The US working classes have suffered extraordinary economic reverses for the last thirty years: stagnant real wages, increasing individual work loads, rising household debt levels before 2008 and then record levels of unemployment and home foreclosures since. Yet, unlike workers in other advanced industrial economies, they have shown remarkable passivity in terms of social or collective efforts to end these conditions. We begin a conversation about why this is the case, whether it will continue, and what its social and individual effects may be.