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Comment by fnord77 | Hacker News Reader

> Richard Sharpe: "The strikers were often working-class men and women who had achieved suburban middle class lives as air traffic controllers without having gone to college. Many were veterans of the US armed forces where they had learned their skills; their union had backed Reagan in his election campaign. Nevertheless, Reagan refused to back down. Several strikers were jailed; the union was fined and eventually made bankrupt. Only about 800 got their jobs back when Clinton lifted the ban on rehiring those who went on strike. Many of the strikers were forced into poverty as a result of being blacklisted for [U.S. government] employment."

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To be honest, they were asking for 35% raise, PLUS reduced working hours PLUS benefits. They were offered somewhat smaller raise which they refused, while participating in an illegal strike. From my experience, in most negotiations, you rarely get everything that you want, but you can get a good deal if you are willing to compromise. When you play hard, it can backfire.

> illegal strike

I genuinely can't tell if you're being sarcastic with your comment.

Some industries crucial to public safety have legal restrictions on the right to strike.

I imagine air traffic controllers spontaneously deciding to strike _here and now_ without prior warning would be quite dangerous.

But if an air traffic controller strike is announced, say, 24 hours beforehand, it can't be reasonably argued to be a public safety hazard.

Counterpoint: My wife has a medication that has short shelf life and isn't widely distributed so it needs to be flown via air.

Airplanes stop flying my wife no longer gets her medicine, she now dead.

That is true, but you cannot force someone to fly it regularly to her. The miracles of modern medicine allow people to live when this would not have happened 100 years ago, but cannot guarantee that. Take it as a gift, not as a given.

It sounds like quite an important job then. Maybe you should join in and pressure the bosses to give them the raise they need

Some great logic there.

Put it on the one party to give into anything the other wants, because they're said to be important.

Does it work the other way in your mind too? If we all agreed that air traffic or say, Amazon, were a critical resource and has to run efficiently and for the country's benefit, not individuals, that means that they get to put whatever conditions on labor they like?

This is the worst kind of approach to governing ever, if it can even be called that.

I can appreciate the irony of you posting this after seeing the post I was replying to. I hope you can appreciate it too!

The pilot unions are rent seeking from the man you are replying to. Why do you think he should support that?

EDIT: Just to clarify my point, my interest wasn't only in my wife, rather an anecdote about how these things can be vital to people's lives.

That being said, yes I agree we should be grateful for what we have and me an my wife regularly marvel that if she'd been born just 40 years earlier she would've been dead by the time she was 9.

Curiously, one of the things that gives pilots and airline workers such powerful bargaining leverage, is exploiting safety regulations. If an airline is playing hardball with the union, the pilots go out of their way to create flight delays based on safety double-checks or "concerns" (a form of "work-to-rule" [0] strike), which the FAA gives them wide latitude to do.

Unfortunately, this works against those who work directly for those government agencies. At the end of the day, bargaining power comes from holding value hostage; and we react differently to holding on-time flight arrivals hostage, versus holding public safety hostage. It's a wicked problem for anyone who works in service of the latter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule

That was part of the deal when they willingly signed up for a well paying job.

Economic pressures didn't inform any of that, you think?

Most people (presumably you as well) have undergone at least one experience where they were forced to sign paperwork that they would not normally agree to, except under those specific circumstances (kid/family/rent/gadget etc.) Signing a piece of paper under such duress does not sign one's rights away exclusively.

It was an illegal strike so I am pretty sure he is not being sarcastic. They had "civil service" clauses in their contract that made them "Federal employees" and Federal employees could not strike (not sure if that is true today).

It absolutely is. The courts have their take on it, as expected, but the spirit of a strike remains consistent despite laws against it. A strike, by definition, cannot be illegal. That includes armed forces and every federal employee.

Whether existing legislation recognizes certain types of strikes as legal or not is irrelevant. Civil disobedience has deep roots in American history. This is an analogue to that, given that their rights to strike have been struck. (pun intended)

Could you explain how a strike cannot, by definition, be illegal?

Civil disobedience can be illegal.

All civil disobedience is illegal, yet you seem to adjust for some of it vs. others.

Extend that to all employment. Nothing illegal about not being forced to work. A contract is not a prison sentence, or I should hope so.

