the fall of the american worker

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/07/the-fall-of-the-american-worker.html



There’s a moment in Dale Maharidge and Michael S. Williamson’s “Someplace Like America,” a documentary account of three decades of American downward mobility, when Maharidge spontaneously decides to phone up Charles Murray. It’s around the year 2000, welfare reform is on the books, and Maharidge wants to know what Murray, the author of “Losing Ground” and the country’s harshest critic of the welfare state, has to say about the growing phenomenon of the working poor—Americans who have jobs but still can’t make ends meet.

“Give me an example,” Murray says. Maharidge begins to describe a woman named Maggie Segura, employed by the state of Texas, whom Maharidge met, along with her daughter, at a food bank. “Is she a single mother?” Murray demands. Guilty as charged. Maggie Segura shouldn’t have had a child with the wrong guy—point Murray. He asks for another example, and Maharidge describes an intact family: three kids, mom, and dad, Obie, who works as a janitor but has to sell his blood plasma to make up for shortfalls in the family budget. Murray is undeterred. “What is the appropriate success for working families? The guy is making ten bucks an hour, the wife is working part time. They’ve got three kids. Should we feel bad?” Murray does some quick calculations. “If I had to, I could figure out ways to live on $550 a week with three kids. I probably wouldn’t live in Austin. I’d go someplace else, where it was a lot cheaper. I’d make choices.”

Point Murray again. Whatever stories from around the country Maharidge hits his way, Murray kills with the return. You can win every point when your social theory tells you that the only poor people in America—especially the America of the nineties boom, when “the general trajectory is up and away. You can make a decent living without the government helping you”—are ones undeserving of help. Maggie Segura had a child by the wrong man. Obie should have moved his family to Appalachia. Everybody screws up.

I was reminded of this scene from “Someplace Like America” while watching a new documentary film, “Two American Families,” which will air next Tuesday night, July 9th, on the PBS series “Frontline.” The film, produced by Tom Casciato and Kathleen Hughes (friends of mine), and narrated by Bill Moyers, follows the lives of two families in Milwaukee, the Stanleys and the Neumanns—the former black, the latter white—over the past two decades, starting in 1991. Both come out of the solid working class, and their fates are familiar ones. Jackie Stanley and Tony Neumann had factory jobs at the huge engine maker Briggs & Stratton, while Claude Stanley worked for A. O. Smith, a leading maker of chassis frames. All were union jobs, and all disappeared around 1990 as manufacturing went overseas. That’s when we meet the Stanleys and the Neumanns—just as both families are beginning to sink. The only work the men can find pays half the factory wage, without benefits—Claude waterproofs basements, Tony retrains and works the overnight shift doing light manufacturing. Jackie Stanley tries to sell real estate; Terry Neumann gets into a cosmetics-selling scheme, works at a school cafeteria, then drives a forklift. Without unions to support them, they are all at the mercy of indifferent employers and the harsh vagaries of the post-industrial economy.

[byeya]

1. Milwaukee had at least a couple of Socialist mayors and the era was marked by responsive

and honest government; workplace safety and high worker productivity; social spending; and seething enmity from those whose grip on the political economy was loosening.
The war on workers is not a new thing, it's mostly more out in the open now that government and capital has marginalized the Left.