The Invisible Class…

Here’s a startling number: 70% of the U.S. workforce has less than a college degree. And about 70% of the young adult workforce  (age 25-34) lacks a BA. Yep, you read that right. Seven in ten my friends.

And yet… no one seems to be talking about the straits many of them are in. We hear instead about the young man with a degree from Colgate who is still living with his parents while he searches for the right “fit” in his job. Or we hear about high college debt that is supposedly hamstringing  so many young adults. I did a little digging and only about 30% of young adults aged 25-34 have education debt, and the average debt is only $20k. You’d never know it from the press.

What we hear less about is the stagnant wages of this large group (the vast majority in fact) who have less than a four-year degree. Those with only a high school degree are earning about 25 cents less an hour than in 1973. Those with some college (but not a four-year degree) are earning only 30 cents more. College degree holders are up by $5 an hour, and advanced degrees earn $6 more an hour than in 1973, all after adjusting for inflation.

What we hear even less about is the erosion of benefits for this group that goes hand in hand with the rise of a contingent, DIY workforce across all rungs of the work ladder. What we hear less about is the number of part-time jobs this group must cobble together to make ends meet.  It all adds up to a majority that is treading water to stay afloat, and another, very small group that is swimming along with the current.

Sure, it’s easy to say the solution is: get more education. But you need a four-year degree to see the differences begin to matter. Do we really think 70% of the workforce will magically get a degree? (Even if they try–and many do–the college dropout rate is still 40%.)

I’m sensitive to this split right now because with my friends Maria and Pat, I’m launching a new book on how the recession is affecting young adults. The idea is picking up interest with those in the publishing world, but yet–and this happened also with Not Quite Adults–this question keeps cropping up:

Who cares about the working class? Write about the elite kids–their parents buy the books.

Ouch. Who cares? I care, for one. And I suspect a lot of my friends and family here in the middle of the country care–since that’s a big ground zero for the major workforce retrenchment of the past few decades: Michigan, Ohio, farm country.  Yes, it’s in the big middle swathe of the country running from north to south, east to west, where the big shift from well-paid manufacturing to the low-paid service sector is felt the most. It is where families who once were practically guaranteed a secure future lived and raised families, but whose second and third generations now wonder if they can sustain the dream.

Since I keep hearing this question, I’ve become curious why so many in the elite institutions of our country–the newspapers, magazines, and book publishers  (mostly on the East Coast I have to say)–are so certain that no one cares about the working class.

Here’s my theories:

1) working class = poor. Far too often, when we hear the words “working class” we think of the poor. And the poor just don’t generate that much interest or sympathy from anyone, mainly because of our Calvinistic tendency to blame them for not picking themselves up by their bootstraps. We tend to think of the poor as deserving of their status, since they fail to follow the rules we all learned to play by: work hard, keep up your yards, you know the drill. So no one is going to sell any newspapers or books when the topic is poverty.

But the working class are not the poor. They are not even the working poor (which should be a de facto oxymoron in this country, but sadly is not). The working class I’m talking about are those of us who take a shower after work, not before. They are the group who earns about $40,000 a year at jobs like battling fires, arresting criminals, driving semis, milking cows, operating precision machines, driving forklifts, handling our baggage on airplanes, delivering  UPS packages, and teaching our kids.  This is the solid middle. Their wages put them at between 150-200% of the poverty level, or about $19 an hour for a family of four. Notably absent from that list are factory workers who assemble cars, television sets, batteries, and other “things,” because those jobs have largely vanished, and those that remain pay on average about $33,000 a year.

Yet this is the group often overlooked in conversations that, on the one hand, laud the financial quants who move money around the world, and on the other lament the laziness of the poor. It’s too bad, really, that this group gets overlooked, because their plight is the country’s plight. And they are struggling. With one more layoff, they risk slipping down into the ranks of the working poor, forced to bartend, become an orderly in a hospital, or sell cheap televisions at Best Buy–or probably all three at once.

