For much of modern political discourse, the “middle class” and “working class” have been defined as distinct social and economic blocks with differences ranging from occupation, culture, taste, educational attainment, and presumed economic security.^[1] But that narrative no longer cleanly maps onto contemporary society. The two groups are progressively and materially coalescing around a shared condition, namely that of systematic exposure to labor precarity. Current methodological assumptions of poverty scholarship–i.e., static income measurements being the dispositive factor for class status–are inheritance of eligibility provisions for government assistance that are themselves outdated. Both poverty law and its study, therefore, are increasingly ill-equipped for their objective of material equality.

 

I. Instability of the “Middle Class”

 

Despite the popularization of the term, there is no single agreed-upon definition of the “middle class” due to both diversity in methodology and objective. For example, economists tend to define the middle class in income-based terms. One classic approach defines the middle class as all households earning around two-thirds to double the median national income within a given society, or those occupying the middle quintiles of the income distribution.^[2] This is a largely relational measurement, i.e., it situates the middle class not by fixed material standards but by positions within a distribution at a given time and place. Within this framework, the size of the middle class expands or contracts depending on overall inequalities, median earnings, and national contexts.

Another popular economic model operationalizes the middle class through socioeconomic status (SES), combining income, education, and occupational standing to distinguish those who possess relative economic stability and institutional access, in contrast to economic elites above and the working poor below.^[3] Because educational attainment and occupational status tend to remain relatively stable over the life course, SES conceptualizes the middle class as a more enduring social position rather than a category that expands or contracts with annual fluctuations in income.^[4]

Other attempts at pinning down the middle class emphasize consumption patterns, lifestyle, and self-perception, what the class members can afford (e.g., home ownership, education, discretionary spending), and/or capacity to invest in human capital and participate in the economy.^[5] If all these kaleidoscopic constructions of the middle class are still insufficient to capture its enigmatic existence,  one can also look directly toward the Marxist theorists who challenge the validity of the concept altogether.^[6]

 

II. Precarity as a Cross-Class Condition

 

Despite their divergences, all highlighted theories share a unifying premise: there exists a group of people who share a materially meaningful and durable degree of economic security as opposed to that of the working class.^[7] Recent evidence, however, complicates this assumption. A 2017 study using the Survey of Consumer Finances data shows that income precarity–measured through 1) probability of income loss and 2) probability of an income windfall minus the probability of an income loss–expanded sharply after the 2008 financial crisis and did not recede for middle-income families in the post-recession recovery period.^[8] Middle-income working families came to exhibit levels of income precarity comparable to those historically associated with the working class.^[9] In other words, the distribution of income levels and income insecurity have partially decoupled.^[10]

Scholarship on labor market dualization have also documented how insecurity has extended well into the higher-skilled middle class.^[11] Post-industrial labor markets have undergone a “dual transformation:” employment protections have weakened for certain segments and work conditions have grown more heterogeneous, even among credentialed workers.^[12] High-skilled young adults and high-skilled women, in particular, face growing employment instability.^[13] Within what was once considered a relatively homogeneous middle class, sharp divisions now exist between protected insiders and exposed outsiders.^[14]

This dual transformation fundamentally alters the relationship between the middle and working classes. Historically, the working class is defined in part by its vulnerability to unemployment and subsequent loss of benefits, wage volatility, and low savings rate.^[15] Today, many middle-class households face structurally similar risks: layoffs in professional sectors, reliance on contract-based or project-based employment, diminished employer-provided benefits, student-debt sensitivity, and exposure to macroeconomic shocks.^[16] While baseline incomes for these two supposedly distinct groups may differ, the conditions of insecurity become increasingly similar.

The shared experience of precarity also generates political cross-pressure. Households frequently contain both relatively secure and insecure earners; educational attainment, usually comparable within households, no longer cleanly predicts employment protection.^[17] The result is an erosion of clear class boundaries in lived experience. Recent comparative research confirms this change in political attitudes. Subjective work-related and financial insecurity are positively associated with support for both radical left and radical right parties across advanced democracies, indicating that economic instability shapes voting behavior in ways that cut across traditional class alignments.^[18] Moreover, studies using longitudinal survey data find that heightened economic and employment insecurity predicts shifts in political preferences and greater political participation or support for non-establishment options, suggesting that exposure to volatility, rather than static socioeconomic status alone, helps explain evolving electoral behavior.^[19]

 

III. Toward a Legal Architecture of Economic Security

 

Currently existing legal and economics systems are largely designed to assess static income levels and have thus always struggled structurally to operate in precarious labor markets that have progressively been removing the seemingly rigid lines between the middle-and-working classes. It should not come as a shock, therefore, that doctrinal and policy responses are already emerging.

