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> Richard Sharpe: "The strikers were often working-class men and women who had achieved suburban middle class lives as air traffic controllers without having g

> Richard Sharpe: "The strikers were often working-class men and women who had achieved suburban middle class lives as air traffic controllers without having gone to college. Many were veterans of the US armed forces where they had learned their skills; their union had backed Reagan in his election campaign. Nevertheless, Reagan refused to back down. Several strikers were jailed; the union was fined and eventually made bankrupt. Only about 800 got their jobs back when Clinton lifted the ban on rehiring those who went on strike. Many of the strikers were forced into poverty as a result of being blacklisted for [U.S. government] employment."

bradleyjg 6y ago
Class in American discourse is a weird thing. If they had achieved suburban middle class lives, what made them working class? In England, you might say well if your dad was working class then you are working class for your whole life regardless of anything else. But the American notion of class isn’t generally thought of that way.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  > If they had achieved suburban middle class lives, what made them working class Did they earn their living by working? Then they are working class. If you make a salary or a wage, if you have a boss, you are working class. Did they make their living by owning stuff (e.g. landlords, investors, etc.)? Then they aren't working class. Edit: Surprised to see downvotes, Wikipedia defines it thus: > "The working class (or labouring class) comprises those engaged in waged or salaried labour, especially in manual-labour occupations and industrial work." White collar jobs are definitely working class folks.
  - bradleyjg 6y ago
    This is a definition intended to push people towards your preferred ideology rather than a neutral description of how the phrase is used out in the wild.
    - ohgodplsno 6y ago
      No, this is the original definition of class struggle. Anything else ("middle class", "upper class") is just an attempt by bourgeois to divide people by trying to make them feel like they're part of a different, special group.
      - bradleyjg 6y ago
        Appealing to originalism, accurately or not, still isn’t descriptivism.
    - Pfhreak 6y ago
      Wikipedia disagrees? Yes, the colloquial usage often implies poor/lower class or physical labor, but it's not the only use of the term. (Just like the phrase 'Middle Class' has really fuzzy boundaries in the US.)
  - bidirectional 6y ago
    This just isn't what the vast majority of people mean when they talk about class. No one uses 'working class' in casual conversation to include doctors, hedge fund analysts and lawyers.
    - skohan 6y ago
      I think even in the UK definition, professionals like doctors and lawyers would be considered middle class.
      - Pfhreak 6y ago
        Working class folks can also be middle class, they aren't mutually exclusive.
    - Pfhreak 6y ago
      > No one uses 'working class' in casual conversation to include doctors, hedge fund analysts and lawyers. Plenty of folks do. Yes, 'working class' is often synonymous with lower class in the US, but I regularly hear and use working class to mean "the class that is working". Engineers, farmhands, day laborers, doctors, grocery store clerks, analysts -- we all are working for a living, we are all working class.
      - e4325f 6y ago
        I think you're just confused.
        Pfhreak 6y ago
        Wikipedia agrees with me? So it's hardly an outrageous position.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    >Did they earn their living by working? Then they are working class. If you make a salary or a wage, if you have a boss, you are working class. There's a pretty massive gulf between a heavy equipment operator who's making token contributions to retirement and would have a tough time with the mortgage if his spouse lost their job and a brain surgeon with maxed out retirement accounts, kids at ivy leagues and a vacation cottage on an exclusive lake. They might work 500yd from each other but they are not the came classes of people. The arcs of their lives from birth to death are wildly different. Both depend on their wage to sustain their lifestyle. But the doctors (and the other people in their neighborhood) mostly wouldn't be caught dead living the way the heavy equipment operator lives (and the reverse is only slightly less true). Referring to the latter working class is something usually only done before telling the former they need to stop drinking bud light, driving 30 cars, get the project boat out of the yard, vote a certain way, talk a certain way, etc, etc you catch the drift. Working class carries a very strong implication of blue collar work or not significantly more than blue collar amounts of money. A social worker or paralegal is working class. An investment banker or law firm partner should find other words to use.
