Drawing on the work of political economist Michael Zweig and sociologist Michele Lamont, as well as other sociological work on working-class life, this reflective essay argues for eliminating “the poor” as a social category but explains why that will be difficult due to both working-class and middle-class ways of construing classes in the United States.
Bartels, Larry M.2008. Unequal democracy: The political economy of the new gilded age. New York: Russell Sage Foundation .
2.
Boushey, Heather, Chauna Brocht, Bethney Gundersen, and Jared Bernstein .2001. Hardships in America: The real story of working families. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute.
3.
DeNavas-Walt, Carmen, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith .2008. Income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States: 2007. U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-235. Washington, DC : U.S. Government Printing Office.
4.
Gans, Herbert J.1962. The urban villagers: Group and class in the life of Italian Americans. New York: The Free Press .
5.
Hacker, Jacob S.2006. The great risk shift: The assault on American jobs, families, health care, and retirement and how you can fight back. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
6.
Jensen, Barbara.Forthcoming. Reading classes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
7.
Johnson, David S., John M. Rogers, and Lucilla Tan .2001. A century of family budgets in the United States. Monthly Labor Review, 124 (5): 28-45.
8.
Kefalas, Maria.2003. Working-class heroes: Protecting home, community, and nation in a Chicago neighborhood. Berkeley: University of California Press.
9.
Lamont, Michele.1992. Money, morals, and manners: The culture of the French and American upper-middle class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
10.
Lamont, Michele.2000. The dignity of working men: Morality and the boundaries of race, class, and immigration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
11.
Leondar-Wright, Betsy.2005. Class matters: Cross-class alliance building for middleclass activists. British Columbia, Canada: New Society Publishers.
12.
McDermott, Monica.2006. Working-class white: The making and unmaking of race relations . Berkeley: University of California Press.
13.
Metzgar, Jack.2005. Politics and the American class vernacular. In New working class studies, ed. John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, 189-208. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
14.
Rose, Fred.2000. Coalitions across the class divide: Lessons from the labor, peace, and environmental movements. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
15.
Rubin, Lillian Breslow.1976. Worlds of pain: Life in the working-class family. New York: Basic Books.
16.
Weis, Lois.2004. Class reunion: The remaking of the American white working class. New York: Routledge.
17.
Weiss, Michael J.2000. The clustered world: How we live, what we buy, and what it all means about who we are. Boston: Little, Brown.
18.
Wright, Erik Olin.1997. Class counts: Comparative studies in class analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
19.
Zweig, Michael.2000. The working class majority: America’s best kept secret. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
