In the U.K., working-class lives are depicted with the characters' humour, but in the U.S., people with difficulties are often depicted with pious or simply dreary lives.
The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got.
I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.
Frankly that's what makes such a big difference between President Obama on one hand and Mitt Romney on the other. Gov. Romney has not walked in those shoes of the ordinary Americans and frankly I don't think he has the capacity to quite understand the struggle that the 98 percent of Americans go through every single day.
Nobody who works 40 hours a week should be living in poverty.
The working class who toil everyday to pay their rent and put food on their families' tables are tired of being lectured by the fat cats in Washington and Brussels who preach what we need and when we need it.
I have a visceral response to a memory of working-class life.
Experience demonstrates that there may be a wages of slavery only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.
My family was mostly unemployed working class.
If work were good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor.
These Americans are among the working poor with full-time jobs earning $5.15 an hour. Millions fall into this boat, even more when you consider that the poverty line has not been adequately adjusted to reflect the true level of poverty in this country.
I'm definitely working class, and I still believe in those values. I know that losing everything would not be an unfamiliar feeling. Meaning, if you don't have it anymore, you didn't have it to begin with.
My mother was born into a solidly middle-class family, but, as all too many Americans understand, everything doesn't always go as planned - no matter how hard you work. She died on welfare. Without the support of the state, I shudder to think of where we would have ended up.
I'm from working-class, blue-collar America, and I don't believe that people in that socioeconomic strata wait until they're 40 to have children.
… the struggling masses
Bryan's concept of struggling masses included farmers and small businessmen.
We need to do more to help the men and women across the country who are working hard but still struggling to make ends meet due to low wages and high healthcare costs.
The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.
Pauperism is the hospital of the labor army.
I could actually care less about the poor. We have some living near us, and pee-yew. They are always coming and going to their three or four jobs at all hours of the day and night. Annoying!
America's vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach.
The idea that working a blue-collar job and living in a working-class community provides barriers that are unique to your circumstances - that's not a very controversial subject anymore. I think it's something that people on both the Left and the Right probably accept.
I was happy working for £6 an hour.
Low pay generally means harder work under worse conditions.
Financial hardships were rough on us, even though Mom had a good job at G.M.
My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.