I will grant you certain conditions apply to armed forces that wouldn't otherwise apply to civilian employment, as that does actively put other's lives at risk. This isn't a conversation about desertion of duty, merely protesting or quitting. Even then there are laws that protect conscientious objectors .

>A strike, by definition, cannot be illegal. That includes armed forces and every federal employee.

Wrong. A strike, by definition, as actually defined in federal law, can indeed be illegal. That includes armed forces and every federal employee.

A strike, by definition, cannot be illegal. It's an established form of protest which may or may not lead to firing. Despite the results of the strike, the protest itself is not illegal, nor is walking out of a job. At least from both a moral standpoint.

*At least from a moral standpoint.

>A strike, by definition, cannot be illegal.

Wrong. A strike, by definition, as actually defined in federal law, can indeed be illegal.

>It's an established form of protest which may or may not lead to firing.

Wrong. It's an established form of protest which may or may not result in criminal fillings because it is illegal federally for federal employees.

>Despite the results of the strike, the protest itself is not illegal, nor is walking out of a job.

Despite the results of the strike, the protest itself is illegal, as is walking out of federal jobs (in a strike).

You literally can't be any more wrong.

Whether existing legislating recognizes a certain type of strike as legal is very relevant to whether or not it is an illegal strike.

I would argue that from a moral stand point, every strike is legal.

It's not clear from your comment, but I'm assuming you deem the term "illegal strike" oxymoronic. It isn't.

De facto or de jure

My wife is a member of a non-striking teachers union..

I've always wondered what their ultimate collective bargaining power is if the single thing that grants them their leverage (to strike) is off the table from day 1. Shes never been able to answer.

Its not shocking that they rarely even settle for a fraction of what is asked and are just "thankful" when the government and politicians are so kind to budget them raises.

Best part....Due to the policies put in place during the 08 crash, salaries and raises were severely restricted. The government last year decided to "make up for it" by changing the base salaries for NEW teachers. So now a brand new teacher just out of college makes about as much (within a couple thousand) as much as my wife, who has a masters and has been teaching for about a decade.

Thats the issue with people that are passionate about something. It happens in IT as well. Many will work for peanuts because they like it and "experience". And my companies have been put off that I describe myself as a mercenary. I work for money and have absolutely no emotional ties to team, company or organization.

Depending on how it's structured, she may be able to bounce to a different city/county/state (depending on logistics) for a year or two. Much like in industry, how leaving (and potentially coming back) can get you far more of a raise than staying.

> I've always wondered what their ultimate collective bargaining power

To be fair, unions don't exist solely as threats to employers. The ability to bargain collectively still results in better/fairer outcomes in most situations. Most of the time, employers want to compensate their employees in good faith. Most of the time, employees want to work for a team who get rewarded more or less fairly and not compete in a cutthroat arena where everyone has to bargain for themselves.

But yes: non-striking unions are absolutely not going to have the kind of corrective power in the face of genuine imbalance that real organized labor does.

"I've always wondered what their ultimate collective bargaining power is if the single thing that grants them their leverage (to strike) is off the table from day 1."

While they can't strike, they can do the absolute bare minimum, which is what happens in a lot of professions (police, fire) where they can't legally strike. I'm not saying it's as effective as an actual strike, obviously, but with how much extra time teacher give beyond normal working hours, cutting it down to just working during business hours makes a school noticeably worse.

I don't know the particulars of your wife's union contract but in my union (college faculty union) we can't go on strike while under contract. Our contracts are up for renewal every two years and when the old contract expires we can go on strike and we have in the past.

> non-striking teachers union..

These sorts of unions happen in health, nursing in particular. And then the members end up overworked, underpaid and exploited.

My profession has a strident and aggressive union which I have not always agreed with, but they have improved pay and conditions (and have organised strikes).

Air traffic controllers, like the army and certain other “essential to public safety” vocations, are not allowed to strike.

No one is allowed to strike. LOL

It's war, where all is fair.

I suppose in that sense, the question is whether the government is taking sides.

> Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act states in part, “Employees shall have the right. . . to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” Strikes are included among the concerted activities protected for employees by this section.

From https://www.nlrb.gov/strikes

Does that supercede this?

