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Working Class Quotes

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Working Class Quotes

“Do you know what strength is - forgetting sleep, romance, money I keep working without rest to unite the humans, that's my strength - a single mother working day and night so her child can have a bright future, that's her strength - a street vendor working hard since dawn for his family, that's his strength. Do you have such a strength of your own? Your ancestry, your family money, your material possessions - putting aside all these, what is your own true strength?”

“Let these men sing out their songs, they've been walking all day long, all their fortune's spent and gone... silver dollar in the subway station; quarters for the papers for the jobs.”

“Death by Starvation or Boredom” Many toil for scraps and cheap wages, surviving one fragile breath at a time— just one more breath... While others, bloated with excess, labor only to escape boredom, pretending they’re saving a world drowning in the greed they created, and the power they refuse to let go. The first walks a tightrope between breath and hunger. The second, cushioned by comfort, drifts closer to spiritual starvation, their soul numbed by excess. And here lies the cruel symmetry— fate, with its blunt hands, levels the field by offering death either way: starvation... or boredom. But the greatest tragedy belongs to those who die of both.”

“Taxi Driver” There’s a strange kind of liberation in being just a taxi driver— the freedom tucked inside that word: just. Because you’re just a driver, no one truly sees you. Yet you see it all— the absurdities, the shallows, the beauty, sorrow, joy, heartbreak—passengers unknowingly exposed. They grant you a diluted respect, sometimes half-fake, sometimes not at all— because you’re just a taxi driver. But they leave you be. No one's scheming to steal your seat. They want you in that seat. They ride with you because, for now, it’s a seat they don’t desire. Still, like all fleeting liberations, this too carries disappointment— a bittersweet sting. You realize the only reason they leave you alone is because you've escaped into a seat they never wanted in the first place. And that hurts.”

“When poor and working people in the United States become a politically viable force, relief institutions and their technologies of control shift to better facilitate cultural denial and to rationalize a brutal return to subserviency. Relief institutions are machines for undermining the collective power of poor and working-class people, and for producing in difference in everyone else.”

“[Denial] contorts our physical geography, as we build infrastructure—suburbs, highways, private schools, and prisons—that allow the professional middle-class to actively avoid sharing the lives of poor and working-class people.”

“Classification and criminalization work by including poor and working-class people in systems that limit their rights and deny their basic human needs. The digital poorhouse doesn’t just exclude, it sweeps millions of people into a system of control that compromises their humanity and their self determination.”

“What I hoped was to raise up for the poor and the untaught a friend out of their own midst, some one who had gone through all that they suffer, who was accustomed to earn her own living by the work of her hands as they do, who had never thought herself their better, who saw the world as they see it and knew all their wants. A lady may do good, we know that; but she can’t be the friend of the poor as I understand it; there’s too great a distance between her world and theirs.”

“A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work in itself is good in itself—for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery. I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this: "We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry fort you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.” This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance if it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions. Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothings else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line “Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres” by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience. From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. “Anything,” he thinks, “any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.”

“When I found your name, in my early adulthood, I don't think I'd ever heard the term "white working class". The experience it describes contains both racial privilege and economic disadvantage, which can exist simultaneously. This was an obvious, apolitical fact for those of us who lived that juxtaposition every day. But it seemed tomake some people uneasy, as though our grievance put us in competition with poor people of other races. Wealthy white people, in particular, seemed to want to distance themselves from our place and our truth. Our struggles forced a question about America that many were not willing to face: If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn't racism, what less articulated problem was afoot?”

“During the last four decades of his life-journey, as this chronicle has revealed, it became more and more evident that there was one wrong, one thing over all, standing in the way of honest and contented living the unjust treatment of those who produce the wealth of the world by those who own most of that wealth; and that the continual fight between the moneyed interests and the working people (including artists) was the vital problem of our time. Now, during these recurring and ever-increasing conflicts, is it not obvious that we have to take sides? I think it has come to that, for all of us.”

