White Working Class: Overcoming Class Clueness in America by Joan C. Williams

The reason I don't define class solely with reference to income is that class is not just about money.  Nor is class an abiding characteristic of individuals; it's more like a cultural tradition that people riff off as they shape their everyday behavior and make sense of their lives.
--Joan C, Williams, White Working Class (Harvard Business Review Press, 2017).

Having grown up with parents who did not go to college I see, from my perspective, the primary cultural traditions of the working class as intolerance, racism, anti-intellectualism, hypocrisy, authoritarianism toward children and misogyny, among other attributes.  Joan Williams certainly has some useful suggestions for how to cross the divides between classes but most of them, such as job training and retraining, have been tried, at least to some extent, and have failed.  Communication is part of the problem, as many people don't realize, when railing against welfare, how much they benefit from Medicare, Social Security and SS disability, mortgage interest deductions, student loans, tax exemptions for retirement and health benefits, et. al.  But some differences are hard to overcome, as when Williams suggests that pro-choice people can overcome objections to abortion by arguing that those who believe in healthy families should support the choices of those who don't want children!

There's no doubt that more working class kids should go to college and there should be more and better student advisors helping kids in high school.   In the 50's and 60's most of the working class kids I grew up with did not go to college but went to work in the many decent-paying factories in the area:  cement, pocketbooks, pipes, matches and many other items were manufactured and the factory jobs paid well. I will not get into the debate here about the purpose of college other than to say that there are many benefits to an education beyond what job one can get and how much money one can make; but college is not for everyone and there should be many more ways of learning trades, in high school and after high school in community colleges and apprentice programs.

There are a number of ways of overcoming working class resentment:
1. Bring back strong unions and support them.  It is not surprising that the current shift in equality is directly tied to the waning power of unions.

2. Medicare for everyone, i.e., a single-payer health system such as every other developed country has.  Many people worry about their health benefits if they lose their jobs (that is, if they even have health benefits) while even those with benefits have trouble meeting high deductibles and co-payments.

3. Free public university and community college education, so qualified people can go to college and contribute to society in ways other than a lucrative job that helps pay the enormous debt that often goes with a college education.

4. "Some combination of a universal basic income and a federal jobs guarantee," as Sarah Jones says in the Aug 14/21 Nation.  "Charity and worker retraining are no real substitutes for the redistribution of wealth."