And it’s no doubt gotten worse since this was written in 1984 — just look at the shabby way the heroic workers who became ill from Ground Zero have been treated:
“Every year 100,000 workers are killed or die of work-related accidents or disease; 400,000 are disabled; 6 million are hurt at work. In The Working-Class Majority (1974), Andrew Levison says, ‘All the clichés and pleasant notions of how the old class divisions…have disappeared are exposed as hollow phrases by the simple fact that American workers must accept serious injury and even death as part of their daily reality while the middle class does not.’ And he goes on:
‘Imagine the universal outcry that would occur if every year several corporate headquarters routinely collapsed like mines, crushing sixty or seventy executives. Or suppose that all the banks were filled with an invisible noxious dust that constantly produced cancer in the managers, clerks, and tellers. Finally, try to imagine the horror…if thousands of university professors were deafened every year or lost fingers, hands, sometimes eyes, while on their jobs.’”
– Paul Fussell, from his book “Class,” Ballantine Books (1984).