“Organize their money on a chopping board. Sort out your worth. $15,000 for outdated textbooks K-12. $1,000 for a lifetime of flu vaccinations. $8 an hour to help someone else make money. $300 a year for food coupons. $1,000 additional salary for any job that has a chance of expected death. $600 co-pay on medication for an illness they cause you. $2,000 for social security. $15,000 for pension. $150,000 for the average life insurance policy. $250,000 for a doctor’s fatal mistake. $350,000 if the doctor made it in a different state. 2/5 of a soul lost in the workplace. 3/5 of a soul lost to fuck for food. $4,000 to bury someone in the soil. And there you have you. Easy to make. Affordable. Special.”

“The Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Transportation, and other bureaus reserve that a budget for a human life is worth anywhere from 4-10 million dollars. Like a sports car. Like a construction site. Or an airplane. As if the mysterious gift of consciousness could fit in the box of a W-2 form. To them, we are 4 inches of digital ink on a computer screen. Money: if we can’t get rid of it, we can at least admit it doesn’t deserve us.”

“Middle-class Americans, like myself and my fellow seekers, have been raised with the old-time Protestant expectation that hard work will be rewarded with material comfort and security. This has never been true of the working class, most of which toils away at wages incommensurate with the effort required. And now, the sociologists agree, it is increasingly untrue of the educated middle class that stocks our corporate bureaucracies.”

“It's possible to see how much the brand culture rubs off on even the most sceptical employee. Joanne Ciulla sums up the dangers of these management practices: 'First, scientific management sought to capture the body, then human relations sought to capture the heart, now consultants want tap into the soul... what they offer is therapy and spirituality lite... [which] makes you feel good, but does not address problems of power, conflict and autonomy.'¹0 The greatest success of the employer brand' concept has been to mask the declining power of workers, for whom pay inequality has increased, job security evaporated and pensions are increasingly precarious. Yet employees, seduced by a culture of approachable, friendly managers, told me they didn't need a union - they could always go and talk to their boss. At the same time, workers are encouraged to channel more of their lives through work - not just their time and energy during working hours, but their social life and their volunteering and fundraising. Work is taking on the roles once played by other institutions in our lives, and the potential for abuse is clear. A company designs ever more exacting performance targets, with the tantalising carrot of accolades and pay increases to manipulate ever more feverish commitment. The core workforce finds itself hooked into a self-reinforcing cycle of emotional dependency: the increasing demands of their jobs deprive them of the possibility of developing the relationships and interests which would enable them to break their dependency. The greater the dependency, the greater the fear of going cold turkey - through losing the job or even changing the lifestyle. 'Of all the institutions in society, why let one of the more precarious ones supply our social, spiritual and psychological needs? It doesn't make sense to put such a large portion of our lives into the unsteady hands of employers,' concludes Ciulla. Life is work, work is life for the willing slaves who hand over such large chunks of themselves to their employer in return for the paycheque. The price is heavy in the loss of privacy, the loss of autonomy over the innermost workings of one's emotions, and the compromising of authenticity. The logical conclusion, unless challenged, is capitalism at its most inhuman - the commodification of human beings.”

“But one can see exactly why Dr Ali is so successful - he seems to offer a solution within the individual's grasp: you may not be able to change deadlines and workloads, but you can make yourself more efficient. Ancient wisdoms can be adapted to speed up human beings: this is the kind of individualised response which fits neatly into a neo-liberal market ideology. It draws on Eastern contemplative traditions of yoga and meditation which place the emphasis on individual transformation, and questions the effectiveness of collective political or social activism. Reflexology, aromatherapy, acupuncture, massage - these alternative therapies are all booming as people seek to improve their sense of well-being and vitality. Much of it makes sense - although trips to the Himalayas are hardly within the reach of most workers and the complementary health movement plays an important role in raising people's under standing of their own health and how to look after themselves. But the philosophy of improving ‘personal performance' also plays into the hands of employers' rationale that well-being and coping with stress are the responsibility of the individual employee. It reinforces the tendency for individuals to search for 'biographic solutions to structural contradictions', as the sociologist Ulrich Beck put it: forget the barricades, it's revolution from within that matters. This cultural preoccupation with personal salvation stymies collective reform, and places an onerous burden on the individual. It effectively reinforces the anxieties and insecurities which it offers to assuage.”

