Her new book, Sleep­ing Giant: How the New Work­ing Class Will Trans­form Amer­i­ca , attempts to con­nect the dots between the strug­gles of those mil­len­ni­als and the pol­i­tics of aus­ter­i­ty, glob­al­iza­tion and the mas­sive trans­fer of wealth to the 1 per­cent that has reduced the liv­ing stan­dards of almost all work­ing fam­i­lies over the course of the last 40 years. It finds a strong sense of opti­mism in the recent increase in protest activity.

But the work­ing class is a sleep­ing giant that is begin­ning to stir and will soon insti­gate a great cam­paign for racial and eco­nom­ic jus­tice, accord­ing to a new book by Tama­ra Draut. A vice pres­i­dent of the lib­er­al think tank Demos, Draut’s pre­vi­ous book, Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30- Some­things Can’t Get Ahead, explored the how the high cost of col­lege, hous­ing and health insur­ance, com­bined with stag­nant wages and made the usu­al mile­stones of adult­hood increas­ing­ly out of reach for millennials.

The Amer­i­can work­ing class has been dissed and dis­missed. Our unions bust­ed, our wages slashed, our homes fore­closed and our rents raised. We’re blamed for the rise of Trump , but oth­er­wise do not exist in the media landscape.

Draut spends a good deal of her nar­ra­tive mak­ing the case that there is still a work­ing class in ​“post-indus­tri­al,” ​“dig­i­tal age” U.S.A. The het­ero­gene­ity of this new work­ing class — no longer solid­ly white and male, if it ever was — along with media indif­fer­ence and a cul­tur­al lega­cy of devalu­ing ​“women’s work” and dis­en­fran­chis­ing immi­grants and peo­ple of col­or ren­ders it ​“invis­i­ble” to many.

Quan­ti­fy­ing who is even in the work­ing class, sta­tis­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, is a noto­ri­ous­ly hard thing to do. She con­sults with the dean of work­ing-class stud­ies, SUNY Stony Brook pro­fes­sor Michael Zweig, who uses fed­er­al occu­pa­tion­al data to esti­mate that 60 per­cent of us com­prise the work­ing class. But most polit­i­cal sur­veys do not inquire into one’s rela­tion­ship with the means of pro­duc­tion, and so Draut uses edu­ca­tion­al attain­ment as a not-unrea­son­able proxy.

Not that Draut’s tome would fit with­in the moun­tain of pun­dit­ry that empha­sizes edu­ca­tion­al attain­ment as a cure for pover­ty. She evis­cer­ates this ​“elite blind spot” that focus­es on the ​“minis­cule” sliv­er of new pro­fes­sion­al jobs while ignor­ing the ​“scads of new jobs being cre­at­ed in home health care, fast food, and retail.”

Draut is one of the few main­stream writ­ers I’ve seen who has not­ed the fact that work­ers are increas­ing­ly reject­ing the label ​“mid­dle class” for them­selves, while polit­i­cal and media elites still use the term as a short­hand for the ide­al Amer­i­can lifestyle. Not not­ed — per­haps not known — is that when unions do inter­nal polling on polit­i­cal cam­paigns, ques­tions phrased around improv­ing the lives of mid­dle-class Amer­i­cans per­form sig­nif­i­cant­ly worse than iden­ti­cal ques­tions that talk instead about ​“work­ing fam­i­lies.” Work­ers hear politi­cians’ ​“mid­dle class” cam­paign rhetoric as promis­es to give more breaks to peo­ple who are already bet­ter off than them. (Which prob­a­bly isn’t that far from the truth.)

The largest class of peo­ple in the coun­try demand­ing their vis­i­bil­i­ty and rais­ing expec­ta­tions that they deserve more is the very def­i­n­i­tion of a sleep­ing giant stir­ring. Draut sees the ​“Day with­out Immi­grants” May Day protests, Black Lives Mat­ter and the Fight for 15 as the begin­ning of a new work­ers move­ment. The key, she says, will be work­ing through the his­tor­i­cal lega­cy of racism and sex­ism to make com­mon cause between these three inter­con­nect­ed movements.

There is per­haps a lit­tle too much opti­mism in Sleep­ing Giant. After all, the last big May Day strike was over a decade ago at this point. The ground is unde­ni­ably shift­ing, open­ing up a space for more pro­gres­sive demands, but it’s not mov­ing all that fast.

Still, since Draut hand­ed in her final draft of this book, mil­lions of vot­ers ral­lied have to a social­ist pres­i­den­tial can­di­date who will rewrite the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party’s plat­form, and the work­ers at Kohler and Ver­i­zon proved that the remain­ing large indus­tri­al unions can still go on strike and win. So the time is right for books that speak con­fi­dent­ly that a new work­ers move­ment is ris­ing up.

But it’s not entire­ly clear who the audi­ence is for Sleep­ing Giant. While she clear­ly advo­cates for more unions, Draut’s treat­ment of unions is a lit­tle too abstract.

The ​“real pow­er” of unions, she writes, is that they ​“can amass sig­nif­i­cant resources to engage in vot­er turnout, agen­da set­ting and issue advo­ca­cy.” That’s a think-tank view of unions. Any­one who’s ever been a part of a work­place job action that result­ed in, say, a reduced work­load or new safe­ty equip­ment or got a dis­re­spect­ful super­vi­sor straight­ened could take offense at the notion that our ​“real” pow­er is in our union trea­sury and checkbook.

Sleep­ing Giant seems best addressed to the Acela-rid­ing polit­i­cal class: reporters and polit­i­cal staffers who need to learn that the work­ing class still exists and that their ​“untapped polit­i­cal pow­er” should be heed­ed. There’s a val­ue to that. One thing that pre­ced­ed labor’s great upsurge in the 1930’s, ever so slight­ly, was a ris­ing tide of opin­ion among intel­lec­tu­als and polit­i­cal actors that an increase in union pow­er was nec­es­sary to sta­bi­lize the econ­o­my and shore up the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party’s base.

They can have their rea­sons for want­i­ng unions, and we’ll always have ours.

The book fal­ters a bit as well when it comes to the ​“Blue­print for a Bet­ter Deal” it advo­cates. Draut cor­rect­ly notes that while the demand for a $15 min­i­mum wage was imme­di­ate­ly derid­ed as unre­al­is­tic, the high bar that the demand set, com­bined with work­place action, quick­ly opened up a space that made a range of wage rais­es polit­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble. Curi­ous­ly, though, her pro­gram­mat­ic pro­pos­als are safe, mod­er­ate, vet­ted. It includes paid sick and fam­i­ly leave, uni­ver­sal pre‑K, tuition-free pub­lic col­lege, card check for union orga­niz­ing and over­turn­ing Cit­i­zens Unit­ed.

I’ll take it all, but this is the stuff of a white paper, not a polit­i­cal man­i­festo. These are tran­si­tion­al demands that have a snowball’s chance in hell in the short term, and that, once the sleep­ing giant is ful­ly woke and press­ing a cam­paign that looks more like a mass strike wave, would hope­ful­ly be trad­ed-in for much more ambi­tious demands.

Still, Sleep­ing Giant is a wor­thy entry in the con­tem­po­rary pro­gres­sive canon that should inspire more debate about the world we have to win.