It’s an election year, which means we’ll be hearing a lot from both Democrats and Republicans claiming that their party is the one true champion of working-class Americans. Sure, but what does it mean to be part of the working class in America these days? It means being female.
If there’s one statistic that describes the “working class” it is this: Of the 869,000 workers that are paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or less, 69% are women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Their ideal champion is one who fights for universal paid family leave, universal childcare, a higher minimum wage, improved regulations that guarantee paid sick days, and better enforcement of labor laws that protect them from wage theft and sexual harassment.
The polling firm Gallup has routinely asked Americans to self-identify into a class: upper, upper-middle, middle, working and lower. By their categorization, the working class is somewhere between poor and comfortable, avoiding poverty but missing the hallmarks of middle-class life, such as retirement security or owning a home. The working class have jobs, but they’re surviving, not thriving.
And as vague as the notion of “surviving, not thriving” is among workers, women are much more likely to fit the bill. Just under half, around 47%, of employed workers in the US are women but they are the majority of low-paid workers. There are a few ways to think about this. One is to look at the lowest-paying occupations and determine what share of the workers are women. Sure enough, among the bottom 20 lowest-paying occupations, in which a worker can expect to earn $30,000 to $35,000 a year, women are the majority in 15 of them, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — a clear overrepresentation.
An alternative to looking within low-paying occupations is to sum them up. Using this method, we find about 8 million workers are employed in the 20 lowest paid occupations and 4.9 million, or about 62%, are women. Clear overrepresentation again. Summing the data across the bottom 50 and 75 occupations would tell the same story. In other words, if it’s lower paid, women will be overrepresented.
With that in mind, the policies that they need championing are ones that improve working conditions for women because low-wage jobs are less likely to have paid time off, retirement benefits or health insurance. Also, such jobs are more likely to be in high-violation industries, or those identified by the Department of Labor as having the highest incidence of wage theft.
For women workers, there’s the added issue of harassment. Data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are hard to come by, but historically pregnancy discrimination and sexual harassment is much more common in low-wage industries, such as retail, accommodation and food services, than it is in higher-paying industries. Plus, there’s the burden of caregiving. Women are more likely to be caring for children as well as sick or elderly family members than men. Hence, a true working-class champion would also be fighting for labor law enforcement and paid family leave.
The politics of the working class has largely ignored women because they have proven less interesting as a voting bloc. Over the last 40 years, white men without a college degree switched political parties. They were dubbed the white working-class male. It’s a political moniker, not borne from the actual working-class demographic, but a convenient shorthand to describe people who have not gone to college. That’s not the same thing as actually being working class. For example, defined that way, 62% of Americans would be working class, which is far too broad. That’s more than double what those in the Gallup polls self-identify as, which has held at around 30% since 2000.
Sure, plenty of men are part of the working class, but they aren’t representative of the group overall because they generally earn too much. Consider that men with no more than a high school diploma out-earn their female counterparts by around $6 an hour. Viewed another way, men who didn’t finish high school can expect to earn about the same as women who did — $19 an hour. The low wages for women are one reason they are more likely than men to be working at least two jobs.
None of this is meant to minimize white, male, non-college degree holders as a group. They have a unique economic history that is deeply intertwined with the decline of blue collar work. Economists estimate that the wages of 25- to 54-year-old men without a college degree tumbled 18% in real terms between 1973 and 2015. But keep in mind that even after that decline they are still far out-earning similarly educated working women. Plus, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will create more non-college jobs at higher pay in typically male occupations.
The true working class — the surviving not thriving low-paid women in jobs without fringe, without leave, without care — deserve a champion, or at least a politician to recognize them for what they are.
Bloomberg columnist Kathryn Anne Edwards is a labor economist and independent policy consultant.
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