More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In the United States, the middle class is the group of working people who, according to a May 2016 Pew survey, with a yearly household income for a family of three ranging from $42,000 to $125,000 in 2014, make up 51 percent of U.S. households.
65 percent of all Americans worry about paying their bills—as
middle-class life is now 30 percent more expensive than it was twenty years ago; in fact, in some cases the cost of daily life over the last twenty years has doubled. And the price of a four-year degree at a public college—one traditional ticket to the bourgeoisie—is nearly twice as much as it was in 1996.
just-making-it group “the Middle Precariat,” after the precariat, a term first popularized six years ago by the economist Guy Standing to describe an expanding working class burdened with temporary, low-paid, and part-time jobs.
The United States is the richest and also the most unequal country in the world. It has the largest wealth inequality gap of the two hundred countries in the Global Wealth Report of 2015.
according to a 2016 study by the Equality of Opportunity Project, Americans born in the 1940s had a 92 percent chance of making more money than their parents did at age thirty. Those born in the 1980s have around a 50 percent chance of earning more than their parents. (In the Midwest, as the New York Times reported, the odds are less than half.)
Before the 2008 crash, only one-quarter of Americans viewed themselves as lower-class or lower-middle-class. Even those who were struggling tended to view their problems as temporary. No longer. After the recession of 2008—which, though caused by the financial crash, could actually be said to have exposed or congealed decades of social class separation and downward mobility, since the Reagan era—a full 40 percent of Americans viewed themselves as being at the bottom of the pyramid.
In a study published in 2017 by the organizations the Institute for Policy Studies and Prosperity Now (full disclosure; IPS is the fiscal sponsor of my organization, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project), the median wealth—assets minus debt—of white households is now over sixty-eight times higher than that of black households. For black families, the median was just $1,700.
pregnancy discrimination cases are on a massive upswing. In 2016, a report published by the Center for WorkLife Law found that so-called family responsibilities discrimination cases had risen 269 percent over the last decade, even though the number of federal employment discrimination cases as a whole had decreased.
Martha Nussbaum points out, America penalizes the caring classes—mothers, fathers, day-care workers—and deems them “less than.” This attitude stems in part from an intolerance for human weakness, and thus for those who serve humanity.
According to a study written in 2013, the cost of delivery, for both vaginal and cesarean births, has nearly tripled since 1996: the average cost for a C-section in the United States in 2013 was $16,038, compared with $12,560 for a vaginal birth.
Only 14 percent of American workers have paid family leave.
The nearly forty-year-old Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA), which amended the Civil Rights Act of 1964, asserts that discrimination on the basis of pregnancy or childbirth is unlawful sex discrimination.
Gender Equality Law Center (GELC) have some ideas. They want “pay transparency” for both men and women and gender-neutral paid leave laws. The GELC encourages men, even those who are not “high-level” workers, to take—or just ask for—paternity leave; the group also applauds the best corporate child leave practices and calls out the worst.
The number of people with graduate degrees receiving food assistance or other forms of federal aid nearly tripled between 2007 and 2010, and those with a Ph.D. who received assistance rose from 9,776 to 33,655.
There is something uncomfortably classist in the insistence on doing what you love in the first place, I realized after putting my own “creativity” aside to edit for hire at various points in my life. If the insistence on “doing what you love” comes from a place of privilege, where risks are lower and failure is not the be-all and the end-all, what happens to those who don’t have that privilege?
must reconsider the long and deeply held belief that a graduate degree in a stable and ostensibly sensible field is the path to personal betterment. That is no longer a given route to success.
Class mobility has long been seen as shorthand for progress; moving upward. People once trusted such mobility to get them out of their hometowns. They assumed that with the right training, they would be able to move into new, more comfortable, and more powerful existences. But now this mobility works in the wrong direction for some, who are sliding backward. After all, for so many intellectual workers, their refined training brought them huge school debt, not a better future.
“Our entire disposable income goes to child care,” Bellamy said. “It’s not a tragic story, but it is tiring and tiresome. I have a career, I work really hard, and yet I get no break.”
This brought their combined income up to $130,000 or so, which was good news, of course, and more recently it had risen again to around $160,000 when she became chair of her department and finally got a raise. But their combined earnings now also blocked their access to middle-class affordable housing under New York City’s Housing Development Fund Corporation (HDFC) program, which would have enabled them to move.
today more than 40 percent of the teachers at American colleges and universities are adjuncts. They are typically paid by the class,
a union representing some adjuncts, the SEIU, has set a pay target of $15,000 per course, in total comp and benefits. Uncommon unions could put a dent in the present university business model and eventually free some brain-workers from desperation and penury.