    - ryandrake 6y ago
      > There's a pretty massive gulf between a heavy equipment operator who's making token contributions to retirement and would have a tough time with the mortgage if his spouse lost their job and a brain surgeon with maxed out retirement accounts, kids at ivy leagues and a vacation cottage on an exclusive lake. The only real difference between these two people is the number of missed paychecks they are away from bankruptcy. Sure, that number is probably small for the equipment operator and large for the surgeon, but it's still a number. Their wealth goes down when they're not working. In contrast to the class of people whose wealth goes up when they're not working.
    - marakv2 6y ago
      This comment really comes across as if it's from someone who hasn't done manual labour for a living. Drinking bud light? Probably because it's the best buzz/cost ratio(this is a guess) . Project boat: it's the only way we would ever have a boat, certainly can't purchase a new one. I've met many blue collar workers who walk and talk like white collar workers, mass assumptions do not help the conversation progresses.
  - derekp7 6y ago
    It sounds like the division is really if you make a living from investments vs. from labor. In that case, a Doctor has invested a lot of time and money into certification and skill building, so they make a living more from investment and only partly from labor. Someone who owns apartment buildings is making an even higher percentage of their living from investments, however there is still a labor component to it (maintenance, management, etc). Which can be performed directly by the owner or it may be farmed out to others (which elevates the owner a bit higher in this class).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mywittyname 6y ago
  I think it implies some social mobility. So these people likely came from a working class parents to and achieved a suburban (read:upper) middle class life.
- bin_bash 6y ago
  In the US the term "middle class" doesn't mean the same thing. In the UK it means above working class but below upper class. In the states, it means anyone that's not poor or rich. Mostly everyone likes to think they're "middle class" in the US whether they're blue-collar or white-collar.
  - bradleyjg 6y ago
    Right. So I would say that people working (up until then) secure government jobs with good benefits and a high enough wage to live a good suburban lifestyle middle class, not working class (which in American usage implies manual labor and low to low middle wages, neither of which applied here.)
    - jgwil2 6y ago
      I think it's more education level in the states; "working class" => high-school graduate or less education.
    - xxpor 6y ago
      The problem is the quote is mixing the Marxist notion of working class (someone tied to wage labor for survival) and the general American notation of middle class (comfortable but not rich, defined by income rather than family status)
- tim333 6y ago
  As a brit I'd say it's kind of an education thing. If you are bricklayer that's working class and limited education required and if you get a law degree say and become a lawyer that's middle class even if your dad's a bricklayer.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    what if you're sick of your lawyer career, and then become a brick layer? you're now an educated brick layer, so does that bust the class type?
    - tim333 6y ago
      I'd say that was a middle class person doing a working class job, depending on the details.
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      Churchill was an amateur brick layer in his spare time, I wonder where that left him.
    - marakv2 6y ago
      We are the stupid class. We are the ones who regret our decisions 20 years later, because while our work is enjoyable, companions are fun and entertainment cheap, we realise our children won't have as many opportunities and that we should have offset our current enjoyment for our children's future
- MsMowz 6y ago
  "Middle class" in this context refers to the level of their income and standard of living, where "working class" refers to their relationship to production (i.e. industrial wage workers).
  - bradleyjg 6y ago
    But it wasn’t industrial. The work was cognitive not physical. It also wasn’t exactly for wages in the classic sense given that the federal government had holidays, vacation, and so on.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - ProAm 6y ago
