end of Labour Studies class

[cannibal_x]

I had my last Labour Studies 101 class the other day. Interesting, I thought it might ease my transition to once more being a unionized worker somehow, but I didn't expect that a unionized job would just fall in my lap in the middle of the course

Comments

[youwhowereborn]

In my hometown I grew up as part of the big modest middle, neither rich nor poor, and everyone I knew was in that middle. I knew there were poorer and richer people in theory, but the reality didn't really touch me. Same with small town middle class vs big city notions/expressions of class... what was normal and unremarkable at home became lower-class in a metropolis (I guess that's common with migration/urbanization, everywhere). And having one parent from a small town and one from a big city, both more or less "middle class" relative to their respective environments, has been a mindfuck, because of the generational differences and flawed/absent parenting, and my own mixture of hopes and expectations and whatnot. I'm a little curious about how I would have experienced or made sense of class and whatnot in the last decade if I'd moved to Vancouver or even Victoria instead of Toronto and Montreal. I know one of my friends ended up in Vancouver and had some of the same reactions/realizations as I did to my places, but I still think it'd

[youwhowereborn]

I guess I also wonder what the "expiration date" is, in this day and age, on establishing a class position relative to your parents/family--like when do you officially leave their bracket, if ever? Like, there is a lot of talk in developmental psych circles about inserting a category between adolescence and adulthood called "emerging adulthood", referring to us, the boomer children, and our generation's experience of our twenties basically. So people who are moving back home in their mid-twenties due to career/educational/financial problems or pressures are not yet out of the running for becoming middle class, if you went with that concept. Also, what about rags-to-riches, people who go bankrupt but still possess loads of social/cultural capital? I feel like class is this complex algorithm of family history, education, economic factors, but is made out to be deceptively simple by profs and activists and media types...

[cannibal_x]

Hehe, true..

[edgecondition]

Unrelated to this post, but even less related to the one newer post, so here: have you read this old "futurist" book "the third wave" by an Alvin Toffler? I picked it up (cough cough picked...) recently, after several of my teachers have been mentioning it over the last decade, enough that I would remember the title. I just started reading it, but wonder if you read it maybe?
I imagine there are hundreds of books of the kind - explaining post-industrial versus industrial societies and predicting this and that (even if the book is older than I am..., all the people who recommended it - did that because they thought it was actually playing out that way) and like with all these books I'm scrolling over the drama and trying to get at tip on where the bullets come from next time around...

[cannibal_x]

Nope, never heard of it.. I should check it out, along with the other book you mentioned a while ago!
Now that I work in an academic library, there's no excuse that I can't find a book, even if I have to order it in..

[edgecondition]

If I were you, I'd leave it for after I'm out of school again and have time ;) But then again, I'm the slowest reader I know.
PS. re: preveious comments & description of parents from different backgrounds making up for a "mindfuck" --> SPOT ON!!!

[cannibal_x]

hehe, well, my exams are in a week, so maybe I'll read it over my 2-week break.