Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America

by Alissa Quart

the problem of not being able to afford to live in America can’t be cured by self-help mantras. It can’t be mended simply by creating a résumé that utilizes several colors of printer ink or a regimen of cleansing green juices. The problem is systemic. Squeezed is the story of this psychological and socioeconomic predicament. Being squeezed involves one’s finances, one’s social status, and one’s self-image. The middle class I refer to in these pages is a group defined by more than just money: it also leans on credentials, education, aspirations, assets, and, of course, household income. 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. Michelle Belmont and her family were in the middle class, and they were squeezed.

I call this 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. My term, the Middle Precariat, describes those at the upper end of that group in terms of income. Its membership is expanding higher and higher into what was traditionally known as the solid bourgeoisie. These people believed that their training or background would ensure that they would be properly, comfortably middle-class, but it has not worked out that way.

Like the classic precariat, the Middle Precariat has lost the narrative of their lives and futures. Who are they and what will they become? Their income has flatlined. Many are “fronting” as bourgeois while standing on a pile of debt.

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. And when the top 1 percent has so much—so much more than even the top 5 or 10 percent—the middle class is financially and also mentally outclassed at each step.

The middle class is endangered on all sides, and the promised rewards of belonging to it have all but evaporated. This decline has also led to a degradation of self-image. 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.

For the median family of color, that wage and wealth stagnation can be pretty dire. 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.

The 2017 tax bill will likely only make these numbers even worse for many Americans. But this so-called tax reform is only the most recent example of how income inequality is written into the law of the land.

The number of parent employees who are part-time caregivers for their children has increased, partially due to an expanded female workforce. Workplaces have not changed enough. In this country, pregnancy—and as we shall see later, being a parent at all—can be a professional hazard. Nanau recounted that the female workers for whom she prosecuted cases were not given chairs to sit in while they worked behind cash registers into their sixth month of pregnancy. The white-collar workers she represented were harassed in subtler ways: They were given more work than they could handle, offered “friendly” suggestions by their colleagues about work-life balance, or simply needled about everything from their clothes being too tight to whether they suffered from postpartum depression.

These fears were not unreasonable. Overall pregnancy-related discrimination charges are on the rise, increasing 23 percent from 2005 to 2011. These women felt like they had to “cover” the fact that they had what I call “hidden pregnancies.”

These negative stereotypes are part of the “caregiver penalty”: a broad theory of what amounts to social punishment for being a caregiver. As the philosopher 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.

Other elements of the parental penalty are both the scarcity and high cost of child care. This is a country that has not cared enough to support affordable and accessible child care for working parents—one of the biggest impediments for those either trying to sustain or aspiring to a middle-class life.

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. Kids don’t come cheap.

Acquaintances asked, “Are you planning on another?” I knew my daughter was destined to be an only. With just a scrap of maternity or paternity leave, many parents choose to have just one child, as my husband and I did, because it’s all they can manage economically. Our family was far from alone. Only 14 percent of American workers have paid family leave.

Postpone, plan, and wait are the watchwords of a middle-class professional. When one’s employer determines one’s family planning, everything is upside down. If you add institutionalized racism and America’s race-based wealth disparities to the gestation equation, you will swiftly discover that the median black family has it even worse.

The nearly forty-yearold 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. An employer can’t refuse to hire a woman because of a pregnancy-related condition alone. Congress approved PDA in 1978, when I was six. “PDA brought about some immediate and significant changes in employer policies,”

Some have argued that discrimination itself costs us billions of dollars in diminished output, job turnover, and the time, effort, and money to file discrimination claims. There is also the price paid by the employer with the reputation as a corporation that sucks the life out of employees and shuts out pregnant women.

in the post-crash world of today, a good education may not keep you from hovering near the poverty line. 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. More specifically, at least 28 percent of households that used food stamps in 2013 were headed by a person with at least some college education. This proportion was 8 percent in 1980, according to an analysis by University of Kentucky economists. This

Michelle Belmont, the Minnesota librarian and web developer who admitted that few of her friends had any clue how broke she was, put it this way: “Every American thinks they’re a temporarily embarrassed millionaire: I am no exception.”

Her situation was what it was. She belonged to a class of people who suddenly find themselves with neither extensive social support, besides parents and an online social network, nor a clearly delineated future. One reaction to this plight might be: Get over yourself! Find work that pays the bills! Or, as Karen Kelsky, a former anthropology professor who founded a counseling service called The Professor Is In, has put it: “find a ‘real job.’” (I paused at this, wondering how being a professor was not “real” in Kelsky’s mind.)

Bolin’s situation was not just the result of too few hours in the day. As social psychologists who study what’s known as “decision fatigue” have found, being poor takes a huge amount of mental work. There is a constant need to weigh the merits of spending even the smallest amounts of money: yes, maybe I should buy a few extra bars of that seriously marked-down soap (one of the experimental conditions tested by a Princeton economist in poor Indian villages), but then I can’t afford this week’s medicine or food. Tagging along with Bolin at Trader Joe’s, whose very upscale-ness pointed to Bolin’s fractured identity, I saw how tiring it was for her to try to stay within her monthly $349 food-stamp budget, for which she qualified only in the summer, when school wasn’t in session.

