What does “working class” even mean?

Since Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, pundits and politicians have been trying to figure out why the country’s working class is moving to the right. 

“Donald Trump Won as the Champion of Working-Class Discontent,” read one headline. “How Donald Trump Gave Democrats the Working-Class Blues,” read another. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders gave Democrats a scathing post-mortem: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he wrote in a statement after the election. 

But what often gets lost in these conversations is this simple fact: There isn’t a single neat definition of “working class.” Some analysts focus on someone’s education as an indicator of class; others look at people’s incomes or jobs. A more traditional definition of “working class” encompasses both blue- and white-collar workers alike. (Many pundits also had a tendency to erroneously conflate the working class with the white working class when explaining Trump’s rise in 2016.)

The problem with having such a vague — or in some cases broad — definition of “working class” is that it becomes politically meaningless to talk about the working-class vote.

According to a recent Pew survey, the majority of Americans consider themselves working class. That also includes many people making higher incomes: Nearly 60 percent of Republicans in the upper-income tier (based on the size of household and cost of living) identify themselves as working class. For Democrats in the same income bracket, 33 percent identified that way.

At a glance, that poll might show that people are out of touch with reality: How could people at the top of the income ladder consider themselves working class? But the deeper story is much more complicated.

Three imperfect measures of class

So what do analysts mean when they say “working class”? Usually, they are implicitly referring to one of three informal metrics: a person’s job, their household income, or their level of education. But each of these measures tells only part of the story.

Take someone’s occupation, for example. A common image that politicians conjure up when talking about the working class is that of a unionized manufacturing worker. One recent example of this is how President Joe Biden tried to win over working-class voters by talking a lot about bringing back manufacturing jobs or even joining autoworkers on strike — becoming the first president to walk a picket line.

But that image of the working class no longer captures what many people are referring to. For starters, union jobs don’t make up that large of a share of the overall labor market. In 2023, 10 percent of workers — 14.4 million people — were members of a union, down from 20 percent in 1983. And, because of the bargaining power that unions provide to their members, some union jobs can be well-paid. According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, union members earn higher salaries than their nonunion peers, and union households’ wealth is, on average, 1.7 times higher than nonunion households.

Working-class workers aren’t tied to any particular industry. As the United States lost manufacturing jobs, it also saw a rise in service industry jobs that had lower unionization rates, lower pay, and fewer benefits, which is especially true in women-dominated fields. These jobs are often considered “working class,” despite not being union gigs, because of the lack of economic security that comes along with them.

Another often-used measure of class is income or wealth. We tend to think of people in various income brackets as upper, middle, or lower class, and “working class” is often used as a euphemism for the latter because there’s a stigma attached to the term “lower class.” But these aren’t interchangeable terms. 

On the surface, income might seem like the easiest way to understand class divides, but there isn’t a rigid income bracket for any given class because someone’s class varies depending on their household’s size or their region’s cost of living. Typically, someone living from paycheck to paycheck is viewed as working class, while someone who can save a bit of money and live in relative stability is viewed as more middle class.

But someone’s current income or wealth doesn’t necessarily determine their class. “[Class] is related to economic security and opportunity,” said Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. People who have college degrees, for example, have more job stability and are more likely to make more money in the future, even if their current income is relatively low. And if two people have the same job and income but vastly different backgrounds, they probably aren’t in the same class as one another. If one of them came from a well-to-do family and the other grew up in poverty, for example, the former would likely have a bigger safety net than the latter in the event of a layoff.

That leads to another way we define working class: whether or not someone has a college degree. People without college degrees, after all, tend to fill the kinds of jobs associated with the working class: jobs in manufacturing or in the service industry. 

This is often the implied definition in political conversations because it’s much easier to measure in polls. When analysts write about Trump’s gains among the working class, they’re often referring to his support among non-college-educated voters. (About 62 percent of Americans don’t have a college degree.) 

But the problem with this definition is that education doesn’t always determine someone’s economic status. Adjunct professors are a good example. Though adjunct professors are typically seen as part of the elite instead of working class, they are often paid very little. According to one study, nearly a quarter of adjunct professors earn less than $25,000 a year. 

