Blue Collar Worker Quotes

Getting a group of rowdy, blue-collar workers together in one room and putting in a tape that shows a guy in a leisure suit putting his hand on his secretary's ass and you've got complete and total anarchy, ladies and gentleman.

But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

People are born on this planet with no choice at all And have to spend most of their life working to pay it off.

Then, in the 1980's, came the paroxysm of downsizing, and the very nature of the corporation was thrown into doubt. In what began almost as a fad and quickly matured into an unshakable habit, companies were 'restructuring,' 'reengineering,' and generally cutting as many jobs as possible, white collar as well as blue . . . The New York Times captured the new corporate order succintly in 1987, reporting that it 'eschews loyalty to workers, products, corporate structures, businesses, factories, communities, even the nation. All such allegiances are viewed as expendable under the new rules. With survival at stake, only market leadership, strong profits and a high stock price can be allowed to matter'.

This is the conservative problem: reality itself is radical, so we must not get too close to it. The Third World really is poor and oppressed; the U.S. often does side with Third-World plutocrats; our tax system really is regressive and favors the very richest; millions of Americans do live in poverty; the corporations do plunder and pollute the environment; real wages for blue-collar workers definitely have flattened and even declined; the superrich really are increasing their share of the pie; and global warming really is happening.

If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in the pockets than all the property of capitalists. . .

Blue-collar workers" have jobs requiring just as much brainpower as "white-collar professionals." To run a family farm is to be a business owner in a complicated industry. But, unlike many jobs requiring smarts and creativity, working a farm summons the body's intelligence, too.

A CEO shouldn't get several hundred times the salary that the janitor is paid. An athlete shouldn't get several hundred times the salary that the waterboy is paid. A filmstar shouldn't get several hundred times the salary that the crew at the bottom are paid. I understand if you are not yet civilized enough to flatten the field completely – for you are an infantile species after all. But at the very least, do your best to reduce the gap - that is, if you intend to be human someday.

His mind filled with visions of a decadent kleptocracy in rapid decline, abetted by both political parties. America's masses, fed on processed poison bought with a food stamp swipe card. Low-skill workers, structurally unable to ever contribute again and too dumb to know their old jobs weren't coming back. The banks in Gotham leaching the last drops of wealth out of the country. Corporations unrestrained by any notion of national interest. The system of property law in shambles. The world drowning in debt.

You may well ask: when the bubble finally burst, why did we not let the bankers crash and burn? Why weren't they held accountable for their absurd debts? For two reasons. First because the payment system - the simple means of transferring money from one account to another and on which every transaction relies - is monopolised by the very same bankers who were making the bets. Imagine having gifted your arteries and veins to a gambler. The moment he loses big at the casino, he can blackmail you for anything you have simply by threatening to cut off your circulation. Second, because the financiers' gambles contained deep inside the title deeds to the houses of the majority. A full-scale financial market collapse could therefore lead to mass homelessness and a complete breakdown in the social contract. Don't be surprised that the high and mighty financiers of Wall Street would bother financialising the modest homes of poor people. Having borrowed as much as they could off banks and rich clients in order to place their crazy bets, they craved more since the more they bet, the more they made. So they created more debt from scratch to use as raw materials for more bets. How? By lending to impecunious blue collar worker who dreamed of the security of one day owning their own home. What if these little people could not actually afford their mortgage in the medium term? In contrast to bankers of old, the Jills and the Jacks who actually leant them the money did not care if the repayments were made because they never intended to collect. Instead, having granted the mortgage, they put it into their computerised grinder, chopped it up literally into tiny pieces of debt and repackaged them into one of their labyrinthine derivatives which they would then sell at a profit. By the time the poor homeowner had defaulted and their home was repossessed, the financier who granted the loan in the first place had long since moved on.

It’s a great scandal of the CEOs, who are simply bandits. They go into a company that had a rich base, grab everything they can for themselves, stock options, huge salaries, fire as many people as possible. If we ever have an oldfashioned revolution in the United States, it will be made by well-educated blue-collar workers who have lost their jobs.

We became the most successful advanced projects company in the world by hiring talented people, paying them top dollar, and motivating them into believing that they could produce a Mach 3 airplane like the Blackbird a generation or two ahead of anybody else. Our design engineers had the keen experience to conceive the whole airplane in their mind’s-eye, doing the trade-offs in their heads between aerodynamic needs and weapons requirements. We created a practical and open work environment for engineers and shop workers, forcing the guys behind the drawing boards onto the shop floor to see how their ideas were being translated into actual parts and to make any necessary changes on the spot. We made every shop worker who designed or handled a part responsible for quality control. Any worker—not just a supervisor or a manager—could send back a part that didn’t meet his or her standards. That way we reduced rework and scrap waste. We encouraged our people to work imaginatively, to improvise and try unconventional approaches to problem solving, and then got out of their way. By applying the most commonsense methods to develop new technologies, we saved tremendous amounts of time and money, while operating in an atmosphere of trust and cooperation both with our government customers and between our white-collar and blue-collar employees. In the end, Lockheed’s Skunk Works demonstrated the awesome capabilities of American inventiveness when free to operate under near ideal working conditions. That may be our most enduring legacy as well as our source of lasting pride.

A village is very much like boarding school (I was in boarding schools for ten years, so I know whereof I talk): let any threat come from outside, and everybody, old and new, Republican and Democrat, white-collar worker or blue, will band together. Perhaps that is what our divided world needs now: a threat from outside. Certainly, as one good American said, if we do not hang together we will hang separately.

