"Improving our nation's child-care system will have a compound effect," said Aleyamma Mathew, director of the Women's Economic Justice Program of the Ms. Foundation for Women. "Not only on the millions of women in the workforce but on communities and the economy as a whole."
Labor historian E.P. Thompson is perhaps best known for his monumental and path-breaking work, The Making of the English Working Class. The collected essays reviewed here, many either out-of-print or difficult to obtain, were written between 1955 and 1963. They show Thompson as also a dedicated educator of workers, a sharp polemicist, a skilled political theorist and a tireless agitator for peace, against nuclear weapons and for a rebirth of the socialist project.
Reader Comments: #BLM taking the baton from SNCC; More on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - The world did not need this horrendous 'experiment'; Sanders, Clinton, Trump, Stein; Saluting Labor Notes; Growing Racial Wealth Gap - how to unite the multi-racial working class; Readers debate Portside post on Syria; Saluting Fidel Castro at 90;
Announcements: New York events - August 31
When Bernie Sanders talks about a political revolution larger than himself, it is important to understand that it must also be larger than electoral movements. Although the working class has changed from the halcyon days of yesteryear, it is still the class at the heart of the contradictions of capital, and it is time to take back its true meaning.
While candidates and political parties use mostly volunteers to get the public to help them optimize ad spending, Working America aims to shape attitudes in face-to-face conversations, usually standing on a front stoop with a cracked screen door or a barking dog between a canvasser and a malleable voter. Over the past 12 years, the labor group has held repeat conversations on their front porches to advance progressive policies and candidates.
Trump's strategy and campaign is to appeal to majority white, working class voters who have economic anxiety and fear of demographic change. Trump's candidacy viewed in the context of historical continuity - nativism is a primary political discourse in American history. Trump has shown us that it is just as powerful now as in the 1850s or the 1920s. Indeed, "Make America Great Again" recalls the 1920s Ku Klux Klan's appeal for "100% Americanism."
Liberal condescension towards white workers is code for a broader anti-working class agenda.
After decades of being told white workers would never support socialism because they’re racist, we’re now told that they support the socialist candidate because they are racist. Yes, this is where liberals are in the year 2016.
In a sense, the current debate over just how much employment is or isn’t “precarious” misses the bigger change in U.S. working-class life over the past three decades or more: the decline in living standards experienced by the vast majority of this class. One measure of this is the fall in both hourly and weekly real wages which despite some ups and downs remain below their 1972 level.
Trump's voters are better off economically compared with most Americans. The definition of "working class" and similar terms is fuzzy, and narratives like these risk obscuring an important and perhaps counterintuitive fact about Trump's voters: The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That's well above the national median household income of about $56,000.
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