“Stress costs British business over £400 million a year, and the Health and Safety Executive predict that the bill will continue to rise. The World Health Organisation estimates that stress will account for half of the ten most common medical problems in the world by 2020. The economic costs, and the threat of legal action, have alarmed employers and governments alike; it is these, rather than the human cost, which are driving government policy - it is the Secretary of Trade and Industry who comments on stress, not the Health Secretary. Over the last decade there has been a huge amount of research into the causes of stress, yet its incidence has continued to soar. Little has come out of the research except a burgeoning industry which offers stress consultants, stress programmes, stress counsellors, therapists and, when all that fails, lawyers to fight stress claims. This amounts to a dramatic failure of collective will either to recognise the extent of the problem or to do anything effective about it. All that is offered are sticking plasters to cover the symptoms, rather than the kind of reform of the workplace which is required to tackle the causes. According to one major study into the causes of stress, 68 per cent of the highly stressed report work intensification as a major factor.”

“The analogy with the environment [crisis] is apt, because both forms of sustainability - human and environmental - have no market value, they cannot be bought and sold. Both fall into the category of what economists call the tragedy of the commons': in an unfettered market, they are subject to its depredations without any accounting for their true value. Just as the damage to the environment has become increasingly clear, so we will see in the coming decades a growing anxiety about the erosion of human sustainability as we witness an exponential rise in depression, stress and anxiety. It is the conditions of our working lives which are one of the main causes.”

“What we have lost to a very great degree is the possibility of resistance, confrontation or reform of taking the struggle for freedom back into the workplace. Many of the private sector jobs worst hit by long hours and rising stress have a low rate of trade union membership. The number of workplaces with high union density and well-established collective bargaining fell from 47 per cent in 1980 to only 17 per cent in 1998.26 Two-thirds of all workplaces have no union presence at all.”

“Work's enormous drain on time and energy is depriving relationships of care and dependence, the investment they urgently need right now. At the same time, it often adds new demands on those relationships as the stress and exhaustion spill over. Overwork erodes intimate relationships, which have never been so brittle and which, in a competitive, individualistic society, have never been so essential in supporting individual well-being, identity and security. Never have we so needed a place to call home, a place of refuge from the dictates of the market, from its crude calibration of value and its demands on us to perform. Yet at the very same moment, the time we have at home is shrinking, and the privacy we have there is fast disappearing. What is in conflict here is a labour-market ethic of individual achievement and effort, versus older ethics of the dignity of dependence and the fulfilment of selflesness.”

“As their personal connections to a geographical community shrink, so people look to work to compensate; volunteer schemes organised through the workplace and corporate social responsibility programmes become a substitute. Putnam quotes one commentator's conclusion: 'As more Americans spend more of their time "at work", work gradually becomes less of a one-dimensional activity and assumes more of the concerns and activities of both private (family) and public (social and political) life. It is the corporation which hands out advice on toddler pottytraining and childcare, offers parenthood classes and sets up a reading support programme in a local school - all of which exist in British corporations – rather than the social networks of family, friends and neighbours. This amounts to a form of corporate neopaternalism which binds the employee ever tighter into a suffocating embrace, underpinning the kind of invasive management techniques described in Chapter 4.”

“[...] The revolution was left unfinished. The feminists of the sixties and seventies challenged the rigid division of labour between men and women; they wanted women to have access to the workplace, and men to rediscover their role at home. The psychotherapist Susie Orbach reflects on the thinking of the seventies: 'We wanted to challenge the whole distribution of work we wanted to put at the centre of everything the reproduction of daily life, but feminism got seduced by the work ethic. My generation wanted to change the values of the workplace so that it accepted family life.' This radical agenda for the reorganisation of work and home was abandoned in Britain. Instead we took on the American model of feminism, influenced by the rise of neo-liberalism and individualism. Feminism acquired shoulderpads and an appetite for power; it celebrated individual achievement rather than working out how to transform the separation between work and family, and the social processes of how we care for dependants and raise children. Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt remembers a turning point in the debate in the UK when she was at the National Council for Civil Liberties: 'The key moment was when we organised a major conference in the seventies with a lot of American speakers who were terrific feminists. When they arrived we were astonished that they were totally uninterested in an agenda around better maternity leave, etc. They argued that we couldn't claim special treatment in the workplace; women would simply prove they were equals. You couldn't make claims on the workplace. We thought it was appalling.”

