When politicians talk about America’s working class, they often mean blue collar workers without college degrees. But as more workers feel financially squeezed, should we expand that definition?

Guests

Kathryn Anne Edwards, labor economist. Opinion writer at Bloomberg. Host of the “Optimist Economy” podcast. She also posts on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube as “Keds Economist.”

Also Featured

Kristina, compliance manager for a transportation company in Atlanta, Georgia. On Point is not using Kristina’s full name to protect her privacy.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Coketown, England, a town of machinery and chimneys, a town of red brick or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it. Coketown is a creation of Charles Dickens in his 1854 book, Hard Times. It’s actually one of my favorite Dickens books, and he didn’t have to look far for inspiration because hundreds of Coketowns were very real in mid-nineteenth century Britain.

But it took Dickens’ special genius to give us what I think is one of the most evocative descriptions of working-class life in the Industrial Revolution. He writes, quote, “Coketown was vast piles of buildings where the piston of the steam engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.

It contained several large streets, all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound, upon the same pavements to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow.”

End quote.

The concept of the working class has been inextricably tied to industry ever since its first usage more than one hundred years before Dickens wrote Hard Times. In 1757, a guy with the wonderful name Malachy Postlethwayt, he was real, not a Dickens creation. Malachy published the term working class in his Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce. And he used it to describe a new category of people who were not subsistence farmers, they weren’t artisans or journeymen, and they certainly were not landed gentry or the aristocracy.

As the Industrial Revolution produced a bewildering number of changes, it also produced an entirely new class, and I think it’s actually really important that the term comes from England and all the strictures of the British class system that it imposed. The working class had nothing to sell but their labor, and industrialists were eager to buy up that labor brutally and in bulk.

Here we are, two and a half centuries later, and I’d say our common understanding of the term working class in the United States maybe hasn’t changed all that much. Physical labor, not ownership. A college degree maybe isn’t a part of the picture. On Point listener Laurie in Olympia, Washington describes her working-class life this way.

From the time I was eight or nine, I was working in berry fields, picking berries. I worked in a garment factory when I was going to high school. No one sent any of the women in my family to college, so I worked in telecommunications, outside climbing poles for 26 years. My last four years in telecommunications was in construction.

I worked by the hour. We could work Monday through Saturday, scheduled Saturdays with a Wednesday or Thursday off. Every day when I got home, I was dirty and sweaty.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s very real in Laurie’s life and for millions of other Americans. But these days, I wonder. If it was the new economic reality of 18th century Britain that gave rise to the term working class, maybe the economic realities of 21st century America should cause us to expand that definition.

Obviously, I am far from the first person to ask this, and in fact, I cannot resist. All the way back in 1980, the late and immortally great Dolly Parton sang.

(9 TO 5 PLAYS)

They just use your mind, not just your physical labor anymore. All you can do is just barely get by, like On Point listener Zach, who holds a master’s degree in Lakeview, New York.

I’m a first-generation college student. I’ve still had to resort to working low-paying jobs. I’ve had to work jobs that make it hard for me to make ends meet.

And looking up the definition of working class, I’m not so sure that manual labor is an accurate definition of it. I’m running for office, Erie County Legislature, and the people that I come across who are struggling, a lot of them have degrees and just can’t find good jobs. I would expand the definition to include people who have to deal with the day-to-day struggles that American life provides.

CHAKRABARTI: Don’t get me wrong, working class will always imply labor of some kind. And a lot of the time it’s going to be that physical, manual labor that we’ve historically thought about. But now, should we be thinking of the American working class not simply as labor, but as a broader, more basic state of being? What if we defined working class as anyone who has to work, in whatever kind of job that might be, to materially survive from month to month or even day to day?

If we did that, how would that change what we expect from the politicians who claim to govern for America’s working people? I’m going to put that question to Kathryn Anne Edwards. She’s a labor economist. She’s also an opinion writer at Bloomberg and host of the Optimist Economy podcast, and she posts on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube as Keds Economist, and she’s written a lot about this exact same question, and joins us from Houston, Texas.

