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Comment by Pfhreak | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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).

>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.

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.)

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