“There are more—many, many times more—working-class Americans than there are folks at the top of the income pyramid”

Haley Sweetland Edwards is right:

It’s true that wealthier Americans tend to vote for Republicans and that the less well-off tend to vote for Democrats. And it’s true that, in theory, such a demographic breakdown would be good for Dems. After all, in raw numbers, there are more—many, many times more—working-class Americans than there are folks at the top of the income pyramid.

Part of the problem, as Andrew J. Cherlin argues (and I noted back in 2011) is that the working-class has mostly disappeared from our political language. There’s lots of talk about the struggling middle-class—from both Democrats and Republicans—but no mention, let alone serious discussion, of the working-class.

Our political language has served to ignore the working-class status of most so-called middle-class Americans and, as a result, to confine the working-class (understood as workers without a college education), when it is mentioned at all, to a relatively small segment of the population. In other words, the working-class has come to be defined as the working-poor and the middle-class as something else.

As I see it, we’ll get a more accurate representation of our economic and political landscape if we redefine what we mean by the working-class. The fact is, what others understand to be working-class and middle-class actually have a lot in common. They may have different levels of education (high school, a year or two of college, and a four-year college degree), different color collars (blue, pink, and white), and work in different sectors (manufacturing and services, private and public) but they’re all pretty much in the same boat: they are forced to sell their ability to work to someone else in order to make enough money to support themselves and their families. That’s a very large part of the population. It basically excludes two relatively small groups: the capitalists at the top (who get the profits) and managers and supervisors (who manage the labor of others and get a cut of the profits).

If we follow the class analysis conducted by Edward N. Wolff and Ajit Zacharias [pdf], then we’re talking about 80 percent of the U.S. population who are members of the working-class.*

Unfortunately, the World Top-incomes Database doesn’t break things out in quite that way. However, if we use the average incomes of the bottom 90 percent as a proxy for the working-class, we can see (from the chart above) what has happened since 1960: the average real incomes (in 2012 dollars) of the bottom 90 percent have barely changed (from $25,014.76 in 1960 to $30,438.59 in 2012), while average real incomes of the top 1 percent (from $275,281.29 to $1,021,760.82) and top 0.1 percent (from $690,610.30 to $4,660,987.83) have soared. In percentage terms, the real incomes of the working-class only increased by 21.7 percent while those of the top 1 percent rose by 271 percent and those of the top 0.1 percent by 575 percent.

Now, as we know, the real incomes of the American working-class did rise during the immediate postwar period—almost doubling from 1945 to 1973. But then, even as productivity continued to climb, and, with a lag of about a decade, incomes at the very top started a dramatic rise, working-class real incomes have actually fallen. The result? Working-class incomes today (or, more accurately, in 2012) are 13 percent lower than they were in 1973.

As I see it, “there are more—many, many times more—working-class Americans than there are folks at the top of the income pyramid.” There are also more—many, many times more—working-class Americans than our political language currently allows.

And all those working-class Americans created the conditions for the dramatic rise of the small group at the top of the income pyramid during the decades leading up to the crash of 2007-08—and they’ve fallen further and further behind during the so-called recovery.

That’s the real condition of the working-class in the United States in 2015.

 

*According to their calculations, in 2000, about 2 percent of American households were classified as “capitalist” and 18.8 percent as “manager” or “supervisor.”