> An individual may not accept or hold a position in the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia if he— > (3)participates in a strike, or asserts the right to strike, against the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia; or

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7311

I'm guessing no since the firing wasn't challenged.

Federal employees are not regulated by the NLRA but rather the FSLMRS. The FSLMRS explicitly denies the right of all federal employees from striking or even discussing a strike.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Service_Labor-Manageme...

You can have a contract that makes striking illegal and that you have to do arbitration instead when disputes arise.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. A good arbitration setup can be less combative and feel fairer than a setup where the threat of strike is the motivating factor.

A wildcat strike is what it is called when workers strike when their contract says they can't.

Air Traffic Control. It’s a matter of public safety. Strikes are not allowed.

Do you really expect us to believe that you don't know the concept of an "illegal strike"?

Then again, your profile picture is a soyboy face, and you're constantly spewing braindead leftist dribble, so, no one should be surprised by your glaring ignorance and naivety.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

HN does not value personal attacks like the kind you made.

Please consider that you could have elevated the conversation by actually addressing the idea of an illegal strike (what differentiates a legal one from an illegal one, for example).

We've banned this account. Creating accounts to break HN's guidelines will eventually get your main account banned, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> illegal strike

It's easy to win when you can change the rules of a game as you go.

Were the rules changed mid-strike?

I think the default rule to employment is that if you refuse to work, your employer can fire you and hire someone else to do the job, especially in a critical industry like air-traffic control

I'm sure many good justifications can be made for this, or for (e.g.) the Taft-Hartley act, but at the end of the day, there is no arguing that the last 75 years of US federal policy decisively kneecapped unions, and we are by no means better off for that.

In the past, the US gave unions a bunch of special "rights" that violate the rights of others.

It would take a decisive kneecapping to go back to parity.

Unions (and corporations, for that matter!) should have the same rights as any other group of people. No more, no less.

Labor organizers don't care about that, of course. Their "job" is to increase the power of "labor," by hook or by crook.

This. If union's had less rights than any other organization then you might argue they have been "kneecapped" but that's just not the case.

Let companies fire workers for unionizing, let them refuse to negotiate with unions, and in turn let unions do what they are intended to do, serve as a way for groups of workers to jointly apply pressure for their interests alone.

"Let companies fire workers for unionizing, let them refuse to negotiate with unions" This renders unions pretty much useless. There is already an imbalance of power in favor of the companies.

Most companies can't fire everyone all at once. If you didn't need your employees, you wouldn't have them in the first place. When both sides have something to lose, then finding acceptable compromise is in everyone's interest.

That's because unions don't represent workers, they represent their members. If their members are easily replaceable, they don't have much leverage.

If you can't fire a union worker for not working (on strike), then you take away all the leverage of not just the company, but of the unemployed who may wish to work and is not represented.

I think people white knight for unions all the time but don't look at all the people who couldn't get represented at all. They saw jobs go to people based on connections rather than skills. They applied and simply couldn't get hired -- and were still expected to support the unions politically.

So you say busting unions leads to higher employment? Did that actually ever happen? We have over century of experience, why not learn from it.

I'm very sceptical that changing "not everyone is represented" into "nobody is represented" is an improvement.

If you can fire workers on strike you remove the only leverage of a union. While on strike you don't get money from your employee and the employee won't make money from his company. So both sides benefit if a strike ends. If you can just replace workers on strike the unions have no power especially today when more workers than work exist.

BTW without unions you start a race to the bottom for the wages. But for everyone, even the employees, most of them just ignore that fact.

"BTW without unions you start a race to the bottom for the wages"

Is this why software engineers make so little on the US?

For every software engineer, there are tenfold logistics, customer service, house keeping and hospitality workers. You know, the people living on food stamps because their employers are anti-union. The difference between the former and the latter isn't unions, but "market value".

My understanding is that early unions (prior to the New Deal and labor law reform) didn't have much legal protection, and instead resorted to massive strikes. Companies fought back with firings and sometimes violence. Over time labor laws were built up because having major portions of your economy at war does not lead to a stable and productive society. As we disassemble those laws, we'll probably learn why they were created.

Those laws were put in place as a sort of olive branch to unions who were holding mass general strikes where entire cities were shut down. If you get rid of any restrictions on the employers, you better believe the unions are going to go scorched earth in return. You really want that?