He was miles past middle age with a gut that housed ample good meals. A patch of silver hair formed a trail from his forehead to the crown of his head where it dead ended with male pattern baldness. A sea of family photos took up residence on his desk. He sat back in a high-back leather swivel chair. Steepled hands. Robert Last Boots in Cognac Cordovan. Blue collar city worker with prestigious white collar dreams.

When Jesus asked His followers to remember Him in the meal, what if Jesus wasn’t referring to the steps taken in a ritual? What if Jesus was saying instead to organize your gatherings just like this one? Make sure you invite tax collectors, traitors, zealots, rough blue-collar workers, and loudmouths. And seat them all at the same table, indicating to them and everyone else that they are welcomed and cherished by God.

McGovern’s revenge also represents the Democrats’ switch from a party of blue-collar workers to a party of urban elites—feminists, vegans, drug legalizers, untaxed hedge fund operators, and transgender-rights activists. Back when Democrats still claimed to represent working Americans, they opposed illegal immigration. Since being taken over by the Far Left, all that matters to them is changing the electorate to one that doesn’t mind liberal insanity.

There was only a hint of it in New Hampshire, but in Wisconsin it came together with a decisiveness that nobody could quite understand in the alcoholic chaos of election night… but when the votes were all counted and the numbers broken down by wards, districts, and precincts, all you had to do was scan the tally sheets to see that McGovern had won all across the board. In Green Bay’s Ward 12, which the tally sheet says is “mostly paper mill workers,” he beat Wallace by 32 to 22 percent. In Sheboygan’s Ward 4, another blue-collar, factory-worker neighborhood,

But while I worked in those ways, like my mother and father I wrote poetry in my mind. There’s an idea that laborers end up in their role because it’s all they’re suited for. What put us there, though, was birth, family history—not lack of talent for something else. “Blue-collar workers” have jobs requiring just as much brainpower as “white-collar professionals.” To run a family farm is to be a business owner in a complicated industry. But, unlike many jobs requiring smarts and creativity, working a farm summons the body’s intelligence, too. Sometimes it was miserable. Sometimes it was satisfying.

When blue-collar, white workers in middle America look at Donald Trump in his fill-fitting suit and baseball cap, with a physical image that is perhaps more like their own, they see a possibility that they could be him. Aside from his skin colour, Barack Obama, with his lean physique, good looks and charisma, hanging out with rock stars and movie stars, his life and what he stands for seems at a far remove. Except the reality is that he was raised without his father, cared for by his grandparents and moved around a lot as a child, meaning he has potentially much more in common with the Appalachian voters than Donald Trump. He lived and achieved the American Dream in arguably a more fundamental way than Trump did.

sandy-haired, friendly, smiling, small-town attorney of Pennington, had been born in 1950 in a roach-infested Newark slum. His father had been a construction worker fully employed through World War II and Korea creating new factories, dockyards and government offices along the Jersey Shore. But with the ending of the Korean War, work had dried up. Cal was five when his mother walked out of the loveless union and left the boy to be raised by his father. The latter was a hard man, quick with his fists, the only law on many blue-collar jobs. But he was not a bad man and tried to live by the straight and narrow, and to raise his toddler son to love Old Glory, the Constitution and Joe DiMaggio. Within two years, Dexter Senior had acquired a trailer home so that he could move where the work was available. And that was how the boy was raised, moving from construction site to site, attending whichever school would take him, and then moving on. It was the age of Elvis Presley, Del Shannon, Roy Orbison and the Beatles, over from a country Cal had never heard of. It was also the age of Kennedy, the Cold War and Vietnam. His formal education was fractured to the point of near nonexistence, but he became wise in other ways: streetwise, fight-wise. Like his departed mother, he did not grow tall, topping out at five feet eight inches. Nor was he heavy and muscular like his father, but his lean frame packed fearsome stamina and his fists a killer punch. By seventeen, it looked as if his life would follow that of his father, shoveling dirt or driving a dump truck on building sites. Unless . . . In January 1968 he turned eighteen, and the Vietcong launched the Têt Offensive. He was watching TV in a bar in Camden. There was a documentary telling him about recruitment. It mentioned that if you shaped up, the Army would give you an education. The next day, he walked into the U.S. Army office in Camden and signed on. The master sergeant was bored. He spent his life listening to youths doing everything in their power to get out of going to Vietnam. “I want to volunteer,” said the youth in front of him. The master sergeant drew a form toward him, keeping eye contact like a ferret that does not want the rabbit to get away. Trying to be kindly, he suggested

There are many reasons why the tech revolution will hit the emerging world much harder than it will hit Europe and the United States. In developed countries, children are more likely to grow up with digital technologies as toys and then to encounter them in school. Governments in these countries have money to invest in educational systems that prepare workers, both blue and white collar, for change. Their universities have much greater access to state-of-the-art technologies. Their companies produce the innovations that drive tech change in the first place. This creates a dynamic in which high-wage countries are more likely than low-wage ones to dominate the skill-intensive industries that will generate twenty-first-century growth, leaving behind large numbers of those billion-plus people who only recently emerged from age-old deprivation. The wealth in developed countries helps them maintain much stronger social safety nets than in poorer countries to help citizens who lose their jobs, fall ill, or need to care for sick children or aging parents. In short, wealthier countries are both more adaptable and more resilient than developing ones.