Kathryn, welcome to On Point

KATHRYN ANNE EDWARDS: Thank you so much for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: I’m gonna get distracted for a second. Keds Economist, the first thing that comes to mind is the shoes. That’s not what you’re talking about?

EDWARDS: And I’ll know I’ve made it in the world when they sue me for copyright infringement. That’s my biggest marker of success is when there’s a lawsuit filed from the actual Keds. Keds is a nickname, Kathryn Edwards, Keds. And I didn’t know when I started out picking a Twitter handle eight years ago that I would end up having so many followers. But yeah, there’s going to be an injunction, and it’s going to be a great day.

CHAKRABARTI: I got you. You know it means I made it … clearly you’re too young, because immediately I saw Keds and I was like, “Girl, I’m back in middle school. This is great.” Okay, so back to the more serious matter at hand. I wanted to go through that long sort of historical introduction here. Because I do actually think it’s important to talk about when we think about who the working class is today, to discuss for a second that this emerged from a really pivotal point, I would say, a change point, not just in Britain, but in all of human history when we talk about the Industrial Revolution and this emergence of an entirely new class of people.

Give us your two cents on that.

EDWARDS: What I think is so fascinating about Postlethwayt’s original definition is that working class in some ways has become the remainder category. You’re not an artisanal class. You’re not a shopkeeper. You’re not an owner of factories. You’re not a subsistence farmer.

You’re not an independent farmer. You’re the everybody who’s left are the people that have to work. And it really does seem like a catch-all category for the remainder. And over the course of the two and a half centuries since he wrote that, there have been many definitions of the working class, many people who have identified with it, but it often comes down to, I’m not, at least in certain terms, I’m not the thing above me.

And especially in the U.S. today, what I’m really struck by of this expanded identification with the working class is that it’s so much a function of feeling like I’m not middle class.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, interesting. And of course, how we define middle class in America. We’ll talk about that in a few minutes, because you’re exactly right.

It’s that that space, that in between or the border, the mental border in between. But there’s also an important point to make in terms of the working, the emergence of the working class and the Industrial Revolution also dovetails with this, again, the concept of labor versus capital, right?

Because as I said in the introduction, we were talking about a group of people not just in Britain, but other countries at the time who all they had to, quote-unquote, “sell” was their labor. And I think that labor versus capital distinction becomes ever sharper with subsequent generations.

EDWARDS: Yes, and that they sold it in a market. The labor market is a fundamental part of the working class. We’ve had lots of people who had nothing to give but their labor, but they weren’t off and compensated for it monetarily, right? We had serfdom and fiefdoms. We had landed gentry who had people renting and working on their farms, and they only had their labor to give.

They didn’t own anything, but they were not paid wages for the work that they did.

CHAKRABARTI: So having the emergence of a labor market. That would imply that then this is a class of people who I’m not sure I could claim this in 18th and 19th century Britain, but ostensibly, if they were part of a market, they should have some kind of then economic power.

EDWARDS: Depending on their stance in the market. Yeah, power shifts within the market, within a labor market, across a labor market, in different parts of the labor market. Some people in the labor market can be quite powerful, even if they’re workers and some are very powerless in the market. Okay, so we have this huge civilizational change with the Industrial Revolution.

And interestingly also the continuance of massive income inequality. Although the Industrial Revolution also, to be fair, brought along some positive changes for humanity I don’t think we would have without it. But let’s fast-forward now to the working, quote-unquote, “working class” in the United States.

In the 30 seconds or so we have before our first break, Kathryn, is there any formal definition of working class, whether it be in the census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, anywhere?

EDWARDS: Not that I’m aware of.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, me neither. And why do you think that is?

EDWARDS: I think because it’s the same reason why you don’t have a fixed definition of the middle class.

There’s lots of room for how people see themselves versus how people respond to their economic situation, whether that’s a response of feeling empowered, of feeling powerless, and knowing that can vary across people.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: We’re talking about whether it’s time for all of us, this whole country, to expand what our common definition of the working class is.

For example, here’s Bob. He’s in Mashpee, Massachusetts, and he told us he considers himself, or considered himself working class in the early part of his career, and he has two distinct ways of defining it.