      "Working class' is generally identified as a 'trade' job in terms of ATC it was a trade job back then because it did not require much to get the job in terms of experience or education, you were trained to do the specific job and it rarely changed over the course of your career.
      - nickelcitymario 6y ago
        I always thought "working class" means you make your living via your labour, regardless of what that labour is. The difference would be people who make their living by owning things (stock, companies, property) that pay dividends. This is not to say that they don't work hard, but that their income isn't directly tied to their labour. In this sense, someone can be both lower class (poor) and a part of the owner class. Someone else can be upper class (rich) and working class.
    - aaron-santos 6y ago
      Parent should have used e.g. or ex rather than i.e. The not all working class are industrial workers. A good test is if one sells their labor for wages then they are likely working class.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  In the US it only matters how much money you earn or have. Your comment is why I wish HN banned European IP addresses - it's not applicable in the US.
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  It isn’t “weird”, it’s a different culture. Britain’s conceptions of class are not the baseline for the rest of the world.
- thescriptkiddie 6y ago
  "Middle class" is generally not a useful concept. The only two classes that matter to anyone but an academic are "working class" and "ruling class" (or as I like to call it, "owning class"). People often confuse the symbols of class for the class itself. Baz who grew up poor in a dilapidated tower block, speaks exclusively in east london slang, but now owns his own plumbing firm and drives a £100k land rover (with custom plates that say "working class") is not working class any more. He owns for a living. On the other hand a footballer who makes a huge salary is working class, because they have to work in order to get paid. In the US and UK both this is deliberately obscured, but in different ways. In the UK, class is seen as inherited social status. In the US, class is seen as more or less a synonym for income or wealth. Both of these are wrong.
  - lukifer 6y ago
    I think the dividing line in practice between "working" and "middle" is the four-year college degree, serving largely as a status signifier, and marking one a participant in cosmopolitan cultural aesthetics and norms. While a great many college graduates do genuine work, it makes one eligible for high-status "bullshit jobs" [0], in a way that even those in the high-paid working class (plumbers, electricians) are not. A subset of this middle class could arguably be defined as the "managerial class", engaged largely in performative busy-work, but ultimately only borrowing their power from owners. That said, I think the "owning" vs. "working" model is incredibly valuable; and just as "lower class" has been redefined into "working class" (in a noblesse oblige of linguistic dignity!), I'll definitely be referring to the upper class as the "owning class" from now on. ;) (One complication, and arguably the reason that capitalism has proved resilient against its alleged contradictions: the middle class has managed to carve out some portion of ownership, in the forms of home ownership, stocks, etc. Not enough to carry substantive political or economic power, but enough to give them "skin in the game", and therefore a motivation to vote to preserve the ownership status quo, lest they lose their achievements of security and status.) [0] https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
- lukifer 6y ago
  Scott Alexander recently wrote a great piece about class in America: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on.... tl;dr: one of way of looking at class is that it's not one ladder, defined solely by economic status; rather it's three ladders (Working/Middle/Upper), which are largely independent, and which intersect both economics and culture. In this sense, Jeff Bezos is not actually upper class ("old money"), but the world's most successful middle class worker; and the reason Trump appealed to the working class despite exorbitant wealth, was an enthusiastic embrace of working class culture (baseball hats, fast food).
  - bradleyjg 6y ago
    Wasn’t that Michael O’Church’s thesis? He (used to?) post here.
    - lukifer 6y ago
      Huh, it's actually top of his blog right now [0]. Alexander is borrowing from the 80's book by Fussell, so it's apparently an idea that's been kicking around a while. O'Church's piece looks interesting, I'll dig in, thanks for sharing! [0] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2021/01/28/a-reply-to-alex-danco-revisiting-macleod-and-the-three-ladders-in-the-wake-of-trump/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2021/01/28/a-reply-to-a...
