The Fate of the Working Class in Metropolitan America

• In Event: Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 18. Race, Class, and Gender

Abstract

This paper examines how recent skill polarization has transformed the geography and economic prospects of the American working class. Using a relational class framework and applied to over 300 metropolitan areas from 2004 to 2020, we analyze the economic fate of American workers that have the least power in their places of work. Our analysis reveals three central findings: (1) the working class has declined in employment share by 4.8% and experienced significant compositional deskilling; (2) most working-class employment is in large cities where non-college employment rates are high (by American standards) but the concentration of working-class occupations is low; (3) when conceptualizing working class flourishing via three dimensions—working class concentration, non-college employment rates, and median hourly wage—modeling results show that skill polarization and the transition to the so-called knowledge economy has indeed partially compensated the disappearance of comfortable middle-skill jobs through spillover effects. However, that compensation has at the same time systematically undermined the concentration of working-class employment that has been theorized as necessary for overcoming the obstacles to collective action. In other words, the very conditions that improve material outcomes for individual workers simultaneously disperse and fragment the class as a collective entity, potentially creating a structural barrier to class-based mobilization.

Authors

• Di Zhou, New York University

• Virgilio Urbina Lazardi, New York University