This article seeks to rethink the trope of the “working family” so prevalent in contemporary politics, with particular attention to its promise and constitutive limits for the Left. It takes up contemporary socialist, feminist, anti‐racist and queer scholarship on the discourse of family, bringing it to bear on the case of “working family” rhetoric in the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising against austerity and public‐sector union‐busting. Reckoning with the term's racist and heteropatriachal valences, and its centrality in privatising social reproduction, I conclude by considering potential alternative horizons for thinking intimacy, labour, and social citizenship for the intersectional Left.