ABSTRACT
It is fifteen years since I first interviewed Rhonda, Bill, and thirty-nine additional third-year white students as part of a full-scale ethnographic investigation of a white working-class high school located in Freewaya then rapidly de-industrializing town in the northeastern United States. Based on a form of what I call ethnographic longitudi nality, Class Reunion is the 2004 story of the individuals who first appeared in Working Class Without Work (Weis, 1990). More than just a story of thirty-one individuals whom I reinterviewed in 2000-2001, however, Class Reunion is an exploration, empirically and longitudinally, of the re-making of the American white working class in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. Arguing that we cannot write off the working class simply because white men no longer have access to well-paying laboring jobs in the primary labor market (Edwards, 1979), jobs that spawned a distinctive place for labor in the capital-labor accord (Hunter, 1987; Apple, 2001), I track and theorize the re-making of this group as a distinct class fraction, both discursively and behaviorally inside radical, globally-based economic restructuring (Reich, 1991, 2001; Rogers & Teixeira, 2000; McCall, 2001).