What rights are you referring to?

Negative rights, i.e. rights that protect you from the initiation of force by others, i.e. rights that don't create a new obligation for someone else, i.e. what freedom or liberty actually is.

I get that labor organizers don't want a free society, and frankly, I don't know how to bridge that gap to convince them otherwise. We want different things.

can you provide a specific example of what you are referring to?

I don't really understand the question.

The fundamental right is the right to not have force initiated against you. All other rights are derivative. For instance, the right to have property, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, etc.

John Locke did good thinking on this, but I suspect a lot of his ideas were already implicitly enshrined in common law (but I'm not an expert on that).

More information: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/individual_rights.html

Public and private sector unions are very different beasts from a power point of view. The employer in the public sector case is not a profit maximizing capitalist but the workers’ fellow citizens. Moreover, it’s well known in political science that concentrated interests are more likely to have their policy preferences enacted than diffuse interests and the interests of workers in their pay and conditions are much more concentrated than those of taxpayers in general government efficiency.

> The employer in the public sector case is ... the workers’ fellow citizens.

How is a private sector employer not? Are you alluding to the difference in affluence?

In the private sector case it might be some fellow citizens, though it need not be, but that’s qualitatively different from all your follow citizens democratically represented. All the theoretical arguments for unions are predicated on the relationship between labor and capital that doesn’t exist in the public sector.

This comment is basically, "How dare they ?"

"illegal strike"

- For My Friends, Anything. For My Enemies, the Law

not working is illegal.

This was a time of the biggest inflation in US modern history. The treasury rate was >15%, double what it was five years earlier, and triple of 10 years prior.

These people were probably getting 4-5% annual raises at a time when inflation was going at over 10%. The 35% raise was probably just to bring them back up to their baseline.

For reference, using the BLS CPI calculator, $10,000 in 1975 was $17,000 in 1981. That's insane. And those are the official BLS numbers, which most of us feel undersell inflation.

I'm curious, do you also have the numbers for 1980-1990, 1990-2000, 2000-2010, 2010-2020? I can't place your number in perspective.

Yeah, good question, I should have cited these numbers:

I got the treasury yields here: http://www.fedprimerate.com/10-Year-US-Treasury-Yield-Histor...

For the inflation stats, I used the BLS Inflation calculator here: https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

And this thread of comments here lets us know that shallow narratives still perpetuate/ripple many decades later, hiding the detailed truth - which we're all prone to.

For completeness:

10000 USD in Start was worth Result at End:

Start-End: Result

1920-1930: 8860

1930-1940: 8128

1940-1950: 16906

1950-1960: 12468

1960-1970: 12901

1970-1980: 20582

1980-1990: 16375

1990-2000: 13249

2000-2010: 12837

2010-2020: 11905

For contrast

1990-2020: 20248

Yeah, the period you mentioned wasn't fun. I guess the last 30 years weren't so bad.

Kind of strange how things feel to get so much more expensive while money doesn't devaluate that much.

These demands are hard to evaluate without the prior status quo. How much did they earn before, how long were the working hours?

Clever lying by omission. This is the kind of dirty tricks FOX plays. They leave of crucial information to twist the truth. By not mentioning the sky high inflation existing at the time, you give the impression that the was completely unreasonable raise.

You count on the fact that people today are used to very low inflation, and will immediately be disgusted by the demands of these workers.

This sort of manipulation, is something conservatives have perfected over many years. Also classic conservative backstabbing. Reagan got these people to support him. He even had a past as a union representative. Yet when push came to shove, he didn't have their back. No, he stabbed them in the back instead, and reduced them to poverty.

Denying them employment in the future was classic vengeful pettiness which would have made Donald Trump proud.

> Denying them employment in the future was classic vengeful pettiness which would have made Donald Trump proud.

https://www.ft.com/content/d73b9541-f91c-4423-9353-1f6606f31...

