we started out calling them the working poor, and we found that really it wasn’t the best term, because we want to work in a way that engages people in the process, and when—nobody wants to be poor. Nobody wants to be called poor or low-wage. So when we started out talking about the working poor or low-wage workers, we came, in the course of conversations with these workers, to understand that maybe it would be better to find another way to talk about it. So that’s why we came up with this formulation “economically distressed,” which really talks about the content of their lives, rather than something which might get turned into an epithet.
these economically distressed workers are people whose incomes are so low that they can’t get out of the bottom of their own housing market in their area for a family of their size without spending more than 30 percent of their income to do that. And the federal standard is 30 percent. You shouldn’t spend more than 30 percent of your income on housing. Otherwise you won’t have enough money for everything else that you need. So that’s how we look at the problem.
And we found that in the United States, it’s almost 21 percent of the labor force are people who are in this economically distressed status, and it varies. In metropolitan areas, it’s higher. Here in New York, it’s in New York metropolitan area, 29.4 percent of the families and households in the New York metro area are economically distressed. And it goes as high as—in Miami, it’s 32.4 percent. So, in Los Angeles, it’s 31 percent. So we’re talking about really a lot of people who are in a very, very serious situation.
-Michael Zweig
the phrase “working class” is kind of forbidden from political talk in the United States, because it’s—people are going to be accused of being class warriors. So, unfortunately, that phrase is rarely used. But I think, you know, the catch phrase is the middle class, and they’re both focusing on the middle class. But we have this ever-expansive definition of what the middle class is: people from $20,000 a year to $200,000 a year.
Washington was ignoring the squeeze on the nation’s workers.
– Steve Greenhouse
there is a discussion, of course, of class war; every time anybody talks about redistributing income down, “Oh, that’s class warfare.” Well, yes, it is class warfare to redistribute the income up. We’ve been living for thirty-five years in a period of intense class warfare, except the working class has been losing. And part of that class warfare is to deny that there are classes and to deny that any of this dynamic is actually happening, so that people’s attention are shifted elsewhere. And that’s why I think that it’s so important to keep talking about and bringing back into focus what is actually happening with working people in this country.
-Michael Zweig
sort of remedy that was provided by the New Deal in 1935, through passage of the National Labor Relations Act, which labor is trying to amend now through enactment of the Employee Free Choice Act, and that is a strengthening of workers’ collective bargaining rights.
– Steve Early
It seems that there’s been almost an unwritten agreement among both candidates and the media not to ask Obama or McCain about their immigration policies since the primaries. Once the primaries were over, the debate is over, in terms of the national debate.
They don’t need to get into it. And each has enough in them in their backgrounds and in their programs that Lou Dobbs and that whole militant anti-immigrant crowd is going to be dissatisfied with both of them, so why get into it?
I will say that in the immigration situation, whatever happens, we want to make sure that there isn’t a two-tier labor force that we have in this country, where the immigrants, in whatever form they’re here, as guest workers or in whatever guise we sort of allow them to come into America, that they are some second-class labor citizen.
-Michael Zweig
You look back at the history of labor law reform efforts over the last thirty years, under Clinton and Carter, a lot of disappointment and a record of failure. It’s going to take a tremendous grassroots movement, now and then, by organized workers to keep the pressure on Obama and the Democrats to make this long overdue change so that workers can organize more freely without management interference. It’s not a done deal. And I think Obama would prefer to avoid a knockdown, drag-out fight with corporate America over this issue right out of the box.
– Steve Early
Discussion: Michael Zweig, Steven Greenhouse, Steve Early, Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez
Michael Zweig, Professor of economics and director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His most recent book is What’s Class Got to Do with It?: American Society in the Twenty-First Century.
Steven Greenhouse, labor and workplace reporter for the New York Times, and author of the new book The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.
Steve Early, Boston-based labor journalist and the author of a forthcoming book for Monthly Review Press called Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home. For twenty-seven years, he was an organizer for the Communications Workers of America.
– from democracynow. 27 Oct 2008