Welcome to the Working Class!
New York Times, July 13, 2002

Michael Zweig is professor of economics at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook, where in 1999 he
founded the Group for the Study of Working Class Life, an
interdisciplinary center that studies the impact of class.
Professor Zweig is also the author of "The Working Class
Majority: America's Best Kept Secret" (Cornell University
Press, 2000). Felicia R. Lee spoke with him.

How are you defining "class," and how does it differ from
popular conceptions?

The common way that people talk in the popular culture and
also in some sociology and other academic literature is to
understand class as income. Or it's a matter of lifestyle:
a person has class, they wear fancy clothes, they eat at
good restaurants, they know which fork to use. I think
those ways of looking at society are not very helpful.
There are rich people, but to me, it's most helpful to
understand class as power.

When I say middle class, what is it in the middle of? It's
in the middle of labor and capital, not necessarily in the
middle of income distribution.

Over the last 30 years, when the working class has been
taking it in the neck, the middle class got divided. Those
people in the middle class most closely associated in their
lives and their work with the working class have done
poorly. Those people in the middle class most closely
associated with the capitalist class in their work have
done very well. A Legal Aid attorney is much worse off now
than 30 years ago. But the attorneys who are partners in
white-shoe law firms, who are doing business with Wall
Street, are doing very well.

You use the term working class; who exactly are you
referring to?

Sixty-two percent of the labor force in the United States
are working-class people, by which I mean people who do not
have much control or authority over the pace or the content
of the work and they're not a supervisor and they're not
the boss. We're talking about white-collar workers, like
bank clerks or cashiers; we're talking about blue-collar
workers and construction and manufacturing.

How does income fit in?

If we're all in the middle class,
then people think the poor will always be with us and there
is something wrong with the poor. But if you look at the
poor in any given year, it may be 12, 13 or 14 percent of
the population but over a 10-year period, 40 percent of
Americans experience poverty for at least one year.

The rich are really the top 1 percent. And they have more
than half the wealth. The change in the distribution of
income is widely known. I have some data from Business Week
about the ratio of C.E.O. compensation to worker
compensation. In 1981 it was 42 to 1; last year it was over
500 to 1, and it's gone up consistently.

Is there class mobility?

There is some, but not a great
deal. The single most important predictor of a child's
class position is the occupation of the child's parent. Not
only for the working class but the middle class and the
capitalists.

Do people confuse race and class?

The principal conflation of race and class comes from the
idea that there's a broad middle class, and there's the
rich and the poor. In that conception, this middle is
really what Bill Clinton talked about, people who work hard
and play by the rules. Who are these poor people? Well,
they're black.

But two-thirds of all poor people in the United States are
white, and three-quarters of all black people in the United
States are not poor. We can't talk about the
African-American community as one thing because it's
divided by class.

You have people saying, "I don't want affirmative action
for a black kid if their parents are professionals and
their grandparents were professionals." White,
working-class kids trying to get into college, trying to
get a job are saying: "Why am I being disadvantaged for the
child of black professionals? I want class-based
affirmative action." Well, there's something to be said for
that. But if you just do it on the economic status, you
miss the continued existence of racism. It is complicated.

In your view, the increasing gap between the rich and the
poor is not just a matter of real income but reflects the
reduced power of workers.

The reduced power is in part the decline of union strength
in the private sector and the weakness in organizational
capacity of the labor movement, which now has less than 10
percent of the private sector in unions and about 13
percent of the total labor force, compared to the middle
1950's, when it was a third.

What is your take on this series of Wall Street scandals?


With the end of the cold war, the capitalist class is
triumphant in that they just go to the limit. There is no
organized opposition that is effective enough or strong
enough to stop them. In the exercise of that power, it's
extremely ugly. The mentality that cheats investors also
cheats workers, like at Wal-Mart, where they don't pay
workers for working off the clock.

What do you mean by organized opposition?

It would be a
broad social movement that had different values, different
ethics and different ways of understanding what is right
and wrong and not a very narrow understanding of the bottom
line.

How did Sept. 11 affect our notions of class?

There was a moment there when if you were your basic
firefighter or emergency medical technician or ironworker,
you were America's hero. I don't think the glow dissipated,
but it's a question of how is that used, what are the
lessons there. There is a double message: the workers are
heroes but the workers didn't get help. Tens of thousands
of people lost their jobs in the airlines but the workers
did not get extensions of their benefits - but the airlines
got $15 billion in aid.

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