But the consolidation, even expansion, of Mr Trump’s base rests on a more concrete achievement. For the first three years of his presidency, he produced steady growth (which a number of presidents have managed) in which a disproportionate share of the gains went to low-income workers (a rarer feat). Workers in the lowest quarter of incomes saw their wages rise almost 5 per cent. This was the first sustained downward redistribution of income and wealth since the last century, a vindication for voters in the forgotten parts of the country who voted for Mr Trump in 2016. It may account for the shock of this election: the gravitation of young Latinos and black men to Mr Trump’s candidacy.

the way I understand it was they govt actually agreed to a pretty healthy pay raise before the strike (inflation was high then and salaries did not go up). PATCO thought they could get more and Reagan went nuclear on them.

this seems like a good write up (dunno the accuracy) https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2796do/what_...

Genuine question...Can you have an illegal strike without slavery?

I didn't think a strike was a legal (having to do with the law) action?

Worth noting that this mass firing is coming around for a second wave of hurt. They re-staffed most of the ATC force with military personnel who were around the same age, all at the same time. Now that block of people are hitting the ATC's mandatory retirement age (56) and last I checked they haven't had much success (arguably intentionally, but that's another story) in increasing their onboarding stream enough to compensate for the sudden loss. Current controllers are already working large (possibly unsafe) amounts of overtime and have limited ability to change locations or positions due to the shortage, which is only getting worse.

At some point, they'll either need to find a way to accept more trainees, retain employees longer, or reduce services/throughput.

EDIT: I may be out of date. Perhaps this second wave already came and went with little impact. My math says anyone hired in 1981 would be past retirement age by now. Not sure how they handled it.

where's the plucky upstart wanting to disrupt ATC with their AI trained system to automatically route airtraffic? The uber of ATC?

move fast and break things can't possibly go wrong in the ATC world.

Guessing this is humorous, but it does seem like a job that could one day benefit from being automated. The job is highly rules-based, and the rules are well documented requirements.

The biggest two problems that immediately come to mind:

1) Current ATC communication with planes happens by human voice over radio. Wouldn't want to trust an AI's speech recognition over that medium, so you'd probably have to mandate some kind of pilot-ATC interface that all planes would need to carry. You'd get huge pushback from the community of small planes. Probably from commercial pilots as well, since they'd have to train on the new system, and it would likely add to their cognitive load, at least short term.

2) We've put a ton of effort into producing a good radar picture to let controllers know where planes are, but it's far from perfect and requires some intuition. Radar waves bend due to atmospheric conditions, and it's difficult/impossible to distinguish real targets from various forms of clutter. The heuristics we currently use are pretty amazing, but you still get things popping up on ATC's radar scope that aren't really there.

> Guessing this is humorous, but it does seem like a job that could one day benefit from being automated

The tools ATCs use have evolved tremendously. Just three decades ago, not all major airports had ground radar for instance. Then there's ADS-B that's fully automated and does part of the job. The problem is that air traffic has increased a lot.

Even if automation goes much further, ATCs are needed for supervision of operation, compliance and backup in case systems fail. The evolution mirrors that of the job of pilots. Flight engineers have been rendered obsolete long ago, maybe copilots will be eventually replaced by a remote operators for backup at some point. Each ATC will be able to handle more and more traffic, as they already have, but someone's gotta be keeping an eye on the system.

> The job is highly rules-based, and the rules are well documented requirements.

Yes, so is actually flying a plane. However, MCAS let us see how badly things can go wrong following rules that were not well defined/understood/studied. Contributing to that was the system's method of knowing its environment came from sensors. If/when those sensors malfunction then the system is useless. At the end of the day, even if 100% of all instruments and sensors were to stop working, a human can still use its back up sensors (eyes,ears,brain) to continue flying where the auto system pretty much is game over.

My brother in law is an ATC. Didn't go to school for it, but studied and went through the training and passed the sequential tests required to get a seat in the building. He enjoys the job a ton.

Based on just observing him through the process, it seems like there's a combination of things that might keep younger people away from being an ATC. One might be the unfortunate politicization of government jobs at large, and especially how people like ATC's get affected during those pesky "government shutdowns". There's also, I think, the fact that being an ATC is more or less an "invisible job" to many people and especially college educated people. Also, the job itself can be stressful (but nothing like the horror story myths I've read about, apparently) and the exams to get in whittle down the herd pretty dramatically it sounds like.

