The withering of the working class

...As recently as the late 1950s, more than onethird of all American non-farm workers belonged to labor unions That figure slowly tapered off in the late 1960s, and by the late '60s the percentage had dropped below 30 percent By the late '70s it was down to about 25 percent, and in the mid-1980s it finally slipped below 20 percent By 1993 it stood at 15 8 percent In the old days it was one out of three workers, now it is one out of six or seven At first glance that sounds pretty bad, but at second glance the situation turns out to be even worse In 1960 the overwhelming majority of unionized workers were m private industry, not the public-service sector, they worked for privately owned companies as opposed to governmental bodies That has shifted dramatically over the past generation The relative "de-industrialization" of America has driven abroad many industries whose workers used to be well-organized, and it has caused serious shrinkage in many others The vacuum left by empty factories has been filled by service industries—hospitals, restaurants, retail stores—which have this merit from an organized labor point of view They cannot flee offshore But they have the disadvantage that their workers have been far more difficult to organize than were the older factory workers The real growth sector of the labor movement in the last thirty years has been among government workers This is very understandable Government cannot leave town, it is constantly expanding, and it will rarely or never fire you if you and your co-workers talk about forming a union The result of these changes is that the proportion of nongovernmental workers who belong to unions in 1993 had sunk to 11 2 percent Only one such worker out of every nine now belongs to a union, whereas in the late 1950s it was one in three By contrast, nearly 40 percent of governmental workers are unionized Today less than 60 percent of all union workers are in the private sector, while more than 40 percent are in the government sector But wait, the story gets even worse Among the union members in the public-service sector are college professors, public school teachers, social workers, and holders of various other white-collar, college-educated governmental occupations These people do not belong to the working class, they belong to the higher class As a member of one of these unions myself (the National Education Association), I am not about to lament the fact that C-1 persons now have the protections afforded by labor unions But m assessing the current strength of that old C-2 institution, the labor movement, it has to be borne in mind that nowadays it has lost its class purity C-l people have infiltrated it, and increasingly they have come to dominate it So there has been a threefold shift in the labor movement" an overall downward shift in union membership, an even greater downward shift in union membership in the private sector of the economy, and a shift from the purely C-2 character of the labor movement to a mixed-class character All three shifts have operated to the disadvantage of the working class In the old days the labor unions were the powerful voice of a wellorganized, blue-collar class...

...Hence solidarity, strength in numbers, group discipline become all the more important for members of the working class Thus a decline in party solidarity and a corresponding nse in political individualism are political developments that play to C-l strengths and C-2 weaknesses Finally, note must be taken of the obvious fact that the Democratic party, which held the White House for all but eight years (the Eisenhower years) during the previous era, has held the White House for only two terms (Carter and Clinton) in the more recent era In other words, during the age when the party was more fully committed to the interests of the working class, it was also in a strong position to act on those commitments, while during an age of greatly diminished commitment to C-2 interests, the party's power to deliver on even this lesser commitment has shrunk • The Catholic Church...

...he aim of this essay has not been to paint an overall picture of the Amencan class system...

...but when the working class withers, these chances for upward mobility wither along with it Difficult as the condition of the Amencan C-2 class is today, the condition of the C3 class is far, far worse It is a grave scandal that demonstrates, among other things, the social and political incompetence of the nation's ruling classes If America's top class is living in a kind of secular paradise and the working class in a kind of purgatory, the lowest class is living in a kingdom of the damned The only thing missing from the worst neighborhoods of our big cities is a large sign saying, "Abandon all hope, ye who have the misfortune to be born and raised here " I am afraid this has not been a very hopeful article If my account has been even approximately correct, it suggests that the years to come will be as unpromising as the years just gone by, if not worse For there is no likelihood in the foreseeable future that the working class will rally, or that what were once its three great institutions—the labor movement, the Democratic party, the Catholic church—will be restored to its control But in the absence of a strong working class, there is no significant social base for a social class analysis of Amencan society, and without such an analysis, there is no way of painting an honest and accurate picture of contemporary Amencan society I hate to end on so pessimistic a note, but it is not easy to find grounds for optimism ? 15...

...For when the working class flounshes, members of the lowest class have abundant opportunities for upward mobility...