drno123 6y ago
To be honest, they were asking for 35% raise, PLUS reduced working hours PLUS benefits. They were offered somewhat smaller raise which they refused, while participating in an illegal strike. From my experience, in most negotiations, you rarely get everything that you want, but you can get a good deal if you are willing to compromise. When you play hard, it can backfire.
- krageon 6y ago
  > illegal strike I genuinely can't tell if you're being sarcastic with your comment.
  - CalRobert 6y ago
    Some industries crucial to public safety have legal restrictions on the right to strike.
    - ookdatnog 6y ago
      I imagine air traffic controllers spontaneously deciding to strike _here and now_ without prior warning would be quite dangerous. But if an air traffic controller strike is announced, say, 24 hours beforehand, it can't be reasonably argued to be a public safety hazard.
      - hpoe 6y ago
        Counterpoint: My wife has a medication that has short shelf life and isn't widely distributed so it needs to be flown via air. Airplanes stop flying my wife no longer gets her medicine, she now dead.
        AdrianB1 6y ago
        That is true, but you cannot force someone to fly it regularly to her. The miracles of modern medicine allow people to live when this would not have happened 100 years ago, but cannot guarantee that. Take it as a gift, not as a given.
throwawayzRUU6f 6y ago
> had achieved suburban middle class lives as air traffic controllers without having gone to college This sounds almost surreal in today's market. Nowadays: > Candidates typically need an associate’s or a bachelor’s degree from the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative program. Other applicants must have 3 years of progressively responsible work experience, have completed 4 years of college, or have a combination of both
- alexjplant 6y ago
  Not sure if you're speaking generally or only with regard to ATCs, but it's completely possible to make a good living doing IT work without having a college degree. If you're able to make the jump to software development it can become even more lucrative. The salary progression is more linear than a Stanford grad clearing $200k annually at Google straight out of college but making six figures in your 20s without a degree as a network/cloud engineer or sysadmin is pretty doable.
bryondowd 6y ago
Worth noting that this mass firing is coming around for a second wave of hurt. They re-staffed most of the ATC force with military personnel who were around the same age, all at the same time. Now that block of people are hitting the ATC's mandatory retirement age (56) and last I checked they haven't had much success (arguably intentionally, but that's another story) in increasing their onboarding stream enough to compensate for the sudden loss. Current controllers are already working large (possibly unsafe) amounts of overtime and have limited ability to change locations or positions due to the shortage, which is only getting worse. At some point, they'll either need to find a way to accept more trainees, retain employees longer, or reduce services/throughput. EDIT: I may be out of date. Perhaps this second wave already came and went with little impact. My math says anyone hired in 1981 would be past retirement age by now. Not sure how they handled it.
- dylan604 6y ago
  where's the plucky upstart wanting to disrupt ATC with their AI trained system to automatically route airtraffic? The uber of ATC?
  - stevehawk 6y ago
    move fast and break things can't possibly go wrong in the ATC world.
  - bryondowd 6y ago
    Guessing this is humorous, but it does seem like a job that could one day benefit from being automated. The job is highly rules-based, and the rules are well documented requirements. The biggest two problems that immediately come to mind: 1) Current ATC communication with planes happens by human voice over radio. Wouldn't want to trust an AI's speech recognition over that medium, so you'd probably have to mandate some kind of pilot-ATC interface that all planes would need to carry. You'd get huge pushback from the community of small planes. Probably from commercial pilots as well, since they'd have to train on the new system, and it would likely add to their cognitive load, at least short term. 2) We've put a ton of effort into producing a good radar picture to let controllers know where planes are, but it's far from perfect and requires some intuition. Radar waves bend due to atmospheric conditions, and it's difficult/impossible to distinguish real targets from various forms of clutter. The heuristics we currently use are pretty amazing, but you still get things popping up on ATC's radar scope that aren't really there.

