Archive: Sherry Linkon
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WCP: Fighting Poverty with Classism
Reform movements in the US have a long history of trying to address poverty by teaching, manipulating, and sometimes forcing working-class people to behave more like the middle class. In Working-Clas
Categories: News, Working-Class Perspectives
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WCP: Bucket Toilets and Casseroles: Belonging, Mutual Aid, and Working-Class Survival
This past year of the pandemic has, for many, been one of struggle and isolation. So films about single older working-class women dealing with economic and personal challenges might not seem inspirin
Categories: News, Working-Class Perspectives
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WCP: Beyond Economic Populism
Debates about working-class voters often treat them as a marketing problem, a way of thinking that reflects the commentators’ sense of superiority to people they view as deluded, foolish, stupid, or
Category: News
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WCP: Rethinking Working-Class Belonging
Belonging is a central theme and a strength of working-class culture, a source of pleasure and of collective agency. Yet it can also be divisive, emphasizing how "we" are different from "them" -- a w
Category: News
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WCP: Essential Work: The 2020 WCSA Awards
At the center of all the chaos and turmoil of 2020 has been the essential worker on the front lines—from healthcare workers treating those infected with COVID-19 to service workers of all kinds who have kept us fed, supplied, and safe while putting their own safety at risk, all too often in jobs which are precarious and underpaid. Working-class life, experience, and precarity have has perhaps not been more central or important in recent memory.
Category: Visiting Scholars
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WCP: The Downwardly Mobile: How Some People Lose Class Privilege
In the U.S., the expectation of upward mobility has begun to seem like magical thinking. Few Americans move up the social class ladder, and quite a few fall a few rungs down from the status their parents achieved. In Working-Class Perspectives this week, sociologist Jessi Streib looks at some of the factors that contribute to downward mobility.
Category: Visiting Scholars
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WCP: Universal Basic Income and Working-Class Futures
There have been few good things to come out of COVID-19. We’ve seen a genuine sense of community spirit emerge along with greater respect for blue-collar workers in the front line. In the UK, we’ve seen another less obvious shift: an emerging commitment to the idea that all citizens within a country should enjoy a basic minimum income.
Category: Visiting Scholars
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WCP: Deindustrialization as a Template for COVID-19
As we wrote in Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown, Youngstown’s story is America’s story. That’s true now as we try to imagine American life after the pandemic. No doubt, coronavirus is a natural disaster that is more contagious, widespread, and deadly than the economic disaster of deindustrialization.
Category: Visiting Scholars
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WCP: “People Ain’t Gonna Come to Work if They Don’t Feel Safe”
For many essential workers, the coronavirus pandemic presents an impossible choice: earn a living by risking your life or stay healthy but lose your income. In this week’s Working-Class Perspectives, Christopher R. Martin shares the view from Iowa, where meatpacking plants have high rates of infection.
Category: Visiting Scholars
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WCP: Fishing Industry Workers Struggle to Beat Long Odds
In recent weeks, we’ve heard increasing concerns about how the pandemic is affecting the workers who feed us, from farmers to grocery clerks. But we’ve heard very little about the fishing industry or its workers. Usually, reports on fishing focus on tons of catch, not the workers who bring it to market.
Category: Visiting Scholars