Jay Gould once bragged he could get one half of the working class to kill the other.

It does seem to be a feature of the American working classes that they are led to be persistently, easily and even violently divided over wedge issues. Abortion, gender, race, "coastal elites" vs. "flyover country", millenial vs boomer, heck, or even, as in this case, "1 paycheck away from bankruptcy vs. financially stable".

You'd think illegal collusion over wage suppression would unite people who... earn wages but it doesnt seem to. Not in the same way belonging to, say, an arbitrarily advertiser defined age cohort does.

Which is really weird if you step out of American culture and look at it from the outside for a bit.

Maybe this is what Marx was referring to when he talked about a lack of class consciousness.