By Jason Boyd

I spent my early adult years working as a bellman in hotels. It taught me many things that I know I wouldn’t have learned in college. I’ve often joked that everything I needed to know I learned from being a bellman. The most important lesson: money makes the world go ‘round. 

The recession after the attacks on 9/11/2001 brought about a slash to my hours, and a need for new full-time employment, which I found at a grocery store. But then the grocery store installed self-check machines and again I needed full-time hours, which, by this time, the hotel could once again give me. 

I felt as though my education as a bellman was complete, and so I began the ascension up the corporate ladder within the hotel. Within a few years I was in management and feeling pretty good. I was the youngest manager there. I had made it. I even wore a suit to work! I had successfully transcended my meager blue-collar existence. And, of course, to be a member of the club you had to buy into the orthodoxy – supply & demand, free market, the invisible hand… Yeah, I bought into all of that. 

But in 2009, I was suspended from the club, having been laid off from my position at the hotel. It was a bad time to be in the hospitality industry, and I struggled to get my foot back in the door. In hindsight, I can recognize my naivete, but I truly thought I was a rising star. Unfortunately, the hotel business is all I really knew, and I found that it was really difficult to get into something different. 

The struggle led to me having to move my family into my mother’s house, which wasn’t uncommon during what we now know as the Great Recession, but it sure didn’t feel good at the time. Any sense of pride I had was gone. And naturally, the idea that I had transcended anything began to look like pure folly. I was, and very much still consider myself, a part of the precariat.  

The term precariat is a portmanteau of the words precarious and proletariat. It describes a social class whose income is so precarious that it has an adverse effect on their material and psychological well-being. 

I have a decent job currently, but if I lost it tomorrow, I’d most likely be thrust into an immediate struggle to keep my head above water. Sure, technically there are plenty of job openings, but, in reality, decent jobs that pay a living wage are hard to come by. Millennials are often derided for not wanting to start at the bottom and work their way up; but, when the bottom means poverty wages, then really who can blame them? 

The rise of the precariat class has undoubtedly played a significant role in the rise of populist politics. The 2016 election was essentially a contest of populism versus the status quo, and populism won. Of course, that was right wing populism, but there’s populism on the left as well, in the form of candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren whose support largely comes from younger voters who are more likely to be a part of the precariat. 

 While I have fundamental disagreements with right wing populism on who is to blame and what steps to take, I certainly recognize the frustration with the status quo. And I’m very familiar with the sentiment from centrists that we on the fringes just don’t get how it works – we lack the education or experience to know better. I hear it from coworkers, many of them public-sector lawyers, who, if they lost their job and had to find another in the private sector, would probably make even more money. The system works in their favor so of course they’re going to want to protect it. They are not the precariat, and neither are those on the television who are paid by the rich to tell us what to think. 

I used to buy into their message that if you play by the rules and work hard you’ll make it, you’ll be a part of the club. Ok, centrists. I did what you asked and failed, repeatedly. It’s a false promise. So, I’ve got no interest in maintaining the status quo, because all it’s good for is keeping the rich fabulously rich, and the rest of us fighting for the scraps.