BOB: First, do you shower before you go to work or do you shower after you come home from work? The second was the level of wages.

If it was below poverty level or close to just above minimum wage, I figured that was working class, so that would include waitressing, early clerical work, delivery men, and the like.

So Catherine I’m not going to ask you what your specific definition of working class is just yet, but more broadly, how do you think when the working class is talked about, whether it’s Americans amongst themselves in the media or in politics, what are we presuming that is?

EDWARDS: I think it really depends on whether or not you’re having a political conversation or not. Because the politics of the working class, especially, in the current era, is very much about this litmus test for Democrats in primaries and general elections, this kind of fabled loss of the white working-class male that happened two generations ago, and how Democrats need to win them if they’re going to win.

And so every election, every candidate, every primary, it all gets framed around what a certain set of white people are doing in the ballot box.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I just stop you right there? Because I think you made such an important point, and I really wanna put we in the media under the microscope here, because I think too often we just use the shorthand of working class, right?

That it’s everywhere. I try, I’m not perfect by any means, but I try when I say that phrase, to specify whether I mean working people in general, or, as you said, white working-class males. Because when we think about Americans who have to work just to get by, that includes vast numbers of people of color, right?

But their voting patterns historically have been different than the past 20, 30 years of white working-class males.

EDWARDS: Yes, and I think it’s white men who don’t have a college degree as a voting bloc. They are of outsize importance. And you, again not to be too harsh on the media, but you could just

CHAKRABARTI: You can.

EDWARDS: Read the news any time over the past 10 years. And it is like they are the only group of voters in the U.S. And then, occasionally people of Hispanic origin. But it’s they have such an intense focus politically that I think the economics behind what is the working class and what is the policy that they need.

The issue I often take with this white working-class male is, one, it conflates it with blue collar, which typically excludes women, and so you de facto just drop women who work in industries that wouldn’t necessarily be blue collar because they’re doing things like childcare, or they’re in the service sector, or they’re your waitress, they’re bringing you food, they’re seating you at a table.

They’re excluded from the blue-collar definition that we casually conflate with white working-class male. And then, of course, the second problem is that politicians, I’m not trying to say that they don’t act in good faith, but they might not always be that good at designing economic policy. Because the conversation about blue-collar work that we don’t have in the country, in as large degrees as we used to, becomes I’ll be the one to recreate the past for you.

I’ll be the one to bring back manufacturing jobs. I’ll be the one to get more factories into rural Ohio. And it’s a very disingenuous conversation because whatever you think about manufacturing production in the United States, if you close your eyes and think about what a factory looks like in 50 years, there aren’t many people inside.

Factory and production employment has been going in one direction since the 1920s, and that’s to rely less on labor and more on machines. And it’s been called lots of things. It’s some version of automation. But there is this mythology that we can somehow recreate 1950s America and have lots of good jobs for people who don’t have a college degree, but that this somehow relies on manufacturing employment, and that conversation is embedded into so much of our political coverage.

Yeah. And I think it’s both wrong to exclude lots of people who are working from political attention, and then of course, it’s wrong to give attention to people and then sell them a false bill of goods.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Even if we weren’t going to expand the definition of working class beyond people who really have to do a lot of physical labor, which I think we should, but even if we weren’t, you’re exactly right.

When we think about manufacturing jobs, it still privileges a very narrow slice of the kinds of physical labor that are done today. We had a show a couple of weeks ago where our guest said he thinks we need to expand working class. He wasn’t very broad in his expansion, but he said to, for example a lot of people in healthcare, home health aides who are doing incredibly physical work, but they have not been historically considered part of the working class because it wasn’t factory work.

EDWARDS: Yes, and I think we have given the idea of blue collar working on the line in a production setting this privilege of like, this is the working class, and even if you were to say, “Actually, working class jobs are physical jobs,” child care is a physical job. Health care is a physical job. But if you were to … that’s extending, I would say, maybe a skill and feature definition of working class.

That still excludes a lot of people who economically are in the same place, but then we would say you don’t use your hands, so you’re not working class. I think the need to exclude people from the definition has consequences because of how we talk about policy and how we think about designing policy, and if I don’t think, one of the lowest paid jobs in our economy is hostess. The person that walks you back to your table. All right, she’s not in a factory. She’s probably a woman. She’s overwhelmingly going to be a person of color, and she doesn’t lift things. She doesn’t carry things.

