Wages, Housing, and Challenges in the Working Class

One of the most evident features of any society is Class. Societies in the world, especially American, tend to deny the fact that there is an existence of classes. To fully understand the concept, one needs to know the definition of class and the natives of the class. Class can be defined as “a system in which social standing is determined by factors over which people can exert some control, such as their educational attainment, their income, and their work experience.”

If you ask an open-ended question about what class people see themselves in, almost everybody will answer that they are neither rich nor poor but “somewhere in the middle”—that is, they presume a three-class model of rich, poor, and middle class with almost everybody in the middle. Indeed, in forced-answer surveys, researchers who do not offer “working class” as a possible choice find that something like 90 percent defines themselves as “middle class.”

People often associate class as a difference in life style or monthly income, which is not incorrect, but in actual, the class is the different extents of power people posses at their work. United States is one of the best examples of the class system where people from underprivileged background acquire education and work hard to raise their positions.

Most of the poor do not stay poor for long periods. They cycle in and out of poverty, depending on employment, family situation, changes in earnings on the job. More than half the working class experiences poverty in a ten-year period. The poor are not some persistent lump at the bottom of society; they are working people who have hit hard times. (Zweig 2000, 86)

There are many challenges that working class faces in United States. The foremost is the wage rate that does not match with the expenses. Ehrenreich writes in Nickel and Dimed (2001) that officials claims that the wages of the workers are going up. This, in fact, is not a convincing argument. If the wages are going up, they are still very minimal and not in proportion to the expenses and inflation. In spite of the hardships, the working class is unable to improve their quality of living.

We could argue all day about what levels of income allow life to be easy, comfortable, or settled, but I doubt anybody would argue that the amount of money you have makes no difference in the kind of life you lead. Insufficient income all by itself disrupts daily life, making it difficult to settle in and work a plan.

“The poor” as a social category hides the dynamism of economic circumstances in working-class life—just as “the unemployed” and “the uninsured” do. Even within a single year, millions of Americans go in and out of these categories. Still, similar to the economist's “lump of labor fallacy,” even after we know better, it is still hard not to think of the unemployed or the uninsured or the poor as the same group year after year.

Unemployment is indeed ...