Who Counts as Working-Class?

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We'll begin today at the intersection of this year's midterm primaries and 175 years of political philosophy.
Ask a New Yorker what class they belong to, and you'll almost always get the same answer, I think, middle class.
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 around Mamdani, want a lot of us to start saying something else. WNYC and Gothamist Elizabeth Kim reported this month 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?

**Grace Mauser** (1:22)
She did, yeah.
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% holds, is to come together as a broad working class movement and fight back. And in fact, historically, labor movements and enlarged 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 healthcare 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, teachers who are, you know, 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** (2:55)
NYC DSA co-chair Grace Mauser here last week. 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, you know, $18 an hour. And even the mayor asked to define the term in a New York Times interview last week. 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** (4:15)
Good morning, Brian.

**Chris Maisano** (4:17)
Good morning.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:19)
Liz, why did this question, who counts as working class, become a story on your city hall beat right now?

**Elizabeth Kim** (4:25)
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, and he was forced to drop out this month 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.
He himself talked about what it meant to be working class, and he had defined it in interviews, and one of them was actually a really lengthy interview he gave to the New York Times as part of their weekend podcast, the exact same forum that the mayor recently did. And he was asked about how he defines working class, and he said that it was as long as you were making your living from a paycheck, meaning that you're not making your living off a large stock portfolio or some kind of existing wealth, that that makes you work in class. And that just kind of really stuck and resonated with me. And I remember coming back to the newsroom after listening to that interview and talking about it with people.