People strut and swagger in front of others, but rarely alone. These are social gestures. Walking, the slowest form of travel, is the quickest route to our more authentic selves. We can't return to some long-lost paradise that probably never was. But we can walk. We can walk to work. We can walk our daughter to school. We can walk alone, to nowhere in particular on a crisp and breezy autumn afternoon. We walk to forget. We walk to forget the cranky boss, the spat with the spouse, the pile of unpaid bills, the flashing warning light in your Subaru, indicating either that the tire pressure is low or the car is on fire. We walk to forget, if only momentarily, a world that is "too much with us," as William Wordsworth, another fine walker, put it. We walk to forget ourselves, too. I know I do. The surplus fifteen pounds resistant to every diet known to man, the recidivist nasal hair, the decade-old blemish that suddenly, for reasons known only to it, has decided to self-actualize on the crown of my bald head, spreading like an inkblot. All forgotten when I walk. Walking is democratic. Barring a disability, anyone can walk. The wealthy walker has no advantage over the impoverished one. Rousseau, despite his literary success, always saw himself as "the son of a worker," what we now call blue-collar. People like that didn't ride in fancy carriages. They walked. They walked as I do now: attentively, one step at a time, relishing the sturdiness, and the springiness, too, of serious earth.

Simple class-based bigotry that infected truth in the liberal media. And he knew the difference between those same propaganda dicks who distinguished between blue collar and white collar workers with the old Soviet-catchphrase, “Working Class,” as if human beings were broken down into different species according to their education or wealth or jobs. He hated that jarringly divisive phrase as the kind of Cold War propaganda that launched “class struggle” and “people’s democracy” as American political concerns, among the evil Communist movement’s greatest coups. It was something he only heard from the so-called “elites” but never back home in the old neighborhood. “Old Harbor Village housing projects.

For example, “the richest Americans, those earning more than $ 10 million annually, reported levels of personal happiness only slightly greater than the office staffs and blue-collar workers they employ.

the Democrats’ switch from a party of blue-collar workers to a party of urban elites—feminists, vegans, drug legalizers, untaxed hedge fund operators, and transgender-rights activists.

In 2005 joblessness would peak at 10.6 percent. To combat this scourge, between 2003 and 2005 the Schroeder government announced a national restructuring program titled Agenda 2010. Its main thrust was a multiphase program of labor market liberalization and benefit cuts, designed by a committee headed by VW’s head of human resources, Peter Hartz. The fourth and final phase of cuts, Hartz IV, became synonymous with a new German “reform” narrative. The unemployed were returned to work. Wage restraint restored German competitiveness. The reward came already in 2003 when Germany could boast of being the world export champion (Exportweltmeister). Agenda 2010 would come to define a new bipartisan self-understanding of Germany’s political class. Having accomplished the enormous task of reunification, Germany had overcome its internal difficulties and “reformed” its way back to economic health. It is a narrative that is superficially compelling and it would have significant implications for how Berlin approached the crisis of the eurozone, but it does not withstand close scrutiny. Hartz IV certainly drove millions of people more or less willingly off long-term unemployment benefits into a range of insecure jobs. This helped to hold down wages for unskilled workers, such as cashiers and cleaning workers. In the first ten years of the euro, despite soaring productivity, half of German households experienced no wage growth at all. This shortened unemployment rolls. It also increased pretax inequality and lowered Germany’s wages relative to its European neighbors. But as to the competitiveness of German exporters, the significance of Hartz IV is far less obvious. German companies do not win export orders by shaving the wages of unskilled workers. A far more important source of competitive advantage came from outsourcing production to Eastern Europe and Southern Europe. Added to which there was the boost from the global recovery of the early 2000s. While its economic impact has been exaggerated, what Hartz IV did transform was German politics. The blue-collar electorate and the left wing of the SPD never forgave Schroeder for Hartz IV.

It appears to be widely assumed by politicians, executives, academics, public intellectuals, industrial economists, and the like that they have a competent understanding of agriculture because their grandparents were farmers, or they have met some farmers, or they worked on a farm when they were young. But they invoke their understanding, which they do not have, only to excuse themselves from actual thought about actual issues of agriculture. These people have found “inevitability” a sufficient explanation for the deplorable history of industrial agriculture. They see the reason for the present discontent of “blue collar” voters as low or “stagnant” wages. They don’t see, in back of that, the dispossession that made many of them wage-workers in the first place. The loss everywhere of small farms and small towns and the respectable livelihoods that they provided was ruled “inevitable” and thus easily explained and forgotten.

You can no more expect her to work without meaningful challenge than you could expect her to work without salary. The nearly equal status of challenge and pay is unique to knowledge workers. They are different from the blue-collar workers that our fathers managed a generation ago. The easy, dumb error of managing knowledge workers is to forget that they are different and assume that basic rules developed on factory floors a century ago apply to them.

The Quiet Revolution Detroit, 1979. U.S. auto companies were being threatened by foreign competition, and the Motor City became a symbol of American industrial decline. Chrysler would be subjected to its first (but not last) government bailout; the Ford Motor Co. was about to lose $1 billion for that fiscal year, and at least as much again in 1980; and GM’s profits were expected to plunge by a breathtaking $2.5 billion. Meanwhile, Japanese automakers were gaining market share; Toyota would soon surpass GM as the world’s largest car company. (A similar scenario played out in other industries too, especially consumer electronics and the copier industry.) Then, as now, the convenient scapegoat was the rank-and-file employees—in Detroit’s case, the unionized workers whose relatively high wages and ostensibly poor work ethic were initially blamed for the automakers’ problems. Only as Japanese wage rates reached parity with those in the United States and Japanese automakers began hiring American workers for their U.S. plants did some Detroit auto executives begin rethinking the narrative of blue-collar failure.

TO RECAP, three forces are tilting the scales in favor of R-Directed Thinking. Abundance has satisfied, and even oversatisfied, the material needs of millions—boosting the significance of beauty and emotion and accelerating individuals’ search for meaning. Asia is now performing large amounts of routine, white-collar, L-Directed work at significantly lower costs, thereby forcing knowledge workers in the advanced world to master abilities that can’t be shipped overseas. And automation has begun to affect this generation’s white-collar workers in much the same way it did last generation’s blue-collar workers, requiring L-Directed professionals to develop aptitudes that computers can’t do better, faster, or cheaper.