A growing strand of anti-poverty scholarship advocates for dynamic, risk-responsive program design: recalibrating welfare eligibility rules to account for income volatility rather than point-in-time earnings, implementing continuous eligibility provisions to prevent coverage gaps during employment transitions, and reducing administrative burdens that disproportionately exclude households precisely when they are most economically vulnerable.^[20]

More ambitious proposals extend this logic further. For example, scholars have explored earnings supplements and tax-based income floors that operate like insurance against downturns, including expanded refundable tax credits that provide regular cash support to families up to a set earnings level and disbursed monthly to smooth over income volatility.^[21] Building on this, some advocates propose a guaranteed income framework delivered through the tax system that would provide predictable cash transfers to low and moderate-income households irrespective of employment status, directly addressing the risk-exposure this analysis identifies.^[22]

These approaches collectively point the way forward for poverty law: from policing static thresholds to institutionalizing economic security as a legal objective. The implications extend beyond program design. As economic volatility penetrates the middle-income strata—including segments of the professional–managerial class once assumed to be buffered from these labor market risks—the political architecture built around a stable middle class has begun to fracture.^[23]

Marx observed that under capitalism “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned . . . and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”^[24] It is perhaps more distracting than useful, therefore, to focus on definitional innovations such as that of the “middle class”; rather, we are at last compelled to face the erosion of predictability within strata historically associated with stability.

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Footnotes

^[1] See generally Rollock et al, Middle Class by Profession: Class Status and Identification Amongst the Black Middle Classes, 13 Ethnicities, 253, 253–75 (2013); Sally Power, Education and the Middle Class (2003); Stephanie Lawler, Disgusted Subjects: The Making of Middle-Class Identities, 53 Socio. Rev. 429, 429–46 (2005); Christian E. Weller & Amanda M. Logan, Measuring Middle Class Economic Security, 43 J. Econ. Issues 327, 327–36 (2004).

^[2] See e.g., Brian W. Cashell, Cong. Rsch. Serv., RS22627, Who Are the “Middle Class?”, at 2 (2018);

Richard V. Reeves et al, Defining the Middle Class: Cash, Credentials, or Culture?, Brookings Inst. (May 7, 2018), https://www.brookings.edu/articles/defining-the-middle-class-cash-credentials-or-culture [https://perma.cc/4UZD-6RUA].

^[3] See, e.g., Dennis Gilbert, 244–46 The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (8th ed. 2010).

^[4] See Barone et al, The Rise of Income and the Demise of Class and Social Status? A Systematic Review of Measures of Socio-Economic Position in Stratification Research, 78 Rsch Soc. Stratification & Mobility 100678 (2022) (noting that occupational class positions remain largely stable after occupational maturity and that class and status measures exhibit greater life-course stability than income measures).

^[5] See, e.g., Luis-Felipe Lopez-Calva, What Does it Mean to be in the Middle?, U.N. Univ. World Inst. for Dev. Econ.  Rsch. (Jan. 2013); Gérard Amoranto & H. Ishihara, Who are the Middle Class and What Values Do They Hold?, Asian Dev. Bank Econ. Working Paper (2010).

^[6] See, e.g., Val Burris, The Discovery of the New Middle Class, 15 Theory & Soc’y, 317, 317–49 (1986) (“From the standpoint of the mode of production [the middle class] have no common place or function. In Marx’s view…they do not constitute a ‘class’ in the strict sense of the term, but merely a heterogeneous grouping of intermediate strata.”).

^[7] See Scott T. Fitzgerald, Middle Classes, in Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology (Lynette Spillman ed., 2026) (observing that although scholars variously define the middle class by income, occupation, education, or relation to production, each approach seeks to identify a distinct socioeconomic stratum occupying a position between economic elites and the working or lower classes).

^[8] Michael Nau & Matthew Soener, Income Precarity and the Financial Crisis, 17 Socio-Economic Rev., 523, 537–538 (2017).

^[9] Id. at 523.

^[10] See Arne L. Kalleburg & Steven V. Vallas, Precarious Work, 31 Rsch. Socio. Work 1, 10–11 (2018) (noting that even during periods of employment growth following the Great Recession, a disproportionate share of new jobs was in non-standard arrangements, indicating that aggregate income recovery did not restore employment security and that job quantity and job stability increasingly diverged).