bradleyjg 6y ago

Class in American discourse is a weird thing. If they had achieved suburban middle class lives, what made them working class? In England, you might say well if your dad was working class then you are working class for your whole life regardless of anything else. But the American notion of class isn’t generally thought of that way.

Pfhreak 6y ago
> If they had achieved suburban middle class lives, what made them working class Did they earn their living by working? Then they are working class. If you make a salary or a wage, if you have a boss, you are working class. Did they make their living by owning stuff (e.g. landlords, investors, etc.)? Then they aren't working class. Edit: Surprised to see downvotes, Wikipedia defines it thus: > "The working class (or labouring class) comprises those engaged in waged or salaried labour, especially in manual-labour occupations and industrial work." White collar jobs are definitely working class folks.
- bradleyjg 6y ago
  This is a definition intended to push people towards your preferred ideology rather than a neutral description of how the phrase is used out in the wild.
  - ohgodplsno 6y ago
    No, this is the original definition of class struggle. Anything else ("middle class", "upper class") is just an attempt by bourgeois to divide people by trying to make them feel like they're part of a different, special group.
    - bradleyjg 6y ago
      Appealing to originalism, accurately or not, still isn’t descriptivism.
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    Wikipedia disagrees? Yes, the colloquial usage often implies poor/lower class or physical labor, but it's not the only use of the term. (Just like the phrase 'Middle Class' has really fuzzy boundaries in the US.)
- bidirectional 6y ago
  This just isn't what the vast majority of people mean when they talk about class. No one uses 'working class' in casual conversation to include doctors, hedge fund analysts and lawyers.
  - skohan 6y ago
    I think even in the UK definition, professionals like doctors and lawyers would be considered middle class.
    - Pfhreak 6y ago
      Working class folks can also be middle class, they aren't mutually exclusive.
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    > No one uses 'working class' in casual conversation to include doctors, hedge fund analysts and lawyers. Plenty of folks do. Yes, 'working class' is often synonymous with lower class in the US, but I regularly hear and use working class to mean "the class that is working". Engineers, farmhands, day laborers, doctors, grocery store clerks, analysts -- we all are working for a living, we are all working class.
    - e4325f 6y ago
      I think you're just confused.
      - Pfhreak 6y ago
        Wikipedia agrees with me? So it's hardly an outrageous position.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >Did they earn their living by working? Then they are working class. If you make a salary or a wage, if you have a boss, you are working class. There's a pretty massive gulf between a heavy equipment operator who's making token contributions to retirement and would have a tough time with the mortgage if his spouse lost their job and a brain surgeon with maxed out retirement accounts, kids at ivy leagues and a vacation cottage on an exclusive lake. They might work 500yd from each other but they are not the came classes of people. The arcs of their lives from birth to death are wildly different. Both depend on their wage to sustain their lifestyle. But the doctors (and the other people in their neighborhood) mostly wouldn't be caught dead living the way the heavy equipment operator lives (and the reverse is only slightly less true). Referring to the latter working class is something usually only done before telling the former they need to stop drinking bud light, driving 30 cars, get the project boat out of the yard, vote a certain way, talk a certain way, etc, etc you catch the drift. Working class carries a very strong implication of blue collar work or not significantly more than blue collar amounts of money. A social worker or paralegal is working class. An investment banker or law firm partner should find other words to use.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    > There's a pretty massive gulf between a heavy equipment operator who's making token contributions to retirement and would have a tough time with the mortgage if his spouse lost their job and a brain surgeon with maxed out retirement accounts, kids at ivy leagues and a vacation cottage on an exclusive lake. The only real difference between these two people is the number of missed paychecks they are away from bankruptcy. Sure, that number is probably small for the equipment operator and large for the surgeon, but it's still a number. Their wealth goes down when they're not working. In contrast to the class of people whose wealth goes up when they're not working.
  - marakv2 6y ago
    This comment really comes across as if it's from someone who hasn't done manual labour for a living. Drinking bud light? Probably because it's the best buzz/cost ratio(this is a guess) . Project boat: it's the only way we would ever have a boat, certainly can't purchase a new one. I've met many blue collar workers who walk and talk like white collar workers, mass assumptions do not help the conversation progresses.
- derekp7 6y ago
  It sounds like the division is really if you make a living from investments vs. from labor. In that case, a Doctor has invested a lot of time and money into certification and skill building, so they make a living more from investment and only partly from labor. Someone who owns apartment buildings is making an even higher percentage of their living from investments, however there is still a labor component to it (maintenance, management, etc). Which can be performed directly by the owner or it may be farmed out to others (which elevates the owner a bit higher in this class).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mywittyname 6y ago
I think it implies some social mobility. So these people likely came from a working class parents to and achieved a suburban (read:upper) middle class life.
bin_bash 6y ago
In the US the term "middle class" doesn't mean the same thing. In the UK it means above working class but below upper class. In the states, it means anyone that's not poor or rich. Mostly everyone likes to think they're "middle class" in the US whether they're blue-collar or white-collar.
- bradleyjg 6y ago
  Right. So I would say that people working (up until then) secure government jobs with good benefits and a high enough wage to live a good suburban lifestyle middle class, not working class (which in American usage implies manual labor and low to low middle wages, neither of which applied here.)
