Reply #52: So it's not a "characteristic" such as owning a pickup...

[lumberjack_jeff]

... because sometimes you might choose/find it necessary to sell your labor to meet survival needs and other times not. In other words, it's transient. Not like owning a pickup... which is... uh... forever.

Did I get that right?

You seem to be making the case that there's no such thing as "working class", so therefore it's impossible to insult them, or to work counter to their interests or to violate their trust in any collective way.

I find the distinction between a self-employed contractor who contracts with multiple clients from a teacher which (in my experience) contracts with one to be completely arbitrary. "Working class" is a very real demographic, despite the reticence of those who occupy it to admit it, and there is very little class mobility in this country - I've had lots of forms of transportation, but I've pretty much always been working class.

We don't have a problem with identifying the wealthy. We don't seem to have a problem with identifying (and self identifying) the middle class. We have a chronic problem with working class though, and the result is public policy which, (unsurprisingly - since they don't exist) fails to meet their needs.