Privilege theory offers the liberal multicultural subject a phantasmatic reality. It gives that subject the tools to name society’s bad apples: they are easily discernable; they are those who don’t check their privilege, blind to the social and cultural power that they undeservedly enjoy. And if privilege theory calls on you to curtail the pleasures of your own privilege, to willingly renounce your culturally given claims on the world, you are rewarded with “libidinal profit,” with what Lacan calls a “surplus-enjoyment,” an enjoyment-in-sacrifice or enjoyment-inconfession. Suffering—the feeling of guilt from realizing that you can never fully eradicate your privilege (again, privilege theory concedes that “one can no more renounce privilege than one can stop breathing”), that you are enjoying the fruits of an impure liberalism, that you’re taking up the space of someone more deserving, and so on—and exhaustion— the emotional cost for your unflinching vigilance in naming racism and denouncing prejudice wherever it appears—ironically become signs not of your defeat but of your self-enlightenment, moral righteousness, and true commitment to social justice. There is thus a kind of illicit satisfaction—an unconscious enjoyment—not only in exposing the blind spots of others, in the rhetorical disciplining of others, but in your own self-discipline, in your perceived suffering and exhaustion as well, amounting to an abstract testimony to the heroism of whiteness (“another self-glorification in which whiteness is equated with moral rectitude,” as Butler puts it) and the progress of multicultural liberalism: it’s not perfect, but we’re getting there . Along the way, privilege theory redeems its practitioners: since its biopolitical logic tends to individualize racism— check your privilege—your self-check exempts you from the charge of racism. It is fundamentally the problem of individual others (typically that of the less educated, white blue collar workers), concealing society’s “civil racism,” the pervading, naturalized racism of everyday liberal life. In contrast, psychoanalysis compels the liberal multicultural subject to confront a starker reality. For psychoanalysis, the routinized and ritualized call to check your privilege appears too convenient; it enables the liberal multicultural subject to diminish his or her guilt ( I ’m doing something personally about implicit biases) without needing to take on the sociopolitical framework directly. If privilege theorists are pressed, they will gladly confess that they know that it is not enough to denounce the unearned privileges of others without simultaneously attending to the networks of power relations that sustain such advantages. And yet in their active scholarly activist lives, they act as if it were enough, displaying the psychoanalytic structure of fetishistic disavowal (I know very well, but all the same). They maintain a split attitude toward antiracism. They know very well that denouncing white privilege is necessary but not sufficient, yet they don’t really believe that this critico-gesture does not accomplish the task at hand. Privilege theory, we might say, “wants social change with no actual change.” Rather than addressing the social antagonisms immanent to capitalism, it misapprehends the framework (and its enablement of racism). Privilege theory typically only sees social structures as the sum of their individual parts, their individual consciences. At its base level, it provides you with the fantasy of intervention and action; it offers you criticism without critique . For the proponents of privilege theory, social change follows the gradual and predictable path of reform.

what the New York Times recently characterized22 as a perfect storm in which no one, whether blue-collar or white-collar and whatever level of expertise, can afford to stand pat. “The need to constantly adapt is the new reality for many workers” was the theme of the piece headlined “The Age of Adaptation.” The story had a term for what is now required of many workers—serial mastery.

Similarly, use of cocaine by black day laborers and other blue-collar workers was initially encouraged, as long as the use was in the service of accomplishing work tasks for whites. But then the situation changed as whites discovered that blacks, too, enjoyed cocaine recreationally for its euphoria- and confidence-inducing effects. Use by blacks was increasingly reported in a manner designed to evoke fear among the white majority. Countless articles exaggerated both the extent to which cocaine was used by blacks and the connection between their use of the drug and heinous crimes. Popular myths held that the drug made black men homicidal as well as exceptional marksmen. Perhaps the most outrageous claim was that the drug rendered this group unaffected by .32-caliber bullets. Incredibly, these ridiculous assertions were actually believed. They prompted some southern police forces to switch to a larger .38-caliber weapon in order to deal with the mythical black, cocainized superhuman.

There is no blue collar, no white collar, just honor. And honor is defined by character not collar.

Researchers Alice Eagly and Linda Carli debunked the idea of a “glass ceiling,” a barrier that exists only at the top. Instead, their extensive analyses show that gender bias in the United States is alive and well at entry-level and senior-level jobs, for blue-collar workers and executives. Women are more likely to get flack for mistakes, especially in typically “male” roles—this phenomenon is called “the glass cliff”—and studies show that women of color are even more at risk for being perceived as incompetent.

It eventually becomes another conversation with W.V. Raman. I tell him what I honestly feel. Bowlers are used as blue-collar workers by batters as they wish. Why is that a bowler apologizes to a batter in the nets if he bowls a bad ball and not the batter if he plays a bad shot?

Blue Blood & Blue Collar (The Sonnet) I have nothing against blue blood, any more than I'm against blue collar. But blue blood think honor is an heirloom, while blue collar earn their rightful honor. That's what I call true human character, unreliant on some fictitious identity. Every human must earn their admittance, into the civilized realm of humanity. I can still accept any blood, blue or otherwise, if they have the decency to acknowledge atrocity. Otherwise, all blue blood are canine incarnate, unworthy of acknowledgment of their existentiality. King and president, ceo and janitor, all are equal, only behavior merits honor.