“Neoliberalism insists that if we work hard enough, we can earn as much money as anyone else. Of course, the concept of meritocracy is integral to neoliberalism and erases the reality of capital itself, that capitalism is not just material capital but also, importantly, social and cultural capital. Without these forms of capital, (p. 77) one cannot, in fact, “succeed” in a capitalist culture. One obvious example is the art world, where one can only have their work shown in a gallery if they have connections to that gallery (galleries do not, for the most part, accept unsolicited submissions). All the cash in the world can’t create the generations of social connections of a middle-class family, whose circle might include art collectors, gallerists, critics, and artists. It is also the values and unspoken rules of the ruling class that distinguish who is allowed in and who is not.”

“A Moment of Joy" The ruling global elites are holding their breath in anticipation of who may be the first to start a nuclear war! The wealthy and the stock market traders are fearfully watching the fluctuation in the stock prices… Writers, media pundits, and academics on the payroll of power and authority are worried about a potential revolution that may put an end to the powers in place, and consequently to their existence! Doctors, engineers, and other professionals are all alarmed and watching the job market in fear of losing their cushy jobs! Only the waitress at the nearby restaurant is experiencing a moment of joy for the generous tip she just received from the last customer tonight! [Original poem published in Arabic on October 30,2023 at ahewar.org]”

“As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our 'national security' calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of 'Left' intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush's legitimacy. So I don't even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.”

“Dreams are our own. Our dreams stay with us till we realize them. We can never ignore our dreams. It is because of our dreams that we get inspired to keep on working and striving harder to achieve our life’s purpose. A life spent in achieving and realizing our dreams makes life meaningful!”

“Europe, the land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts. The land where the economy gets to stagger all over the continent.”

“The first problem with the word “diversity” is the word itself. Who is diverse in relation to whom? The way diversity is often framed in institutional domains implies that some people are diverse in relation to others. That some need to learn diversity while others have it and bring it to the table. This framing, I argue, has from the start driven a wedge between a significant percentage of marginalized and disadvantaged white people and other marginalized and disadvantaged groups—groups that should naturally be allies, not enemies. The only group that benefits from this divide is a small percentage of privileged whites who use the structure of whiteness to their full advantage. [From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”

“I am off to a life where I can exist in a room and not have to pretend I want to be there. I am off to hear people who have something to say. I don’t even have to agree with it— I just want to know what it’s like to listen to a real sentence. I long for a time where I don’t wish the day would be over. This means leaving the company. I can wonder, or I can wander—and it’s time for me to get lost. Reinvention is hard. To let it go? To admit you don’t love something anymore? That’s the stuff that kills you. But I must run before another workday asks for me again. Things are hard so that we can start. I feel like fate is blindfolding me. My arms reach out not knowing if I’ll impale myself or secure my foothold—but all great things come from motion. Nothing begets nothing. And I’m scared, but I have the movies with me. The things we love require us. I wonder what would happen if everyone in the world did what they loved. Would things fall into place and leave no empty spaces? Would there be harmony in the work field? Sustainable marriages? Children with parents? Dirty water? Would there be resignation letters?”

“--You're rather well read for a working-class girl, she said with her back to me. --Really? I've found that all my well-read friends are from the working class. --Oh my. Why do you think that is? The purity of poverty? --No. It's just that reading is the cheapest form of entertainment. --Sex is the cheapest form of entertainment. --Not in this house.”

“While bilingual is understood as a valuable asset or goal for middle-class and upper-class students, for working-class and poor students it is framed as a disability that must be overcome”

“Marginalised masculinities describes a group of men who are marginalised and excluded from all the benefits of male privilege because of race or class. For example, although working-class men may embody a kind of toughness and stoicism that is prized, they do not benefit as greatly from that privilege as those in the middle and upper classes do. ... 'working-class men are the male equivalent of the "dumb blond" - endowed with physical virtues but problematized by intellectual shortcomings'.”