Professionals, professional workers, the PMC, are all associated with the petite bourgeois since they often adopt the morality and aspire to the lifestyle of the bourgeois, without owning the means of production. There’s a cultural divide this creates between the professional and rest of the working class as well. In the professional workplace, despite workers having inherent value in the knowledge they hold (ie not being reduced to the utility of their physical labor), there’s all kinds of exploitation and language/culture developed around this arrangement and structures of controlling these workers. “Being professional” is a weasel word for all kinds of behaviors that legitimize the hierarchy of the professional workplace, and how workers are positioned in it and compensated for their work. Some professional workplaces even use employee associations or “business unions” to control the way employees can organize together, undercutting potential for a professional workers union.

Ultimately the notion professional workers are separate from the working class benefits the bourgeois and employer because they are more likely to aspire to an individualized concept of personal success in their careers. The class privilege of having access to a professional education also reifies the divide. Since de-industrialization in North America and the shift to a neoliberal consensus and global service economy, the exploitation of professional workers is only increasing. Promoting class consciousness among professional workers is a bigger opportunity than ever, especially since the comforts of petite bourgeois life like consumerism are becoming less and less alluring.