-two million people, but was still 16 percent of total employment in the United States.2

Despite all the changes in the economy, it remains as true today as it was forty and eighty years ago that the majority of Americans are working class people. To see this clearly, we first need to understand what classes make up modern capitalist society. The way to do that is to assess power.

Class is about the power some people have over the lives of others, and the powerlessness most people experience as a result. This way of approaching class is different from looking at income or status or lifestyle. When Americans do talk about class, these are the measures that usually come up, and for good reason. The working class does have different income, status, and lifestyles from those of the middle class and capitalist class. But if we leave the matter there, we miss the basic reason that classes exist in the first place.

Classes are groups of people connected to one another, and made different from one another, by the ways they interact when producing goods and services. This production process is based in the workplace, but extends into the political and cultural dynamics of society as well, where the rules and expectations that guide the economy are laid down, largely in accord with the needs of the economically powerful. Class is not a box that we fit into, or not, depending on our personal attributes. Classes are not isolated and self-contained. What class we are in depends upon the role we play, as it relates to what others do, in the complicated process in which goods and services are made. These roles carry with them different degrees of income and status, but their most fundamental feature is the different degrees of power each has. The heart of class is not about lifestyle. It is about economics.

Clearly it makes a difference whether you own the factory or are a hired hand. It makes a difference whether you are the CEO at the bank or the technician who repairs the ATMs. The chief difference is a difference of power: power to determine and control the processes that go on in the factory and the bank, and beyond that, power in the larger society, especially political power.

Power is complicated; it has many sources and is exercised in many ways. Some people have the power to determine which goods and services will be made, how, and by whom. Some set government policy and use the government to control others, through the police, through regulations, through the military. Others have cultural power to shape the ideas and values that tend to dominate our thinking. Elections involve still another type of power.

A person with power in one of these parts of life doesn’t necessarily have power in another. But power isn’t random. We can find patterns in the exercise of power, spillover from one area of society to another. Economic power and political power are related and reinforce one another. The power to affect our culture comes from control over economic and political resources, but influencing the culture tends to strengthen one’s economic and political power as well.

Some power is obvious and some is invisible. The power that we can see we tend to identify with individuals. My supervisor has power. The president of the United States has power. A media critic for the New York Times and a program officer at the National Endowment for the Arts have power. I have power, and you do too, in the aspects of our lives that we can control or influence. Most of us are acutely aware of power in its visible, individual forms.

But other kinds of power are easy to miss. The power of inertia tends to perpetuate existing ways of doing things and existing relationships. We aren’t necessarily aware, day to day, of the power that limits alternatives, the power of a kind of social automatic pilot, invisible as long as everyone goes along with the program. Invisible force fields of power are built into the structures that hold society together, giving it shape, setting the paths for our opportunity, and setting the limits as well. We tend to take these contours for granted, internalize them, and think of them as the natural order. But when some group of people seriously challenges this kind of power, in politics, in the culture, in assertions of new ways to organize the economy, what had been invisible roars into full view: the “powers that be” step out to demolish the threat.

Classes arise in these relationships of social power, visible and invisible. Class is first and foremost a product of power asserted in the production process. This means power over what goes on at work: who will do which tasks at what pace for what pay, and the power to decide what to produce, how to produce it, and where to sell it. But beyond that, production power involves setting the rules for how markets work and the laws governing property rights. Production power includes organizing an educational system that will generate a workforce with the skills and work habits required to keep production going. Production power extends into many aspects of our lives beyond the job.

We will see shortly that the majority of the population in the United States belongs to the working class. The working class does not exist in isolation, of course; it draws its existence from its relationship to other classes, other people also engaged in making and distributing goods and services. First and foremost among these other classes is the capitalist class, those who own and operate the major corporations. What is important about capitalists is not simply that they have the power to dispose of all that is made in their factories and offices. They have the power to control the work lives of their employees, most of whom are working class people. Their economic power finds its way into enormous influence in politics as well.

In a capitalist society, the “powers that be” are largely the capitalists, the corporate elite at the top of relatively large U.S. businesses. For the most part, capitalists set the terms of production, in all the senses just described, and more. They own or control the businesses so of course they have the power to make the rules. Owning or controlling the businesses, they have the money and social status and, with these, power to influence the political and cultural life of the country. Their influence tends to define everyone’s opportunities and limits according to what will be good for capitalists, what will continue, broaden, and deepen their power. Sometimes this power is visible; when it is not, it just is, baked in the cake.

When I talk about the working class, on the other hand, I am talking about people who share a common situation in these social structures, one without much power. To be in the working class is to be in a place of relative vulnerability—on the job, in the market, in politics and culture.

On the job, most workers have little control over the pace and content of their work. They show up, a supervisor shows them the job, and they do it. The job may be skilled or unskilled, white-collar or blue-collar, in any one of thousands of occupations. Whatever the particulars, most jobs share a basic powerlessness in relation to the authority of the owner and the owner’s representatives who are there to supervise and control the workforce.

Even when workers do have some influence at work, the basic power relations are unchanged because the capitalist retains the ultimate authority. At the Saturn plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, General Motors and the United Auto Workers established a labor-management cooperation process that many observers have taken as a new kind of worker power. Before the first car was built in 1990, teams of workers and supervisors together designed the factory and the labor relations system. Workers helped make hiring decisions and were part of the product design teams. A union officer sat on the Saturn policy committee.

None of this, however, made the workers anything other than workers. They did not become capitalist executives. Whatever power they had came from two sources: 1) the power of their union to negotiate a contract that gave the workers power under the rules of cooperation, and 2) the agreement of the company, the boss, to allow the workers these powers.

In fact, tensions existed at Saturn between General Motors and the workforce, despite the forms of cooperation. In June 1998, when workers in Flint, Michigan, struck GM parts plants to limit outsourcing, the workers at Saturn almost joined in, because the same issues were at play there, despite cooperation.3 The immediate problem was only one of many in a years-long pattern of conflicts of interest between the company and those who worked the line. Work teams and a respectful supervisor could offer some relief from the typical burdens of capitalist work rules (or teams could create a whole new set of problems). But these improvements hardly make workers into nonworkers. Nor did cooperation save the workers’ jobs at the plant when General Motors top management decided to discontinue the Saturn brand and close the plant altogether in 2009, with an announcement that made no mention of their partner union nor production workers.4

The same conflicts continue even in companies where workers have employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs). In the first decade of the new century, about 11,500 businesses in the United States, with ten million employees, had ESOPs.5 Stocks in such plans typically have various voting restrictions that make it impossible for workers to exercise control of the company. Instead, the plans are usually a form of pension program or sometimes a profit-sharing plan imposed in connection with wage concessions forced upon the workers.6

The employees at United Airlines, for example, were part owners of the company through an ESOP imposed when the company was in trouble in 1994. But that didn’t turn the workers into capitalists, or even make them any less working class in the power they exerted. As evidence, in July 1998, nineteen thousand reservation takers, gate agents, and ticket sellers voted to join a union, the International Association of Machinists, when the company they “owned” continued to treat them as the workers they in fact continued to be.7 When the company finally entered bankruptcy in 2002, the ESOP ended and workers gained no benefit in the reorganization from the ESOP’s existence.

Occasionally workers really do own, operate, and control the company where they work. These worker cooperatives ...