Archive: Working-Class Perspectives
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WCP: Karl Marx Makes a Comeback
Is Karl Marx making a comeback right in time for his upcoming bicentennial birthday? In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Kathy M. Newman considers the reasons for Marx’s resurgence in popularity.
Category: Visiting Scholars
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WCP: Valuing a Lost Work Culture
Beyond a paycheck, work fosters social connection, dignity, and a sense of creativity. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Tim Strangleman ponders whether the decline of older industries means that fewer workers engage art in their labor.
Category: Visiting Scholars
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WCP: Getting Over in the Heart of Dixie
Alabama may be known for its conservative politics, but the state has a wealth of working-class and progressive organizing taking place. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Helen Diana Eidson describes the growth and achievements of Alabama Arise, a coalition of congregations and community groups fighting for public services, fairer taxation, tenant rights, and criminal justice reform.
Category: Visiting Scholars
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WCP: The Dual Economy
Increasing inequality has squeezed many Americans out of the middle class and into the working class. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Victor Tan Chen reviews Peter Temin’s book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in the Dual Economy. Chen argues that Temin’s ‘duel economy’ framework illuminates the challenges facing our economy, but falls short of proposing realistic solutions for the “corrupt and unresponsive political system” that he sketches out.
Category: Visiting Scholars
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WCP: The Work Lives of Uber Drivers Are Worse Than You Think
Uber promises freedom and flexibility to drivers but instead delivers risk, exploitation, and low wages that compel drivers to work long and inconvenient hours. That is what Katie Wells, Kafui Attoh, and Declan Cullen discovered by conducting a groundbreaking series of interviews with 40 Uber drivers in the DC area, highlighted in this week’s Working-Class Perspective.
Category: Visiting Scholars
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WCP: Women Hold the Keys to New Working-Class Prosperity
Pundits use ‘working class’ as a shorthand for white blue-collar men, but the American worker today is just as likely to be a woman of color in the service or healthcare industry. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Lane Windham makes the case for promoting women’s leadership in the labor movement and introduces an ambitious project seeking to do just that.
Categories: Visiting Scholars, Women Innovating Labor Leadership
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WCP: Fear of Hygge and Working-Class Social Capital
The Danish concept of hygge associated with coziness, peace of mind, and communality has received much attention and scrutiny from commentators in the United States. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Jack Metzgar argues that hygge is quintessentially a working-class ethic that eludes Americans due to an increasingly rigid professional culture and the absence of robust social welfare.
Category: Visiting Scholars
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WCP: Have We Been Had? Why Talking About the Working-Class Vote for Trump Hurts Us
Much of what has been said about Trump’s support from working-class voters is either false or unproven. Even worse, flawed analyses reinforce damaging conservative narratives and undermine worker solidarity. In this week’s Working-Class Perspectives post, Allison L. Hurst calls for a more inclusive understanding of the working class in America.
Category: Visiting Scholars
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WCP: Profiting from the Working Class: How the Opioid Epidemic Echoes the Mortgage Crisis
In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Marc Dann and Leo Jennings III draw frightening parallels between the opioid epidemic and the subprime mortgage crisis. They call on the Department of Justice to do what it failed to do in 2009: prosecute Wall Street executives whose greed devastate working-class Americans.
Category: Visiting Scholars
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WCP: Religious Liberty (Not) For All
Religious freedom claims have significant deference in the U.S. legal system, and they have increasingly come into conflict with the rights of workers. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Ken Estey warns that a failure to balance religious liberty with public welfare undermines the common good.
Category: Visiting Scholars