She just walks back and forth in a small space. But because she’s not working class, we don’t care about her policy or her voting or things like that. I worry about what’s to gain in our economic and political discourse by deciding she doesn’t count.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay, so that brings me to the second chunk, the second part of the issue here.

So it’s not just a particular type of work, but more broadly speaking, in 21st century America, think we’re fundamentally, as you said, we’re talking about income and the ability to get by. So let’s listen to Howard Turner. He’s in Elkhart, Indiana. And he has been in the working class. He self-identifies as having been working class his whole life, and specifically a subcategory of that, he says.

HOWARD TURNER: I consider myself poor working class because my income normally is right around my cost of living. My paycheck is above my cost of living because I ended my health insurance for the rest of the year, because I could not afford health insurance, because that put me even to or below what my paycheck was.

CHAKRABARTI: So Kathryn, Howard and the many other On Point listeners who shared their stories with us, I think they get right to what I would argue is what should be the common definition of working class in America now. And tell me if you think this is too expansive, but it’s anyone who has to work because in order to survive, literally survive, to put a roof over their heads, to eat, and that the have to work part is defined by a precarity that if they did not work, that maybe even just next week they wouldn’t have some of those things, food, shelter, et cetera.

It’s an income question. What would you think about that?

EDWARDS: I would attach … I think they’re … okay, so I think we’re doing great. People have to work. People have to work makes them working class. I like that it’s simple. It’s easy to access and understand. I think the have to work to survive encapsulates as you say, a sense of precarity that goes beyond, I don’t know I think people would take issue with the idea that someone, say a couple, they pull down $300,000 a year. They have to work to make their mortgage, but they live in a house, they live in a six-bedroom house. And they have to work to pay their bills, but they make plenty of money, and there’s no sense of sure, their life is vulnerable, but they also got a million in their 401s if anything goes really wrong.

Yeah. So I think that there is a positionality to the working class that is removed from some degree of comfort, from some degree of asset holding, of having the big goods like a house that they can afford. I think there’s something to wedge into that sense of precarity to get at the people who feel like they can’t make it.

The other part that I think we could do is to wedge in on the quality of job. It’s one thing if you have to work, if you have a really nice cushy job with great health and great benefits, you’ve never really struggled to pay for things. That doesn’t mean you spend all the time, but you’re fine.

I think there’s a job quality metric that is at the heart of the working class because there’s some type of lack of respect, lack of dignity, lack of safety that makes you feel like you aren’t middle class. I said this earlier, but I do think part of being working class in the U.S. is being not middle class, of not feeling like you’ve achieved this storybook middle class American life.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so there was a lot there. The dignity part we’re going to get back to, but you also got to something else, which is I’ll rephrase it a little. Tell me if I got this all wrong. But my sense is that the American dream, to put it bluntly, has always been about having the ability and opportunity to not just get by, but to get ahead, and that many people in this country today feel that the best hope they have is to just get by.

And the question now, though, is at what income level do people feel like they’re just getting by? And this is where it actually gets pretty controversial, Kathryn, you brought this point up. If you’re earning $300,000 a year, but you have a house whose mortgage consumes most of that money, are you working class?

Or because you have the house, do you have a pretty big asset that makes you an asset, part of the asset-owning class? We talked to Christina. She’s a single mom in the Atlanta area, and she works as a compliance manager for a transportation company in Atlanta. And we’re just using her first name in order to protect her and her family’s privacy.

And she told us that she has a college degree, and she makes around $98,000 a year, but she still feels financially squeezed.

CHRISTINA: I’m doing okay in the sense that my bills are paid. We have food most of the time. Sometimes the pantries are a little bit bare. We’re making ends meet, but thinking about future planning for my daughter, who is 14, thinking about college, in the near future, it’s a little overwhelming.

So I’d say that I have a lot of anxiety with finances, especially because it’s like if the rug gets pulled out, we’re on the streets. So that’s what I worry about.

