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Working class   /wˈərkɪŋ klæs/   Listen
Working class

noun
1.
A social class comprising those who do manual labor or work for wages.  Synonyms: labor, labour, proletariat.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Working class" Quotes from Famous Books



... of Government was used in the aggrandizement and perpetuation of a propertied aristocracy, what was its specific attitude toward the working class? Of the powerful few, whether political or industrial, the conventional histories hand down grossly biased and distorted chronicles. These few are isolated from the multitude, and their importance ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... obtained a declaration from an authoritative source that a bill which, in a country with five millions of adult males, proposes to add to a limited constituency 200,000 of the middle class and 200,000 of the working class, is, in the judgment of the leader of the Tory party, a bill to reconstruct the ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook

... breath of life is also felt in this country, through the formation of the "Industrial Workers of the World." It awakens the hope of a transformation of the present trade-union methods. In their present form they serve the money powers more than the working class. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... civilisation, where music is a part of the government of the people; a feature far more prominent than in Britain or the United States. The cathedrals, the quaint architecture of the streets, the barred windows, and the picturesque dress of the working class, form an atmosphere of distinctive life and colour. Let us halt a moment in the plaza. The band is discoursing soft music, varied by some stirring martial air; the Mexican moon has risen, and now that the ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... instruction, and the memory of the children overburdened with incomprehensible dogmas and theological distinctions; that sectarian hatred and bigotry are awakened as early as possible, and all rational mental and moral training shamefully neglected. The working class has repeatedly demanded of Parliament a system of strictly secular public education, leaving religion to the ministers of the sects; but, thus far, no Ministry has been induced to grant it. The Minister is the obedient servant of the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... White Guards. They pointed out that the Soviet Government had offered concessions in order to buy off the imperialistic countries and had received no reply. Taking all this into consideration the demand to end civil war amounted to a demand for the disarming of the working class and the poor peasantry in the face of bandits and executioners advancing from all sides. In a word, it was the worst form of state crime, namely, treason to a state of workers and peasants. The Committee considered useful every kind of practical ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome

... reason served to make it difficult for a poet of the plowman type, like Robert Burns, or for an author from the general working class, like Benjamin Franklin, to arise in the South. Labor was thought degrading, and the laborer did not find the same chance as at the North to learn from close association with the ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... painted those of each class with different colors, in order to study their proceedings; and these were not interchanged. In another experiment, after supplying a hive deprived of a queen with brood and pollen, we saw the small bees quickly occupied in nutrition of the larvae, while those of the wax working class neglected them. Small bees also produce wax, but in a very inferior quantity to what is elaborated by the real ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... the young man, with a visible effort to bring himself to pronounce the word, "has no ideas, and my father is not agriculturist, nor working class; he is of the Kayeth caste; but he had not the advantage of a collegiate education, and he does not know much of the Congress. It is a movement for the educated young-man"—connecting adjective and noun in ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... America. They began, and have continued, to lose their old belief in distinct and warring nationalities. To denationalise the nations into one nation only—the nation of mankind—is too vast an idea to grow quickly, but in all classes, and perhaps most in the working class, there are an increasing number of thinking men who say to the varied nations, "We are all one; our interests, duties, rights, nature and aims are one." And, for my part, I believe that in the full development of that conception ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... the majority of ministers are proletarians, eking out their existence upon a miserable salary, and beholden in all their comings and goings to the wealthy holders of privilege. Even in the Roman Catholic Church that is true. The ordinary priest is a man of the working class, and knows what working people suffer and feel. So in the Catholic Church there are proletarian rebellions; there is many a priest who does not carry out the political orders of his superiors, but goes to the polls and votes for his class instead of for his pope. ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... woman of the working class consists in earning sufficient to feed, clothe, light and heat the family, besides supplying the soldier husband with tobacco and a monthly parcel of goodies. Even the children have felt the call, and after school, which lasts from eight until four, little girls whose legs must ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard

... and State are adrift; organised Christianity has abdicated; the aristocracy no longer governs even itself; Parliament has died of a surfeit of its own rules. If fundamental reform is to come, it will be forced upon us by the working class, and (at the pinch) opposed tooth and nail by the privileged. But is it to come? Is the working class deploying for action? In all the miscellaneous scrapping which we watch to-day is there one strong man with a sense of direction? It doesn't look ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett

... even yet—girl, you mustn't pity me! That's one thing I can't have. I'm here because the master class is stronger than my class, the working class. Here, because I'm dangerous to that master class. This isn't said to make myself out a martyr. It's only to make you see things right. I'm not complaining at this plight. I've richly earned it—under Capitalism. So, then, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... break themselves or the union rather than get out, and those who can't get in hang on outside like limpets and refuse to be kicked off; that the Russian workmen in organising their trade unions must start right and keep them free of every element except the working class." ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward

... Alsace-Lorraine. The other policy was that of peace abroad and socialistic transformation at home, inspired by the modern ideals of justice and fraternity, and supported by the best of the younger generation of philosophers, poets, and artists, as well as by the bulk of the working class. Nowhere have these two currents of contemporary aspiration met and contended as fiercely as in France. The Dreyfus case was the most striking act in the great drama. But it was not the concluding one. French ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson

... discontented middle class, unable to rouse the Church-and-State governments of the day from their bondage to custom, caste, and law by appeals to morality or constitutional agitation for Liberal reforms, made common cause with the starving wage-working class, and resorted to armed rebellion, which reached Dresden in 1849. Had Wagner been the mere musical epicure and political mugwump that the term "artist" seems to suggest to so many critics and amateurs—that is, a creature in their ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw

... to be seen more plainly some of the many ways in which an inflation policy robs the working class. As these knots of plotting schemers at the city centers were becoming bloated with sudden wealth, the producing classes of the country, though having in their possession more and more currency, grew lean. ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White

... the bourgeois mind a class struggle is a terrible and hateful thing, and yet that is precisely what socialism is,—a world-wide class struggle between the propertyless workers and the propertied masters of workers. It is the prime preachment of socialism that the struggle is a class struggle. The working class, in the process of social evolution, (in the very nature of things), is bound to revolt from the sway of the capitalist class and to overthrow the capitalist class. This is the menace of socialism, and in affirming ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London

... the writers of history, from Thierry to Guizot, Mignet, and Thiers in particular, pronounce it as a key to an understanding of French history, especially since the Middle Ages. And since 1830 the working class, the proletariat, has been recognized as the third competitor for mastery in both countries. Circumstances had become so simplified that one would have had to close his eyes not to see in the fight of these three ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels

... place, the Negro must make common cause with the working class which to-day is organizing and struggling for better social and economic conditions. The old slave oligarchy maintained its ascendency largely by fixing a gulf between the Negro slave and the white free laborer, and the jealousies and animosities of the ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... glorious world from which the working class has been carefully shut out. Here we find armor that cannot be dented and weapons whose points cannot be turned aside in the struggle of the ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis

... that, on the occasion of the Infanta's first confinement, twins were born, and that the prettier of the two had been adopted, another blunder, this, of the grossest kind. A book of this sort could deceive only the working class and the Parisian lower orders, for folk about the Court, and even the bourgeoisie, know that it is impossible for a queen to be brought to bed in secret. Unfortunately for her, she has to comply with the most embarrassing rules of etiquette. ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan

... term "working-class" in the Bill. It would encourage the Socialistic fallacy that the people of England were divided into two classes—the leisured class and the working class; whereas everybody knew that most of the "leisured class" had no leisure and many of the "working-class" did ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various

... development of a thousand other industries, great and small, to the extension of the railroad system, to inter-oceanic navigation, to the manual skill of thousands of workers, to a certain standard of culture reached by the working class as a whole—to the labours, in short, of men in ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... whether I belong to the well-to-do class of the oppressors, or the working class of the oppressed, in either case the disadvantages of non-compliance are less and its advantages greater than those of compliance. If I belong to the minority of oppressors the disadvantages of non-compliance will consist in my being brought to judgment ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy

... said Choate gravely. There was even warning in his voice. "Not since Weedie and his like have told the working class it owns the earth." ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... meanwhile had become a notary, arrived with two witnesses, odd-looking fellows who belonged to the working class, and I made my will in due form. The certainty that when I was no more what I possessed would be divided as I wished was a ray of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... large table-cloth, with a hole in the middle for the head to go through. This is often as coarse as a blanket, but being beautifully woven with various colors, is quite showy at a distance. Among the Mexicans there is no working class; (the Indians being slaves and doing all the hard work;) and every rich man looks like a grandee, and every poor scamp like a broken-down gentleman. I have often seen a man with a fine figure, and courteous manners, dressed in broadcloth and velvet, with a noble horse completely ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... high-fangled notions and who seriously debated whether or not he should charge Martin extra for the water. Another stride was in the direction of creased trousers. Now that Martin was aroused in such matters, he swiftly noted the difference between the baggy knees of the trousers worn by the working class and the straight line from knee to foot of those worn by the men above the working class. Also, he learned the reason why, and invaded his sister's kitchen in search of irons and ironing-board. He had misadventures at first, hopelessly burning one ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... fidelity to nature make us think that it is founded upon much experience of young girls in the working class. To such it would, no doubt, ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... desire for conversation, I went out and walked up and down the beach until breakfast time. I had to pretend to eat, but I ate so little that both Lute and Dorinda once more commented upon my lack of appetite. Lute, who had never become fully reconciled to my becoming a member of the working class, hastened to lay the blame for my condition upon ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln

... discredit which they throw around man's labor power. They have carried the discredit of labor in its social position further than it had been carried, but this is merely a by-product of the discredit they cast on the skill and intellectual power which is latent in the working class. In this connection the significant truth for civilization is that while exploitation of labor and physical hardships induce the antagonism between labor and capital, modern factory organization destroys creative desire and ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot

... title page, in the smallest of type, is the following: "Note.—Great care should be taken to keep this tract out of the hands of radical workmen, Socialist demagogues and the like, as they are but too apt to conclude that schemes favourable to landlords cannot be permanently advantageous to the working class." This elaborate joke was, except for one amendment, adopted as drafted on June 5th, 1885, and there is a tradition that it was favourably reviewed by ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... considerably reduced and the certainty of the arrival of any particular cargo would have disappeared. The price of food must therefore rapidly and greatly rise, and that alone would immediately impose very great hardships on the whole of the working class, of which a considerable part would be driven across the line which separates modern comfort from the starvation margin. The diminution in the supply of the raw materials of manufacture would be much greater and more immediate. Something like half the manufacturers of Great Britain must close ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson

... plain to him that in this teeming section of London the chance of the religious reformer lay entirely among the upper working class. In London, at any rate, all that is most prosperous and intelligent among the working class holds itself aloof—broadly speaking—from all existing spiritual agencies, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... developed to a vileness so amazing. What refining influence, what trace of good manners, what desire for better things, what self-restraint, respect, or government, was left in the minds of these girls as a part of their education? As one of the bystanders, himself of the working class, said to me, 'God help their husbands!' Yes, poverty has many stings; but there can be none sharper than the necessity of marrying one of these poor ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant

... utter contempt for the liberals, and for constitutional government—ce batard du regime feodal et du regime industriel; and to counsel the crown, after the example of Louis XI. to place itself at the head of the working class, and in opposition to the middle class. (Oeuvres de Saint Simon, ed. 1841, 44, 148, 209.) Bazard, Exposition, 76, demanded that all antagonism between the temporal and spiritual powers, all opposition for the sake of freedom, mefiance organisee of parliaments, and all ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher



Words linked to "Working class" :   class, organized labor, stratum, labor, lumpenproletariat, proletarian, labor force, proletariat, labor pool, socio-economic class, prole, social class, worker



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