So we're here in Pittsburgh: Where are the steel workers? Why aren't they here? This question was raised at the 1995 American Studies Association meeting during a special panel titled Does Cultural Studies Ignore Class? The discussion had reverted to the same old left academic angst over whether we are capable of addressing people in the world. Someone suggested that the ASA program committee invite Pittsburgh's steel workers to formally participate in the conference. Next thing you know, scholars in attendance started a litany of testimonials about their own privilege, the need to speak to broader audiences, to participate in the world as public intellectuals, ad infinitum. In the midst of this academic self-loathing, a grad student standing in the back of the room injected a dose of reality by reminding everyone that a real struggle was going on at Yale University to unionize teaching assistants and that, as progressive scholars, we should be doing all we can to support their efforts. In other words, don't mourn, organize. The young woman who spoke from the floor that November morning indirectly brought home another lesson. If you're looking for the American working class, you'll do just as well to look in hospitals and universities as in the sooty industrial suburbs and smokestack districts. And they are more likely to be brown and female than they are to be the good old blue-collar white boys we're so accustomed to seeing in popular culture. The combination of immigration and the transformation of work from manufacturing to service, from decent-paying full-time work to low-wage part-time and temporary work, means that the employed working class is increasingly female and Latino, black, and Asian American, and its main employers are hospitals, universities, food processing plants, food services, and various retail establishments. Sweatshops are making a huge comeback, particularly in the garment industry and in electronics assembling plants, and homework (telephone sales, for example) is growing. Most of us know firsthand that universities (as well as hospitals) make up one of the largest sectors of the service economy. Universities, after all, employ a vast army of clerical workers, food service workers, janitors, and other employees whose job it is to maintain the physical plant, not to mention fulland part-time faculty and researchers. In 1991, for instance, colleges and universities directly employed 2,662,085 workers-a figure