CHAKRABARTI: By the way, I said that Christina makes $98,000 a year. You might think that’s a lot, but in the metro Atlanta area, the median income according to most recent census data, is $92,000 a year.

That’s median. And Christina doesn’t have any student loans. She told us she worked through college. She pays $1,700 a month in rent for what she calls a, quote, “crappy apartment.” After that, and her utility bills, she says she usually has around $200 to $300 left from her paycheck for things like gas and groceries.

CHRISTINA: My power bill between 2025 and 2026 has gone up 100% with the same usage. I’ve reached out to the landlord. I’ve reached out to the power company, and there’s nothing that they can do. And for somebody like me, the change from $98 to $220 a month is a huge impact. So it has been pretty common for me to just go do Uber Eats on a Saturday and make an extra $120 just so I can use it for gas to get to my main job.

I just keep thinking that I shouldn’t be working this hard and having to do all this.

CHAKRABARTI: Christina says she’s been feeling the sting with grocery prices too.

CHRISTINA: I was, shopping at, here we have Publix and Kroger. Those are like the higher end grocery stores. Then I was like, “This is getting too expensive.”

So I downgraded to Walmart, and then Walmart’s prices got a little more expensive, so we downgraded to Aldi. And now with all the meat prices and also the issues with the FDA and their food regulation, that makes me nervous. So we’re mostly vegetarian, and I’ve tried to get my grocery budget down to around $75 to $100 a week, which is extremely low.

But again, to accommodate for the unpredictability of everything else, I needed to make an adjustment that I could control.

CHAKRABARTI: So with those bills and expenses, Christina rarely has anything left over each month. But she does have a 401k, and most of her savings are in that retirement account through work, which she says she feels lucky to have.

However, she did have to dip into her 401k recently for an $1,800 car repair.

CHRISTINA: I want to retire one day. I don’t want to work forever. It feels like, am I just going to have to keep pulling out of that? Is that really going to be my savings account? But I don’t think that’s what it’s meant to be.

CHAKRABARTI: So all in all, Christina tells us that she does consider herself working class.

CHRISTINA: When I look around at my neighbors because I think you can judge based on where you live and your lifestyle. Like my neighbor upstairs, it’s a family from Guatemala, and the father is a painter. Next to me is an officer in the Air Force and his family.

Across from me is a guy that owns another construction company. So I would say because I’m surrounded by the working class, yeah, absolutely, I am. I always thought when I made it to X amount, I would be fine. And what’s been so frustrating for me is as I’ve been growing in my career, the cost of living has skyrocketed.

I just don’t know how much longer people like me, and people who make less than me, because I’m, I acknowledge, like I make a decent income. But I often think of my neighbors and my coworkers who don’t, and how are they making it right now? I just feel like we’re at a breaking point soon.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Kathryn, is Christina part of America’s working class?

EDWARDS: She absolutely nailed it. The notion that we want to cling to as Americans is that there is some dollar amount that once we earn it, we’re fine. And we have this almost security blanket that once we make a certain income or once we do a certain thing, we’ll be okay economically.

And there is no level of income in the U.S. that most people will reach that will actually get them economic security, because they are faced with an overwhelming number of market failures in the delivery of key goods and services.

CHAKRABARTI: There’s no level of income?

EDWARDS: I think the level of income that a lot of people could reach.

If you still hear about people who pull down a half a million dollars, but their mortgage is so much, they’ve got kids in childcare, they’ve got kids in college, and their out-of-pocket is through … now maybe they have a 401k, but I don’t think that makes them working class. I think that the definition or thinking about what makes someone working class is helping people view broader economic issues for which income is not a protection.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: The story we heard earlier from Christina definitely will ring true to millions of people.

But I gotta say, I also can hear in my mind lots of other people saying, “Hey, hang on for a second. Christina earns $98,000 a year. She almost earns $100,000 a year. She’s close to six figures.” Now, she lives in an expensive city in the Atlanta Metro area, but maybe her being a member of the working class has less to do with the specifics of her labor and more to do with choices, right?