There's no shortage of applicants. They get tons of applicants every year, but the FAA academy can only accept a limited number to their 3-4 month training program. Then they wash out roughly 50% of the trainees with their final exam, which is a set of ATC scenarios on a simulator. Existing controllers have to take the same exam to become a trainer at the academy, and roughly 1/3 of them also fail, so one could argue that the standards are set far too high. The survivors go on to their first posting, where they spend another year or two training before they can actually control live traffic on their own, and more wash out in this stage if they fail to certify.

I think it depends on your definition of "younger people" in this case. For the "off the street" hires like your brother in law, those postings require you to be under 31.

That said, there isn't really a good path to ATC for those 18-22 either. The off the street bids require something along the lines of "4 years progressively responsible work experience" to even be eligible to start the process. The Collegiate Training Initiative (CTI) schools exist, but have not provided much meaningful benefit to graduates since the FAA's changes to the hiring process in December 2013.

When I was offered a training slot 30 years ago, I was told they had better results the younger you were. 18 year olds could get in with the right test results. I suspect the establishment and CTI relationships intended to close up the rate of younger onboarding as the post-Reagan guard got older.

Back then journeymen controllers in Chicago were making $150K.

I get the impression that whatever the FAA intended with the CTI schools, it didn't work out as they wanted. I attended a CTI school in 2013-2014 but left when they modified the hiring process to essentially devalue the CTI path. In recent years it looks like the CTI schools have clawed back a little bit more preferential treatment when it comes to weighing ATSA results, but it's not like it was before.

I don't resent it though - it sounds like at the time CTI students weren't much more successful than off the street hires at the academy, nor were the different CTI schools very consistent in their quality and curriculum. I went to a good one, and was sad to leave as it was a ton of fun, but I've heard stories of some CTI programs being little more than a few lecture-based classes and a certificate.

One of my friends was a hired courtesy of Reagan's actions. He retired in the middle of last year (mandatory retirement). I know 2 other ATCs that retired in the last year. I bet you're right.

Class in American discourse is a weird thing. If they had achieved suburban middle class lives, what made them working class?

In England, you might say well if your dad was working class then you are working class for your whole life regardless of anything else. But the American notion of class isn’t generally thought of that way.

> If they had achieved suburban middle class lives, what made them working class

Did they earn their living by working? Then they are working class. If you make a salary or a wage, if you have a boss, you are working class.

Did they make their living by owning stuff (e.g. landlords, investors, etc.)? Then they aren't working class.

Edit: Surprised to see downvotes, Wikipedia defines it thus:

> "The working class (or labouring class) comprises those engaged in waged or salaried labour, especially in manual-labour occupations and industrial work."

White collar jobs are definitely working class folks.

This is a definition intended to push people towards your preferred ideology rather than a neutral description of how the phrase is used out in the wild.

No, this is the original definition of class struggle. Anything else ("middle class", "upper class") is just an attempt by bourgeois to divide people by trying to make them feel like they're part of a different, special group.

Appealing to originalism, accurately or not, still isn’t descriptivism.

Wikipedia disagrees? Yes, the colloquial usage often implies poor/lower class or physical labor, but it's not the only use of the term. (Just like the phrase 'Middle Class' has really fuzzy boundaries in the US.)

This just isn't what the vast majority of people mean when they talk about class. No one uses 'working class' in casual conversation to include doctors, hedge fund analysts and lawyers.

I think even in the UK definition, professionals like doctors and lawyers would be considered middle class.

Working class folks can also be middle class, they aren't mutually exclusive.

> No one uses 'working class' in casual conversation to include doctors, hedge fund analysts and lawyers.

Plenty of folks do. Yes, 'working class' is often synonymous with lower class in the US, but I regularly hear and use working class to mean "the class that is working". Engineers, farmhands, day laborers, doctors, grocery store clerks, analysts -- we all are working for a living, we are all working class.

I think you're just confused.

Wikipedia agrees with me? So it's hardly an outrageous position.

>Did they earn their living by working? Then they are working class. If you make a salary or a wage, if you have a boss, you are working class.

There's a pretty massive gulf between a heavy equipment operator who's making token contributions to retirement and would have a tough time with the mortgage if his spouse lost their job and a brain surgeon with maxed out retirement accounts, kids at ivy leagues and a vacation cottage on an exclusive lake.