If his year with the ACRR left Ross disillusioned with what he considered mushy professional types, it deepened his faith in the abilities of so-called average folks—field hands, blue-collar workers, housewives—to upend the status quo. Having suffered the sting of injustice most acutely, they were more likely to put in the hard work to end it. Alienated from the dominant white culture, they more easily saw through the lies and empty rhetoric of the opposition. Without as much to lose, they refused to back down. They might have dropped out of school early. They might find it difficult to read and write. They might not be able to deliver an eloquent speech. But what these ordinary people lacked in “more conspicuous statesmanlike abilities” they more than made up for with intestinal fortitude, and they were far more likely to exhibit the type of urgency that got things done. 19 These were the people Ross would be on the lookout for.

Blue-collar workers, meanwhile, were the ones who “didn’t get it,” fast-fading relics of an outmoded and all-too-material past. Certain celebrated capitalist thinkers even declared, at the height of the boom, that blue collars and white collars had swapped moral positions, with workers now the “parasites” freeloading on the Olympian labors of management.

Contemporary conservative politics tries to link the family use and the political use of the models more closely; to point out that conservatives have the Strict Father model of the family and to convince others with the Strict Father model of the family that they should be political conservatives. I suspect that they are being successful at convincing people who believe in and identify with the Strict Father model of the family to vote conservative. For example, blue-collar workers who may previously have voted with liberals because of their union affiliation or economic interests may now, for cultural reasons, identify with conservatives and vote for them, even though it may not be in their economic interest to do so. There

For most of his adult life Coleman Young has been a progressive and militant. Quick-witted, fearless, and feisty, he had distinguished himself as an organizer for the National Negro Labor Council and the National Negro Congress and had become a hero in the black community after he accused the House Un-American Activities Committee itself of being Un-American. Coleman was so bright and so sharp that had he not been black, the idea of him sitting in the Oval Office in the White House would not have seemed far-fetched. But his past had not prepared him for the kind of crisis that today’s cities are in. Having received most of his political education in left-wing circles, he took pride in reducing everything to economics and in minimizing human and social relations. He seemed to think that this added to the image, which he has consciously cultivated, of a hard-nosed, streetwise radical who is always realistic, can’t be pushed around, and doesn’t care what white middle-class people think of him. “Education, drugs, homelessness, unwed mothers, crime, you name it… every social issue is about jobs,” he has written in his autobiography. “Jobs built Detroit, and only jobs will rebuild it.”2 No longer able to count on the industrial corporations for jobs, Young had no hesitation about turning to casino operators. Any jobs would do, even if these jobs were created by a crime-producing industry like casino gambling. To defeat the newest proposal for casino gambling, Jimmy, Shea, and I joined a coalition of community groups, blue collar, white collar, and cultural workers, clergy, political leaders, and

In the 1930s hourly wages for the majority of Germans were counted not in Reichsmarks, let alone PPP-adjusted dollars of 1990, but in Pfennigs. Only the most highly paid workers such as skilled machinists or typesetters earned more than one Reichsmark per hour. At the other end of the scale, the lowest-paid male workers in sawmills and textile factories were on hourly rates of 59 Pfennigs.19 Unskilled women workers in textiles or the food industries could expect no more than 42-5 Pfennigs. In 1936, with the German economy at full employment, 14.5 million people, 62 per cent of all German taxpayers, reported annual incomes of less than 1,500 Reichsmarks, corresponding to weekly earnings of just over 30 Reichsmarks and hourly rates of about 141 60 Pfennigs.20 A further 21 per cent, or 5 million white-collar and blue-collar workers, reported annual incomes of between 1,500 and 2,400

If a small-town, blue-collar man is the most authentic American, then the fact that his vote counts for more than that of a Black urban lawyer or a Latino suburban government worker won't arouse the outrage and demand for change that it might were he not so valorized.

nuclear alienation is the process through which Nuevomexicanas/os are estranged, simultaneously, from both the nuclear industrial complex and their home communities. This nuclear alienation stems from their subjectivities as interstitial objects that exist in a space somewhere between the nuclear industry and their home communities. Local workers from the nearby valleys were forced to straddle their positionality as Tewa or Nuevomexicanas/os in communities that were dependent on subsistence farming and mutual aid. They abandoned their traditional roles in their communities in exchange for good-paying jobs in Los Alamos. They were bused to the Pajarito Plateau to become blue-collar workers in the dangerous nuclear industrial complex. As a result, they were further alienated, both socially and economically, from their families because of their jobs (which also separated them from their small villages in the Valley). Socially, they were unable to talk about their work in Los Alamos. Some of them did speak up about the mistreatment that they received there, but others preferred that their neighbors only see the social mobility they had achieved.

My father was a real interesting cat. He fixed conveyor belts for a living. He was a blue-collar worker, but at night he dressed like a player.

John Judis and Ruy Teixeira identified a useful distinction between members of this seemingly homogenous demographic—a distinction that can help to explain why two white-collar Americans might vote in opposite ways. They suggested that a group they call “professionals” tend toward the Democratic side. These professionals are typically white-collar workers with college or advanced degrees. They include “academics, architects, engineers, scientists, computer analysts, lawyers, physicians, registered nurses, teachers, social workers, therapists, fashion designers, interior decorators, graphic artists, writers, editors, and actors.” In the 1950s, according to Judis and Teixeira, such professionals represented only 7 percent of the workforce. Today, after a decades-long transition from a blue-collar, industrial economy to one where the engine of growth is ideas and services, they represent more than 15 percent of American workers.

A climate of polarization helped the new fascist catch-all parties sweep up many who became disillusioned with the old deference (“honoratioren”) parties. This was risky, of course. Polarization could send the mass of angry protesters to the Left under certain conditions (as in Russia in 1917). Hitler and Mussolini understood that while Marxism now appealed mainly to blue-collar workers (and not to all of them), fascism was able to appeal more broadly across class lines. In postrevolutionary western Europe, a climate of polarization worked in fascism’s favor.

