Labor Day: Working Class; White Collar Unions; Supermarkets; Summer Songs

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, and happy Labor Day. And on this Labor Day, we've gathered and lightly edited some recent segments appropriate to the holiday, including New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber on unionization among white collar workers, an inside look at the work going on in our supermarkets, plus on this Labor Day, we look back at your songs of summer. But let's start here today at the intersection of this year's midterm primaries and 175 years of political philosophy.

Like, ask a New Yorker what class they belong to, and you'll almost always get the same answer. I think middle class, right? The lawyer says it, the bus driver says it. Okay, Michael Bloomberg probably wouldn't say it. But for the most part, pretty rich or pretty poor, middle class is practically the New York and the American default. But the Democratic Socialists of America, the political home of Mayors Iran Mamdani, of course, want a lot of us to start saying something else. WNYC and Gothamists, Elizabeth Kim, reported this summer that new DSA members are taught in orientation sessions to think of anyone who works for a living, works for a living, whatever that means, as working class. Restaurant workers, firefighters, nurses, sure. But also people like doctors and Google programmers, compared to billionaires, the argument goes, they're all in the same boat. Here's NYC DSA co-chair Grace Mauser, when I asked her here on the show about that quote that she gave to Liz Kim. Did Liz get it right?

She did, yeah.

Grace Mauser (1:42)

I agree with what I said.

The point I was trying to make with Liz is that it benefits billionaires and mega-capitalists to divide people who are middle-income or even lower-upper-income from working poor.

When in fact, what we need to do to actually redistribute the massive wealth that the 1 percent holds, is to come together as a broad working class movement and fight back. And in fact, historically, labor movements and large social transformations have often been led by relatively skilled workers who are facing deteriorating working conditions. I think this is a big reason why we're now seeing health care workers, even doctors, start to think about unionization as more and more practices are being bought up by private equity. It's why we're seeing educators, who are in some ways white-collar workers, like thought workers, not manual laborers, lead union movements. Why we're seeing graduate workers do the same thing. These are skilled workers who are facing just increasingly untenable labor conditions, and we're seeing them at the front of the labor movement for just that reason.

Brian Lehrer (3:14)

NYC DSA co-chair, Grace Mauser.

Now, we should say not everyone buys it. The head of the city's largest municipal union, for example, told Liz that someone making $400,000 a year does not share the life experience, or therefore perspective with someone making 18 bucks an hour. Even the mayor asked to define the term in a New York Times interview, the term working class, said he hasn't asked where working class starts and stops, we will play that clip coming up. But this isn't just political philosophy in the abstract. It might actually matter to who wins elections and how New Yorkers and other Americans define ourselves. So we will begin today's show with the definitions, where they came from, how they've evolved literally since Karl Marx, and what this all might mean for politics in New York and for Democrats nationally in these current primaries and with the midterm general elections coming this fall. With me now are Elizabeth Kim, reporter here at WNYC and Gothamist, who wrote the story, and Chris Maisano, editor of New Labor Forum, a labor journal from the Murphy Institute at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.

He's also a member of DSA but not here on their behalf. So Liz, hi, and Chris, welcome to WNYC.

Elizabeth Kim (4:33)

Good morning, Brian. Good morning.

Brian Lehrer (4:36)

Liz, why did this question, who counts as Working Class, become a story on your city hall beat right now?

Elizabeth Kim (4:42)

Well, Brian, I will tell you that I first became interested in this question, not because of a local political figure, but one that I think a lot of Democrats and people who follow politics have been obsessed over in recent months, and that's Graham Plattner. Now, just to remind listeners, he was the former presumptive Democratic Senate nominee from Maine. He was forced to drop out because of sexual misconduct allegations. But prior to that, what I saw at the heart, and other people have talked about this too, the heart of his rise to stardom was his identity, and it was his identity as this oisterman, and him being the self-identified working class Maynard.