The Working Class Can Kiss My A…

When I was a kid back in the 1950’s, you were either a ‘worker’ or a ‘manager.’ That was it. If your father was a worker, he worked in a big building called a factory on an assembly line using his hands.

In my New York City neighborhood there were two big factories where all the guys went to work: a Proctor & Gamble plant which made Ivory Snow soap and an American Gypsum plant which made gypsum before anyone knew that this product could kill you.

The Gypsum plant is now an empty space with a farmer’s market across the street. The P&G factory is rubble.

As of 2023, manufacturing accounted for slightly less than 11% of the GDP. In 1947, the first year that data covering how different economic sectors contributed to the GDP, manufacturing was 26%. As of 2020, manufacturing employment was 12 million, a decline from 20 million in 1979.

What’s happening is a shift in the world’s economy in which manufacturing is increasingly taking place in what used to be called the ‘underdeveloped’ countries, whereas service employment, particularly ties to consumerism and data transfer, is what drives the economies of advanced countries like the United States.

Think things have changed all that much? In England, where manufacturing contributed 25% to the country’s GDP in 1980, the manufacturing percentage…