Sweating Out a Definition of Working Class

In seeking to define the term working class at a reader’s request, I seem to have ruffled a few feathers.

One complaint comes from a physician, one from a college professor, one from a retired journalist and one from a woman I assume is a teacher. Yet another is from a man who does not describe his status, but seems to have the non-working class at heart.

You may remember my conclusion--that everyone is in the working class but those who live off their interest.

Jerry Engle, of Engle Enterprises, notes that in pinpointing people who “live off their interest” as not being of the working class I left out a few other categories of people who do not appear to work.

“In addition to interest,” he says, “there are people who live off dividends, and also from rental income property which they worked hard to accumulate. What about those who do not work and live off Social Security? The unemployed, the unemployable and those living off welfare--none of these work, but obviously they are of the working class.”

Engle also defends the millionaire executive, of whom I said, “He fancies that he works and maybe he does.” “Fancies indeed!” exclaims Engle. “Most of them work their butt off for 10, 12, 14 hours a day, longer than the bus driver who puts in an eight-hour shift.”

Robert J. McNeil, the physician, protests that despite the government’s denials, inflation has made everything more expensive, and that a person who has investments really has to “WORK” to make them profitable.

Dr. McNeil suggests that “the only persons who are not in the ‘working class’ are those very talented and fortunate people who have the ability, after a leisurely lunch, to punch a few keys in the computer which prints out a fine daily column.”

Barbara G. Rader of Spring Valley, who I assume is a teacher, complains about my classification of teachers as “quasi-professional.” She points out that they must complete at least five years of college and obtain a professional credential to qualify for a job. “If ‘true professionals’ are physicians, lawyers and doctors of philosophy, why aren’t teachers?”

I am happy to reclassify teachers as true professionals. The word quasi was the brainchild of a pseudo sociologist. I think today’s journalists may also be professionals, since most of them have degrees. When I got in all you had to know was how to type.

Dr. James Mack of the department of English and comparative literature at San Diego State says teachers receive scant respect, but “of all the professions teaching is the one that most clearly should be a true profession, not because it is or is not work, but because the nature of its exertions is to profess, to state beliefs, and to teach by personal intellectual example.”

Gladwin Hill, retired western correspondent for the New York Times, notes that “working class” is Marxist “jive-talk” for the true producers off whose sweat the non-workers live.

He says history has discredited this notion. “The largest part of our gross national product now comes not from manufacturing, the nexus of Marx’s ‘working class,’ but from service industries--everything from college professors and bank tellers to newspaper reporters--the white-collar bourgeoisie and intelligentsia that Marx derogated.”

Hill also argues that our economy couldn’t function without the “steady infusion of capital from the savings of people who, in your words, ‘live off interest.’ They choose to rent their money out, forgoing pleasures that money would otherwise bring. It’s just as legitimate as renting out a house.”

The people I had in mind rent their money out, but the yield is large enough that they don’t have to forgo the pleasures money brings. They never have to touch the principal.

As for Phillis I. Lewis’s original question--”What the hell does it (working class) mean?” I must revise my answer.

Everybody is in the working class but newspaper columnists. All we have to do is punch a few keys and tell our computers to write a column.

I am reminded of a photographer who was asked whether his camera took good pictures. “Yes,” he said, “all I have to do is put it on a pair of roller skates and send it out and it takes great pictures.”