Workers Hold 70% of Jobs but 2% of Legislative Seats

About seven in 10 jobs in a typical democracy are working-class jobs. Yet only about 2% of legislators across the world's democracies held one before entering politics. That gap sits at the center of Keeping Workers Off the Ballot: How Democracy Undermines Working-Class Representation, a book by Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu reviewed in Jacobin by Jared Abbott.

The review defines working-class work as manual, service or clerical. The numbers get starker close to home. In the United States, working-class people make up more than half the labor force but just 5% of candidates for state, county and local office. In Brazil, workers represent more than 70% of the labor force but only 8% of candidates for the national legislature.

Who Pays for the Gap

Drawing on an original database of legislators in 97 democracies from 2016–18, the authors found that who holds office shapes what gets passed. Politicians with working-class job histories backed more pro-worker economic legislation. Cabinets with more working-class ministers built more generous welfare states. Citizens trusted legislatures less when fewer workers served in them.

The review quotes the book’s blunt summary: “when workers don't hold office, economic policies and outcomes are better for the haves and worse for the have-nots.”

Why aren't workers on the ballot? Carnes and Lupu point to the demands of campaigning: time, money and income security, plus party gatekeeping. In surveys in Mexico and Canada, 29% of high-potential working-class respondents worried about giving up a job or income to run, compared with 14% of similarly qualified professionals. Across surveys in 10 democracies in the Americas, political elites had encouraged 12% of promising working-class respondents to run. The figure for comparable professionals was 34%.

What Has Worked, and What Could

The review challenges the book’s more pessimistic conclusions, arguing that combinations of factors and organized labor can raise working-class representation. History offers evidence. By 1929, more than a quarter of Britain’s House of Commons had previously held working-class jobs under the Labour Party. In Germany, about 16% of the Bundestag came from working-class jobs in 1969. The share in the British Commons rose above a quarter by 1945, hovered around 15% to 20% through the 1970s and stayed above 10% until the 1990s.

A modern example is the New Jersey AFL-CIO candidate program, which has recorded nearly 1,400 election victories since 1997. The review also describes proposals such as candidate pipeline programs, political scholarships to replace lost wages, seed money, a right to return to a job after campaigning, worker committees within parties, worker quotas and citizens’ assemblies. Austria’s 2022 Citizens’ Climate Assembly included college graduates at roughly the same rate as the public. Ireland’s citizens’ assembly preceded the 2018 referendum that repealed the country’s abortion ban. Abbott argues that workers need organized power in workplaces and communities to gain political influence.

The View From the Corner Office

The boardroom offers a very different picture of how power is distributed. Covista CEO Steve Beard has appointed four chiefs of staff in five years, treating the job as a leadership rotation. His picks have specialized in finance, strategy, technology and, most recently, management consulting. “Each of my chiefs of staff has looked different because I've been in a different place in my own journey at the time that they've come on board,” Beard said. “It really is defined by the leader and the moment.”

A 2024 McKinsey report put median chief-of-staff tenure at 2.3 years. Beard oversees five educational institutions that train students for health-care careers, and said that's roughly what he considers appropriate. His alumni have moved up: one to a CFO role at a Covista university, another to a vice president position overseeing business-to-business operations and clinical partnerships, and a third is preparing to become a vice president of enterprise pricing.

Beard keeps long hours, reaching his desk around 7 a.m. and leaving after 6 p.m. on most weekdays. He said he wants honest feedback. His first chief of staff told him he talked too much in leadership meetings, so he began letting others speak first. “I found that I actually learned more by listening to the conversation amongst the team,” he said.

Elsewhere in the Journal, two workplace pieces touched on friction and trust. One described workers avoiding asking colleagues for help because they fear imposing or anticipate rejection. Another profiled a 74-year-old father and his millennial daughter, Caroline Chirichella, three years into a business partnership. He’s deliberate and systematic; she trusts her gut. A third article reported that PepsiCo’s stock is down about a third from its 2023 peak and trades at its steepest discount to Coca-Cola in more than 25 years, with investors wanting bold solutions.

Why This Matters: Put the pieces side by side and a pattern appears. A CEO can hire an adviser to tell him he talks too much; a warehouse clerk or home health aide faces a far steeper climb to get a seat where laws are written. The research Abbott reviews suggests that's not a quirk but a structural feature: when working-class people are 5% of U.S. local candidates despite making up more than half the labor force, people who rarely held those jobs shape policies governing wages, welfare and workplaces. The fixes on the table, from wage-replacement scholarships to a right to return to a job after campaigning, are public choices, not market accidents. Whether democracies make those choices will help determine who gets heard when the next economic rules are written.