...The white/black conflict has at least Xheprima facie appearance of being serious...

...but such subdivisions would be irrelevant to my present purpose, which is to give an account of the waning of the Amencan working class This account requires us to take note of the fact that there are some people more privileged than the working class and others less privileged By the higher, or C-l, class I mean those people for whose benefit society as a whole is organized, so that they might lead interesting and comfortable lives For the most part these people are college graduates, they (or their spouses) work at professional or quasi-professional jobs, they own their own homes, they live in safe neighborhoods of at least suburban quality, their children go to private schools or good public schools...

...The poor Catholics who migrated to America often came from the most degraded social groups in Europe That so many of them were able to elevate themselves within two or three generations from such degradation to C-l status certainly speaks well of America as a land of opportunity, but it also speaks well of the C-2 church that helped them nse But when it comes to Hispanic immigrants, this old genius at organizing and assimilating is no more Great numbers of nominal Hispanic Catholics remain unconverted to committed Catholic status...

...AND WHO'S LETTING IT HAPPEN ' hat follows is an unpleasant analysis that has no happy ending I hate to write so pessimistic a piece, but what can I do"7 The Alcoholics Anonymous people say you have to admit you're a drunk before you can hope for sobriety The born-again Christians say you have to admit you're a sinner before you can hope for salvation Honesty about one's problems is always the first step The following is intended as an exercise in social honesty Although I have little or no idea what moves ought to follow, I trust that a recognition of our problems is always a good first step One of the advantages of the collapse of communism is that it will free us from the century-long myth that Karl Marx was a social theorist of the first rank No question he was an important theorist, as would anyone be who was the official philosopher of the political movement that dominated most of the twentieth century Important is one thing, top-notch something else But the post-cold war reaction against Marxian concepts can be earned too far Consider the idea of class conflict No doubt Marx earned this idea to unreasonable extremes, teaching that class interests are everything, the common good nothing, and that there is no moral limit to the means that may be used in order to make one's own class prevail in these mortal struggles With very good reason we might not want to accept Marx's exaggerated claim, but it does not follow that class struggle is nonexistent or unimportant In Amencan society today, for instance, there are still a number of socioeconomic strata which, for want of a better term, may be called social classes, the interests of one class will often conflict with those of other classes, classes will tend to pursue their own interests, and generally speaking, those classes that have more or better resources—money, organization, education, numbers, control of the agencies of propaganda, etc —will come out on top in these struggles In sum, class conflict is alive and well in the United States, even though it is DAVID R CARLIN, JR, is an associate professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island and a former Democratic state senator not about to plunge the nation into either civil war or revolution Yet to listen to contemporary political discourse, you would think we live in a classless society or something very close to it There is a great deal of talk about conflict based on gender, race, and even sexual orientation, but hardly any talk at all about conflict based on social class There is, I grant, a certain amount of talk about "the middle class" (as in the famous expression, "middle-class tax cut"), but since the great majonty of Amencans, with the exception of the very poor at the bottom and a handful of very rich at the top, consider themselves to be middle class, this hardly qualifies as genuine class analysis When the middle class includes millionaires at one end and low-paid, nonunion, blue-collar workers at the other, the term has lost all real meaning Perhaps someone will say, "There is certainly class conflict in the United States, but it is overshadowed at the moment by far more serious conflicts between men and women, whites and blacks, straights and gays " But this is nonsense—nonsense on 11 stilts, to borrow Jeremy Bentham' s classic expression Anyone who imagines that the male/female clash of interests is more serious than the rich/poor clash is out of touch with the real world...

...The progressive disintegration of political parties during the last generation—the decline in party loyalty, party discipline, and a party's ability to deliver the vote—has damaged C-2 interests...

...There are no longer enough pnests and sisters, no longer enough dollars to operate a lot of free or low-tuition Catholic schools This shortage has been aggravated by the fact that migrants from Hispanic countnes—unlike earlier migrants from, say, Ireland, Italy, and Quebec—have generally not been supported by an influx of pnests and nuns from the old country But in part, too, it is the result of a stylistic change in Amencan Catholicism A Catholicism topheavy with C-l values is socially and culturally very far removed from poor Hispanic immigrants...

