Working Class Reading List

Many people have been asking for suggestions about working class friendly literature. I define “working class friendly literature” as anything written by an working class individual or ally. Some of you may notice a few well-known titles missing from this list, such as “Nickel and Dimed” by Ehrenreich. So allow me to clarify–I have intentionally left off any book written by economically privileged individuals for the consumption of other economically privileged individuals. Some of the following authors are not working class, but they, unlike some of their peers, write about the lives of working class individuals without taking away their individuality and without studying them.

This list is certainly not exhaustive, so please feel free to e-mail me at wcsu.president@gmail.com with any suggestions of books or articles to be included on this list.

• “new working-class studies” Edited by John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon

“We put the working class, in all its varieties, at the center of our work. The new working-class studies is not only about the labor movement, or about workers of any particular kind, or workers in any particular place—even in the workplace. Instead, we ask questions about how class works for people at work, at home, and in the community. We explore how class both unites and divides working-class people, which highlights the importance of understanding how class shapes and is shaped by race, gender, ethnicity, and place. We reflect on the common interests as well as the divisions between the most commonly imagined version of the working class—industrial, blue-collar workers—and workers in the ‘new economy’ whose work and personal lives seem, at first glance, to place them solidly in the middle class.”—from the Introduction

• “Without A Net: the female experience of growing up working class” Edited by Michelle Tea

“It’s been a frustrating search, looking for writing in which poor women get to tell their stories. As far as anthologies go, this may be the only one in print. May it start an enormous trend. Either way, we’ll still be writing. We don’t write to be fast-tracked into publishing glory–many of us haven’t even gone to school, and even those who have still stumble a bit through life. For us, writing isn’t a career so much as it is a vocation, a life saver, a way to prove, to ourselves at least, that we actually exist, that our struggles aren’t for nothing, that our lives are meaningful, are triumphant. We write to release old injustices and abuses, to make sense of them, to contextualize ourselves. We write to tell the truth, our writings like graffiti on the surface of the moneyed culture at large. We write so that we can finally see our experiences portrayed honestly, in many dimensions. And like all writers, we write because it is simply what we do. But for poor and working-class writers, writing itself is a survival skill.”

• “Class Matters” By Correspondents of The New York Times, Introduction by Bill Keller

“The series does not purport to be all-inclusive or the last word on class. It offers no nifty formulas for pigeonholing people or decoding folkways and manners. Instead, it represents an inquiry into class as Americans encounter it: indistinct, ambiguous, the half-seen hand that upon closer examination holds some Americans down while giving others a boost.”

• “America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters”, By Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers

As the mainstream media election analysts constantly divide America by gender, age, ethnicity, occupation, and countless other demographic characteristics, the authors of this book illuminate how the white working class is an American majority that is largely ignored by politicians in general and how previous elections have been affected by the vote of the white working class. As a online summary put it, “a powerful look at the real America, dominated by America’s “Forgotten Majority”–white working class men and women who make up 55 percent of the voting population.” (Keep in mind that this book was published in 2001.)