"Second Class" - a short book review.

Batya-Ungar Sargon's new book on the American Working Class

Back in May of 2022 I received an interesting request from my editor at Newsweek, Batya-Ungar Sargon, whom I had only started writing for a few months earlier, when she found me discussing the Freedom Convoy on Twitter, and asked me to contribute.

”Hey Gordo, would you mind if I came for a ride with you in your logging truck? I’m doing some research for this book …”

And so it was that a self described Marxist, yet editor at one of the nation’s oldest and most widely read magazines, found herself in the jump seat of a 579 model Peterbilt at 4 o’clock in the morning, audio recorder in hand, asking yours truly what he thought about working class life in America.

Batya made many of these kinds of trips, traveling all over the country, from Florida to Ohio to Arizona and California, interviewing the people who keep this country operational - Electricians, janitors, elder care workers, a guy from Home Depot, and even another trucker (What? I’m not the only one?!?!), in an attempt to get a sense of what is going on with America’s working class in the very strange times we now live in. The long and detailed conversations Batya had with all of us are spread throughout the book as she examines issues, policy, arguments, and the narratives around this particular slice of America’s demographic pie, all the while maintaining a sense of empathetic, yet journalistic, curiosity.

She prefaces the book with a disclaimer of sorts, admitting that many of the subjects are either colleagues, as Batya found us through offering some of us the opportunity to contribute our perspectives to the Newsweek Op-Ed section, or have become friends. It should be obvious that my little review of her book shares a similar disclaimer; one of Batya’s projects has been to find people like me and let us have our say on the very large platform afforded by Newsweek, and I have been happy to accept that opportunity.



The Book is written in seven chapters across two halves, the first of which, “Who is the Working Class?” sub-categorizes ‘the working class’, which is an admittedly broad term, and broader still in a country as massive both geographically and population-wise as the United States. Given the diversity and variations of America’s economy and the regions within which they reside, it only follows that the ‘working class’ are likewise a group with various situations going on.

After an introduction which goes through studies and details and graphs and various other work which has likewise examined this swathe of people, chapters are devoted to three sub-categories, “Struggling”, “Floating”, and “Rising”, all of which are centered around the question of where certain sectors of the working class are situated relative to the archetypal ‘American Dream’ of home ownership, and what is necessary to find oneself in a home.

Though I owned a home when I still lived in Canada many years ago, for various reasons both economic, situational, and personal, I haven’t yet purchased one since moving to the United States back in 2016. Batya considers me a ‘floater’, someone who is managing alright, paying the bills, living the average lifestyle, but has a hard time saving up to buy a place. One could criticize my choice of job, the decision to have children much later in life, the fact I came ‘off the road’ and make much less money in a trade off to be home with my kids, or any other number of my own personal life decisions. Judgement towards others is something we all do, and I am not above it. That said, Batya does a good job of situating these various categories of people, and their struggles to buy a house, or merely even get by, in the circumstances we are in. Dollar devaluation and out of control inflation, rising home prices in various markets, wage stagnation for many traditionally blue collar jobs, and the downward pressure on those wages brought to us by America’s seeming unwillingness to stem the tide of illegal immigration, all come to bear on the question of why many people in the working class are having a hard time purchasing a home.

Speaking of judgement, and as an aside, a trend I see with many of the people in the '“Struggling” chapter of the book is with staying single. Seems more than a few of Batya’s other subjects wound up with partners that were of net negative influence on their lives, and made the existing financial struggle even worse. Thinking about my old man, who is on his fourth wife, and the many others who just can’t seem to handle being alone for any stretch of time, and how that effects the rest of their lives, is an interesting question to me. Life is tough enough already, nevermind inviting unnecessary drama and hardship into our lives through poor partner selection.

That said, I’ve lived a very solitary existence for much of my life, which is aberrant and intolerable for most. To each their own, I guess.

Later in the book the power of marriage as a stabilizing force is mentioned, which I can’t argue with, but would only add that marriage is not a magic bullet or something that should be rushed into.