The “gig economy” unleashed by companies like Uber, Instacart, TaskRabbit, and DoorDash spurred an entirely new class of workers—the blue-collar techno-laborer.

The economic collapse of inner-city black communities could have inspired a national outpouring of compassion and support. A new War on Poverty could have been launched. Economic stimulus packages could have sailed through Congress to bail out those trapped in jobless ghettos through no fault of their own. Education, job training, public transportation, and relocation assistance could have been provided, so that youth of color would have been able to survive the rough transition to a new global economy and secure jobs in distant suburbs. Constructive interventions would have been good not only for African Americans trapped in ghettos, but also for blue-collar workers of all colors, many of whom were suffering too, if less severely. A wave of compassion and concern could have flooded poor and working-class communities in honor of the late Martin Luther King Jr. All of this could have happened, but it didn’t. Instead our nation declared a War on Drugs.

One of the ironies of Bezosism is that it’s not the jobs of blue-collar workers that are disappearing, but the jobs of middle managers.

showed that placebos sometimes had actual physical manifestations. For example, people exposed to fake poison ivy developed real rashes (Barber, 1978). And people given fake caffeine experienced real heart-rate jolts (Flaten & Blumenthal, 1999). And if you told blue-collar workers that what they did at their jobs counted as “intensive exercise,” the workers would begin to slim down and get stronger without actually changing one thing about their lifestyle (Crum & Langer, 2007). And while the neurobiological mechanism for all this was still a bit murky, everyone understood that the key to placebo’s strange and remarkable effectiveness was belief.

The Bush plan is economic treason against the American worker. That "civil rights leaders" are silent about the dispossession of the black working class, that unions are not marching to denounce this sellout of blue-collar and white-collar America, only tells us that the amorality of the transnational corporation has infected both. Solidarity be damned, it is all about money now.

Only the Nazis were positioned to be all things to all men and women. They made an appeal that reached beyond narrow economic interests and narrow religious interests. The base of their support may have been among Germany’s small-town middle-class Protestants, but they also won important backing in the cities with Catholics and blue-collar workers. As more research is done on Nazi support, the wider and more diverse that support appears to have been. Indeed, anyone who had lost patience with traditional politics and was looking for a new direction was a potential Nazi. They were the “catchall party of protest,” calling for people to put aside social divisions and class differences for the sake of a larger ideal, the nation, the Volk. The message had enormous appeal to any unaffiliated (and non-Jewish) voter, and to students and the young, who provided the party with its bustling energy, it was a political elixir. There were no more enthusiastic Nazis than the idealistic young. Across the English Channel, George Orwell may have disliked what he saw, but he understood its power. Hitler, he said, “grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life.” The Nazis knew that “human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short-working hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty parades.” Or as one anti-Nazi German journalist wrote, “Hitler was able to enslave his own people because he seemed to give them something that even the traditional religions could no longer provide: the belief in a meaning to existence beyond the narrowest self-interest.

This hard reality about algorithms and robots will have profound effects on the sequence of AI-induced job losses. The physical automation of the past century largely hurt blue-collar workers, but the coming decades of intelligent automation will hit white-collar workers first. The truth is that these workers have far more to fear from the algorithms that exist today than from the robots that still need to be invented.

Domestically, we do not allow child labor, or unsafe labor, or labor that pays less than a minimum wage. Those policy choices reflect a century of domestic political struggle. To allow the fruits of such labor to enter via the back door of trade was a conscious political choice by elites. The orthodox view is that these shifts resulted from changes in the nature of the economy. The market, naturally, rewarded those with more advanced skills and education, while routine workers whose jobs could be done by machines or by cheaper labor offshore lost out. The basic problem with this story is that the postwar blue-collar middle class did not have college degrees, and most semiskilled factory workers had not graduated from high school. Yet the social contract of that era called for paying them decently. For a century, markets have often been wrong, and good social policy has overridden their verdicts. The US, on average, is more than twice as rich as it was in the postwar era. But those riches are being shared very differently today.

Some years ago I took a copy of God’s “whoever” policy to California. I wanted to show it to my Uncle Billy. He’d been scheduled to visit my home, but bone cancer had thwarted his plans. My uncle reminded me much of my father: squared like a blast furnace, ruddy as a leather basketball. They shared the same West Texas roots, penchant for cigars, and blue-collar work ethic. But I wasn’t sure if they shared the same faith. So after several planes, two shuttles, and a rental-car road trip, I reached Uncle Billy’s house only to learn he was back in the hospital. No visitors. Maybe tomorrow. He felt better the next day. Good enough to come home. I went to see him. Cancer had taken its toll and his strength. The recliner entombed his body. He recognized me yet dozed as I chatted with his wife and friends. He scarcely opened his eyes. People came and went, and I began to wonder if I would have the chance to ask the question. Finally the guests stepped out onto the lawn and left me alone with my uncle. I slid my chair next to his, took his skintaut hand, and wasted no words. “Bill, are you ready to go to heaven?” His eyes, for the first time, popped open. Saucer wide. His head lifted. Doubt laced his response: “I think I am.” “Do you want to be sure?” “Oh yes.” Our brief talk ended with a prayer for grace. We both said “amen,” and I soon left. Uncle Billy died within days. Did he wake up in heaven? According to the parable of the eleventh-hour workers, he did.