Folks might say Christina could move somewhere else where it’s cheaper. She could rein in her expenses. She could change what her lifestyle is.” But, an income of $98,000 with also a 401k by no sensible definition could mean the kind of precarity that it seems that we’re talking about, that perceived, or I should say real or perceived, that truly should define working people in America.

She could just move somewhere else and not be working class.

EDWARDS: Wages are a function of local labor markets, so if she moved somewhere cheaper, she’d probably make less money. I will say, okay, so two things. The first is, yeah, tale as old as time, there’s nothing like blaming people for economic struggles, because it must be their fault.

I’ve often thought that there’s a degree of self-preservation there, that if you can blame people for struggling, that means that your economic fate is entirely in your hands. And so if you’re fine, it’s because you did it all, and if they’re not fine, it’s because they messed it all up, and that really undercuts what we know about where economic insecurity comes from, broader macroeconomic trends, things that happen in various industries over time.

So I know the personal finance sector loves to sell that there’s just one product or one trick to make you have a secure life, but that does not play out in real time. The trick is to have a better economy and better economic policy, which is out of the control of most people. The second thing I want to get at is, when you think about working class, I think there’s four ways to arrive at a definition.

The first way is the one that we kind of discarded immediately, of what politicians say. That’s, yeah, the world’s an easier place to understand if you don’t listen to them in the first place. So it’s not just about whether or not the Democrats are going to get a certain share of white male voters in elections.

So that’s, let’s discard that one. Then you have the three that are left. I think one of those is job quality and content, which is, the guy from Massachusetts that’s like, “Do you shower at the end of the day or the beginning of the day?” When do you need to clean off?

That there’s a physical aspect to jobs. And the, of course, the danger there, as we mentioned earlier, is that you exclude people who aren’t necessarily in a physical job but are in a low-quality job. And not all low-quality jobs are physical. So if you think of working class as a job quality metric, that’s one way to arrive at a definition.

CHAKRABARTI: But quality meaning what?

EDWARDS: Quality like, do you have a paid sick day? Do you know your shift more than a week in advance? Are you in an industry that has high levels of wage theft, of being told to clock out and then finish sweeping or finish doing something?

Do you get paid holidays?

CHAKRABARTI: I just wanted to clarify, yeah, I just wanted to clarify that because sometimes people might walk away thinking, oh quality meaning is it a job where you found your bliss? But that is not at all what you’re talking about.

EDWARDS: No, like really tangible measures of the job offers wage and non-wage benefits that would denote that it’s easy to keep. One way to think of job quality as easy, it’s easy to keep. There are lots of jobs that are hard to keep because the schedule and the way that the work is assigned is so punishing.

Okay, so the third way. … Yeah, so the second way I think is just pure pay, which is really tempting to say there’s some level that you’re making it in America, and then you’re not working class anymore because you’ve hit some income level. And then I think the third way, the one that seems to be expanding in the current economic conditions, is this idea of security.

Where it’s not really about the quality of the job. Maybe my job is fine, and maybe the pay is okay, but I cannot purchase a good economic life. I can’t purchase rent and utilities and food and health care and childcare or my college tuition for my kids and have money to save. So these three definitions are related, but you’re gonna have people that, you know, in terms of this massive Venn diagram of working class, you’re gonna have people that aren’t in every circle.

But there is a notion, I think, that’s very American as it reflects the middle class, that people feel working class when they cannot afford their life anymore. And there’s lots of different lives that people need to afford based on where they live and their family situation. But if you can’t afford your life, you feel working class.

If you make low money, you feel working class. If you’re in a terrible job where you’re treated like dirt, you feel working class. I think the point of bringing people together in an identity which, this is the whole world’s nail when you’re a hammer for a labor economist, is how to enact economic policy to address each of these kind of avenues towards working class identification.

How do we actually improve their lives, whether or not the people in the bad jobs, the people not making that much money, or the people who maybe have an okay job but can’t afford electricity?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I actually I agree with what you said, but I’m gonna play the foil here a little bit, Kathryn.

Because when you say when we’re talking about when people feel like they cannot afford their life. The reason why I wanna focus on that is because we started by saying, and I think rightly, that in the media and in politics when we deploy the phrase working class, we’re talking about this narrow subset of white, non-college educated men.

