the.com/working class
The people who make the world run and still get asked to tighten their belts first.
means The social and economic group whose income comes mainly from manual, service, or wage labor rather than from owning businesses, land, or capital.
from A straightforward compound from 'work' plus 'class,' emerging in English in the early 1800s as industrial capitalism sorted society into labor and capital. The phrase hardened into a fixed social category alongside 'middle class' and 'upper class' as factories, wage labor, and labor movements made class distinctions newly explicit and politically charged — the term itself a product of the same industrial era it describes.
- defined by
- labor sold for wages, not capital owned
- marxist view
- sells labor power, doesn't own production
- common myth
- income alone doesn't define it, control does
- economic irony
- produces most value, captures least of it