What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class
The author of this article is a person after my own heart. She succinctly writes about what I know and believe.
"Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo". (The college kid managers comment applies to those managers who have never done any "blue collar" work.)
As I wrote in one of my earlier posts, I was one of the first in my extended working class family to graduate from college. In the beginning I planned to get a professional degree in engineering but my academic talents and aptitude channeled me into a different area of study that resulted in my getting a B,A, degree in Government and History.
By the time I had graduated from high school I had hoed and picked cotton, milked cows in a dairy, plowed with a farm tractor, cleared brush and moved dirt with a bulldozer, worked in a milk processing plant. and worked in a grocery store.
During my college years I worked in construction, did apartment maintenance, washed dishes and served food in a boarding house, worked as a pin boy at the university student union, and was a mail carrier and processor at the university mail room. After receiving a B.A. degree I was a Peace Corps Volunteer, a county juvenile probation officer, an Agency for International Development personal services contractor, a welder's helper for a pipeline construction company, a produce shed maintenance worker, a social worker, a social work supervisor, a social services program manager, a state agency assistant business manager, an IT consultant and business owner, and a residential property owner and manager.
However, I do not believe that I have never been identified as, nor consisted myself to be, a "professional".
All in all I am definitely a member of the middle class described in this article.