But on the other end of the extreme, there are politicians out there right now who are so radically expanding what they believe the working class are, that it basically could include just about every, if not most, if not every American. And here’s the example I’m gonna point to. It’s New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

In a July interview from this year, so just a little bit ago, with The New York Times, host Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Mayor Mamdani to give his definition of the working class, and here’s their exchange.

I think if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that is one definition of being a part of the working class.

So that’s everyone with a W-2? Is that kind of…

1099s too. I’m less interested —

So someone making $250,000 a year is working class?

I haven’t sat at home and asked myself where it starts and stops. What I would say is for those who are working to try and afford the basic dignities of life and aren’t able to do so, I think that is also a working class. And oftentimes we’re asked of how we divide this country. I think there’s only one majority in this country. It’s the working class.

That just doesn’t ring true to me.

What do you think?

It’s less what I think and more that it just seems politically, if you’re saying everyone is the working class or anyone that gets a salary is the working class, yes, that opens up your tent, but practically speaking, we are divided by income and especially if you wanna tax people, where you draw those lines matters.

I’ve drawn it at about a million dollars a year.

Okay. So anyone under a million dollars a year in income is working class?

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying in terms of the practicality when it comes to fiscal policy.

CHAKRABARTI: So … what do you think Mamdani is trying to say there? ‘Cause on the one hand he was like, “Anyone who has to work is working class, but if you earn over a million dollars you’re not.” And then she said if you’re earning, Lulu says, “If you’re earning a little less than a million dollars, are you working class?” He’s like, “No, that’s not what I’m saying.” So I think this is where, to your point earlier, turning back to how this is used, the phrase is used politically really matters.

EDWARDS: Oh, I think he was trying to say that this isn’t a good question, and I’m trying really hard not to dignify it.

I think he was trying to say, “Why do I…” It’s such a trap, right? You’re in the most expensive city in the country. You’ve got housing issues that people across the U.S. would completely fail to understand, so put a dollar amount on it to alienate those people. I think he was just trying to get around a question that had no benefit in answering to say why don’t you say something on the record that’ll make you sound ridiculous to people in the South?”

Great. I respect him trying to broaden the definition. To me, it comes down to, what is the economic policy that responds to how people —

CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump in here for a second … because obviously that’s important, but I disagree with you.

If any politician, Donald Trump to, to Zohran Mamdani, is gonna say, “Give me your vote, ’cause I’m gonna represent America’s working people,” I would like to know who they’re talking about. And Mamdani is … I just see him as definitely trying to avoid answering that question, not because it’s a stupid question, but because maybe his answer isn’t actually gonna play well with a lot of people.

I think he does think that if you earn six figures or more, yes, in the world’s, or in the nation’s most expensive city, you are working class, and that doesn’t actually ring true, as Lulu said, to a lot of folks.

EDWARDS: If I said stupid, then I take it back, because it’s not a word I like to use. I think that the point that she was pushing him on was the dollar amount. And I think that having to name a dollar amount to say above or below this you are or are not working class does not speak to people’s economic realities.

Like Christina who called in from Atlanta to say, maybe I’m kissing six figures, but I have to drive to afford gas. Make that make sense. Yeah. But I think that the dollar amount and trying to find this definition of like here’s what Mamdani says the dollar amount is not fruitful because it’s still a means of erasing people’s economic realities, that there are people who could need help even if they have a high salary.

There are people that could be fine, but their salary isn’t that high. I don’t know, I guess I just don’t know what we would gain by having a dollar amount that has the little “And Mamdani said this,” stamp on it for the economic policy that Americans need, which is to have basic dignity on the job, to have enough money to afford their life, and to attack that problem from every angle, no matter who it hits.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I agree with you on that, and I think it’s fair to say that for as long as, again, when politicians talk about the working class, until fairly recently, they have meant that smaller subset that we discussed. And because of that, there has been an open animosity amongst the political class, the Republican political class at least, and actually a fair number of Democrats, to passing policies that would help the broader world of working Americans.

I think that’s the direction that you were headed earlier.