  - jgwil2 6y ago
    I think it's more education level in the states; "working class" => high-school graduate or less education.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    The problem is the quote is mixing the Marxist notion of working class (someone tied to wage labor for survival) and the general American notation of middle class (comfortable but not rich, defined by income rather than family status)
tim333 6y ago
As a brit I'd say it's kind of an education thing. If you are bricklayer that's working class and limited education required and if you get a law degree say and become a lawyer that's middle class even if your dad's a bricklayer.
- dylan604 6y ago
  what if you're sick of your lawyer career, and then become a brick layer? you're now an educated brick layer, so does that bust the class type?
  - tim333 6y ago
    I'd say that was a middle class person doing a working class job, depending on the details.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Churchill was an amateur brick layer in his spare time, I wonder where that left him.
  - marakv2 6y ago
    We are the stupid class. We are the ones who regret our decisions 20 years later, because while our work is enjoyable, companions are fun and entertainment cheap, we realise our children won't have as many opportunities and that we should have offset our current enjoyment for our children's future
MsMowz 6y ago
"Middle class" in this context refers to the level of their income and standard of living, where "working class" refers to their relationship to production (i.e. industrial wage workers).
- bradleyjg 6y ago
  But it wasn’t industrial. The work was cognitive not physical. It also wasn’t exactly for wages in the classic sense given that the federal government had holidays, vacation, and so on.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ProAm 6y ago
    "Working class' is generally identified as a 'trade' job in terms of ATC it was a trade job back then because it did not require much to get the job in terms of experience or education, you were trained to do the specific job and it rarely changed over the course of your career.
    - nickelcitymario 6y ago
      I always thought "working class" means you make your living via your labour, regardless of what that labour is. The difference would be people who make their living by owning things (stock, companies, property) that pay dividends. This is not to say that they don't work hard, but that their income isn't directly tied to their labour. In this sense, someone can be both lower class (poor) and a part of the owner class. Someone else can be upper class (rich) and working class.
  - aaron-santos 6y ago
    Parent should have used e.g. or ex rather than i.e. The not all working class are industrial workers. A good test is if one sells their labor for wages then they are likely working class.
redis_mlc 6y ago
In the US it only matters how much money you earn or have. Your comment is why I wish HN banned European IP addresses - it's not applicable in the US.
ceilingcorner 6y ago
It isn’t “weird”, it’s a different culture. Britain’s conceptions of class are not the baseline for the rest of the world.
thescriptkiddie 6y ago
"Middle class" is generally not a useful concept. The only two classes that matter to anyone but an academic are "working class" and "ruling class" (or as I like to call it, "owning class"). People often confuse the symbols of class for the class itself. Baz who grew up poor in a dilapidated tower block, speaks exclusively in east london slang, but now owns his own plumbing firm and drives a £100k land rover (with custom plates that say "working class") is not working class any more. He owns for a living. On the other hand a footballer who makes a huge salary is working class, because they have to work in order to get paid. In the US and UK both this is deliberately obscured, but in different ways. In the UK, class is seen as inherited social status. In the US, class is seen as more or less a synonym for income or wealth. Both of these are wrong.
- lukifer 6y ago
  I think the dividing line in practice between "working" and "middle" is the four-year college degree, serving largely as a status signifier, and marking one a participant in cosmopolitan cultural aesthetics and norms. While a great many college graduates do genuine work, it makes one eligible for high-status "bullshit jobs" [0], in a way that even those in the high-paid working class (plumbers, electricians) are not. A subset of this middle class could arguably be defined as the "managerial class", engaged largely in performative busy-work, but ultimately only borrowing their power from owners. That said, I think the "owning" vs. "working" model is incredibly valuable; and just as "lower class" has been redefined into "working class" (in a noblesse oblige of linguistic dignity!), I'll definitely be referring to the upper class as the "owning class" from now on. ;) (One complication, and arguably the reason that capitalism has proved resilient against its alleged contradictions: the middle class has managed to carve out some portion of ownership, in the forms of home ownership, stocks, etc. Not enough to carry substantive political or economic power, but enough to give them "skin in the game", and therefore a motivation to vote to preserve the ownership status quo, lest they lose their achievements of security and status.) [0] https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
lukifer 6y ago
Scott Alexander recently wrote a great piece about class in America: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on.... tl;dr: one of way of looking at class is that it's not one ladder, defined solely by economic status; rather it's three ladders (Working/Middle/Upper), which are largely independent, and which intersect both economics and culture. In this sense, Jeff Bezos is not actually upper class ("old money"), but the world's most successful middle class worker; and the reason Trump appealed to the working class despite exorbitant wealth, was an enthusiastic embrace of working class culture (baseball hats, fast food).
- bradleyjg 6y ago
  Wasn’t that Michael O’Church’s thesis? He (used to?) post here.
  - lukifer 6y ago
    Huh, it's actually top of his blog right now [0]. Alexander is borrowing from the 80's book by Fussell, so it's apparently an idea that's been kicking around a while. O'Church's piece looks interesting, I'll dig in, thanks for sharing! [0] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2021/01/28/a-reply-to-alex-danco-revisiting-macleod-and-the-three-ladders-in-the-wake-of-trump/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2021/01/28/a-reply-to-a...

