OK. The argument is that during the Fordist era there was a class called "workers". Both the aggregate majority of consumption + an aspirational life at an individual level was financed by the largely fungible wage labor of that class. To be a "worker" was to be a successful middle class person. 1/

That is no longer true. Neither the aggregate majority of consumption nor an individually aspirational life can be financed out of wage labor broadly accessible to trainable humans with time and hands. Wage laborers of that sort still exist, but they have been demoted as a class. 2/

Most consumption, and any aspirational life, is financed from the income of people with wealth, or who earn unusual wages because they are situated in ways other cannot easily reproduce for the performance of labor decoupled from time. 3/

Where it was once a reasonable and hopeful project that we could all self identify and respect one another as workers, it no longer is. We live in a society where some workers are winners, and many are perceived and self-perceive as losers. 4/

We therefore understandably aspire to what distinguishes workers, rather than what they have in common. The identity "worker" no longer, um, works as a means of constructing a shared way of living that would yield a reasonably just society. /fin