The State of the Working Class

WYPR - 88.1 FM Baltimore | By Sheilah Kast,

Published February 1, 2017 at 1:42 PM EST

You may feel that you’ve heard more about the American working class in the last year than in the previous decade and a half combined. Could be. There have been books--like Nancy Isenberg’s "White Trash" and J.D.Vance’s "Hillbilly Elegy"--explaining attitudes of and about the working class. More pointedly, Donald Trump highlighted the frustration of the working class and harnessed it to build his campaign’s momentum. While much of the public may have been overlooking the working class for years, Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin has been paying it a lot of attention, and drawing links between what’s going on in the economy and what’s going on in families. In 2014 Cherlin, who is the Benjamin H. Griswold III Professor of Public Policy, published “Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America.”

Sheilah Kast

Sheilah Kast is the host of On The Record, Monday-Friday, 9:30-10:00 am. Originally, she hostedWYPR's Dupont-Columbia University award-winning Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast from 2006 - October2015. She began her career at The Washington Star, where she covered the Maryland and Virginia legislatures, utilities, energy and taxes, as well as financial and banking regulation. She learned the craft of broadcasting at ABC News; as a Washington correspondent for fifteen years, she covered the White House, Congress, and the 1991 Moscow coup that signaled the end of the Soviet empire. Sheilahhas been a substitute host on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday and The DianeRehmShow. She has launched and hosted two weekly interview shows on public TV, one about business and one about challenges facing older people.

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Andrea Appleton

Andrea Appleton is a producer for Midday. She comes to WYPR with years of experience as a freelance journalist filing stories for newspapers, magazines, and public radio. She has reported on topics ranging from bull riding to bionic fish, with an emphasis on science. She is also former senior editor of the Baltimore City Paper, and a graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism.

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