Class

Thinking about class is always work, with all its attendant implications. Class structures how resources are distributed, hierarchies are built, identity is constituted, power is accumulated, desire is realized. And the kinds of industries in which Americans work, the type of labor they perform, the places where they punch a clock or don’t, the remuneration they receive for that labor or don’t, are intimately connected to the work they do, or are perceived as doing, or are disciplined for not doing, or are barred from doing. Class relates closely to labor, but it is not identical with it: women doing the same work as men make less money on the hour; enslaved Black women and men were forced to work without compensation under the oft-realized threat of violence in the antebellum United States, as they still do in America’s prison system; discrimination in the workplace determines who gets in the door and what happens behind it; sex work is frequently rejected as not really work, but it is also marginalized as not really sex either. Unemployment casts suspicion upon subjects who do not work unless those people are categorized as elderly, or as disabled in a way perceived to be legitimate, or as children who happen not to live on a farm, or as highly-successful entrepreneurs who retire before they turn fifty yet somehow embody the American Dream even if they never work again. Meanwhile corporate executives spending afternoons on the golf course to “close a deal” or “working from home” or taking “summer Fridays” collect stratospheric salaries, even as, through tricky accounting, off-shore banking, and tax-dodging investments, their tax forms show little to no income.