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Comments are busted at Ms. Aniston’s blog (it com­plains about a miss­ing captcha, except there’s nowhere on the page to enter it), so I’ll throw my answer to her ques­tion here:

One pos­si­ble method of determing class is to use sta­tion in the hier­ar­chy as a met­ric. If you have a boss, and you have peo­ple who call you boss, you’re mid­dle. If you only have those who call you boss, you’re upper. If you only call oth­ers boss, you’re proletarian.

Of course, that gets murky when you’ve got “team leader,” and journeyperson/apprentice sit­u­a­tions, which comes back to the IWW’s met­ric: can you fire oth­ers? If so, you are a boss. Perhaps not the boss, but cer­tainly a boss. If you can­not fire oth­ers, you are not. I should prob­a­bly note that I’m not in favor of sim­ply grant­ing small busi­ness own­ers a pass. Ultimately all small busi­ness own­ers are sim­ply large busi­ness own­ers in an infan­tile state — those who do not aspire to be bil­lion­aires are on the way to sell­ing their busi­ness to those who do. I liked Trotsky’s take on their role (and dan­ger) in Fascism: What it is and how to fight it.