Archive: WCP
-
Notre Dame Cathedral and Questions from a Worker Who Reads (after Bertolt Brecht)
Public reaction to the Notre Dame Cathedral fire raises several questions in the mind of this week’s contributor to Working Class Perspectives, Sarah Attfield, regarding the biases present in reporting, public sympathy, and colonizers’ mentality. Left out of the telling of Notre Dame’s history are the workers who laid its stones hundreds of years ago, all while looking to the workers who must soon lay stones for the Cathedral again.
Categories: Uncategorized, Visiting Scholars
-
WCP: Class(room) Warfare
While the college admissions scandal has drawn plenty of media attention in recent weeks, few were truly surprised to learn that wealthy parents were using their money and influence to help their children get into elite colleges. In this week’s Working Class Perspectives, Kathy M. Newman analyzes the real surprise among the coverage: mainstream news commentary’s emphasis on class. Newman argues that this reporting reflects a broader shift toward greater attention to class and inequality in American culture.
Category: Visiting Scholars
-
WCP: Will Democrats Reach Rural Workers in 2020?
The slew of Democrats running for President in 2020 have already begun talking with Iowa voters, whose early caucus choices will help shape the primary elections. Candidates should have learned from 2016 how important it is not to ignore “flyover country,” but to win, they have to do more than just show up. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Chris Martin suggests some policy proposals that candidates ought to consider if they want to reach Midwestern voters.
Category: Visiting Scholars
-
WCP: Who Speaks for Us?
Whether it’s Representative Mark Meadows’s decision to have Lynne Patton stand behind him as “evidence” that President Trump is not racist or the media’s embrace of J.D. Vance’s version of Appalachian culture as the key to understanding white working-class voters, political discourse often anoints a single individual to represent a whole social group.
Category: Visiting Scholars
-
WCP: The Oppositional Politics of Race and Class in the Brexit Debate
As debates over when and how Britain will actually leave the European Union go on, echoes of the 2016 campaign continue to ripple through British culture.
Category: Visiting Scholars
-
WCP: Bargaining for the Common Good Comes of Age
The week-long strike by the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) in January 2019 marked the most significant struggle yet in a movement by teachers and other public-sector workers called Bargaining for the Common Good.
Categories: Bargaining for the Common Good, Visiting Scholars
-
WCP: Jobs and Medicare for All
The idea of Medicare for All is gaining attention and support in American politics — so much that it’s now getting careful analysis of its benefits and costs. In Working-Class Perspectives this week, Jack Metzgar considers the most significant cost: jobs for workers in health care and the insurance industry. A better health plan, he argues, must be accompanied by a just transition policy for workers.
Category: Visiting Scholars
-
WCP: Grifting the Working Class
Since the 2016 election, pundits have pondered how a man who began his campaign by gliding down an escalator in a gaudy Manhattan skyscraper festooned with his name managed to ride working-class resentment and anxiety to the presidency. How did a billionaire steal blue-collar Democratic voters right out from under Hillary Clinton’s upturned nose in broad daylight?
Category: Visiting Scholars
-
WCP: Class and the Dignity of Work
In January, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown kicked off his “Dignity of Work” tour through states that will play key roles in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Category: Visiting Scholars
-
WCP: Should We Mourn the Loss of Industrial Jobs?
Many elite and middle-class people dismiss former industrial workers’ attachment to the memory of dirty, dangerous factory work. But as James Partick Ferns reminds us in this week’s Working-Class Perspectives, displaced workers recognize the very real problems of industrial labor.
Category: Visiting Scholars