Image: Wikimedia Commons

working class

Social class composed of members of the society employed in lower tier jobs

EntityQ191159

Also known as lower class · labouring class · poor people · low-income people

Subclass of: social class
, high risk group

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

The working class is a group of people in a social hierarchy, typically defined by earning wages or salaries through their ability to work. Members of the working class rely primarily upon earnings from wage labour. Most common definitions of "working class" in use in the United States limit its membership to workers who hold blue-collar and pink-collar jobs, or whose income is insufficiently high to place them in the middle class, or both. However, socialists define "working class" to include all workers who fall into the category of requiring income from wage labour to subsist; thus, this definition can include almost all of the working population of industrialized economies.

Overview

All data

46 statements · 20% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Members / parts: blue-collar worker
Has characteristic: low income
Opposite of: upper class
Facet of: class theory

On other databases

40 identifiers linking working class across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

20%

externally sourced

Source last edited September 30, 2026. AIDB refreshes this page daily.

Suggest a fact or correction

Links

Use this data

curl https://aidb.si/api/v1/entities/Q191159

API docs, limits & keys

Cite this page

AIDB. (2026). working class (Q191159). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/working-class-Q191159