Sunday, December 11, 2011

The middle class is dead. Long live the working class

Obama is on 60 Minutes tonight,doing his level best to paint a happy face on what can't be a happy time for him.

I think his problem is that he's caught between the expectations of the vast swath of America that got caught up in the "change" mantra on the one hand, and his Wall Street backers on the other.

Obama is shown addressing a "middle-class" audience in Iowa. One of the interesting features of the term "middle-class"  is how over the last fifty years or so it has come to include most of the working class as well.

Before the post-war boom the middle class was relatively easy to define. To be middle class meant that you had hired help in the home and worked in one of the professions or owned your own business. Doctors and lawyers and the guy with the local GM franchise were middle class. Teachers and nurses and plumbers and carpenters were worker bees.

In the fifties and sixties middle-class definition became blurred by the rise of social sciences that posited a white-collar blue-collar divide between people who worked. The underlying prejudice was that white collar people were more educated and didn't get their hands dirty. Blue-collar workers were less educated and either performed manual labor or worked right next to it.

That model was clearly broken by the seventies. For example, if you worked in retail you were considered a white collar worker, but a typical retail manager at the mall made less than a line worker at GM or Ford. What does the white-blue collar divide mean when the the blue collar worker is making twice the annual income of the so-called white collar worker?

A big part of the reason was the success of various unions in improving the standard of living for their members. But just as the unions were celebrating their successes, the real middle class, the professionals and the business owners who identify more closely with the Chamber of Commerce than with the AFL-CIO, and the true capitalist class above them, were launching a counterattack.

I think it was during the Reagan years that union bashing became not only acceptable, but the preferred modus operandi for aspiring politicians. Union bashing became a tool to divide the working class. The non-unionized retail worker who made $15,000 a year was the voter who most loved to hear that the unionized factory worker making $30,000 was coddled and overpaid.

Unionized workers were themselves partly to blame for the success of the campaign to delegitimize their unions. Too many convinced themselves that their good fortune was due to their own individual skills and efforts. Guys making forty an hour manage to convince themselves that the union was holding them back, that on their own they'd be making sixty.

Union leadership in the last twenty or thirty years has been out to lunch too; and usually out to lunch with the boss. No matter how deep their rank and file roots may go, once the union leaders are making boss level wages, they move to the same neighborhoods and join the same country clubs as the boss. They adopt management values.

Where was the fight against NAFTA?

Why was there not a general strike when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers?

Obama talked about saving the car industry in America. Wages at the major manufacturers are now a third of what they were before Obama saved the industry.

The illusion that too many working people had, that they were something else other than working class, is best   buried and left behind.

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