The national conversation about coronavirus highlights existing conversations about enduring class inequities in the United States. Elite colleges and universities, in line with the CDC’s preventive measures for institutions of higher education, have opted to move instruction online and reduce the numbers of students in their residential buildings. The decision has placed a tremendous burden […]
Class in The News
Text, Lies and Videotape
It might be 2017, but it sure feels like 1984 to me. When terms like post-truth and fake news are used to explain what we used to call lies, we must be in Orwellian times. Just as in George Orwell’s novel 1984, political-speak is becoming doublespeak, language used to deceive usually through concealment or misrepresentation of truth.[i] […]
Destroying Labor Law in the “Sharing Economy”
Many a magazine, including the usually liberal New Yorker, has gone ga-ga about Taskrabbit, AirBnB, Elance, and other new companies that in one fell swoop make a mockery of fair labor practices, regulated consumer products, minimum wage, and taxes. In a rather lengthy article in which a New Yorker writer gushed about her Taskrabbit experiences, […]
Wealthy Kids Pulling Away: Accelerating Privilege, Compounding Disadvantage
How does the system of class advantage reproduce itself, generation after generation? Let me count the ways. I have an article in the latest issue of American Prospect called “The New Politics of Inherited Advantage.” I summarize the mountain of growing research demonstrating how affluent families engage in what sociologists call the “intergenerational transmission of […]
A Forty Hour Week From the Other Side
As this election nears, I find myself passionate about a local issue: San Jose, following the stronger leads of San Francisco, Seattle, and Albuquerque, is proposing to raise the minimum wage from $8 to $10 per hour. I will be precinct walking on Saturday to help make this happen. This raise is more important than […]
Who Counts as Poor (and who gets to talk about it)
I had a bizarre and frustrating experience recently talking to an agent at a writing conference. My main interest was to pitch a novel, but when she said she wasn’t looking for fiction, I threw out a few nonfiction ideas, among them a book on what people don’t know about poverty. “What qualifies you to […]
Wall Street occupation for the 99%
The first thing I felt when I arrived at Liberty Park in New York City this past Saturday was the energy. It brought me back to the late ‘60s when I was a graduate student in Wisconsin. Now, in what might become the American Autumn, hundreds of men and women, mostly in their 20s and […]
CEOs Rewarded For Dodging Taxes
As the Super Congress eyes trillions in budget cuts that will undermine the quality of life for most Americans, here’s a stunning fact to contemplate: Twenty-five hugely profitable U.S. companies paid their CEOs more last year than they paid Uncle Sam in taxes. In other words, the more CEOs dodge their civic responsibilities, the more […]
Class, Race & the Attacks on Public Employees
The Wisconsin uprising has become as loud a wake-up call as there has ever been that working America is under attack. Attempts by Governor Scott Walker and the Republican majority to steal away the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers – as a false premise for the state’s budgetary hardships – has triggered a […]
Who Gets Plowed in New York?
After the first huge snow storm on December 26, my family was asking two questions: a) where are the damn snowplows in our Brooklyn neighborhood?; and b) why is Manhattan clear? Smells like a class issue here. I was born and raised in this neighborhood, which saw white flight in the 70s, the crack epidemic […]
