Middle-class blue collar jobs
I don’t have the energy to tie this all together into a thoughtful post tonight, but I’ve been reading some interesting articles about displaced workers and the economy. They’re particularly resonant this week in light of the huge buyout that GM is offering its workers.
First up is Louis Uchitelle writing in NYTimes about the limited success of job training programs for displaced workers. It’s adapted from a book he’s written, which I’ve requested from the library.
Second is Mark Schmitt, writing more broadly about the limits of education as a strategy for reducing income inequality. It’s worth both reading the posts that he links to, and the comments he received — there’s a bunch of very big names in economics joining in the discussion.
I really think we’re reaching the end of an era in which even skilled blue-collar workers could count on a solid middle-class lifestyle. There just are going to be fewer and fewer jobs that pay $30 an hour plus benefits for people who don’t go to college. (The exceptions are likely to be things like plumbing, that can’t be outsourced to India and aren’t subject to mechanization. But there are going to be fewer repair-type jobs too, as it become cheaper to just replace things than to fix them.) But going to college isn’t a guarantee of a middle-class life either. It may be necessary, but it’s not sufficient.
March 29th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
I thought the Times article was very interesting. In my pre-mommy life, I was a high tech worker, and I thought (at the time) that it was a pretty safe career line. You know, computers are the wave of the future, etc., etc. And then the tech bubble burst, and suddenly there were NO JOBS to be found, anywhere, in high tech, even for people with real, tangible skills. It made me want to laugh, in a sad, bitter way, whenever I heard some politician start talking about the necessity of providing laid-off workers with job training, so that they would be ready for the jobs of the 21st century. Just what all we laid-off tech workers needed: more competition for already non-existent jobs. Not to mention the disingenuous sop such promises of jobs following from (expensive?) education represented to those people laid off from other industries.
March 30th, 2006 at 8:45 am
“But going to college isn’t a guarantee of a middle-class life either. It may be necessary, but it’s not sufficient.”
Amen to that. My college degree from an honors college most certainly has NOT paid off.
March 30th, 2006 at 9:45 am
I totally agree with you, but I do think it’s worth asking what we mean by a middle-class life. There was a long article about the “China price” in the NYT Magazine last year, and one of the author’s points was that urban Chinese workers making only $5-$12K (US) a year could, thanks to cheap manufacturing, buy many of the consumer goods that we think of as markers of middle-class living. It’s a sort of interesting imaginative process for me to try to imagine what the median standard of living will be as the US loses manufacturing jobs and the China price pushes down median incomes. How will people’s lives be different? It seems to me that the big explosion point will be health care, but how will it affect the rest of our kids’ lives? Will people be perpetually in debt to pay for the “necessary” consumer goods? Will debt (consumer credit) become harder to get, as people simply carry credit balances their entire lives and then their estates pay whatever they can? Or will the costs of computers, microwave ovens, home entertainment systems, etc., just keep falling in line with incomes? Will people have to revert to the more austere living standards of the pre-1950s period?
Then there’s housing itself. Some economists look at Europe and theorize that children will remain at home right up through the birth of their second child, because housing prices near the city will stay too high. I tend to think that land costs and exurban development will mitigate that, but it’s hard to tell.
In general, I tend to worry slightly more about global climate change and peak oil than declining median incomes, but that may simply reflect our family’s current economic condition. US citizens as a whole have tended to tolerate income inequality far more than any other group in the world, so entrenched income inequality, IF it led to greater political unrest, could have large political consequences. It’s arguable that only racial politics stopped the working class in the nineteenth-century US from demanding greater equality. Or not. I tend to be pessimistic about the possiblity for large political change in the US when it comes to addressing income inequality. Most folks seem to believe that poor or lower-middle class people make as much money as they deserve, never mind inherited advantages (and, more to the point, disadvantages). And the idea of a progressive tax code is all but dead.
So, that brings me back to my original question: what do we mean when we say that the middle class is all but dead? My answer tends to focus on questions of economic security, and the possiblity for medium- and long-term planning, with little fear about family health crises or major inflationary changes, but are there other answers?
March 30th, 2006 at 7:35 pm
I think the thing to remember about this is that middle-class manufacturing jobs didn’t get that way due to the kindness of the owners of the manufacturing industries. I mean, the whole reason that GM jobs were good jobs was because people in Flint occupied the factory in the 30s to get their union recognized. My paternal grandfather was a machinist for RCA Victor, back in the day, and that was a pretty crappy job before they organized their union. And they didn’t win middle class status in their first contract, but they built it over years and decades.
