Why the Working Class Resents the Poor

Remember when President Obama sold Obamacare by constantly stressing that it delivered health care
to 20 million people? To many in the working class, this made it sound like just another program that
taxed the middle class to help the poor. And in some cases that’s proved true: the poor got health
insurance, while some Americans just a tiny bit better off saw their premiums rise. Progressives have
lavished attention on the poor for over a century, devising social programs targeting them. Because
America is particularly testy about the kinds of taxes that many European countries take for granted,
these programs are not universal. Instead, they are limited to those below a certain income level, which
means they exclude those just a notch above. This is a recipe for class conflict.

Is it any wonder the working class feels “totally forgotten,” to quote Annette Norris? “I raised three
children on [$40,000 a year]. . . . But we didn’t get any assistance because we did not qualify.” Annette is
not wrong, or alone: although about 30% of poor families using center-based child care receive
subsidies, subsidies are largely nonexistent for the middle class. My sister-in-law worked full time for
Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay
for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms did not work. One arrived
late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from the local mall. My sister-in-law was livid.

J. D. Vance’s much-heralded Hillbilly Elegy captures this resentment. Hard-living families like that of his
mother live alongside settled families like that of his biological father. While the hard-living succumb to
despair, drugs, or alcohol, settled families keep to the straight and narrow, like my parents-in-law, who
owned their home and sent both sons to college. To accomplish that, they lived a life of rigorous thrift
and self-discipline. Vance’s book passes harsh judgment on his hard-living relatives and neighbors, which
is not uncommon among people from families who kept their nose clean through sheer force of will.

Understanding working-class resentment of the poor needs to begin by looking at everyday life for
working-class Americans of all races. Their rigid, highly supervised jobs often are boring, repetitive, or
both, which makes the work psychologically challenging: think of medical technicians, factory workers,
bus drivers. Men’s jobs, and some women’s, are physically demanding: consider construction workers,
long-haul truck drivers, physicians’ assistants. Women’s jobs—in nursing, customer service, managing
small stores— can be emotionally demanding, too. Job demands are compounded by those of child care.
Many couples tag team, with parents working different shifts to minimize child care costs. Here’s what
that looks like:

Mike drives a cab and I work in a hospital, so we figure one of us could transfer to nights. We
talked it over and decided it would be best if I was here during the day and he was here at night.
He controls the kids, especially my son, better than I do. So now Mike works day and I work
graveyard. I hate it, but it’s the only answer: at least this way somebody’s here all the time. I get
home at 8:30 in the morning. The kids and Mike are gone. I clean up the house a little, do the
shopping and the laundry and whatever, then I go to sleep for a couple of hours before the kids
get home from school. Mike gets home at 5, we eat, then he takes over for the night, and I go
back to sleep for a couple of hours. I try to get up at 9:00 so we can have a little time together,
but I’m so tired that I don’t make it a lot of times. And by 10:00, he’s sleeping because he has to
get up at 6:00 in the morning. It’s hard, it’s very hard. There’s no time to live or anything.

That’s the face of working-class life today. Not easy.

Excerpted from White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America by Joan C. Williams.
Reprinted with permission from Harvard Business Review Press.