Looking back over the 1950s, an American today might be surprised at the number of strikes that disrupted the nation’s economy and changed the American economic, political and social scene.
Headline after headline announced that the railroads were shut down, that the nation’s steel workers had walked off jobs, that no cars were rolling off assembly lines at General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and Studebaker, that John L. Lewis had led his coal miners out of their shafts once more.
Each of those strikes was settled. Each settlement produced higher wages, richer fringe benefits. America’s middle class grew stronger and stronger.
At the end of World War II, returning servicemen and the high school graduates of the year had a choice. They could go to college or a technical school or they could go to work for one of America’s giant corporations. Either career choice seemed sound at the time. Thanks to organized labor and a world economy dominated by America’s industrial might, assembly line workers had a secure future. They could earn enough to afford a good house, an automobile or two, send their kids to college and, when the time came, would have a pension and health care that would keep a man and his wife comfortable till the grim reaper came to call.
The 12 million — give or take — veterans of the war could choose college and Uncle Sam would pick up the tab under the GI Bill of Rights. When they graduated the still-strong U.S. economy provided them with an even rosier economic future — and America’s middle class became the envy of the world.
As Dr. Gallup affirms and reaffirms, America’s middle class ain’t what it used to be. Its members tell Gallup and other pollsters that the country is headed in the wrong direction. It seems that way because the middle class no longer has the clout it takes to demand and get the share of the economy that its numbers deserve.
Politicians today campaign against labor unions — and win. Business ships jobs overseas and workers understand they must accept low wages and shrinking fringe benefits or find themselves on the street as their jobs fly to Mexico or China or Indonesia.
It is not that America is less wealthy. Quite the opposite. But the economy is shaped differently today. A wealth distribution map looks like a dumbbell today, with a ball of wealth at one end, a ball of poverty at the other and a bar that grows ever thinner connecting the two.
That thinning bar is today’s middle class.
A scholar by the name of Sherle Schwenninger, who is director of economic growth and American strategy programs at the New America Foundation, wrote a report recently titled “The American Middle Class Under Stress.” Here are a few of the facts he cited:
— There are 8.5 million people receiving unemployment insurance and over 40 million receiving food stamps.
— At the current pace of job creation, the economy won’t return to full employment until 2018.
— Middle-income jobs are disappearing from the economy. The share of middle-income jobs in the United States has fallen from 52 percent in 1980 to 42 percent in 2010.
— Middle-income jobs have been replaced by low-income jobs, which now make up 41 percent of total employment.
— 17 million Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.
— Over the past year, nominal wages grew only 1.7 percent while all consumer prices, including food and energy, increased by 2.7 percent.
— Wages and salaries have fallen from 60 percent of personal income in 1980 to 51 percent in 2010. Government transfers have risen from 11.7 percent of personal income in 1980 to 18.4 percent in 2010, a post-war high.
BECAUSE MOST Americans consider themselves a part of the middle class, and because the majority still has the power to shape the economy in this democracy of ours, America’s economy is bound to be re-shaped over the not-too-distant future.
Middle class Americans are not dumbbells. They will find a way to regain their share of the world’s richest economy.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
