What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class

by Joan C. Williams, Harvard Business Review, November 10, 2016

My father-in-law grew up eating blood soup. He hated it, whether because of the taste or the humiliation, I never knew. His alcoholic father regularly drank up the family wage, and the family was often short on food money. They were evicted from apartment after apartment.

He dropped out of school in eighth grade to help support the family. Eventually he got a good, steady job he truly hated, as an inspector in a factory that made those machines that measure humidity levels in museums. He tried to open several businesses on the side but none worked, so he kept that job for 38 years. He rose from poverty to a middle-class life: the car, the house, two kids in Catholic school, the wife who worked only part-time. He worked incessantly. He had two jobs in addition to his full-time position, one doing yard work for a local magnate and another hauling trash to the dump.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he read The Wall Street Journal and voted Republican. He was a man before his time: a blue-collar white man who thought the union was a bunch of jokers who took your money and never gave you anything in return. Starting in 1970, many blue-collar whites followed his example. This week, their candidate won the presidency.

For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap.

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich….

continue reading at Harvard Business Review

We’re NOT Number 1: Guess Which Country Now Has a More Affluent Middle Class Than America?

By Lynn Stuart Parramore, AlterNet, 4/23/14

America’s rich are surging ahead, but the rest are falling behind. What happened?

Fancy living up in Canada? Granted, it’s a bit chilly. But the middle class up there has just blown by the U.S. as the world’s most affluent. America’s wealthy are leaping ahead of the rest of much of the globe, but the middle class is falling behind. So are the poor. That’s the sobering news from the latest research put out by LIS, a group based in Luxembourg and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

After taxes, the Canadian middle class now has a higher income than its American counterpart. And many European countries are closing in on us. Median incomes in Western European countries are still a bit lower than those of the U.S., but the gap in several countries, including the Netherlands, Sweden and Britain, is significantly smaller than it was a decade ago. However, if you take into account the cost of things like education, retirement and healthcare in America, those European countries’ middle classes are in much better shape than ours because the U.S. government does not provide as much for its citizens in these areas. So the income you get has to be saved for these items.

The report found also found that the median U.S. income, which stands at $18,700, has remained about the same since 2000. And it found that the poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.

So what does Canada have that the U.S. doesn’t have? Well, it has universal healthcare, for one thing. And more unions. And a better social safety net. Ditto with the European countries whose middle classes are better off than ours when you take into account government services.

The LIS researchers found that American families are paying a steep price for high and rising income inequality. Our growth is on par with many other countries, but our middle class and poor aren’t really getting much out of it.

Things have been going downhill for the middle class since 1990, the report shows. Remember anything that got started in those years? Ah, yes! Deregulation….

continue reading at AlterNet

The Big Stall

by Robert Reich, Robert Reich’s blog, April 5, 2013

Bad news on the economy. It added only 88,000 jobs in March – the slowest pace of job growth in nine months.

While the jobless rate fell to 7.6 percent, much of the drop was due to the labor force shrinking by almost a half million people. If you’re not looking for work, you’re not counted as unemployed.

That means the percentage of working-age Americans either with a job or looking for one dropped to 63.3 percent — its lowest level since 1979.

The direction isn’t encouraging. The pace of job growth this year is slower than its pace last year.

What’s going on? The simple fact is companies won’t hire if consumers aren’t buying enough to justify the new hires. And consumers don’t have enough money, or credit, or confidence to buy enough.

It’s likely Americans are beginning to feel the pinches of January’s hike in the payroll tax combined with the government budget cuts known as the sequester. Increases in gas prices haven’t helped. All are taking money out of the pockets of most people – whose job situation remains precarious. So they can’t and won’t buy much.

One indicator: Retailers cut their staffs in March — by 24,100.

Yes, the stock market has rebounded. But only a small portion of Americans are affected by the rebound. The richest 1 percent own 35 percent of all shares of stock; the richest 10 percent own 90 percent.

And, yes, housing prices have stopped falling, and construction of new homes has picked up. The construction sector added 18,000 jobs in March.

But the turnaround in housing isn’t because prospective homeowners have been able to get new mortgages. It’s because investors are buying or building homes to rent. And a buoyant rental market doesn’t make most people feel wealthier.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is that we’re in the fifth year of a supposed economic recovery from the second-worst economic downturn of the past century, and we’re still not nearly back on track. Instead, we’ve had the most anemic recovery in history.

A Gallup survey released Thursday showed that the percentage of Americans holding full-time jobs has remained essentially unchanged over the past year. With 12 million people out of work and another 8 million holding part-time jobs who’d rather have full-time ones, this just isn’t nearly good enough.

We’re experiencing the burden of austerity economics and the continued scourge of widening inequality. Both are squeezing average Americans. Yet it’s impossible to have a buoyant and sustained recovery without a large and growing middle class.

Blame rich, Wall Street, big business

letter by Dr. B. Gerard Bricks, Kennett Twp, in Daily Local News, March 14, 2011:

We are the richest country in the world. Where did all the money go?

The protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining rights for public sector workers have spawned a cottage industry of bashing public sector workers, their unions, and teachers especially, for their compensation packages. They are accused of sucking the lifeblood out of the middle-class taxpayers.

I need public sector services; I expect high-quality public sector services. I expect public sector workers to have fair total compensation packages; I expect to pay for those services.

The average wage for teachers that I’ve seen during this discussion is in the $50K range. I think that is underpaid, maybe grossly underpaid, for the service they provide. They are in charge of our human capital development. Why should they be paid so much less than Wall Streeters who are in charge of our financial capital and just tanked our economy through criminal behavior?

Middle-class private sector workers think teachers and public sector workers are overpaid, because the middle class private sector workers are actually being underpaid.

In the last 30 years, worker productivity has gone up 83 percent, while inflation-adjusted private sector wages have gone up 0 percent.

In the last 30 years, the percentage of the total national wages taken by the top 1 percent has increased from 9 percent to 20 percent. The wealthiest 2 percent have had 10 years, plus a two-year extension, of the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Billionaire hedge fund managers’ wages are taxed at a 15 percent rate, much lower than the rest of us.

Corporations in Wisconsin just got $160 million in tax breaks. The oil industry, the most profitable industry in the world, still gets tax subsidies. Two-thirds (2/3) of corporations pay no taxes. …

keep reading at Daily Local News