Journal of Working-Class Studies

Community Inequalities and Children’s Life Chances in the United States

Lawrence M. Eppard — 2023-12-24

This piece discusses the growing empirical evidence that the communities where American children spend their formative years—not just the households they are raised in but where those households are located—matter for their prospects of success in subsequent stages of their lives. The authors explore the various community characteristics—including social capital, family structure, school quality, and income—associated with educational attainment, health, teen pregnancy, social mobility, violence, crime victimization, and more.

Editorial

Sarah Attfield — 2023-12-24

Preparing Working-Class Academics for Success

Kenneth Oldfield — 2024-04-25

I was one of Ryan and Sackrey’s Strangers in Paradise, an academic raised in a working-class family. After becoming a professor, I slowly grew to understand that being a successful faculty member requires learning a different set of survival techniques than those I needed to succeed in my undergraduate and graduate studies. As it was during my student years, nobody in my family or anyone they knew could counsel me on what it takes to earn tenure, promotion, sabbatical leave, or any of the other rewards the academy offers. Compounding this problem was a counterproductive belief, one frequently held by others from backgrounds like mine. Namely, the fear that asking for help shows weakness, prima facia evidence that I was unqualified to be an academic. Beyond the questions I was afraid to ask were the many questions I did not know to ask, questions with answers that would have saved me from countless headaches. In hopes of smoothing the way for recently hired working-class academics, this article presents seven lessons I wish I had learned before becoming a university professor, knowledge that had I acquired early on would have made my travels through the university labyrinth far easier – infinitely less trying.

The Man with a Million Names: A Personal Essay on Transit Work

Fred S. Naiden — 2024-01-25

This essay is a scholarly personal narrative about transit work, especially the operation of omnibuses, horse cars, trolleys, and trams in New York City in the nineteenth century. The culminating event is the trolley strike of 1895, the longest in New York history, and the theme is the need for solidarity between transit workers and the riding public, and thus for what is now is called union “Bargaining for the Public Good.” In this essay, the author speaks as both a transit worker and an historian.

Motorcycle on my mind

Ian C Smith — 2023-12-24

Refusing the Sentimental Italian Immigration Story in Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven

Nancy Caronia — 2023-12-24

This article examines how Denise Giardina’s award-winning novel Storming Heaven offers a counterpoint to views of early twentieth-century Italian immigration to the US that rely on assimilationist conclusions. The story of Sicilian immigrant Rosa Angelelli is embedded within the fictional retelling of West Virginia labor history known as the Mine Wars. Giardina creates a female immigrant protagonist who makes plain the abuse and trauma Italian immigrant women and girls face. This point-of-view is normally obfuscated in favor of a male immigrant’s perspective, but Rosa’s story is neither ignored nor erased. As one of four protagonists in the novel, Rosa’s fractured remembrances are told through a halting discourse, revealing her isolation and the danger that awaits her no matter the choices she makes. Taking from Loretta Baldassar and Donna Gabaccia’s ideas on personal intimacy, Rosa’s struggles are not an exception, but an object lesson in how immigrant women and girls are often left with no means to develop community or intimacy, endangering their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

Middletown Lives through Middle-Class Eyes: Hillbilly Elegy and the Problem with the “Liberal Media”

Sharon Zechowski — 2023-12-24

J.D. Vance does not become Senator Vance without the success of Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling memoir (and later, film) about growing up in, and getting out of, rural Appalachia. Initially praised by media critics for its ability to challenge middle-class assumptions about the “white working class,” the book assuaged both liberal anxiety and conservative outrage by providing demographically appropriate explanations for the election of Donald Trump. However, the book, feature film and subsequent political campaign are also part of a much larger, lucrative culture industry built upon the commodification and fetishization of the white working class, one driven by middle-class tastes and prejudices. This was most apparent in the promotion of the book and film by the so-called liberal media establishment, represented by the New York Times, The New Yorker, Netflix, Imagine Entertainment, HarperCollins, and Harpo Productions, to name a few. However, the reinforcement of the false binary between liberal and conservative media obscured how the corporate media system helped elect a candidate who will work most certainly against the interests of actual working people, further alienating them from each other and a shared labor platform more generally. Examining Hillbilly Elegy through the five filters of the Propaganda Model will help to explain the ideological and material effects of the corporate media’s agenda upon the growing class divide.

