{"id":430431,"date":"2010-03-15T15:43:13","date_gmt":"2010-03-15T19:43:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/?p=79274"},"modified":"2010-03-15T15:43:13","modified_gmt":"2010-03-15T19:43:13","slug":"what-is-the-difference-between-%e2%80%98middle-class%e2%80%99-and-%e2%80%98working-class%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/430431","title":{"rendered":"What Is the Difference Between \u2018Middle Class\u2019 and \u2018Working Class\u2019?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new ABC News poll shows that 45 percent of Americans consider themselves middle class<\/a>, a significant difference from other polls that find when asked unprompted, 80 percent of Americans self-identify as middle class. The difference: ABC asked people to identify as middle, working or upper-middle class<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What’s the difference between “working class” and “low-income Americans”? It can be pretty significant. “Working class” often conjures up images of those who engage in physical labor for an hourly wage<\/a> as opposed to office workers and service industry staffers; and yet, due to unionization and collective bargaining, the former often earn far more than the latter. For instance, a brickmason would probably proudly identify as “working class” instead of “middle class” if given the option, but the mean salary for a brickmason is $47,000<\/a> — certainly in the middle-income quintile (and pretty close to the median income). A worker assembling aircraft makes an average of $43,000 a year<\/a> — also in the middle quintile.<\/span><\/p>\n

By comparison, a teacher’s assistant — a more “middle-class” job, if the distinction between working and middle class is physical labor and physical setting — makes an average salary of $23,000<\/a>. A laboratory technician makes an average of $37,000 a year<\/a>. An optician makes a mean salary of $35,000 a year<\/a>. A bookkeeping, accounting or auditing clerk will pull in an average of $33,800 a year<\/a>. All of those jobs require some amount of postsecondary education, don’t involve physical labor and place the people in them in the “lower-middle-class” income quintile<\/a>. Very few of them would, however, likely identify as “working class” when “middle class” was offered as an option.<\/p>\n

The problem with “working class” is that it denotes a class of labor and a particular social grouping, rather than a class of income, while middle and upper middle class — though obviously imprecise in the vernacular<\/a> — connote a comparative income. The use of “working class” as a category, while obviously designed to overcome the questionable utility of a system by which 80 percent of Americans self-identify as middle class, creates a whole new host of problems for surveys that attempt to determine how income affects people’s perceptions — so much so that, in the middle of its own analysis<\/a>, ABC News switches to using income-based definitions of the middle\/working-class divide to tease out how concerned people are about the economy.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, after people self-identify as working class, ABC’s survey stops caring about their opinions. Even though the survey designers are obviously aware that the middle\/working-class divide is not about income — since they stop using it halfway through the survey — they still disregard the opinions of those who identify as working class. No wonder those who identify as working class think there’s some conspiracy among the “elites.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new ABC News poll shows that 45 percent of Americans consider themselves middle class, a significant difference from other polls that find when asked unprompted, 80 percent of Americans self-identify as middle class. The difference: ABC asked people to identify as middle, working or upper-middle class. What’s the difference between “working class” and “low-income […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5454,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-430431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5454"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430431\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}