Sleeping Giant
The Untapped Economic and Political Power of America's New Working Class
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
There was a time when America’s working class was seen as the backbone of the American economy, having considerable political, economic, and moral authority. But the working class we have now—far more female and racially diverse and employed by the fast food, retail, health care, and other service industries—has been marginalized, if not ignored, by politicians and pundits. This is changing, swiftly and dramatically.
Today’s working class is a sleeping giant. And as Tamara Draut makes abundantly clear, it is just now waking up to its untapped political power. Sleeping Giant is the first major examination of the new working class and the role it will play in our economic and political future. Blending moving individual narratives, historical background, and sophisticated analysis, Draut forcefully argues that this newly energized class is far along in the process of changing America for the better.
Draut examines the legacy of exclusion based on race and gender that contributes to the invisibility of the new working class, despite their entwinement in everyone’s day-to-day life. No longer confined to the assembly line, today’s working class watches our children and cares for our parents. They park our cars, screen our luggage, clean our offices, and cook and serve our meals. They are us.
With “Fight for $15” minimum-wage protests popping up throughout the country (and in some places winning) and economic inequality being recognized as one of the defining issues of our time, today’s working class will soon become impossible to ignore and foolish to dismiss. Sleeping Giant is the first book to tell the story of this extraordinary transformation in full and inspiring detail.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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."