All I have I would have given, gladly, not to be standing here today.” The chamber became hushed. He had struck exactly the right note of sorrowful humility. It was a good start, George thought. Johnson continued in the same vein, speaking with slow dignity. If he felt the impulse to rush, he was controlling it firmly. He wore a dark-blue suit and tie, and a shirt with a tab-fastened collar, a style considered formal in the South. He looked occasionally from one side to the other, speaking to the whole of the chamber and at the same time seeming to command it. Echoing Martin Luther King, he talked of dreams: Kennedy’s dreams of conquering space, of education for all children, of the Peace Corps. “This is our challenge,” he said. “Not to hesitate, not to pause, not to turn about and linger over this evil moment, but to continue on our course so that we may fulfill the destiny that history has set for us.” He had to stop, then, because of the applause. Then he said: “Our most immediate tasks are here on this hill.” This was the crunch. Capitol Hill, where Congress sat, had been at war with the president for most of 1963. Congress had the power to delay legislation, and used it often, even when the president had campaigned and won public support for his plans. But since John Kennedy announced his civil rights bill they had gone on strike, like a factory full of militant workers, delaying everything, mulishly refusing to pass even routine bills, scorning public opinion and the democratic process. “First,” said Johnson, and George held his breath while he waited to hear what the new president would put first. “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.” George leaped to his feet, clapping for joy. He was not the only one: the applause burst out again, and this time went on longer than previously. Johnson waited for it to die down, then said: “We have talked long enough in this country about civil rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time, now, to write the next chapter—and to write it in the books of law.” They applauded again. Euphoric, George looked at the few black faces in the chamber: five Negro congressmen, including Gus Hawkins of California, who actually looked white; Mr. and Mrs. Wright in the presidential box, clapping; a scatter of dark faces among the spectators in the gallery. Their expressions showed relief, hope, and gladness. Then his eye fell on the rows of seats behind the cabinet, where the senior senators sat, most of them Southerners, sullen and resentful. Not a single one was joining in the applause. •

Certain celebrated capitalist thinkers even declared, at the height of the boom, that blue collars and white collars had swapped moral positions, with workers now the “parasites” freeloading on the Olympian labors of management.13

wanted to talk.’ ‘So I do. Outside, though,’ Tess said firmly. ‘Unless you want Marianne hanging on your every word, of course.’ They ate bacon sandwiches and drank tea, and then Andy put on his long, navy-blue overcoat and Tess put on her dark-brown one with the fur collar, and they set off, into the chilly and uninspiring morning. ‘I told Marianne we’d be out for lunch,’ Tess said rather guiltily. ‘But in for an evening meal. It’s too cold for a picnic, but I thought – I thought we might buy a pie each or something.’ ‘You do want us out of your house, don’t you?’ Andy said quizzically. ‘Now I wonder why?’ ‘I’ve told you. Because of Marianne,’ Tess said. She could not bring herself to admit that she thought Ashley would turn up on the doorstep and make them both uncomfortable. For one thing, it would give Andy the impression that Ashley was a person of some significance in her life and for another, it would make her seem such a ninny. ‘Now, where shall we go?’ ‘The Broad isn’t iced up any more but I don’t fancy boating,’ Andy said as they stood in Deeping Lane, looking up and down it. ‘Shall we walk up to the bus stop and go into the city? Or we could walk to Stalham, I suppose.’ ‘We’ll catch a bus into the city,’ Tess decided. She was certain that Ashley would find them in Stalham without any trouble; Norwich would be a whole lot more difficult. She had no idea just what she expected Ash to do, except that it would be something embarrassing and unpleasant both for herself and for Andy. Ashley was so proprietorial, that was the trouble. He seemed to think he owned her. The bus came and the two of them jumped aboard and went right down to the front, for it wasn’t full by any means. Tess sat in the front seat against the window and Andy sat down beside her. ‘What luxury, a bus not crammed with office workers,’ she said, turning to Andy. ‘The bus Cherie and I catch in the mornings . . . oh!’ ‘Why Oh?’ Andy asked curiously. ‘Got a pain?’ ‘No, I just remembered . . . something I’d forgotten,’ Tess said confusedly. ‘It doesn’t matter . . . tell me what you did after that summer, the one you spent in Barton.’ She did not think it necessary to explain that she had just seen Ashley, in his snarling sports car, driving in the opposite direction. He had not, she was sure, seen her, which was one blessing, anyway. ‘School, then Russia, then school again,’ Andy said. ‘Now what I want to know is, did you ever discover about your mother and your dream and everything? You kept hinting mysteriously but you never actually came out with much.’ ‘No. Well, I wasn’t any better than you at putting things down in writing. But I really have found out more than I bargained for, Andy. D’you mind if I don’t tell you right away, though? I’ll save it for when we’re alone, later.’ ‘Being alone in the city isn’t easy,’ Andy said. He sounded rather disgruntled. ‘We could go to the flicks, I suppose, but then you can’t talk. People keep hushing you

Between 1985 and 2000, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, India, Argentina, and Chile all opened up to trade by unilaterally cutting their tariffs across the board. Over the same time period, inequality increased in all those countries, and the timing of these increases seems to connect them to the trade liberalization episodes. For example, between 1985 and 1987, Mexico massively reduced both the coverage of its import quota regime and the average duty on imports. Between 1987 and 1990, blue-collar workers lost 15 percent of their wages, while their white-collar counterparts gained in the same proportion. Other measures of inequality followed suit.

Granovetter’s findings, which applied to white-collar workers, showed that personal contacts were the main way these workers found jobs. But by comparing his data with other sources, he also found that this was not different from the way in which blue-collar workers found jobs. With a few exceptions, subsequent studies in and outside the United States have confirmed that personal contacts are crucial for people to find job opportunities. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which followed five thousand American families in which the household heads and their spouses were under age forty-five, found in 1978 that 52 percent of white men, 47.1 percent of white women, 58.5 percent of black men, and 43 percent of black women found their current job through friends and relatives. The National Bureau of Economic Research’s 1989 Study of Disadvantaged Youths found that 51 percent of whites and 42 percent of African Americans in three poor neighborhoods of Boston found jobs through personal contacts.

