{
  "id": "working-families.broad",
  "term": "working families",
  "sense": "broad",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "published",
  "level": 19,
  "domain": "agency",
  "style": "folk",
  "definition": "A collective self that makes its boundary wider to every family whose income comes from jobs, so that acting for them reads as acting for most members.",
  "folk_gloss": "households that live on earnings from work, addressed as the main body of the public",
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "collective-self.shared",
      "boundary.limit",
      "in-group.inside",
      "jobs.employment",
      "income.financial",
      "make.verb",
      "wide.spatial",
      "family.social",
      "come.arrive",
      "act.deed",
      "read.information",
      "member.social"
    ],
    "interaction": "A condition most members share is used as the edge of the in-group, so the boundary drawn is wide and a policy aimed inside it reads as aimed at nearly everyone.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "an in-group drawn wide enough to read as the whole",
      "a condition of most members used as the edge"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The Working Families Party was founded in New York State in 1998.",
      "domain": "politics"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "middle-class.centre",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "the middle class draws the edge by a range of wealth; working families by where income comes from"
    },
    {
      "id": "ordinary-people.core",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "ordinary people splits off those with power; working families widens without naming an out-group"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "hard working families",
    "hardworking families",
    "working families",
    "working family"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "claude-opus-5-5:hand-curated",
    "date": "2026-09-29",
    "confidence": 0.85,
    "sources": [
      "schema/power-agency-phase.md"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-working-families.broad"
}