...In passing, however, it might be noted that a thnving working class is necessary for the amelioration of the condition of the lowest class...

...In part, of course, this failure is the result of diminished Catholic resources...

...In the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, the American Catholic church displayed a positive genius in its skill at recruiting, socializing, and mobilizing immigrants arriving in the United States from historically Catholic lands, e g, Ireland, Italy, Poland When they were committed Catholics to begin with, it kept them that way When they were only nominal Catholics, it kept them from drifting away to other faiths, and it commonly turned them, and especially their children and grandchildren, into committed Catholics In addition to its religious service to the immigrants and their children, the church helped perform a vital secular service as well" it helped Americanize them, persuading them of the merits of the American political, economic, and educational systems...

...If the Catholic church record is poor, it is certainly no worse than that of other institutions, and it is better than most...

...But it had great strengths as well it was well-organized and welldisciphned, it was led by confident bishops, priests, and nuns— all three groups, especially the last two, of largely C-2 origins...

...The nature of the Democratic party has also changed dramatically in the last thirty years The labor unions continue to play an important but far less powerful role in the party Once they had star billing, but now they share the limelight with a number of other interests pro-Israel, AfncanAmencan, feminist, gay-lesbian, and others With the partial exception of blacks, none of the other leading groups in the Democratic party represent working-class interests African-American interests cut across class lines, which means C-2 blacks have to compete for attention with C-l and C-3 blacks Affirmative-action programs have been helpful to C-2 blacks, but they are chiefly intended to benefit blacks from the top class, and such programs are of virtually no benefit to those in the bottom class It may even be argued that neither has any other program backed by Democrats over the last twenty-five or thirty years been truly helpful to the lowest class But whether efforts to help this bottom class have been successful or not, the disproportionately large size of the black lowest class has meant that a vast amount of the attention and energy of the African- American leadership has been invested m these efforts— attention and energy taken away from the interests of workingclass blacks It might be objected that the feminist movement, like the African-American movement, is at least partially representa13 tive of C-2 women, since it too cuts across class lines There is some truth to this, but not much, for feminism tends to be almost exclusively a C-l phenomenon Its most notable accomplishment—opening careers to women previously held either exclusively or disproportionately by men—has been at most only a slight benefit to C-2 women (and of course no benefit at all to C-3 women), while it has been an enormous boon to upper-class women What is rarely noted, the opening of these careers to women benefits not only C-l women but C-l men and boys as well—the husbands and sons and daughters of these women Despite a great deal of exaggerated, foolish, and sometimes dishonest talk about female solidarity, when a woman lands a high-paying job she shares her abundant paycheck with her husband and children, not with other women, especially not with other women from social classes beneath her own The feminist movement has brought enormous financial benefits to the top class, above all to C-1 women, but to C-1 men and children as well In the New Deal era, when the Democratic party was a predominantly working-class party, a certain number of C-1 liberals played an important role in the party It would be an exaggeration to say that these upper-class people had no desire to promote the interests of their class But they were relatively few in number, and their quotient of class altruism was rather high, that is, they were attached to the Democratic party because they wanted to promote the interests of a class they did not themselves belong to, the working class Besides, it was the job of the Republican party to look out for the interests of the upper class But that has all changed Nowadays vast numbers of C-l liberals support the Democratic party, their social class altruism, to the degree it exists, is focused on the lowest class, and they have little or no concern with the interests of the working class More important still, they no longer leave it to the Republicans to promote C-l class interests, they insist that the Democratic party do this as well When I say C-1 altruism is focused on the lowest class, I do not mean to suggest that it has produced much in the way of genuine benefits for C-3 people...

...Many Hispanics have actually slipped from low C-2 status into the bottom class, that is, they have fallen from being marginally useful members of Amencan society into the category of the superfluous In fairness, however, it ought to be acknowledged that Amencan institutions generally have done something less than an outstanding job of assimilating Hispanics and moving them up the social ladder...