“the fair labor seal.” This commendation would be given to, say, colleges that treat their employees well. The labor practices of colleges and universities would be rated for their fairness and for how precarious their workers are. This strategy would work because American parents remain spellbound by U.S. News & World Report’s ranking of colleges when they are searching for schools for their children.
If this “seal” was adopted, colleges could then call themselves “fair labor” institutions the same way that some brands call themselves “fair trade.”
cost of education risen so fast? In 2013, a raft of articles and studies found that tuition at colleges and universities was increasing faster than inflation and pinned the blame on the fact that public universities had been hiring far more administrators than teachers, creating sprawling bureaucracies.
according to U.S. Department of Education data, college and university administrative positions grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009—ten times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. Why weren’t universities using their pricey tuitions to pay the adjuncts, whom students actually saw each day, rather than the costly administrators?
The rise of 24/7 day care also reflects the disempowerment of unions and with that the extreme corporate schedules that have shattered the traditional workweek and hours for employees.
Although 30 percent of Americans were in unions in the 1960s, now only 11 percent of all workers are union members, and only 7 percent of private-sector employees are union members. Unions have lost bargaining strength and also popularity among American voters.
almost two-thirds (64.2 percent) of women with children under age six are working and one in five working moms of small children work at low-wage jobs that typically pay $10.50 per hour.
If an employee works over thirty hours, the employer is required to provide health insurance. (Not surprisingly, the number of part-timers working just below thirty hours a week rose from 2013 to 2015, and the number working just over thirty hours fell.)
Those who provide child-care services for the folks with crazy schedules have crazy schedules themselves. Both go to bed around 1:00 or 2:00 A.M. Deloris then wakes up again if one of the overnight babies needs attention. She goes back to sleep and Patrick wakes up at 5:45 A.M.
in 2015 unpredictable work schedules governed the lives of 17 percent of American workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Despite a federal bill reintroduced after an earlier failure in 2017 and attempts at legislation in ten states to require employers to stabilize their workers’ schedules, erratically scheduled jobs remain widespread.
“fulltime” is still defined as a forty-hour workweek, not even four in ten Americans employed full-time work this little. In fact, 42 percent work forty hours, and roughly 50 percent work more than forty hours: the average is forty-seven hours; only 8 percent of full-time employees say that they work fewer than forty hours. (Eighteen percent work sixty hours a week or more!)
United States is close to the bottom of the ranks of wealthy nations with respect to our federal child-care expenditures as a percentage of gross national product (GNP).
Many survey participants talked about the shock of day-care costs, which can devour 30 percent of one income in a two-salary household,
In thirty-three states and the District of Columbia, the cost of center-based day care (let alone a nanny) for an infant is higher than the cost of a year at a public college.
A single parent, she was often late in picking up her children because her manager would ask her to do extra tasks at the end of her shift, keeping her from leaving on time. These
Because of her unstable hours and inability to afford adequate day care, she was often not around to help him with his homework, and as he missed assignments, his usual As and Bs had been dropping.
America doesn’t support a public, nationalized system of care, day care should be wholly funded by the private sector. (In this sense, day care resembles the health-care system, a private-sector system that fails because of social resistance to its institutionalization.)
“What is our strange commitment to seeing care as a purely private individual act rather than one embedded in the larger community?”
reason that care and care work are looked down upon. The theorist Jeremy Rifkin puts it well when he writes that our degradation of care is caused by “hypercapitalism,” our crazily unfettered free market. Rifkin channels my own worries and beliefs when he argues that we substitute market transactions for what should be human interactions.
“commodification of emotion”; when we sell our most intimate relationships, the result can be emotionally (and monetarily) damaging.
“prisoner of love phenomenon.” The “prisoner of love” theory asserts that employers can underpay care workers in part because they know they can manipulate these workers’ specifically caring natures.
care work has long been associated with charity and piety. Care workers were either not paid or paid in alms.
as if we Americans assume that when people spend their time loving or tending to others they have somehow stepped out of the commercial—and thus any pragmatic, valuable, and intelligent—sphere. This is partly why these workers are paid little; indeed, they are made to pay for what is seen as their unworldliness or idealism.
Viviana Zelizer, a Princeton University scholar, thinks that we first must understand that no contamination results when the two spheres of intimacy and the marketplace overlap.
Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, as part of the Economic Opportunity Amendments. This bill addressed the rising demand for day care as more women went to work. It also promised to improve the educational quality of day care, from early infancy to early adolescence, and would have subsidized care for working mothers and even for some of the middle class. But President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill later that year,
The most obvious measure is to make child care affordable through subsidization. However, political resistance to this solution is overdetermined and long-standing.
In France, the government provides reasonably priced day care as well as tax breaks for families with in-home au pairs or nannies—plus universal preschool starting at age three.
