"The Dispossessed" William Deresiewicz

SEEING 1:

The author defines the "working class" "as a first approximation" as a class whose members are someone who receive an hourly wage. But he admits that there will be a few exceptions. He suggests that working class excludes the true middle class and that the working class has "a very different relationship to their work and their workplace". The author defines the working class as the "American workforce". Those people who sometimes simply are getting unnoticed by us: "the ones who serve our food, ring up our purchases, fix our cars, change our bedpans."

Deresiewicz notices that we hear about the working class from the middle-class observers, those "who get paid to create mainstream culture - journalists, editors, writers, producers." The last ones are "masquerading" as working class even though they are not. As far as I understood, the author tries to prove the point of how one could write or represent the other one when the first has never been in the shoes of the other?! How could the least part of the country - the middle class - talk and make inferences about the majority of that country?! Why the only people who pay attention to the working class are the middle class ones?!

The virtues of the working class are the ability to be unionized, to have a working-class culture with the opportunity to have your own voices, cultural institutions, own sense of who participants of the working class are and what and how they do things. The main virtue of it used to be the ability of the working class to define themselves without depending on the middle class to define who they are. To be a worker used to be something to be proud of. To have the ability to have and pursue your own traditions and values, constituting your own community used to be the most significant part of it. Their virtues are such qualities as "loyalty, community, stoicism, humility, and even tolerance."

On the other hand their "vices tend to be the negative of bourgeois values," such as being "less temperate, prudent, thrifty, and industrious." The working class cares more about their families and communities than about their careers. They take life and their lifestyle for granted and do not strike for more in order to better yourself. 

The working class differs from the middle class, and their virtues and vices differ based on what they strive in life for, their values and qualities.

In order to distinguish working class, working poor, and working families, the author suggests that working poor is "to be called idle poor." It "reminds us how meagerly many jobs pay these days." Meaning that you might be still employed, but you make a bare minimum for your living/or existing. Working families have different values in mind: "the doctor struggling to pay for his kids to go to Harvard, the cashier struggling to pay for medicine". It means each family member works, but they have different goals in mind and different approaches of them. Based on two, Deresiewicz confronts that working class has been erased as a cultural category, but insists that it still exists in our society.