EDWARDS: All right. So this is, I think, step back, step way back, and think about U.S. economic history over the past 150 years, right? It’s really since our industrial revolution. We move in economic eras, broadly defined, that are conservative and then liberal and then conservative again.

And you can think of the really first big conservative era was through the Gilded Age and up to the Great Depression. Bitter repression of unionization, almost no policies to help or protect workers on the job or give them any sense of power. Very much a tax structure and a power structure that favored the wealthiest, that favored the concentration of power, and we’d started to chip away at it, but it was a relatively conservative era.

And then the pendulum kind of switches. And between the 1930s and the 1970s, we have a broadly liberal economic era. That’s not to say we only elected liberals. That’s not to say we never did a conservative thing, but it’s just we had a relatively, a liberal era. We had expansions of the social safety net, expansions of regulations in the labor market and other key markets.

And then since the 1980s, we have been in a fairly conservative economic era that puts markets over people, that puts deregulation over regulation and whose favored economic policy is a tax cut. This century, we have had $14 trillion of tax cuts. Keep in mind when conservatives are talking about the status quo, that they have to be on the defense because it is, we are living in their economic era.

We are living in an era in which the idea that we would raise the minimum wage, that we would give all workers a bump in overtime or just raise the tipped minimum wage is a non-starter. We’re gonna put a little bonus in the tax system for a certain set of tipped workers as long as they’re not living with too high earning of a partner to say that we helped the working class.

But we’re not helping the working class  … because we’re not passing labor law.

CHAKRABARTI: I’m gonna jump in here and say I would also hold Democrats to account on this point. Because looking at the presidency of Bill Clinton when we had massive welfare reform, that, looking back, was not necessarily favorable to the working poor of America already.

EDWARDS: And cash help for them. Yeah. But I think this is, this kind of speaks to the notion of a conservative era, that even liberals, leaders in a conservative era are gonna do conservative things. Just like conservative leaders in liberal eras did pretty liberal things. I think that we put a lot of emphasis on looking at who exactly is in office and whether or not there’s an R and D next to their name.

But when you step back, this is a very conservative era. And I think one of the tensions that the working class definition embodies is this era is gonna come to an end because it is not working for so many people.

CHAKRABARTI: It’s not sustainable for the democracy, I’d say.

EDWARDS: It’s not. And okay, so here’s my quippy little anecdote about the next economic era.

I testified in front of Congress this spring about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And it was in front of the House Ways and Means Tax Subcommittee. So this is the committee Republican-led that wrote the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and I was the lone Democratic witness. And two or three days before the hearing, I get the hearing title and notification, and it says like something about the Working Families Tax Cut.

And I go into like a state of pure panic. And I email the Dem staff, and I’m like, “Y’all, y’all, what are they talking about? I didn’t prep. I’ve been preparing for weeks about the One Big Beautiful Bill.” And he said, “Oh, calm down. They’re trying to rename the One Big Beautiful Bill Act as the Working Families Tax Cut Act because it’s polling so horribly.”

And I was like, I think that tells you everything you could ever need to know about how much tax cuts actually help the working class. If it’s an afterthought rebrand, it’s not a good policy.

CHAKRABARTI: So we have a minute left, and I wish we had so much more Kathryn. Because it makes me wonder, I think I’m gonna land at a place where I believe that, yes, America’s working class is so much larger than we talk about in the media or in politics.

That is a truth. And to your point, the economy as it currently is going to bring this conservative economic era, as you’re saying, to an end because people cannot live with such precarity, and we’re talking about tens and hundreds of millions of people. But the folks who could potentially make the policy changes, those lawmakers, I think, what encouragement can, do they have to actually expand their vision of what the working class is to make those policy changes?

I’m not sure I see that they have that encouragement.

EDWARDS: Oh, yeah, that politicians are responding to their constituencies really well. That’s, again, tale as old as time. I think the point to keep in mind when we have these conversations about the working class is that we would not have them if people felt more secure.

You would not have people who make six figures saying, “I’ve gotta conclude that I’m working class because my life is so hard.” That is a performance of our current economy and economic conditions, and if you don’t feel like you’re making it, we need to change who’s in the chair.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.