They might work 500yd from each other but they are not the came classes of people. The arcs of their lives from birth to death are wildly different. Both depend on their wage to sustain their lifestyle. But the doctors (and the other people in their neighborhood) mostly wouldn't be caught dead living the way the heavy equipment operator lives (and the reverse is only slightly less true).

Referring to the latter working class is something usually only done before telling the former they need to stop drinking bud light, driving 30 cars, get the project boat out of the yard, vote a certain way, talk a certain way, etc, etc you catch the drift.

Working class carries a very strong implication of blue collar work or not significantly more than blue collar amounts of money. A social worker or paralegal is working class. An investment banker or law firm partner should find other words to use.

> There's a pretty massive gulf between a heavy equipment operator who's making token contributions to retirement and would have a tough time with the mortgage if his spouse lost their job and a brain surgeon with maxed out retirement accounts, kids at ivy leagues and a vacation cottage on an exclusive lake.

The only real difference between these two people is the number of missed paychecks they are away from bankruptcy. Sure, that number is probably small for the equipment operator and large for the surgeon, but it's still a number. Their wealth goes down when they're not working. In contrast to the class of people whose wealth goes up when they're not working.

This comment really comes across as if it's from someone who hasn't done manual labour for a living.

Drinking bud light? Probably because it's the best buzz/cost ratio(this is a guess) .

Project boat: it's the only way we would ever have a boat, certainly can't purchase a new one.

I've met many blue collar workers who walk and talk like white collar workers, mass assumptions do not help the conversation progresses.

It sounds like the division is really if you make a living from investments vs. from labor. In that case, a Doctor has invested a lot of time and money into certification and skill building, so they make a living more from investment and only partly from labor. Someone who owns apartment buildings is making an even higher percentage of their living from investments, however there is still a labor component to it (maintenance, management, etc). Which can be performed directly by the owner or it may be farmed out to others (which elevates the owner a bit higher in this class).

I think it implies some social mobility. So these people likely came from a working class parents to and achieved a suburban (read:upper) middle class life.

In the US the term "middle class" doesn't mean the same thing. In the UK it means above working class but below upper class. In the states, it means anyone that's not poor or rich. Mostly everyone likes to think they're "middle class" in the US whether they're blue-collar or white-collar.

Right. So I would say that people working (up until then) secure government jobs with good benefits and a high enough wage to live a good suburban lifestyle middle class, not working class (which in American usage implies manual labor and low to low middle wages, neither of which applied here.)

I think it's more education level in the states; "working class" => high-school graduate or less education.

The problem is the quote is mixing the Marxist notion of working class (someone tied to wage labor for survival) and the general American notation of middle class (comfortable but not rich, defined by income rather than family status)

As a brit I'd say it's kind of an education thing. If you are bricklayer that's working class and limited education required and if you get a law degree say and become a lawyer that's middle class even if your dad's a bricklayer.

what if you're sick of your lawyer career, and then become a brick layer? you're now an educated brick layer, so does that bust the class type?

I'd say that was a middle class person doing a working class job, depending on the details.

Churchill was an amateur brick layer in his spare time, I wonder where that left him.

We are the stupid class. We are the ones who regret our decisions 20 years later, because while our work is enjoyable, companions are fun and entertainment cheap, we realise our children won't have as many opportunities and that we should have offset our current enjoyment for our children's future

"Middle class" in this context refers to the level of their income and standard of living, where "working class" refers to their relationship to production (i.e. industrial wage workers).

But it wasn’t industrial. The work was cognitive not physical. It also wasn’t exactly for wages in the classic sense given that the federal government had holidays, vacation, and so on.

"Working class' is generally identified as a 'trade' job in terms of ATC it was a trade job back then because it did not require much to get the job in terms of experience or education, you were trained to do the specific job and it rarely changed over the course of your career.

I always thought "working class" means you make your living via your labour, regardless of what that labour is.

The difference would be people who make their living by owning things (stock, companies, property) that pay dividends. This is not to say that they don't work hard, but that their income isn't directly tied to their labour.

In this sense, someone can be both lower class (poor) and a part of the owner class. Someone else can be upper class (rich) and working class.

Parent should have used e.g. or ex rather than i.e. The not all working class are industrial workers. A good test is if one sells their labor for wages then they are likely working class.

