2 thoughts on “‘Middle class jobs’”

  1. Susie, WTF?? Seriously. WTF. This year I paid as much in taxes as I will get in unemployment benefits next year. Middle class people ARE the working class. Anybody who can’t live on their investments is working class. It doesn’t matter if you are educated, not educated, professional, union, whatever. If you can’t make a living without working, you’re working class. Didn’t you get the whole message of the “We are the 99%” thing??
    I don’t even know what to say to this idea that because the middle class is marching that we’ve given up on the working class. I’m from Pittsburgh fergawdssakes. My relatives are all union people. Union steelworkers, Union autobody workers, union carpenters, union busdrivers. I was the first person in my family on both sides to go to college. I went to college because I wanted an education and I worked my way through it. It was very difficult. I mopped floors until 2am in restaurants and had to go to class at 8am the next morning. And after I graduated, I had to still take classes because scientists are never done. And you know what? My cousins who didn’t go to college are doing better than I am now. I could have saved myself time and money and decades of hard work slaving over some structures on my computer and ecoli simmering in my incubators. I will make $24,000 a year next year if I don’t find a job and as of this month, I have no health insurance because it is too damn expensive.
    When the steelworkers lost their jobs, I was there, I understood. When you lost your job, I understood. When I lose my job, suddenly I’m callous and insensitive to the plight of others? That makes no fucking sense, Susie. Wishing professional scientists misery because after years of dedicated study and difficult work they will be out of work, some of us permanently, is not going to win you allies. It is a perfect way to split the 99% into warring factions who sit around an try to outgrieve each other. The 1% loves that. It keeps everyone miserable and distrusting of their neighbor.
    I don’t get you, Susie. You don’t seem to have any problem insulting people who work for nuclear power plants, or the military or pharma. My family has done all three jobs. And we are not as ashamed as you think we should be. But then you think that some of us who are middle class have nothing to complain about. You are completely missing this big picture.

  2. Talking about middle-class jobs is a political strategy, and it makes people who aren’t middle class feel excluded. How is that an insult?

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