...The Catholic church was not the only large denomination that used to be typically C-2 in its membership But the Catholics were by far the largest, and they were disproportionately concentrated in the Northeastern quadrant of the country, the center of the urban industrial working class, which included such populous states as New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts Through the fifties the Catholic church had the weaknesses you would expect of a predominantly C-2 church, it tended to authoritarianism, anti-intellectuahsm, narrow-mindedness, and poor taste Its piety was plebeian, sometimes even vulgar...

...Today that class is poorly organized and its spokesmen have a voice that is not only weaker but less exclusively devoted to working-class interests • The Democratic Party...

...Is there any class (or classes) whose interests would be served by distracting attention from the reality of class conflict7" The answer "Yes, of course, the privileged classes, the classes who are doing very well under the status quo " It is never in the interests of the privileged classes to analyze society in terms of class interests, at least not publicly They may engage in such analysis privately, of course—at the office, over dinner tables, in country club locker rooms But if they were to do this publicly, it would only call attention to their privileges, to what would seem to many (though not to themselves) to be the unfairness of the prevailing distribution of wealth, power, and prestige So it is best to remain silent about these things But silence all by itself is never enough, for it leaves a vacuum that someone else might fill Thus it is important to sponsor alternative, nonclass definitions and analyses of society and its problems There are various ways of doing this One way is to stress class cooperation, for example, how the higher classes help the lower classes to improve their situation Another is to stress values that all classes hold in common, such as religion, nationalism, and sports Still another way is, while acknowledging that society experiences a great deal of conflict, to focus attention on nonclass forms of conflict— race, gender, and sexual orientation It is in the interest of the relatively underprivileged classes to sponsor analysis of society in terms of classes, class interests, and class conflict, for such analysis legitimates the desire of the underdogs to alter the status quo in their favor, to rectify what they perceive to be social injustices Thus in early nineteenth-century England the new class of manufacturing capitalists embraced a class analysis of society that undermined the privileges of the old upper class of landowning nobility and gentry And no sooner was this accomplished than the equally new urban industrial working class embraced a form of class analysis (the Marxian critique of society being the prime example) that undermined the privileges of their masters, the newly triumphant capitalist class Of course, not all underdog classes are able to generate or support an intellectually senous classbased critique of their society Classes of slaves and serfs, for instance, though capable at times of intense class hatred, rarely or never produce such a critique To do this the class has to have a certain minimum amount of strength, in terms of numbers, solidarity, education, and confidence In other words, it has to be both privileged and underprivileged at the same time Once upon a time in the United States, indeed as recently as the early sixties, there was a social class with the nght mixture of privilege and underpnvilege It sponsored a class analysis of society, albeit an analysis that was relatively mild in tone, not as radical as the Marxist analysis, not even as radical as the analysis typical of socialist parties and labor unions in Western Europe This class was the Amencan working class he disappearance of social class analysis from popular political discourse during the last generation, and its corresponding replacement by analysis based on gender, race, and sexual orientation, is the consequence of a twofold process the drastic decline in the working class, and the unchallenged pre-eminence of an expanded higher class For purposes of the present discussion, let us view the United States as divided into three major social classes a higher class (C-l), a working class (C-2), and a lower class (C-3...

...Organizational loyalty, as measured through money contributions and church attendance, deteriorated...

...its members had a high degree of organizational loyalty and commitment, which translated into a willingness to follow instructions handed down by the leadership...

...and increasingly great numbers of immigrants and their children have deserted Catholicism altogether for Protestant churches of the Evangelical and Pentecostal variety— a loss without precedent in the history of Amencan Catholic immigration...

...Rather it has been to account for the relative absence of social class analysis in contemporary Amenca Hence it has focused on the decline of the Amencan working class, the class which once provided the social base for such an analysis Consistent with its aim, the essay has said little about the top or C-1 class and virtually nothing about the C-3 or lowest class...

...whereas seventy or a hundred years ago Amencan Catholics were not many steps above the people just getting off the boat And of course it is this stylistic change that is largely responsible, or at least strongly correlated with, the decline in resources The newer, predominantly C-l church produces few pnests and nuns, and despite the enormous wealth of C-l Catholics, a wealth that would have seemed incredible to the grandparents of the current generation, there is less generosity in church-giving than there was in the "days of the grandparents...

