Working class: you are sustained by your current labor.
Upper class: you can sustain yourself based on the returns from your investments more-or-less indefinitely.
Middle class, between the two: you can sustain yourself off your investments for so long that you can’t practically be threatened by unemployment.
It is a labor relations issue explicitly, you need a union if you are in the first of the three classes, because otherwise you can be threatened by unemployment to do something dangerous or dehumanizing.
In the middle class definition, practically there’s some element of the fact that our skills are in high demand, so you can become unthreatened by unemployment by having just, like, a 1 year buffer. But I do think we can overstate how in-demand our skills to satisfy our egos…
If you have to think about which one you are you are working class. At a stretch you might consider the owner of a small tech company (say 5-10 employees) as petit bourgeoisie but the vast majority of small business owners (say mechanics, shop owners, small companies) are squarely in the working class. They may have employees but they still work, either for wages or as managers of those employees - which is work.
The middle class (petit bourgeoisie) is real, but its not centered around middle income (it is middle in the sense of being between the dominantly capital-dependent class and the dominantly labor-dependent class, primarily in how it relates to the economy, but in practice also on average, in income and wealth, but it is still an elite minority, just less so than the haut bourgeoisie that sits at the top.)
I like the definition I provided because it seems functional to me; it describes classes with labor-capital relationships, and describes how the incentives influence their behavior.
What I don't like about the middle class definition is that it is to my mind just a subset of the working class but designed to drive a wedge between people who should be looking out for each other. It has the effect of attempting to align working class people with super rich capitalists. Interesting that "middle class" was the original name for the capitalists who were between the working class and the nobility, now we pretend that the middle class are working class adjacent.
One definition I found reasonable was that it it "starts" with those that can meet their basic necessities (housing, food, transportation, healthcare) and still have funds left over for discretionary spending:
* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-biggest-lie-in-personal-fin...
Where it "ends" at top-end is perhaps more arbitrary (not Top 10%? 20%? 1%?).
Like if you by groceries, rent an apartment, have a bus pass, qualify for Medicare, and you have a Netflix account or get fast food (discretionary spending), then you seem to be middle class by this definition. Is that right? Maybe Medicare bumps you out. But ok, you can get the cheapest marketplace plan.
I mean, to be below middle class by this definition your expenses have to exactly match your revenue, or you are living beyond your means. So other than some tiny slice (in some perimeter vs area sense) of the populace, being working class seems to be definitionally unsustainable.
Middle-class is a spectrum like being "rich" is.
This would put a trader earning $3m/yr as working class. That’s fine I guess, but then we need another distinction, for the difference between that person and a minimum wage worker.
Now in all the conversations where we would say “working class” we use this new term, because we almost always mean things relating to income level rather than labour vs owner.
And so all we’ve done is changed the name for “working class”
You can be rich working class. If you acquire enough capital where you no longer work and just deploy your capital you are no longer working class.
At the very least the second camp is the only one that can effectively vote with their wallets, Poorer and you can't afford the better alternatives, richer and you have better means of influence (Or deal with things that are low volume and less price sensitive)
The difference is public policy. Owning property in the US absolutely elevates you to a higher privileged status above renters. How many homeowners were being evicted from their homes after missing a couple mortgage payments during the pandemic? Precisely zero. While thousands of renters in red states had the sheriff at their throats within 60 days. That's all you need to know about class in this country.
different circumstances are treated differently?
Yes, exactly. My entire point is that owning a home is nothing like renting, even if you're spending the same amount, and is treated as a privileged status.
Because many tech workers don't see themselves as workers, with some justification, many having substantial capital investments alongside labor income, making them, in class terms, petit bourgeois or at least close enough to it to perceive their own interests in more bourgeois than proletarian terms. And even the tech workers that are clearly part of the proletarian intelligentsia tend see themselves (rightly or wrongly) on a path that leads into the bourgeoisie, with bourgeois interests.