The Incredible, Shrinking Middle Class

By Steve Hynd

If you're looking for depressing true stories of a screwed, blued and tattooed American middle class, look no further than McClatchie's Kevin G. Hall today.

The good paying, predominantly white-collar jobs that once sustained many American communities are disappearing at an alarming rate, keeping the unemployment rate stubbornly high despite the end of the Great Recession.

More troubling, these jobs in accounting, financial analysis, commercial printing and a broad array of other mostly white-collar occupations are unlikely to come back, experts predict.

There isn't a single cause to the trend. Some of it is explained by changing technology, some of it is the result of automation. Sending well-paying jobs to low-cost centers abroad is another big part of the story. So is global competition from emerging economies such as China and India.

The result is the same in all cases, however. Jobs that paid well, required skills and produced vital communities are going away and aren't being replaced by anything comparable.

"Unfortunately, the evidence is that you see a form of downward mobility of workers who are displaced from middle-skilled, stable career occupations," said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an interview.

Autor published a much-discussed paper in April, suggesting that the U.S. labor market has become polarized, with employment growth in the high-skill, high-wage end, and the low-skill, low-wage end. The vast middle, he concluded, is shrinking.

"The Great Recession has quantitatively but not qualitatively changed the direction of the U.S. labor market," Autor concluded, pointing to an accelerating trend that he said has been underway for more than a decade.

The McClatchie piece has some heartbreaking stories from middle-class folks who have plummeted down the economic rabbit hole, but the statistics are depressing enough. Autor's study reveals that growth in jobs in the skilled professional and office administration sectors slowed to a near halt from 1999 onwards and have been in decline since 2007. That means that professionals who lose their jobs - due to downsizing, offshoring, takeovers, whatever - almost inevitably will only get a new job at a lower salary, if at all. Despite (or perhaps because) of this, the top 1% of income earners have captured nearly half of all growth in income since 1993. The disparity points to an explosion of a modern myth:

"The middle class think they will be rich someday. The chance that people are going to become super rich is negligible. In fact, what we know is that income mobility up the ladder is slowing down, it's not increasing," said Robert Reich, an economist and former U.S. labor secretary, in a recent interview. "It's harder now for a kid born into a middle-class family to make it. It's harder for a kid in a lower middle class to do well . . . the story is obvious and so clear that it really needs to be laid out to people."

The rich have eaten all the pie, and are continuing to gobble up more and more of it with the avid collusion of both major political parties, both led by the super-rich for the super-rich. It isn't too much of a stretch to call it a Class War - and the middle class are largely shilling for the wrong side.