If you look at a place like Las Vegas, you see a city where UNITE HERE! has basically been able to give a middle-class life to service workers–all those servers and housekeepers make a living wage because their entire industry in that town is unionized. Those jobs can’t be outsourced either, and the industry that they’re in is highly profitable.
I don’t believe that unionization is a panacea for all forms of economic injustice, but there have been great strides made in economic equality when working class people stood up and demanded a change.
March 30th, 2006 at 9:09 pm
I hear you Landismom. I’ve heard the President of HERE give that speech — that manufacturing jobs aren’t inherently better jobs than service industry jobs, that mining was a brutal miserable job, and that unionization is the difference between Gulfsport MS and Las Vegas.
March 30th, 2006 at 11:16 pm
Another good example of this is a study that the IWPR did (commissioned by SEIU) about the ‘union advantage’ for nurses (http://www.valuecarevaluenurses.org/newsroom/news1.cfm)–again, a profession that for many years was underpaid & considered ‘women’s work,’ but is now a solidly middle class job.
March 30th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
Yeah, I was going to wait until your next post (already up) to point out that the sort of “middle-class jobs” that are disappearing now were an historical anamoly, created out of Great Depression, and even more World War II, social programs, combined with the power of unions during the 1950s and 1960s (and the power of the unions was created, I believe, in equal measure by union activism and by World War II, when the government finally supported union demands wholeheartedly). And to those who would say, unions were never more than — er, is it 30% of manufacturing? 40% — I would say that there were vast spillover effects.
And now, unions aren’t large enough to create those spillover effects anymore, and more importantly, the federal government has more or less finished dismantling the New Deal (something that mostly really happened under Reagan, but we’re not fully reaping the effects until now). So from a long historical point of view, we’re returning to something like the economic situation of the late 19th century, another Gilded Age, and the question becomes, from an academic historical point of view (or maybe just a wonky one): is the US a fundamentally economically conservative country, even at the cost of vast income inequality, or a fundamentally progressive country, currently undone by the institutional power of big business?
The old story about the Gilded Age was that all the various progressive groups — Unions, African-American civil rights activists, the Social Gospel folks, the Club Women/Municipal Housekeeping folks (and feminists generally), the populists/agrarians — were undone by their failure to make common cause, or even to have a common cause. And so big business, supported by a hands-off Supreme Court, held sway over Congress for fifty years, thwarting the “real” progressive interests of the majority. But I’ve always wondered whether the problem wasn’t more deep-rooted than that, if the problem wasn’t that most US citizens and immigrants aren’t fundamentally economic conservatives, disinterested in even incremental change. Again: look at the lack of support for anything like a real progressive income tax. The Republican Party has had great success convincing people to vote against their own economic interests, and not just through social conservative scaremongering. People truly believe that the Republican economic agenda will help them, even though every economic model and all the government’s own records indicate that that agenda does not help the middle and working classes.
Also, I think that historians have, in general, given too much credit to changes in social attitude to explain the temporary triumph of the progressive and union agendas. I think most of it can be explained, in retrospect, by wartime necessities.
See, it turns out that everyone really should have been paying attention during those Robber Baron/Gilded Age lectures in that big US history lecture course they hated after all.
Or else I’m just too enamored of my own subject for my own good.
March 30th, 2006 at 11:20 pm
Oops. “Most US citizens and immigrants ARE fundamentally economic conservatives, disinterested in even incremental change.”
March 31st, 2006 at 3:53 am
It could be that I’m just a snob, but coming from Australia (which owes about half its cultural mores to the UK, and half to the US) class is about much more than income. It’s also about the kind of job you have – hairdressers, factory workers and plumbers are working class, teachers and nurses are middle class, lawyers and other professionals are upper-middle class, and inherited wealth is upper class (which is a very very small group of people, fundamentally).
So to me, the story of income inequality is not just a story about the working class being squeezed, it’s also a story of the lower middle classes getting a smaller share of the pie than they used to. The reasons are complex, and reduction in unionisation is part of it, but part of it is also the increasing returns to high skills – you can make much more of a fortune by being the top lawyer in your field than you could fifty years ago. Fifty years ago the judges would have been much closer to the top of the income tree than they are now.
I find this class stuff really interesting. As a child of scientists, I never felt that I fitted in any class, although now I’m a professional, upper middle-class is clearly where I fit (both income, and on my classifications above).
April 4th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
The NYT book review this Sunday had a review of Uchitelle’s book.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/books/review/02delong.html?ex=1301634000&en=ee691dd8afbad9ca&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
June 24th, 2006 at 2:08 am
After a visit to the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri last week and noticing miles and miles of multi-million dollar homes compared to the one or two of my youth in the 1960s, my question is this: did the middle class disappear into poverty, affluence or BOTH?