2) flyover land, and what’s the matter with Kansas: Both the east and west coasts pride themselves on a cultured habitue. There’s really no reason to touch down in the middle of the country on those cross-coast hob-nobs. What’s there to see? Racists, shrill Tea Partiers, ignorant and scary hillbillies. Glenn Beck. (oh wait, he’s on the East Coast). Iceberg lettuce. Folger’s coffee. State schools. No, might as well skip all that and stick to our own.

The result of this distance (literally and figuratively), we in the vast middle of the country have been reduced to a novelty. Witness NPR a couple nights ago. They felt it necessary to trot out a young Harvard grad whose mother was a truck driver–the epitome of stereotypical working class (save for the female twist). The interviewer kept asking her, over and over, to tell the story of life on the road with her mother–who home-schooled her kids by making them estimate mileage, how far they could go on a tank of gas, and braking speed, among other lessons. “And, so, you were in the truck, and then what?… your mom made you do math lessons, while driving a truck?…” It was as if the interviewer had never imagined that a truck driver could truly impart a good education–enough to get into…Harvard. (She’s on her way to Harvard Law, btw.)

So, in essence, it becomes a matter of small circles circulating amongst themselves.  It reminds me of the New Yorker‘s  Pauline Kael’s quote about Nixon’s election: I don’t know how he won. None of my friends voted for him.

3) The 1970s are a long time ago: I was having a late (and long) lunch with two friends last Sunday and the conversation turned to the working class (because I forced them). We had a very engaging chat–but I was up against a pro: he spent his young adulthood in East Berlin before the wall came down. Nothing like having to drive a small plastic Trabbie all your life to make you clamor for free markets. Yes, he knows a thing or two about the proletariat (and is now an ardent free-market capitalist with a capital F. )

I tried to hold my own, lamenting the days when a majority of workers without a college degree could earn a decent living and make it to the middle class–largely because the unions saw to it that they were paid well for a hard day’s work. His response? Boo-hoo, you want to live in the past and bring manufacturing back to US shores?  You want to go back to paying $1200 for a television?

The idea that workers should not always have to be on the defensive, fearful that they will be downsized at the drop of a hat, or that there was once a time when their happiness and security on the job was a prime concern of employers was quickly dismissed as a tired, utopian (!) notion that doesn’t belong in a world competing globally for jobs.

How could that be, I thought? Then I realized: he was born in 1970–about a decade past the point of the American blue-collar hey-day. His generation did not grow up with the security and the sense of stability that work offered. It was in the 1970s that everything started to spiral. Oil shocks, inflation, poor Jimmy Carter, Detroit’s demise. Then the 1980s and Reaganomics. Remember the air traffic controllers?

With competition knocking on our doors from overseas, it was only a matter of time before the workers had to accept wage concessions. No longer did the corporate gods have to pay attention to their workers or risk disruption. Now they just had to bow down to their share holders–and that meant cost-cutting and layoffs, and a race to the bottom on pay and benefits. It’s no coincidence that today’s headline read “stock market soars on good earnings reports.” Yes, corporate profits are up, and shareholders can rejoice. Yet unemployment is stuck at about 10%. Go figure.

This was the climate that the current generation came of age in. They saw their parents laid off willy-nilly. They saw job security disappear into thin air. They took it for granted that they would have to fund their own retirement, and most likely go without health insurance because, as they were told over and over, corporations can’t afford to pay these benefits anymore. They also got used to convenience and cheap prices in WalMart sized packages and the message that to consume was All-American. Bamboozled we all were.   To that was added the exaltation of everything entrepreneurial, especially high-tech entrepreneurs. The mythic two guys in a garage parlaying an idea into a million-dollar IPO offering was the hoop dream of a generation. A new rebel was born and he wore cargo shorts and flip flops.

The upshot is that the younger generation today has no historical memory of a time that wasn’t an employer’s market. They have no memory of a time when job security was a given and employers offered the training on the job, and real wages kept families afloat.

So it’s not surprising, I guess, that the working class gets overlooked. Ralph Ellison wrote The Invisible Man back in 1952, as a lament on the invisibility of life as a black man in the United States.  We might add to the shelf, The Invisible Class. I for one think a lot of people would read that book– at least 70% of the country is the target market after all.