I think you may be (or I may be) confusing "i.e." for "viz."; I intended to use "i.e.", as I was specifically referring to the ATCs as industrial workers.

It is industrial work, and industrial work is not purely physical; even working in a modern factory often requires cognitive work. Tire production is a great example, and if you visit a Goodyear factory you will notice a profound lack of Taylorism in the actual work of the employees (of course, not in the processes themselves).

>It also wasn’t exactly for wages in the classic sense given that the federal government had holidays, vacation, and so on.

Wages are typically understood as whatever price is paid to employees for their ability to work[1]; we may be operating under different definitions, though (I studied economics rather than business).

[1]: https://www.economist.com/economics-a-to-z/w#node-21529310

it's like there's really only two classes, the owner class and the working class I think a bearded dude wrote a book about it a long time ago, idk

The bearded dude doesn’t have such a great track record. Seemed like some good ideas but they didn’t pan out when they were tried. Not sure why people are still reading him.

lol https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1375942199066648582?...

It isn’t “weird”, it’s a different culture. Britain’s conceptions of class are not the baseline for the rest of the world.

"Middle class" is generally not a useful concept. The only two classes that matter to anyone but an academic are "working class" and "ruling class" (or as I like to call it, "owning class").

People often confuse the symbols of class for the class itself. Baz who grew up poor in a dilapidated tower block, speaks exclusively in east london slang, but now owns his own plumbing firm and drives a £100k land rover (with custom plates that say "working class") is not working class any more. He owns for a living. On the other hand a footballer who makes a huge salary is working class, because they have to work in order to get paid.

In the US and UK both this is deliberately obscured, but in different ways. In the UK, class is seen as inherited social status. In the US, class is seen as more or less a synonym for income or wealth. Both of these are wrong.

I think the dividing line in practice between "working" and "middle" is the four-year college degree, serving largely as a status signifier, and marking one a participant in cosmopolitan cultural aesthetics and norms. While a great many college graduates do genuine work, it makes one eligible for high-status "bullshit jobs" [0], in a way that even those in the high-paid working class (plumbers, electricians) are not. A subset of this middle class could arguably be defined as the "managerial class", engaged largely in performative busy-work, but ultimately only borrowing their power from owners.

That said, I think the "owning" vs. "working" model is incredibly valuable; and just as "lower class" has been redefined into "working class" (in a noblesse oblige of linguistic dignity!), I'll definitely be referring to the upper class as the "owning class" from now on. ;) (One complication, and arguably the reason that capitalism has proved resilient against its alleged contradictions: the middle class has managed to carve out some portion of ownership, in the forms of home ownership, stocks, etc. Not enough to carry substantive political or economic power, but enough to give them "skin in the game", and therefore a motivation to vote to preserve the ownership status quo, lest they lose their achievements of security and status.)

[0] https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/

Scott Alexander recently wrote a great piece about class in America: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on....

tl;dr: one of way of looking at class is that it's not one ladder, defined solely by economic status; rather it's three ladders (Working/Middle/Upper), which are largely independent, and which intersect both economics and culture. In this sense, Jeff Bezos is not actually upper class ("old money"), but the world's most successful middle class worker; and the reason Trump appealed to the working class despite exorbitant wealth, was an enthusiastic embrace of working class culture (baseball hats, fast food).

Wasn’t that Michael O’Church’s thesis? He (used to?) post here.

Huh, it's actually top of his blog right now [0]. Alexander is borrowing from the 80's book by Fussell, so it's apparently an idea that's been kicking around a while. O'Church's piece looks interesting, I'll dig in, thanks for sharing!

[0] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2021/01/28/a-reply-to-a...

> had achieved suburban middle class lives as air traffic controllers without having gone to college

This sounds almost surreal in today's market.

Nowadays:

> Candidates typically need an associate’s or a bachelor’s degree from the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative program. Other applicants must have 3 years of progressively responsible work experience, have completed 4 years of college, or have a combination of both

Not sure if you're speaking generally or only with regard to ATCs, but it's completely possible to make a good living doing IT work without having a college degree. If you're able to make the jump to software development it can become even more lucrative. The salary progression is more linear than a Stanford grad clearing $200k annually at Google straight out of college but making six figures in your 20s without a degree as a network/cloud engineer or sysadmin is pretty doable.

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