Workers in universities have been unionizing precisely because there has been a growing discontent with how they are treated in the workplace, with low wages and minimal benefits or job security. But people with graduate degrees, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat, aren’t generally viewed as part of the “working-class vote,” even if they experience the precarious economic conditions of working-class life.

What “working class” actually means

One Marxist scholar, Michael Zweig, emeritus professor of economics and founding director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, puts it this way: “To be in the working class is to be in a place of relative vulnerability — on the job, in the market, in politics and culture. On the job, most workers have little control over the pace and content of their work. They show up, a supervisor shows them the job, and they do it. The job may be skilled or unskilled, white collar or blue collar, in any one of thousands of occupations.”

By Zweig’s measure, the majority of the American labor force — a solid 62 percent, he says — is part of the working class. 

But as much as we try to define class in rigid terms, the reality is that it’s more complicated than a person’s job, education level, or income. Ultimately, understanding a person’s class requires also taking into account how they feel about their place in society.

“How we form our ideas of who we are in the world in terms of our economic experience, it has to do with our sense of who we are in the political world and our connections to government,” said Cramer.  “So for example, if we feel like even in our jobs, if we have very little control and very little that’s telling us we are respected, that translates to how we see ourselves in relationship to other institutions of power like governments.”

There’s also a cultural element to the working class, which is informed by people’s family histories. Sherry Linkon, an English and American studies professor at Georgetown University, gave the example of somebody who might recall how their grandfather lost their job at the steel mill, how their father went on to work at an auto plant that would later shut down, and how they’re now not sure they can count on anybody to provide them with a secure future.

“I think a lot of the economic anxiety that we’ve seen this year, for example, that led a lot of people to say, ‘I trust Trump more than I trust Harris to fix the economy,’ is about the memory of previous rounds of bad times and about the long-term history of what certain policies and practices have done,” said Linkon. “So I think part of the insecurity that people feel is not necessarily — as so many pundits have said in the last month or so — just about the price of eggs,” Linkon added.

“Working class” is a useful but overused term

As the gig economy in the US continues to grow, with more and more people working as contractors or freelancers rather than full-time employees with benefits, people who work in entirely different fields or have entirely different educational backgrounds are starting to feel similar conditions: a lack of job security, worker benefits, or much control within the workplace.

“Part of why I still like the term [working class] is I think we need to be reminded of this sense of collectivity and a sense of people who identify as workers and see themselves as kind of united in some way, like against managers or owners,” said Jennifer Silva, a public affairs professor at Indiana University who studies the working class. In this context, the term is useful when it comes to organizing workers around getting things like better working conditions, regardless of what their politics are at an individual level. 

Still, “working class” is often overused, especially in political contexts. Given how broad and muddled the definition of the term can be and just how many Americans identify as working class, talking about the so-called working-class vote is probably not all that illuminating.

Focusing on the details of voters’ backgrounds, on the other hand, can be more helpful in breaking down the Democrats’ and Republicans’ weaknesses in their coalitions. The rightward shift among voters without a college degree over the last couple of decades, for example, is significant. Looking at how Trump appears to have made gains among voters with lower incomes ought to worry Democrats, who have historically won voters in lower-income brackets. But those data points are specifically about voters without college degrees and low-income voters, not a broader story about the working class.

That’s not to say that there is no such thing as the working class or that a person’s class doesn’t impact the way they vote. Class politics is still a potent force that helps sway elections. Law-and-order campaigns, for example, focus their ire on crimes associated with people in poverty rather than white-collar criminals. And anti-establishment campaigns capitalize on people’s resentment of the elites.

But when the definition of working class is so loose and means different things in various contexts, it doesn’t help us get a better understanding of how class is shaping partisan politics in America. As the Pew poll suggests, if the majority of Republicans earning a high income identify as working class, their voting patterns don’t tell us anything about how poor or lower-income people feel.

That’s why when analyzing election data, it’s best to stick to terms that better identify someone’s socioeconomic status: How did poor people vote compared to rich people? How did lower-middle-class people vote compared to upper-middle-class people? Why is the partisan gap between college and non-college voters widening? 

All of those answers would explain the role of class in American politics much better than a term whose definition no one can seem to agree on.