Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America

Joining the election-year onslaught of political publishing, Draut (Strapped) taps the working class as 2016’s biggest potential transformers. Draut’s definition of the working class is useful—“individuals in the labor force who do not have bachelor’s degrees”—and she uses two other variables, occupation and income, to paint a dire portrait of decline. Today, members of the working class are most likely to work as “retail salespeople, cashiers, food service and prep workers, and janitors,” earning the hourly wage that goes along with such positions. A growing number of working-class people care for the very young and very old, important work often left unprotected by labor laws. Members of the new working class are less likely than in past decades to work in manufacturing—where the work was physically challenging but generally well compensated—and also much less likely to be white and male. Diversity both complicates political organizing and opens a door of opportunity for successful union solidarity and consciousness-raising. The book is unabashedly progressive, growing increasingly political, accusatory, and angry in its later chapters, where it lays claim to the “left flank of the Democratic Party” with a goal of moving “the center of the party back to being the champions of the working class.” [em]Agent: Andrew Stuart, Stuart Agency. (Apr.) [/em]