NYT: The Wage That Meant Middle Class

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/weekinreview/20uchitelle.html?scp=1&sq=The+Wage+That+Meant+Middle+Class&st=nyt



Damon Winter/The New York Times

STILL WORKING Steelworkers on a shift change in Braddock, Pa., awaited Senator Barack Obama last month.

By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: April 20, 2008

Whatever Senator Barack Obama meant by his less than artful remarks about small-town Pennsylvanians “bitter” over lost jobs, he certainly turned a lot of attention last week to the decline of the American worker, bitter or not.

The talk most often has been of shuttered factories, layoffs, outsourcing and other effects of globalization, especially in a state like Pennsylvania, which has lost tens of thousands of industrial jobs. But there is another way to look at blue-collar workers or their counterparts in the service sector.

Leaving aside for a moment those who have lost their jobs, what of those who still have them? Once upon a time, a large number earned at least $20 an hour, or its inflation-adjusted equivalent, and now so many of them don’t.

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. And it is on its way to extinction.

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 here, too, wages are falling below the $20-an-hour threshold — $41,600 annually — that many experts consider the minimum income necessary to put a family of four into the middle class.

FULL story at link.

[Supersedeas]

1. the American worker, like our troops in Iraq, have been forgotten by the Establishment Media

[endarkenment]

2. In the big metro regions $20/hr doesn't come close.

No way does 41,600 put a family of four into the middle class. Not even close.

[mopinko]

3. i can't believe it, myself. i had a hard hat job in the late 70's. people

doing that job today, 30 years later are making barely a few bucks more. meantime, i am living in a house that is worth 5 times what i paid for it 20 years ago. :crazy: