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defined by its structural place in wage relationships and the capitalist labor process,
only a portion of the members of a working class occupy this place. The molecules
of every class are the families and households that are tied by one or more
members to the structural determinants of that class in the social division of labor.
And families and households within a class establish communities which include
some households or families that are themselves not directly tied to the class*
determinants. In other words, non-wage-working mothers or fathers, the
unemployed, the retired, and children can be as thoroughly working class as the
wage-worker himself or herself by virtue of being members of working-class
families or communities.
By examining occupational data from the 1930 federal census in the light of
the above definitions, and by excluding such administrative petty bourgeois wage
and salary earning occupational categories as foremen, supervisors, managers,
professionals, teachers, technicians, and police, it appears that approximately
253,733 of those 10 years of age or older and gainfully employed in the city and the
industrial region of Baltimore were engaged in working-class occupations. The
employed working class represented about 70.1% of all those employed, a
substantial majority. Baltimore was indeed a working-class town.
Of the working-class employed, 98.2% were engaged in occupations
contained within five categories of the 1930 U.S. Census as listed in Table 4-1. Two
of these census categories, "Manufacturing and Mechanical" and Transportation
and Communication," together approximate the industrial sector of the proletariat.
Census figures indicate that the employed industrial proletariat represented roughly
a 63.1% or nearly a two-thirds majority of the Baltimore working class; workers
employed in the "Manufacturing and Mechanical" category alone comprised 50.6%
of the employed class. If workers who are listed under other census categories, but
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