Working Class

See: White Collar. See: Blue Collar.

The “working class” could mean a few different things depending on the context, much of it pejorative.

The most general, catch-all form of the term is used to describe people of a social class who work jobs with low pay and less education required, such as physical labor or low-skill labor. If you’ve heard “blue collar” workers, that’s basically this use of “working class.”

Another type of “working class” is how economists use it to describe adults without a college degree. Yet this is not super-official among all economists. Some say that the working class is the middle class, while others say it’s the lower-middle class. Either way, it’s the majority of people toward the bottom of the income scale.

Perhaps the oldest, OG form of “working class” comes from economist Karl Marx, who defined the working class as those who do not have ownership of the “means of production,” or the capital we use to make things (land, machinery, etc.). People who don’t have ownership of the means of production then must sell their labor to those who do have those things, in order for them to make a living. Under this framework, you’re either a part of the working class, a.k.a. the proletariat, or you’re a part of the bourgeoisie, who owns the means of production.