January 19, 2013

The New Geography of the Working Class - Jobs & Economy - The Atlantic Cities

The highest ranked metro is Elkhart-Gohsen, Indiana, where the working class makes up 46 percent of total employment, followed by Dalton, Georgia with 45.6 percent. The working class makes up between 35 and 40 percent of employment in six additional metros.

One thing is abundantly clear: the economic crisis has substantially reduced the working class, even in its leading centers. There is not a single metro in America where the working class approaches the average national level of the 1940s and 1950s. The share of the working class in Elkhart-Goshen fell from 55 percent in 1999 to 46 percent in 2010. It has shrunk even more in large metros, none of which made the top 20. Among those metros, its largest concentrations are found in Memphis (26.2 percent), Louisville (26.1 percent), and Houston (24.4 percent), where the working class accounts for roughly one in four jobs. In the once-great industrial centers of Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, just one in five workers belongs to the working class today.

The trend is even more pronounced for production workers—the workers who actually make things. Although roughly one in five U.S. workers (20.5 percent) are members of the working class, the ranks of production workers have fallen to just six percent of the total U.S. workforce.

via www.theatlanticcities.com

Jan 19, 2013 11:06:27 AM

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Jodi Dean

Jodi Dean is a political theorist.

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