Летећи Полип wrote:Uf, statistika, moja dika.
Izgleda da moram da ponavljam pedeset puta. Klasa je između ostalog i kulturna kategorija. Bravar sa osam osnovne ima veću platu nego ogromna većina mladih sa fakultetima koji prekarišu.
A u Americi je pomalo i rasna kategorija, zar ne?
Tvrdnja da progresivci dolaze prvenstveno iz obrazovanih slojeva naprosto nije tačna kada se radi o biračima (mada jeste tačno da se demokratska baza promenila - od radništva i sindikata ka koaliciji profesionalne srednje klase i manjinskih glasača - ali to je u dobroj meri bila posledica otklona od progresivizma ka centrističkom liberalizmu). Ako se radi o liderima, ona je tačna, ali banalna - važi za političku klasu generalno gledano.
A umesto odokativnih sweeping generalizacija, preporučujem malo detaljnije analize.
When mainstream Democrats and center-left mandarins say “working class,” they seem to think of the same people Donald Trump thinks of. Chuck Schumer infamously discounted the party’s lost blue-collar votes in southwestern Pennsylvania next to those he imagined it would gain in the Philadelphia suburbs—apparently forgetting about the question of turnout in Philadelphia itself. In a recent piece in Slate, Yascha Mounk—director of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change—wrote that the Democrats should focus on “states where appealing to the white working class is not as important as increasing turnout among minority groups and appealing to moderate voters in the suburbs.” Note the slippage: whatever program will appeal to the entity known as the “white working class” will not appeal to “minority groups,” who are joined together in this analysis with “moderate voters in the suburbs.” Has Mounk ever spoken to a working-class American outside of a customer transaction? It is difficult to imagine how the categories with which he operates could possibly have survived such an encounter. The American working class is, after all, less white than the rest of American society, and, by all survey evidence, has more left-wing political views—by dint of its composition by race and gender, as well as its class experiences.
The danger that the Democratic Party and elite liberalism now face is that they cannot conceive of the American working class as it actually is, insisting instead on addressing a specter from decades ago. The right-wing hard-hat, the eternal Reagan Democrat—such anachronistic images provide a way of not engaging with questions of class inequality. So long as these ghostly figures are what “working class” means, there can be no working-class force in political life, and the cycle of programmatic dilution and mass demobilization can continue, with increasingly horrifying consequences.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/new-working-class-precarity-race-gender-democrats
More than a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, political commentators continue, despite all evidence to the contrary, to depict his political base as the “white working class.” Articles on his supporters seem almost entirely devoted to baseball-capped Middle Americans in declining industrial towns who believed the president’s campaign-trail promises to bring back coal, or steel, or keep the Carrier plant jobs in the country.
There are problems with this image of the U.S. factory worker as he—and it is generally he—is depicted. First, in American factories, the workforce is far more diverse than the Rust Belt narrative would have it. The Carrier plant, site of Trump’s triumphant deal that, in fact, resulted in hundreds of workers still being laid off, had at least as many African American workers as white, and there were plenty of women laboring there, too. More important, those industrial workers who supposedly put Trump in office (a dubious assumption) have never made up the entirety of the working class or even its majority. These days, only around 11 percent of the working class are white men in industrial jobs.
Although the “narrative makers” may have missed it, the working class has changed. Those who used to occupy its fringes—hotel housekeepers, retail clerks, and home care aides—are now its majority. Today, home health care is the fastest-growing industry in the United States, projected to add over a million new jobs to the economy in the next ten years. Retail jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, currently make up 10 percent of all employment.
These jobs have always been important, but as automation and outsourcing have decimated manufacturing, the relative significance of service work has increased. Manufacturing employment peaked in 1953, at around 30 percent of jobs; now it is the service industry that dominates. An earlier era of political thought dismissed these workers politically, and that thinking still holds in many quarters: In the Supreme Court’s 2014 Harris v. Quinn decision, Justice Samuel Alito deemed home care workers only “partial” employees, a separate category of worker altogether.
Service workers have, of course, been in unions for many years. Their presence has in fact fueled what little growth unions have seen of late. But workers have also found effective ways to pursue their interests outside of the old union model. In one telling example, Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. workers were able to force Andy Puzder, the unpopular former CEO of the two chains, who has faced allegations of sexual harassment and abuse, against his company as well as him personally, to withdraw his nomination for Secretary of Labor.
This change in the composition of the workforce has the potential to redefine traditional alliances in the United States. Already, unconventional partnerships have formed across different groups: Walmart workers, restaurant workers, and domestic workers have organized and joined with community groups and movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Movement for Black Lives. These alliances also take into account the importance of unpredictable scheduling, social isolation, safety concerns, and gendered and racialized expectations of who is “naturally” inclined to service work.
https://newrepublic.com/article/146904/new-working-class
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by Erős Pista Fri Nov 02, 2018 3:48 pm