drno123 6y ago

To be honest, they were asking for 35% raise, PLUS reduced working hours PLUS benefits. They were offered somewhat smaller raise which they refused, while participating in an illegal strike. From my experience, in most negotiations, you rarely get everything that you want, but you can get a good deal if you are willing to compromise. When you play hard, it can backfire.

krageon 6y ago
> illegal strike I genuinely can't tell if you're being sarcastic with your comment.
- CalRobert 6y ago
  Some industries crucial to public safety have legal restrictions on the right to strike.
  - ookdatnog 6y ago
    I imagine air traffic controllers spontaneously deciding to strike _here and now_ without prior warning would be quite dangerous. But if an air traffic controller strike is announced, say, 24 hours beforehand, it can't be reasonably argued to be a public safety hazard.
    - hpoe 6y ago
      Counterpoint: My wife has a medication that has short shelf life and isn't widely distributed so it needs to be flown via air. Airplanes stop flying my wife no longer gets her medicine, she now dead.
      - AdrianB1 6y ago
        That is true, but you cannot force someone to fly it regularly to her. The miracles of modern medicine allow people to live when this would not have happened 100 years ago, but cannot guarantee that. Take it as a gift, not as a given.

throwawayzRUU6f 6y ago

> had achieved suburban middle class lives as air traffic controllers without having gone to college This sounds almost surreal in today's market. Nowadays: > Candidates typically need an associate’s or a bachelor’s degree from the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative program. Other applicants must have 3 years of progressively responsible work experience, have completed 4 years of college, or have a combination of both

alexjplant 6y ago
Not sure if you're speaking generally or only with regard to ATCs, but it's completely possible to make a good living doing IT work without having a college degree. If you're able to make the jump to software development it can become even more lucrative. The salary progression is more linear than a Stanford grad clearing $200k annually at Google straight out of college but making six figures in your 20s without a degree as a network/cloud engineer or sysadmin is pretty doable.

bryondowd 6y ago

Worth noting that this mass firing is coming around for a second wave of hurt. They re-staffed most of the ATC force with military personnel who were around the same age, all at the same time. Now that block of people are hitting the ATC's mandatory retirement age (56) and last I checked they haven't had much success (arguably intentionally, but that's another story) in increasing their onboarding stream enough to compensate for the sudden loss. Current controllers are already working large (possibly unsafe) amounts of overtime and have limited ability to change locations or positions due to the shortage, which is only getting worse. At some point, they'll either need to find a way to accept more trainees, retain employees longer, or reduce services/throughput. EDIT: I may be out of date. Perhaps this second wave already came and went with little impact. My math says anyone hired in 1981 would be past retirement age by now. Not sure how they handled it.

dylan604 6y ago
where's the plucky upstart wanting to disrupt ATC with their AI trained system to automatically route airtraffic? The uber of ATC?
- stevehawk 6y ago
  move fast and break things can't possibly go wrong in the ATC world.
- bryondowd 6y ago
  Guessing this is humorous, but it does seem like a job that could one day benefit from being automated. The job is highly rules-based, and the rules are well documented requirements. The biggest two problems that immediately come to mind: 1) Current ATC communication with planes happens by human voice over radio. Wouldn't want to trust an AI's speech recognition over that medium, so you'd probably have to mandate some kind of pilot-ATC interface that all planes would need to carry. You'd get huge pushback from the community of small planes. Probably from commercial pilots as well, since they'd have to train on the new system, and it would likely add to their cognitive load, at least short term. 2) We've put a ton of effort into producing a good radar picture to let controllers know where planes are, but it's far from perfect and requires some intuition. Radar waves bend due to atmospheric conditions, and it's difficult/impossible to distinguish real targets from various forms of clutter. The heuristics we currently use are pretty amazing, but you still get things popping up on ATC's radar scope that aren't really there.