What we are witnessing is the human wreckage of a great historical turning point, a profound change in the social requirements of economic life. We have come to the end of the working class.
We still use “working class” to refer to a big chunk of the population—to a first approximation, people without a four-year college degree, since those are the people now most likely to be stuck with society’s lowest-paying, lowest-status jobs. But as an industrial concept in a post-industrial world, the term doesn’t really fit anymore. Historian Jefferson Cowie had it right when he gave his history Stayin’ Alive the subtitle The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, implying that the coming of the post-industrial economy ushered in a transition to a post-working class. Or, to use sociologist Andrew Cherlin’s formulation, a “would-be working class—the individuals who would have taken the industrial jobs we used to have.”
