I have a white-collar professional job but I go to work every day. Where did the term “working class” come from?
It’s a leftover from pre-industrial days, when there was the ruling class (the wealthy) and the working class who lived paycheck to paycheck. There was no middle class.
It meant that all the other classes were non-working.
Sure there were middle class people, but they were only in the low single digit percentage of the population. Historically “middle class” has meant the servant-keeping class, probably roughly equivalent to a mix between upper-middle and lower-upper class today (even if a lot of those people today do not actually have full-time or nearly-full-time servants, their being largely supplanted by appliances and service personnel.)
In societies where owning land meant everything, the working class were the people with no assets other than their labor. They literally lived from payday to payday, and had nothing permanent to show for their labor.
The middle class, such as it was, were people like shopkeepers, and tradesmen whose “asset” was that they were skilled members of a guild.
Also when mechanization was a lot less than today, work meant “work” - swinging a sledgehammer or shoveling stuff, not sitting at a desk or writing stuff and shuffling papers.
there used to be mainly blue collar and white collar jobs. Now some people talk about pink collar jobs which are mostly women - nursing, teaching, child care, etc.
Whether or not a white-collar person works depends how the word “work” is defined. When you define work as something physically demanding, something that causes calluses, blisters, aches, and pains, then office work isn’t “real work”.
Of course, physicists would also describe it as a very small amount of work. W = F x D.
There’s a bit of “what you do isn’t real work” to “working class”. There’s also an underlying feeling that some people know how things work (can make repairs, etc.) and some people don’t.
Old joke: how many WASPs does it take to change a lightbulb. Two. One to mix the martinis and one to call the electrician.
I’m pretty sure the WASP thing is completely outdated, but I don’t know what the current designation would be.
Or another way to think of it:
Aristocracy: wealth based on land.
Middle Class: wealth based on capital.
Working Class: wealth based on labor.
This is why Marx called the capitalist ruling class “the bourgeoisie” or middle class. They weren’t aristocrats in the feudal sense, they were industrialists and bankers. Of course there is the distinction between the haute bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie. A shopkeeper or lawyer is petit bourgeoisie, but still middle class because they aren’t proletarian.
The way it is generally used today, working class generally means people who are employed for wages, usually by doing physical labor of some kind. This includes blue-collar and pink-collar jobs, tradesmen, and many service jobs. But the term can have a variety of meanings.
Etymonline says "Working class is from 1789 as a noun, 1839 as an adjective. "
I thought that “working class” meant “wage earner” to include white collar as well as blue collar. No?
No. Working class is generally trades or manual labor
Also, although not entirely so, white-collar jobs tend to be salaried rather than wage earners.
The term dates back to the mid-eighteenth century, when it referred to people who were employed for wages, who were mostly people engaged in unskilled or semi-skilled manual or industrial work. Other people who, in our terms, also survived by their own labour - like, say, schoolmasters or clergymen - were seen at the time as being in a different situation. They held an office, which carried with it a right to emoluments and also a duty to perform certain services, but the office they possessed was seen as an asset, so they were considered to live off the income from their possessions, rather than simply by selling their labour or the product of their labour for whatever it would fetch.
A subtle distinction, you may think. But, socially, a very important one at the time, and for a considerable time afterwards.
So a “gentleman” could be a schoolmaster or a clergyman (or an army officer or an MP) but not a shopkeeper or in any other line of business, that would be “trade.” What about professionals working for themselves, like solicitors or doctors, would that have been suitable for a gentleman, or was that down a rung on the social ladder?
It’s a step down. If you consider Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, the protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, is a “gentleman’s daughter” because her father has a small estate and lives on the income from the estate. But her uncles are, respectively, an attorney in a country town and a merchant in London. These connections are considered (by some characters in the novel) to detract from her status as a gentleman’s daughter - even though her merchant uncle is considerably wealthier than her gentleman father.
Apropos, why is it that in the UK we reserve the term “middle class” for professional and managerial cadres, while in the US it applies much more broadly to artisans who in the UK would be categorised as skilled working class, or C2s?
Because 70% of Americans define themselves as middle-class. It’s a cultural thing - most Americans won’t admit to being poor (at worse, they’re temporarily short of cash), and on the other hand, they take pride in being “ordinary folk”, and not hoity-toity rich fucks.
I understand it’s basically the opposite in the UK. I’ve often heard Brits use “middle-class” as an insult.
I always thought it meant “working poor”, as a way to distinguish people with “low-paying” jobs from those with no jobs. Members of the working class can proudly say they “work for a living” but I’ve heard at least one negative depiction too.
Pink collar? A new term that probably didn’t need creation. While the term “working class” supposedly includes blue collar jobs, some blue collar jobs pay well or very well, so I’m not entirely sure if it fits.