Blue-Collar Classroom

Abstract

This article examines how a labor studies program, most of whose students come from unions in the building trades, wrestles with a deeply rooted perception about the relationship between an individual’s skill and her wages. Aspects of tradition and experience in the unionized building trades validate it, and public discourse today sees it as a basic economic truth. Other aspects of building trades’ tradition and experience, as well as current mobilizations by low-wage service workers, show that collective power determines wages and enables a conversation about the social wage that decouples individual skill from wage levels.