A Study of Self-Estrangement Among Fast-Food Workers

Bethany Haworth — 2023-12-24

This study examines self-estrangement, a dimension of alienation, and its attributes among fast-food service workers, while considering participant sociodemographic characteristics. A self-administered online survey, using Amazon MTURK, deployed over two time periods (N=1,513), provides data regarding our novel 12-item self-estrangement scale by fast-food occupation type (cashier, server, cook, shift manager, and general manager) and sociodemographic covariates. Preliminary analysis shows that a salaried position and those with a postbaccalaureate education experience lower levels of self-estrangement than their colleagues. Cashiers and cooks experience higher levels of self-estrangement relative to those in other positions. This study offers unique contributions to the conceptualization and operationalization of a dimension of alienation specific to self-estrangement, facilitating greater understanding of the fast-food labor sector, its organization, and the state of its workers

What does it mean to be working class? Exploring the definition of a social class identity through the eyes of working-class professional services and administrative staff in Russell Group universities

Jess Pilgrim-Brown — 2023-12-24

What it means to have a working-class identity in the UK today is constantly under tension and debate. From socio-economic proxies used by large organisations as determinants of disadvantage to POLAR data, self identification and other metrics, academic literature has largely disagreed how to measure working class as an identity over the last 20 years. This paper draws on the findings from two parts of an EdD thesis which looked to understand the experiences of working-class professional services staff in UK Higher Education. Here, it presents the findings of the literature review which discovered the multiple ways in which working class identities are determined for the purposes of research recruitment in academic papers. In the subsequent part of this paper, empirical data from interviews with working class staff in UK Higher Education looks at the facets which participants considered defined them as having a working-class identity. Moving away from traditional conceptualisation of a working-class identity as solely connected to the means of production, it suggests that a working-class identity is inherently connected to many factors in 2023, predominantly to economic disadvantage but also by occupation, social mobility discourse, and access to goods technology and entertainment. Furthermore, it finds that there are implicit features of a working-class identity shared across the study which include access to facilitating networks, narratives of luck, and being underappreciated and undervalued. This interplay between the convergence of habitus and lived experience suggests that working-class people in UK universities are subject to a lamination of field, an intersection of multiple temporalities

Kelley, Blair LM (2023) Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class. Liveright

Venise Wagner — 2023-12-24

Zweig, Michael (2023) Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism. PM Press

Jeff Crosby — 2023-12-24

Geronimus, A. (2023) Weathering. The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society. Little Brown

Jamie Daniel — 2023-12-24

Taylor, Y. (2022) Working-Class Queers. Pluto Press

Erin Heiser — 2023-12-24

O’Sullivan, S. (2022) Reality TV’s Real Men of the Recession: White Masculinity In Crisis and the Rise of Trumpism. Lexington Books

Jennifer Forsberg — 2023-12-24

Entin, J. (2023). Living Labor: Fiction, Film, and Precarious Work. University of Michigan Press

Tracy Floreani — 2023-12-24

Cowie, Jefferson (2022) Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power. Basic Books

Scott Henkel — 2023-12-24

Erlich, Mark (2023) The Way We Build: Restoring Dignity To Construction Work. University of Illinois Press

Richard Rowe — 2023-12-24

Schennum, Jill (2023) As Goes Bethlehem: Steelworkers and the Restructuring of an Industrial Working Class. Vanderbilt University Press

Chris Walley — 2023-12-24

Deeren, R.S. (2023) Enough to Lose. Wayne State University Press

Jim Daniels — 2023-12-24