Source:
IHT...
The $20 hourly wage, introduced on a huge scale in the middle of the last century, allowed masses of Americans with no more than a high school education to rise to the middle class. It was a marker, of sorts, but it is becoming extinct.
Americans greeted the loss with anger and protest when it first began to happen in big numbers in the late 1970s, particularly in the steel industry in western Pennsylvania. But as layoffs persisted, in Pennsylvania and across the country, through the '80s and '90s and right up to today, the protests subsided and acquiescence set in.
Hourly workers had come a long way from the days when employers and unions negotiated a way for them to earn the prizes of the middle class - houses, cars, college educations for their children, comfortable retirements. Even now a residual of that golden age remains, notably in the auto industry. But there, too, wages are falling below the $20-an-hour threshold - $41,600 annually - that many experts consider the minimum income necessary to lift a family of four into the middle class.
...
"The most important model that rolled off the Detroit assembly lines in the 20th century," said Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley, "was the middle class for blue-collar workers."
IHTRead more:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/20/business/wage.php
A good point, results from 'wage erosion' plus protracted downsizing, rightsizing, and outsourcing, to increase profits, defeat claims that 'only if' Americans' had more education their lifestyles would improve.
IF higher education IS the answer. No one seem to be paying attention to, 'the gap', that suppose to resolve itself in a 'few years'. Colleges are reporting difficulties to meet the high volumes of high school graduates applications. How will 'the system' accommodate or absorb the Americans within 'the gap'?