"'Working-Class' Majority Needs a Hero"
Viewpoint in Newsday, September 1, 2000, A53
By Michael Zweig** Michael Zweig teaches economics at SUNY Stony Brook
and is the author of The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept
Secret (Cornell University Press).
Al Gore raised a ruckus when he went populist at the Democratic
Party convention in Los Angeles last month. Ever since, he's been
attacking tobacco companies and oil, insurance, and pharmaceutical
giants. Voters seem to like it, giving his post-convention poll ratings
a boost. News commentators and media pundits have more often expressed
shock bordering on outraged disbelief that he would resort to "class
struggle" politics, as though the term alone is enough to discredit the
point entirely.
But it's true. There is indeed class warfare in this country. The
problem is, only one class seems to know it, the class that has been
winning for the last three decades. Between 1972 and 1997, as unions
lost power, the real earnings of non-supervisory workers (after taking
inflation into account) fell about twenty percent, even though their
productivity continued to rise. Family income has stayed level only
because more family members are working, and for longer hours.
Meanwhile, over sixty percent of the new wealth created in the Reagan
years went to the top one percent of households, while the bottom eighty
percent ended up worse off because of a sharp rise in their personal
debt.
In the past three years, tight labor markets have finally led to
increases in real income for workers. But even in the Clinton-Gore
boom, worker incomes are rising more slowly than worker productivity, so
income and wealth continue to grow ever more unequal. In 1980, a
typical major corporate CEO made 42 times the income of an average
production worker. In 1995 it was 141 times. By 1998 it was 419 times.
This is not simply a case of "the rich get richer and the poor get
poorer." This is a case of the working class taking it in the neck
while the capitalist class goes to the bank. By working class, I mean
people who have little control over the pace or content of their work,
and who aren't supervising other workers. That's sixty-two percent of
the labor force.
If we understand class as a question of power rather than income or
lifestyle, we see that America is not a "middle class society." With
the capitalist class amounting to just two percent of the labor force
and a middle class of professionals, supervisors, managers, and small
business owners amounting to thirty six percent, this is a society with
a working class majority.
Campaign talk about "working families" obscures the existence of
classes in this country even as it hints at an appeal to working class
people. Al Gore talks a lot about fighting. But whom are we supposed
to fight? Not just three or four industries that damage us as
consumers. The problem for working people is again to find ways to
limit the power of the capitalist class, the class that for thirty years
has systematically damaged them as workers. That's how we won Social
Security, union protection, and shared prosperity in the past.
The middle class has an interest here, too. Small business owners and
professionals closely connected to the working class, like teachers,
nurses, and social workers, have lost ground along with the workers they
serve. Those, many fewer in number, who serve the capitalist class,
like high-end lawyers and accountants, have prospered. Most middle
class people would benefit from a strong working class political
movement.
After decades of media talk about the middle class, and a disappeared
working class, Al Gore's reference to "working families" comes at a time
of renewed AFL-CIO organizing and student campaigns against sweatshops.
Many people were caught off guard by Gore's rhetorical move to the left,
away from the now-traditional fight for the middle, but we should
welcome this as an opening to explore the realities of class life in
America.
Who among the current crop of presidential candidates is best equipped
to lead the country on behalf of the working class? Is it really Al
Gore?
Could George W. Bush possibly make the case, or whoever emerges from the
Reform Party debacle? Is it Ralph Nader? How can we start again to
create working class politics? The presidential campaign traditionally
gets serious after Labor Day. Will a real working class hero please
step forward?