^[11] Hanna Schwander, Labor Market Insecurity Among the Middle Classes: A Cross-pressured Group, 8 Pol. Sci. Rsch. & Methods 369, 370 (2020) (“Labor markets have become less stable and dualized. Second, the growth of the middle class resulted in more heterogeneous work conditions within the middle class.”).

^[12] Id.

^[13] Silja Häusermann et al, High-skilled Outsiders? Labor Market Vulnerability, Education, and Welfare State Preferences, 13 Socio-Economic Rev., 235, 236 (2015) (finding that “labor market vulnerability has spread well into the more highly educated segments of the population.”).

^[14] For more intersectional complications, see Sophie McManus & Clara Irazábal, Migration and Integration of Middle-class Venezuelans in Costa Rica: Drivers, Capitals, and Livelihoods, 5 Wellbeing, Space & Soc’y 1, 1–13 (showing that “upper- and middle-class” migrants experience divergent migration trajectories depending on their economic, human, social, political, and cultural capitals, and that legal precarity, trauma, and capital erosion complicate the notion of a stable or uniformly advantaged middle-class position).

^[15] See, e.g., John H. Goldthorpe & Abigail McKnight, The Economic Basis of Social Class, CASEpaper No. 80, Ctr. for Analysis Soc. Exclusion (2004) (arguing that social class is fundamentally differentiated by economic security, measured through the risk of unemployment, earnings stability, and lifetime economic prospects).

^[16] See, e.g., Larry Elliot, UK Middle Classes “Struggling Despite Incomes of Up to £60,000 a Year,” The Guardian (Feb. 20, 2024, 02:00 AM EST), https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/20/uk-middle-classes-jobs-housing-costs-abrdn-financial-fairness-trust [https://perma.cc/UDZ5-6ELK]; Kelvin Chen, Amazon Cuts About 16,000 Corporate Jobs in the Latest Round of Layoffs, Associated Press (Jan. 28, 2026, 3:05 PM) https://apnews.com/article/amazon-layoffs-job-cuts-tech-74387fae2313ff7b0b1e638c00863443 [https://perma.cc/A4ZQ-CQ2G].

^[17] See Häusermann, supra note 13, at 254 (showing that employment risk is “distinct from the distribution of skill” and identifying highly educated but vulnerable workers as a “cross-pressured group,” pointing to potential cross-class alliances.).

^[18] See, e.g., Diego Fossati, Economic Vulnerability and Economic Voting in 14 OECD Countries, 53 Eur. J. Pol. Rsch. 116, 123 (2014) (“[V]oters facing higher degrees of job insecurity and lower employability in case of job loss are more likely to condition their support for incumbent governments to good macroeconomic performance.”); Zhinov et al, Precarity and Populism: Explaining Populist Outlook and Populist Voting in Europe Through Subjective Financial and Work-related Insecurity, 40 Eur. Socio. Rev. 704, 714 (“The estimated average marginal effect of financial insecurity on the vote for populist parties—left, right, and centre—is positive and statistically significant in almost all cases.”).

^[19] Bossert et al, Economic Insecurity and Political Preferences, Oxford Econ. Papers 1, 1–26 (2022) (using longitudinal income data to construct an individual insecurity index and finding that, conditional on current resources, insecurity predicts greater political participation and increased support for conservative and non-establishment options, including Trump and Brexit).

^[20] Justin Schweitzer, How To Address the Administrative Burdens of Accessing the Safety Net, Ctr. For Am. Progress (May 5, 2025), https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-to-address-the-administrative-burdens-of-accessing-the-safety-net.

^[21] See, e.g., Janet Shamlian, Guaranteed Income Program Helps Single Mother Makes Ends Meet, CBS News, (May 10, 2023, 8:15 PM EDT), https://www.cbsnews.com/news/guaranteed-income-program-single-mother-make-ends-meet/ [https://perma.cc/JD3W-UHZJ].

^[22] Groundbreaking New Policy Would End Poverty in America, Econ. Security Project (June 21, 2021), https://economicsecurityproject.org/news/groundbreaking-new-policy-would-end-poverty-in-america [https://perma.cc/B8SB-Y4MC].

^[23] Jacob S. Hacker& Paul Pierson, 3–4 Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (2010) (arguing that over the last generation “more and more of the rewards of growth have gone to the rich and superrich,” while the middle and upper middle class have “fallen further and further behind,” reflecting a structural transformation that undermines broadly shared prosperity).

^[24] Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, 17 Manifesto of the Communist Party (2nd Edition).