Working-Class Short Stories?

Two chestnuts I still like are Updike's "A & P" and Langston Hughes's "A Good Job Gone." Hughes's story, "Cora Unashamed" is pretty good, too--with an I.W.W. guy in a bit part. (PBS filmed it). Ann Petry's "Like a Winding Sheet" is good but oh so tough to take. Other recommended short fiction related to labor and class?

I had to find the author's name, I read this a long time ago in some sort of collection. The Quiet Man by Maurice Walsh. It made an impression because my grandfather was also a steel worker and had a reputation. It is the story the John Wayne movie was based on but the story is much better.

Also depends on what political turn one gives to the idea of working class from the perspective of 2008. Updike's "A & P" is well-crafted but has always struck me as a vaguely slumming exercise. Russell Banks' "Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story" from the collection Success Stories hits a lot of good notes, but leaves me with a similar impression. I wouldn't want to go out on a limb about authenticity, because that invites too much BS, but I can't help but think of the old line (Sam Goldwyn? George Burns?) that if you can fake sincerity, baby, you've got it made.

Positive examples: though much of Charles Bukowski settles for miserablism, I've always enjoyed "Kid Stardust on the Porterhouse". Mary Helen Stefaniak is a writer everybody should discover. Her "America, the Beautiful" from Self Storage is very good indeed; maybe nowadays it's marketed as multicultural but if one seeks labels, working class could work, too. Also "The Excitement Begins" by Leslee Becker in a story collection called The Sincere Cafe. The question of rural working class is important, too. Becker does that very very well.

Thanks for the great recommendations. "A & P" always made me a bit nervous, but it frames class-issues for younger college students in ways they seem to "get." But with Updike, you do get the middle-class lens--and the misogyny. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson gets at some small-town class-stuff well, but a lot of it is about failed bourgeois aspirations, as in "The Egg." Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois-Ann Yamanaka is a fresh, very funny, but authentic "take" on working-class life in contemporary Hawaii. It's *really* funny. I'd recommend Fae Myenne Ng novel Bone--great class-and-immigrant stuff in S.F. Superbly written.

Sherwood Anderson, of course, and I might add, on occasion, Ring Lardner. And I like F.X. Toole's collection of boxing stories Million Dollar Baby, if you think of boxing as a profession as much as a sport.