It’s not all bad news, though - the “Rising” chapter features a few people for whom life seems to be going along as it should. This seems to correlate with those whom are tradespeople, entrepreneurs, or who have stuck around a job long enough and whose intrinsic competency lead them to low level management positions. Fewer of those positions in America, however, are available to those who work their way up from the shop floor, because of another problem identified in the book - credentialism.

Many good jobs in America have now been blocked off to the working class because corporations have imposed the requirement of a four year post-secondary education where that level of schooling is clearly not necessary. Though Batya doesn’t mention it, Peter Turchin’s Elite Overproduction Theory comes to mind - its easy enough for companies to require the degrees now when so many people have them, wether they are useful or necessary for the job at hand, or not.

Another question approached by Batya, in the second half of the book called “How can the lives of Working Class Americans be improved?”, is that of union membership and participation, and in particular, why so many working class people are skeptical of them.

There’s a great anecdote I will share from the book which speaks to those of us in possession of motivation, work ethic, and some appreciation for basic concepts like time efficiency -

There was also another objection that came up: Some people I spoke to viewed unions as somehow anti-meritocratic.

Skyler Adleta explained it best. He got a union plumbing apprenticeship pretty much right out of high school, but it didn’t go well. His first day on the job, the journeyman supervising him told Skyler to drill twenty holes into a plywood floor. Skyler drilled the holes, which took about two hours, and then went back to the journeyman and said, “Okay, now what?”

But the journeyman was annoyed. “I told you to spend the whole day drilling holes. You spent two hours drilling holes.”

“Yeah, but they’re all done.”

“Well, I guess then you’re all done today.”

“You telling me to go home?”

“I’m not. We’re off at 3:30.”

Skyler stood around for a while, but he’s a high-energy person, so he picked up a broom and started sweeping, but then he got yelled at again.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m sweeping!” Skyler said.

“That’s not your job! Your job was to drill holes and you screwed that up.”


During Covid, union leadership showed themselves to be part of the same over-produced elites, more often than not university educated and not drawn from the membership they claim to represent, by having completely dropped the ball on defending their members rights to bodily autonomy.

In Canada, for instance, unions, wether public sector, trade, or labor, were all in lockstep with Justin Trudeau’s insane mandates, and were more than happy to throw their membership’s personal autonomy and right to work out the window.

Private sector union membership has been on the decline for decades, and unless and until unions purge themselves of credentialed soft-hands who have never actually done the jobs of those they claim to represent, and turn away from sucking up to the rest of the managerial elite whom are driving our society into the toilet, then many workers like myself are going to stay the hell away from them.

RETVRN

A thread that runs through the book is the question of immigration, and its effects on the market for those whose labor contributions are at the lower end of the income scale.

To Batya’s great credit, she takes on all of her subjects commentary on the matter, and neither scolds them for WrongThink, as we can expect from most media who dismiss these concerns as racist, nor reacts like so many BoomerCons who believe the answer to everything is to just work harder.

A snippet -

And yet, the facts don’t lie: immigration, especially the kind of mass immigration we’ve had in the past forty years has been extremely punishing to those in the working class, part of a dark brew of factors that have reduced their economic prosperity and cut them out of the American Dream. When elites call people racist for opposing immigration, they are doing so from a very unique position of privilege, having been the beneficiaries of mass immigration, in a very real, economic way, while the working class has paid for it. The rise in GDP that economists attribute to immigration is real—but it magically found its way to the top 10 percent, while everyone else was experiencing the opposite impact.

You can see this by comparing the stagnation of working-class wages with the number of immigrants entering the U.S. Back in 1970, the high-water mark for working-class wages, immigrants represented just 4.7 percent of the total U.S. population. Today, immigrants account for 13.7 percent of the U.S. population— closing in on the highest it’s ever been, which was in 1890—not coincidentally, another era characterized by extreme inequality, as you can see in figure 9.

Immigrants now account for 19 percent of workers overall, but the number is much higher for low-wage workers: Immigrants are 32 percent of workers making less than $30,000, compared to just 16 percent of workers making over $60,000 a year, meaning that the pressure that immigrant workers are putting on the labor market is twice as great for lower-income Americans than it is for higher-income ones. And because these numbers are from the United States Census, you can be sure they are undercounting the impact of illegal immigration on the labor market, as Oren Cass points out.