When so much mental activity is devoted to basic survival, little is left to engage in long-term thinking or to muster willpower—as Bolin well knew. “I need to smoke to relieve the pressure,” she told me as she feverishly rolled her own cigarettes one evening when I took her out to a bar, where she also found relief in the form of plentiful margaritas. She was self-medicating, she said; other times, she used Xanax for anxiety. She also took a daily antidepressant. As Linda Tirado, whose raw and honest blog post on her own minimum-wage existence catapulted her into the national spotlight in 2015, bluntly writes in her book Hand to Mouth: “Being poor while working hard is fucking crushing.”

We 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.

The reality for me, and for all the rest of America’s contingent brain-workers, is that the security and respect once accorded to the lifetime academic—the promise of a middle-class life—just isn’t there anymore for most. They no longer have a stable self-conception within reach. And an unstable class identity can be a great source of unhappiness.

The lives of people like Bellamy raise the question: what does “middle-class” actually mean today? She appeared bourgeois, having gotten into a class, through education, that tends to have know-how and access; she had cultural capital, or nonmonetary capital, which is sometimes quite different from the economic capital of money and assets.

Bellamy would start to talk to other mothers like herself in New York City about her situation and realize that discussing your bank balance or even your weekly budget just was “not done.”

“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.”

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. As of 2004, nearly 40 percent of Americans had experienced nonstandard work lives, if by “standard” is meant the (now semi-mythical) eight-hour daily shift of the past. According to the National Women’s Law Center, 9 percent of day-care-center care is now provided during evenings or weekends, more than enough to compose a trend story.

This is common. 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.)

Companies ask employees to be available at the last minute exactly when needed, with little regard to how scheduling affects their family lives. Parents who work such hours often aren’t home to help their children get their science projects done or look over their math homework. Living by the forever clock, families subject to just-in-time schedules never have enough time. One important reason American families are used by such schedules is that our leaders, though they say that they value parenting and caregiving, do little to support them and much to impede their efforts.

AS WE WAIT FOR A MUCH-NEEDED TRANSFORMATION THAT CAN seem most unlikely, the forever work clock keeps ticking by for America’s working parents. And that twenty-four-hour punch clock and irregular hours continue to combine with our lack of affordable day care to make many people’s lives very difficult. Today, unstable hours are a bigger problem than low pay, advocates told me. However, Joshua Freeman, for one, is optimistic: he believes that the movement for a fair workweek will follow in the successful path of the fight for family leave and a higher minimum wage.

A few of the children did seem “parentified,” in the useful but awkward psychology parlance—they seemed wise beyond their years, having been forced to grow up and parent themselves earlier than we might wish.

Upper-middle-class American life today stands on frail foundations. Psychological and social science research demonstrates that living amid the wealthy even when you are reasonably well salaried yourself is damaging to your mental health. In 2010, a study by researchers at the University of Warwick and Cardiff University found that money improves happiness only if it also improves people’s social rank. In other words, being highly paid isn’t enough: people want to see progress in their lives, to feel as if they are moving up, and to be able to exhibit that ascension to people in their community and to themselves.

Again, how your income stacks up against the income of others in your surrounding community is more crucial than your pay itself to your satisfaction—both mental and physical, according to another 2014 study.

These lawyers’ complaints about economic stress should be one-offs, the exceptions that prove the rule, but they aren’t. This is due to the downward direction their previously secure profession has taken. After the 2008 recession, law firms and corporations retained fewer lawyers, and there was also the problem of student debt. It had risen from $95,000 at the average law school in 2010 to roughly $112,000 in 2014.

The born-wealthy tend to understand that education is a strategy. They would know not to enroll in a school with a spoiled reputation, and they would never join a specialty of a trade that has run its course. Here Eribon puts his finger on what seems so true and horrible to me—the formerly male-dominated professions that have become predominantly female are suddenly less desirable: once feminized, a profession’s pay stagnates.

Work and class identity may be games, as some have argued. But they are games that we can’t win or reliably win, at least not anymore. Shaun Tanner, the tech meteorologist, wanted to quit playing this game. He longed to escape from his dominated and stressed upper-middle-class position and neighborhood. Maybe go minimalist? Move to the forest? “Live off the land,” as he put it? I have that wish too. I also recall New York City and San Francisco and L.A. when they were ruddier, more bohemian, and less 1 percent, when they were a palladium of the thoughtful. But how can I leave my opulent city?

Alice Kessler-Harris, author of Women Have Always Worked, tells it, at the turn of the last century and at different points in the twentieth century, America was indeed a land of opportunity. Immigration was always difficult, but it could be a pathway to success. Now, says Kessler-Harris, there is less social mobility in the United States than in most industrialized countries. According to studies, upward social mobility may be as difficult in the United States as it is in Britain, a country famed for its ironclad social class structure. This is counterintuitive, of course. We’ve always thought of America as a socially flexible place, especially since the 1950s, when wages were generally increasing. But now, with paychecks barely budging, workers like Blanca who are trying to support a kid on one income may get stuck, says Kessler-Harris, as two incomes are now a necessary ingredient in the recipe for middle-class success.