I have often wondered about corporate America’s reluctance to hire entry level workers. I mean out of 4 “real” IT/computing jobs in my career, along with a short contracting stint, one job was primarily populated with mid-career people, and hired me as an entry level worker because I would work for cheap. Second job didn’t hire ANYONE who wasn’t already experienced in some fashion. Third job was actually a consulting job, and while we interviewed some, we didn’t actually hire any entry level college grads. And most perplexing of all, the past 8 years in a mid-sized IT department (100-300 people, depending on when), we haven’t hired ANY entry-level college grads that I’m aware of. The closest we’ve come is to hire some entry level help-desk types. But no junior DBAs right out of school, no trainee developers, no trainee network people, no trainee business analysts, nothing. Everyone has to come in experienced.
I figure that there’s some degree of this going on everywhere; it’s like they don’t see the positives of hiring entry-level college grads for a lot of positions, but only the downsides. I don’t know if it’s a response to a large worker pool - “why hire entry level if you can get experience?” or if it’s a bias against training people or dealing with untrained workers.
Since I was one for years I can say that you’re either working class if you’re full time (or close to full time) or underclass if you work part time. I worked around 30 hours a week (or as many hours as they could legally work me without giving me benefits) and I was able to barely live without public assistance making at or barely above minimum wage. I had part time coworkers who were either married and making a bit of spending money or on some kind of welfare (SSI generally) and couldn’t make more money without losing that welfare.
I eventually got into entry-level IT where I’d be considered lower middle class, now as an experienced IT person making more than double what I made when I started I’m comfortably middle-middle class. Since my wife also works and makes a wage similar to mine we’re living as upper middle class I suppose.
Speaking of US society, it’s not classless as it traditionally aspires to be, and everyone knows this. However class is still ambiguous in the US except at the very bottom. I take your points on the weakness of any one economic measure (a $ of income doesn’t buy the same lifestyle everywhere, though OTOH some people live a given lifestyle spending every penny they earn and more but others, albeit fewer, live the same lifestyle well below their means) of class. But I don’t think US socio-economic class can just be measured economically.
Charles Murray, not to rely on him too much for serious things, has that interesting quiz that people in the US now use to see, supposedly, if they are in ‘the elite bubble’ in the political discussion. It’s somewhat hokey and inaccurate IMO, broadens to things some would say are beyond ‘class’, but it’s generally indicative of the divide, outside the underclass, of the broad relatively upper strata still doing better and better in the US, and the lower part of the non-underclass who aren’t doing better and better. That might be the most relevant three way divide. IMO it’s silly to talk about upper class, not one in a 100 people in the US even in the infamous 1% think of themselves as ‘upper class’, and typically aren’t a lot different in tastes and outlook from a large number of upper middle class people. Somewhere toward the bottom of upper middle class is where a serious divide is arising, socially too.
Most of the giant, American factories here are joint ventures (JVs), and so aren’t really and truly American-owned. Our engineers are typically middle class, and the hourly workers are working class. In our US/Canadian plants, though, the hourly workers would very solidly be middle class, even socially. There are some rednecks, certainly, that preserve their working class attitudes, but most of the hourly workers are pretty much just like me.
I don’t either- I think it’s more about lifestyle and outlook than anything else, but how do you measure those?
But I think post-war America was kind of a historical anomaly, in that we had a very large middle class composed of factory workers and other wage-earners (as opposed to salaried people). I get the impression this isn’t the normal way- typically, you’ve had a lot of working class / peasantry without much money at all, a relatively small middle class of skilled tradesmen, merchants, shopkeepers, etc… and then the “rich” who basically control stuff in one way or another.
Maybe the pendulum is swinging back toward the historical norm in the US?
Eventually you could have something like that depending how hereditary the roles become. But as of now IMO ‘the rich’ v ‘the upper middle class’ is a political construct. ‘The rich’ are just people who are a target from whom to raise more tax money, or alternatively investors/creators of wealth to unleash with less tax and regulation, etc, depending on your politics. But IME there’s no real social class line between rich and upper middle class people in the US as a rule, as of now.
There isn’t a shining bright dividing line between upper middle class and middle/working class people below that either, but a fairly narrow zone of transition, and once you’re past it you know it. The way people talk, the entertainment and sports they watch, in education it would more of a line between name brand college or not, rather than anyone completing college, etc. Again I think the Charles Murray ‘are you in the bubble’ quiz captures it to a meaningful degree, with limits, see link.
Then there’s an underclass. Those are the three current American social classes for whose existence you can make a real argument, just IMHO: rich/upper middle, middle/working below upper, and under. Other than that I think one is just dividing people conveniently by easy measures like income, and maybe it’s useful for some purposes, but doesn’t represent really distinct social classes.
one can argue that almost everyone whose income comes primarily from wages (and that means most people worldwide) is part of the working class.
However, if wage levels are high enough, then several may be members of the middle class. That’s probably where the shift to post-industrialization comes in. Meanwhile, the middle class is growing worldwide, especially in BRICS and emerging markets:
The catch is that the cost of moving towards post-industrialization requires increasing amounts of energy and material resources (as more prosperity means more desire for all sorts of consumer goods, etc.), and the biosphere does not allow for that:
The face of the working class seems to be a lot different than it was 30 or 40 years ago. I grew up in a Rust Belt city, and at least in the 1970s and 1980s, working class culture generally meant lower middle class Catholic/European-American culture - workingman’s bars, volunteer fire departments, cottages, big American barge-like cars, garage for screens in the summer, above-ground pools, and large tool collections. Today, even in the Northeast, workimg-class culture seems more like rural Southern culture - pickup trucks, country music, hunting/fishing, and powersports. Carhartt is giving way to camo.
I definitely agree on that, my perception and experience. Southern working class culture has become more nationalized, Northern Catholic/ethnic working class culture I knew as a kid kind of faded away. A lot of my extended family was still ‘ethnic’ Brooklyn/Queens Irish working class. That doesn’t really exist now, and among their arch rivals (kidding, sort of) NY Italian working class (the ‘NY accent’ as popularized is their accent) it’s not as distinct anymore either. And in pop culture ‘white working class’ is either Southerners or other people acting like they’re Southerners, at least compared to what I knew.
Will for hourly retail workers, they could fall into the working class depending on their hourly wage. Some retailers do pay well, even for the hourly workers. Some pay like shit. Take Walmart for example.