“Immigration has provided the margin between a labor market in which employers would feel constant pressure to find and retain workers—especially lower-wage ones—and the labor market as it has operated, in which they can offer the same low wages and poor conditions for decades on end,” writes Cass.

It’s this rise in mass immigration that’s been left out of the story of stagnating working-class wages, though it’s something working-class Americans are acutely aware of. Yet when people object to this level of mass immigration, they are often called racist, creating a taboo around the topic. Until President Trump made immigration a cornerstone of his campaign, both Republicans and Democrats had an agreement around lax immigration policy that favored amnesty and overall more immigrants.

There’s been some other high-profile books examining class in America, from JD Vance’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ to the recent ‘Troubled’ by Rob Henderson, which are autobiographical and not strictly about the working class. Both of these men have a distinct viewpoint from within what Chris Arnade calls ‘Back Row America’ and their own journeys are worthy of consideration. That said, what helped both of those men out was joining the military, which is typically something younger people do, and not a solution for everyone; especially when the US military seems to be more interested in supporting the forces of Rainbow Flag Globalist Hegemony, and not the working class of America from where they draw most of their recruits.

Though Batya doesn’t mention it, its worth noting that over 20 trillion dollars have been spent destroying other locations around the world over the past two decades, and the only beneficiaries of this project have been those who live in the increasingly wealthy counties which surround Washington DC; these Military Industrial Complex Contractors exactly the type of people who will probably never read her book, or give a single tinkers damn about anyone in America who works for a living. The operations which these folks profited greatly from have contributed to the migrant crisis across the west, which overlaps with our immigration problems, as well as the rise in ‘populism’ so many of these same elitists are constantly shitting their pants about.

Perhaps a method of solving many problems for America’s working class would be to halt the shoveling of our communal taxpayer funds at these projects, and instead redirect them inward.

Looking north again, we have seen Justin Trudeau send well over 10 billion $CDN to the Ukraine meat grinder (approaching 600,000 killed or maimed), while just yesterday imposing a new, across the board carbon tax on nearly everything in the economy, which is just about as regressive a move as any politician could make against their own people.

A topic brought up by many of my fellow subjects in Batya’s book is the idea of ‘citizenship’, and what that means relative to people’s economic positions, and the aspirations they have for themselves and their families. Seems to me that our political ‘leaders’ have no interest in serving their constituents; they want us to pay income tax, oh yes, we are definitely citizens then, but in every other way, they view the working class as human resources slurry, meant to be sloshed around wherever is convenient for them, but without any responsibilities due us at all. In fact, the ‘citizen’ population of countries, where it concerns those who actually make material reality function, are just an admixture, to be whipped together as necessary by the technocratic managerial elite who make up our governments, with non-citizens whom are likewise viewed in similar fashion.

Batya wraps up the book with criticism of both left and right and how they treat the working class, and how standard responses of Republicans and Democrats are more or less useless, counter-productive, or worse. I can’t disagree with her assessments, but I would simply add that the political leadership of America, across the board, don’t even view us as human any longer, much less as citizens. At very best we are a caste of untouchables whom they have the unfortunate job of ‘managing’, and until a majority of people in America approach the problem with this clear eyed understanding that it is, in fact, Them against Us, with Them being the biggest problem, issues facing the working class are not going to be solved.

Second Class, overall, is a Studs Terkel-esque document that goes directly to the people, and is a great piece of long form journalism that our governments and their advisers would do well to take heed from. Neither from the left nor the right, Batya asks questions that the priors of both camps would prevent them from asking, and she also doesn’t declare any topics off limits, something the new censorious left would not allow. This makes Second Class a much better book than anything you will get from the NPR or Nation/Mother Jones adjacent crowd.

Batya has agreed to be a guest on my Voice of GO(r)D podcast soon, so if you read her book and have any questions, send them my way.

Second Class can be purchased directly from Encounter Books or if you must make Jeff Bezos any more wealthy, you can buy it at Amazon.

Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail are welcomed and encouraged - gordilocks@protonmail.com