Both Mussolini and Hitler could perceive the space available, and were willing to trim their movements to fit. The space was partly symbolic. The Nazi Party early shaped its identity by staking a claim to the street and fought with communist gangs for control of working-class neighborhoods of Berlin. At issue was not merely a few meters of urban “turf.” The Nazis sought to portray themselves as the most vigorous and effective force against the communists—and, at the same time, to portray the liberal state as incapable of preserving public security. The communists, at the same time, were showing that the Social Democrats were unequipped to deal with an incipient revolutionary situation that needed a fighting vanguard. Polarization was in the interest of both. Fascist violence was neither random nor indiscriminate. It carried a well-calculated set of coded messages: that communist violence was rising, that the democratic state was responding to it ineptly, and that only the fascists were tough enough to save the nation from antinational terrorists. An essential step in the fascist march to acceptance and power was to persuade law-and-order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity in the face of Left provocation. It helped, of course, that many ordinary citizens never feared fascist violence against themselves, because they were reassured that it was reserved for national enemies and “terrorists” who deserved it. Fascists encouraged a distinction between members of the nation who merited protection and outsiders who deserved rough handling. One of the most sensational cases of Nazi violence before power was the murder of a communist laborer of Polish descent in the town of Potempa, in Silesia, by five SA men in August 1932. It became sensational when the killers’ death sentences were commuted, under Nazi pressure, to life imprisonment. Party theorist Alfred Rosenberg took the occasion to underscore the difference between “bourgeois justice,” according to which “one Polish Communist has the same weighting as five Germans, frontsoldiers,” and National Socialist ideology, according to which “one soul does not equal another soul, one person not another.” Indeed, Rosenberg went on, for National Socialism, “there is no ‘law as such.’” The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism. For some, fascist violence was more than useful: it was beautiful. Some war veterans and intellectuals (Marinetti and Ernst Jünger were both) indulged in the aesthetics of violence. Violence often appealed to men too young to have known it in 1914–18 and who felt cheated of their war. It appealed to some women, too. But it is a mistake to regard fascist success as solely the triumph of the D’Annunzian hero. It was the genius of fascism to wager that many an orderly bourgeois (or even bourgeoise) would take some vicarious satisfaction in a carefully selective violence, directed only against “terrorists” and “enemies of the people.” A climate of polarization helped the new fascist catch-all parties sweep up many who became disillusioned with the old deference (“honoratioren”) parties. This was risky, of course. Polarization could send the mass of angry protesters to the Left under certain conditions (as in Russia in 1917). Hitler and Mussolini understood that while Marxism now appealed mainly to blue-collar workers (and not to all of them), fascism was able to appeal more broadly across class lines. In postrevolutionary western Europe, a climate of polarization worked in fascism’s favor.

Of course, as the poor become dangerous - addicted, short-tempered, diseased - the middle class withdraws still further from contact. Better to close the park, as some affluent lower-Manhattanites have argues, than risk mingling with those who have no other space in which to sleep or pass the time. Better to block off public streets, as some Miami neighborhoods have concluded, than allow fee passage to the down-and-out. Even our city streets are less likely than in the past to offer the promiscuous mingling of "others." Suburban mall have drained downtown shopping areas and left them to the poor; the new urban skywalks lift the white-collar population into a weatherproof world of their own, leaving the streets to the overlapping categories of the poor, blue-collar workers, and people of color. And the more the poor are cut off or abandoned, the less they are capable of inspiring sympathy or even simple human interest.

Meanwhile the biggest industry in Los Angeles County was bleeding tens of thousands of entry-level semiskilled jobs. Blue-collar workers everywhere felt the tremors of the so-called Eisenhower Recession of 1958, but in Southern California the primary reason for layoffs was the advent of the Space Age. (Set the Night on Fire)

Secondly, social infrastructures that help produce labour power of one sort may inhibit the creation of another. Herein lies the logic of residential differentiation in the contemporary metropolis, since neighbourhoods organized for the reproduction of professionals are necessarily different from those given over to the reproduction of blue-collar workers. When super-imposed upon historical, religious, racial and cultural differentiations, this tendency towards geographical specialization in social reproduction can take on even more emphatic form. The processes of social reproduction then crystallize into a relatively permanent patchwork quilt of local, interregional and even international specialization. This patchwork quilt may then also be associated with marked differentials in the value and value-productivity of labour power.

Secondly, social infrastructures that help produce labour power of one sort may inhibit the creation of another. Herein lies the logic of residential differentiation in the contemporary metropolis, since neighbourhoods organized for the reproduction of professionals are necessarily different from those given over to the reproduction of blue-collar workers. When super-imposed upon historical, religious, racial and cultural differentiations, this tendency towards geographical specialization in social reproduction can take on even more emphatic form. The processes of social reproduction then crystallize into a relatively permanent patchwork quilt of local, interregional and even international specialization.

The portion of the electorate “in the middle” is quite small—about 20 percent (though some estimates go as high as 30 percent). So far as I can tell, this group consists of at least two significant subpopulations: • “Bi-conceptuals:” People who have both models at their disposal, perhaps used in different parts of their lives, and who may use either model in framing political issues. For example, many blue-collar workers are strict fathers at home, but nurturant in their domestic political priorities. Many executives are strict in their business practices, yet nurturant at home and in their politics. • “Pragmatists”: Pragmatic conservatives and pragmatic progressives. Ideological progressives and conservatives stick firmly to their models, while pragmatic progressives and conservatives are more willing to compromise for practical purposes. Adding