...The expansion and the increasing degradation of the lowest class during the last twenty-five to thirty years suggest the hypothesis that C-l liberal altruism in recent times has been bogus A do-nothing or make-things-worse altruism carries with it certain benefits for those of us in the higher class (a) it permits us to despise the working class, which we see as nfe with racism and lack of sympathy for the poor, (b) it eases our conscience about the situation of the poor, since we are making every effort to help, and (c) in general it allows us to feel morally superior while requiring us to give up none of our privileges...

...but on closer inspection it turns out that much of what seems to be racial conflict is really class conflict, masked by the fact that a disproportionate percentage of African-Americans are found in the poorest classes When collisions of interest that are less pressing get all the attention while those plainly more critical get virtually none, one of two things must be going on Either everyone has become very stupid, or someone is trying to distract our attention The stupidity hypothesis is tempting, but we Americans, while perhaps a little more stupid than we used to be, are not quite that dumb So the question becomes "Who is trying to distract our attention7" The first step toward answering that question is to rephrase it...

...almost all of their children graduate from college By the working, or C-2, class I mean those people whose work, though socially necessary, is too boring or demeaning (not to mention low-paying) to be done by members of the higher class C-2 people lead lives that are neither especially interesting nor especially comfortable They are usually high school graduates, at times community college graduates Sometimes they own thenown homes in cities or older, run-down suburbs, often they are renters for many years, not uncommonly for a whole lifetime Their children attend public schools, often of mediocre quality A college education for their children is far from a sure thing By the lower, or C-3, class I mean those people who are largely unnecessary to the functioning of society Without much exaggeration, they might be called society's superfluous people, corresponding to Marx's lumpenproletanat They suffer from chronic unemployment and underemployment, they often rely on long-term welfare support They almost never own their own homes Their neighborhoods have high rates of crime, poverty, substance abuse, violence, school dropouts, and out-of-wedlock births Their children commonly attend the very worst public 12 schools, and very few of them graduate from college In the last thirty years in the United States there has been an expansion of the upper and lower classes—the fortunate and the miserable classes—combined with a corresponding shrinkage of the working class The question of why these changes took place, though a tremendously interesting and important question, is not something there is room to go into here Suffice it to note that they have taken place, and as a result the class composition of American society is strikingly different today from what it was in the forties and fifties ny social class, including the working class, has three principal sets of interest economic interests, political interests, and cultural interests Until the early sixties the American . working class had three great institutions, each then at the height of its power, devoted to the three sets of C-2 interests The labor movement was devoted to C-2 economic interests, the Democratic party to its political interests, and the Catholic church to its cultural interests In the intervening years a twofold development has taken place in all three of these institutions For one thing, they have all declined in influence For another, where once upon a time they were almost exclusively concerned with the interests of the working class, now they divide their concern between the working class and the upper class, with the interests of the latter tending to get preferential attention A picture of the decline and fall of the working class since the mid-sixties can be given in the form of a number of brief accounts of this twofold transformation in the labor movement, the Democratic party, and the Catholic church • Labor Unions...

...Though bishops spoke more intelligently than ever, especially in documents issued by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, fewer listened, for no one believed that the bishops now commanded the loyalty of their troops The increasingly C-1 nature of the American Catholic church has weakened its appeal to C-2 people It is a church they still find attractive, but not nearly so attractive as it was in the old days The weakness of the contemporary Catholic church with C-2 people is especially glaring in the case of Hispanic immigrants, many of whom are at the lower end of the working class...

...In those days when a bishop spoke politicians listened, for they could be sure the bishops had troops behind them All that changed in the latter half of the sixties—as a result partly of Vatican II, partly of the cultural revolution going on in the United States at that time, and partly of the upward mo14 bility of great numbers of Catholics from C-2 to C-l status The semi-authontarian style so congenial to a well-organized working class was out, the individualistic style so congenial to the top class was in The confidence of the clerical leadership was badly shaken The numbers of priests and especially of nuns declined...

...When compared to the typical member of the top class, a C-2 person has fewer individual resources, less education, less money, less social prestige, fewer influential connections, fewer skills at negotiating the corridors of power...

...Nor is the Catholic church performing its upward mobility function very well...

...I am not saying that my three-part division is the only one, the right one, or even the best one Each of these could be further subdivided...