OTOH, there are plenty of office workers, lawyers and even doctors with student loans out the wazoo and/or other obligations that leave them paycheque to paycheque. Especially in the US where healthcare keeps you tied to an employer.
The original comment was made that nonphysical labour work wasn’t real work. That kind of distinction isn’t helpful and is actually harmful. It’s where people get the idea that office workers don’t need to unionize. It’s also demeaning when directed at women who have heard time and time again that what we do, regardless of what it is, isn’t real work.
To be fair, even in the US, cardiac surgeons aren’t even in the same class as most other physicians, with over 3x the average compensation of other specialties.
Well, but sedentary work can be physically dangerous, too, just in a different way.
I recognize that the people who do manual labor often have hard work to do. I’ve never disrespected that at all, even though I’m sure plenty of people believe that because I have a phd I automatically look down on other forms of labor and that’s been weaponized to great effect. It is in fact a major factor in the ongoing culture wars, which sees academics as Marxist doctrinaires out to trick their children into becoming Che. It’s also part of the reason why there is such a crisis in academia, this idea that schools shouldn’t be places of learning and ideas, but that they should be ONLY job training, not anything that helps people to think critically about the world around them. Hell, there was someone on the American Historical Society message board not last week who was expressing this very point, that most people don’t NEED to learn history anyway, because you’re not going to use it directly in your job! If people are talking like that on the message board of the major organization for historians, we’re well and truly fucked.
/rant
Again, I’m not and never have been a person who believes that having a degree or not having a degree confers any sort of moral superiority or inferiority. I’ve never sneered at anyone doing manual labor. I’ve never assumed that what they do is not real work or that it isn’t hard or physically demanding, because of course it is.
I do take exception that when I’ve worked so hard that I’ve been told that’s not real work. It is real work.
In your case, my definition still holds since their income stream is not, in fact, reliant upon their own labors but on investments and other non-labor related income.
That’s a more proper and academic way of putting it. And it is legitimate to point out that those who have much higher income are rather more likely to have enough labor-independent investment streams to no longer be dependent on their ability to work. Not a given, of course, but very statistically significant.
Well, but see our petty concerns over equal rights for women and people of color are mere distractions from the REAL struggle, for white working class men! /s
I agree, but that expanded in the 1960s to include a larger percentage of working class people (who had pensions, access to credit, an ability to save for their children’s college and for their own retirement on top of a pension and social security, etc). In recent years, those gains have been eroded by the 401K system (and that’s across the board in terms of different kinds of labor), by wage stagnation, and by the constant attack on unions who helped make this happen, including from the inside, by those in unions who were pissed about having people of color and women represented in their ranks. Not only is industrial labor no longer the path to security it once was, so is some white collar work too (I’ll point to my own field once again, because that’s the example I know, academia). So there is still a larger percentage of white collar workers who can count on enough excess income to sock things away for their retirement, but there are also more things eating into that (rising cost of college for their kids, 401ks being hit by the instability in the stock market, the new expectation that you no longer work your entire career at one place, rising cost of living, health care…).
People across the board have to come together to address all manner of problems together and not assume that fixing one will fix them all.
A heartfelt hug for all the people who missed out on extra days off, who have to work Xmas Eve, Xmas, or the day after this year. Your employers may not appreciate you as much as they should, but we do.
I’ve made it a point to have my groceries for the week, so I don’t add to the burden.
Hear, hear! I did have to dare the chaos for one last thing for Christmas dinner and I made a point to thank the grocery clerk for dealing with crazy shoppers (like me) today.
Gender and race blind class reductionism is a severe error, both ethically and tactically.
Class and gender blind race reductionism is a severe error, both ethically and tactically.
Race and class blind gender reductionism is a severe error, both ethically and tactically.
We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others
Even in the world of jobs where you use your body to earn your living there are class divides-look at the way football players and ballet dancers are viewed. Football players are seen as being worthy of million dollar salaries for playing a game, albeit one where there is substantial risk of serious injury and where your ability to continue in your job is limited, age wise. Still, most football players actually perform their job for a few hours each year (average time the ball is in play in an NFL game is 11 minutes) and they are feted and idolized.
Ballet dancers, despite working in a far more difficult and physically demanding job, are seen as effete and silly people poncing about on stage. Watch any video of football players trying to keep up in a ballet class and see who can do more. Football players earned, on average, over 2 million dollars per year. Dancers earned 60,000.
And both are jobs the VAST majority of people in those fields will never have. Yet, both fields deserve respect and a job that pays a living wage and protecting their physical health for our enjoyment of their work.
And the racial politics in both are both warping and indicative. Ballet is overwhelmingly white, and is very hard for a person of color to break into the field. For football, while the field is seemingly overwhelmingly black, it’s still far more about black men putting their physical well-being on the line for the edification of a majority white audience.
Also, it strikes me that there is an entire category there, which we’re not really categorizing when we talk about white vs. blue collar, and that’s athletic jobs and artistic jobs.
[ETA] I think both have within the fields equivalents of blue collar and white collar work. In sports, you have two entire sets of jobs that don’t have anything to do with actually playing the game, and same really with creative fields. But they all are there in some way of support or control of the creative jobs.
There’s a lot of hidden baggage behind what this racist bus lady is saying. No working class bus system? Is she implying that for whatever reason college students don’t need to get places on time? Her racism seems to be rooted in animosity towards college students. Having gone to college in an area with very poor town and gown relations, this doesn’t surprise me at all. It disappoints me, but doesn’t surprise me.
