“Something’s happening to people like me,” Dewey Burton, an assembly-line worker for Ford, told The Times in 1974. “More and more of us are sort of leaving our hopes outside in the rain and coming into the house and just locking the door  you know, just turning the key and ‘click,’ that’s it for what we always thought we could be.”

Johnny Paycheck, a country singer, understood. Throngs of working-class people may have gathered around jukeboxes to raise a glass and chant the famous chorus to his most famous song, but they knew that his urge to rebellion was really just a fantasy: “I’d give the shirt right off of my back / If I had the nerve to say / Take this job and shove it!”

Similarly, in “Network,” Howard Beale, a TV news anchor played by Peter Finch, became famous as “the mad prophet of the airwaves.” But while he and his audiences may have been yelling, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!" the tag line was more a psychological release than a call to arms. After all, at the end of the film, Beale, already in suicidal despair, is murdered by his employer for meddling with the system.

The overt class conflict of the late ’70s ended a while ago. Workers have learned to internalize and mask powerlessness, but the internal frustration and struggle remain. Any questions about quality of work life, the animating issue of 1970s unrest, have long since disappeared  despite the flat-lining of wages in the decades since. Today the concerns of the working class have less space in our civic imagination than at any time since the Industrial Revolution.

Occasionally a rebel shatters the silence. Like Steven Slater, though, they get more publicity than political traction. Many things about America have changed since the late ’70s, but the soundtrack of working-class life, sadly, remains the same.