Middle Class Life Disappears

Posted by on August 29, 2007

If you want to get a taste of what globalization feels like at ground zero, read Louis Uchitelle's poignant story on the loss of Maytag and its well-paying middle-class jobs in Newton, Iowa reported in The New York Times. There are no guarantees in life, but part of the America Dream and a reasonable expectation for most Americans until recently is that if you worked hard and were reliable, your salary would increase annually until retirement and you would enjoy health insurance. (Of course, that was never true for salesmen like my dad, but they understood the vagaries of a "good year" and a bad one.) But no more. Workers at the soon-to-be-closed plant are finding that their $20 an hour wages were way out of whack with good wages elsewhere in central Iowa, which are more like $12-$13 an hour. Double that loss for a two-income couple, remove the health insurance, and you have families that find themselves in unfamiliar and pinched circumstances.

No union card, no college degree, no seniority guarantees you a job today.

No summary or excerpts do it justice, so just read it.