Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America

by Alissa Quart

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.

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 first time since pollsters had asked this question, fewer than half of those interviewed said that they were middle-class—only 44 percent, according to a Pew study. Meanwhile, the wealthy—with “wealth” here defined as assets minus debt—stand in stark relief to the Middle Precariat. A 2014 Russell Sage Foundation report puts the net worth of the top 5 percent at $1.3 million. The incomes of the top 1 to 5 percent have grown explosively in the past three decades, while the incomes of so many others have stagnated. 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 way we treat expectant women is a symptom of how little American businesses and legislators care about care. Another symptom: 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. And women who said they weren’t hired because of their pregnancies were responsible for 10 percent of all discrimination claims to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 2011, a substantial rise.

Pregnant women and children, two populations romanticized in a retrograde way by greeting cards and Republican candidates, receive kind glances and an occasional “God bless you” from strangers. But there is no follow-through on these affirmations in the work world.

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.

The “parental penalty” is the workplace punishment for caring for their children. (Federal and local governments have fought like hell against parental leave laws.) The parental penalty is not just imposed on mothers: men also face it. Employers may slap down any fathers who wish to take a paternity leave. At one point, Nanau cited the research on this solemnly, as if it were source code: male workers on average get a boost in salary after they have children, unlike their female colleagues, but if they take paternity leave, they may pay for it professionally. As a Deloitte survey of adult workers found, one-third of male respondents said that they would not take paternity leave because taking time off would jeopardize their position. And they could be right. Jennifer Berdahl, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, has found that men who take on more of the caregiving of their children than is typical are more likely to be mistreated at work.

The motherhood penalty has shown that, as a subset of parents, we are punished the most. As Shelley Correll of Stanford University notes, employers are less likely to hire mothers. In addition, they are rated as less promotable and less likely to be suggested for management positions. Another study has found that mothers are hired for annual salaries an average of $11,000 less than the salaries offered to their equally qualified, but child-free, peers. The motherhood penalty is also a state of mind imposed on mother-workers who, shamed by rejection by the marketplace, internalize the societal disdain for caregiving, the prejudice that considers caring for children feeble or undistinguished and, even worse, not actual labor.

Yes, pregnant workers may be less profitable employees than women who aren’t gestating. And that’s okay. We can simply choose to value aspects of life beyond economic productivity. Women also shouldn’t have to suffer when they are honest in their workplaces.

Much political rhetoric these days is devoted to the importance of broadening access to college—and there is plenty of evidence that a degree improves financial prospects—but 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.

Foremost is the shock of how much day care costs. If middle-class parents have become an endangered species, pressed in on every side by harsh work-family policies, the cost of child care is very much to blame: the 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). Joya Misra, a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has analyzed data from thousands of parents from different social classes. One study of middle-class academic parents was based on hundreds of surveys and focus group interviews and seventeen one-on-one interviews. Many survey participants talked about the shock of day-care costs, which can devour 30 percent of one income in a two-salary household, Misra said. 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. I’m told that day-care costs for middle-class New Yorkers can easily add up to $25,000 to $30,000 per child. In New York, child care is the single greatest expense among low-income families, surpassing both food and housing costs.

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. “But when most relationships become commercial relationships . . . what is left for relationships of a noncommercial nature?” asks Rifkin. In this transactional American life, human relations are only “held together by contracts and financial instruments,” and reciprocal relationships “born of affection, love, and devotion” are kaput. This is a part of what has been called the “commodification of emotion”; when we sell our most intimate relationships, the result can be emotionally (and monetarily) damaging. On one hand, we can start to mix up love and money. On the other, or we can wind up severely underpaid, like the nannies or nurses or day-care workers who care for others for a living who are subject to what is sometimes called the “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.

In the last decade, tuition debt in general has quadrupled. College costs have risen more than 1,000 percent since 1978, and what American students and graduates owe overall has surpassed $1.3 trillion. Moreover, it is not held just by college students—their parents have taken on debt as well.