today Gina and Darren’s combined income is less than $36,000.
What happened? What’s the tale of shocking personal tragedy and extraordinary misfortune that landed a solidly middle-class woman like Gina at the doorstep of the food pantry?
Nothing.
No crisis. No accident. No tale of woe. Just the grinding wear and tear of an economy that doesn’t work anymore for families like Gina’s.
And that’s the part of this story that makes me want to pound the table in frustration. What happened to Gina and Darren is the modern economy—the one that produces all those bubbly stock market records and corporate profits and private concerts with Katy Perry. What happened is an economic boa constrictor that is squeezing working families so hard they can’t breathe.
Gina’s basic story could be repeated in millions of households across America with only small variations. Could be? Shoot, it is repeated, again and again and again.
But the part of her story that bothers me the most is that Gina did everything just the way she was supposed to. She worked hard—no, she worked herself into the ground for years, getting up for a two-and-a-half-hour commute to work and stretching her food budget so they could pay a little extra on the mortgage. She played by every rule: savings, insurance, retirement. And now she’s fifty years old and on a long slide down. The family that used to eat out occasionally now needs to visit the food pantry to make it to the end of the month.
Fortune smiles on some more than others, and no one is guaranteed smooth sailing. I get that. But Gina is not alone. Instead, she’s part of the collateral damage of a mostly invisible dismantling of America’s middle class. She and millions of other once-middle-class families may keep up appearances, they may keep their lawns mowed and smile and wave to their neighbors, but their economic lives have become a new kind of hell.
When Gina talks, her voice says as much as her words. The pride in her home. The worry over her sons. The bravado, the gravelly I-can-take-whatever-life-dishes-out attitude. And the small tremor of desperation.
What comes next for Gina? What happens when Darren can’t work anymore? When they can’t hold it together? What will they do when the doctor thinks it’s time to start on a medication for high blood pressure that has a $50 copay or when the transmission finally falls out of the car? No wonder Gina talks fast and sometimes sounds like she can barely breathe.
Consider a few other facts—the not-so-smiley-face facts—about the American economy:
Nearly one in four Americans can’t pay their bills on time.
Nearly half of Americans would not be able to cover an unexpected expense of $400.
A lower proportion of Americans own their homes than at any time in the past half century—63.5 percent.
The typical man working full-time earns less today than his counterpart did in 1972.
Nearly one-third of the country’s adult population—76 million Americans—describe themselves as either “struggling to get by” or “just getting by.”
The overall economic statistics—the GDP, the stock market, corporate profitability, unemployment—are powerfully important, but the rosy picture they paint has huge blind spots, and those blind spots hide much of America’s lived experience. As America’s middle class is hollowed out, these numbers become even less accurate in describing what is happening to Gina or millions of other people like her. Growth in GDP said something far more revealing about America back when that growth was widely shared. Stock prices better reflected the growing security of the middle class when more people saved and when their companies invested in pensions for them. Corporate profitability meant a lot more when it wasn’t a function of massive layoffs and moving operations overseas. Unemployment statistics were more useful indicators when people were offered full-time jobs with benefits, rather than twenty random hours at Walmart. Unemployment figures also mattered more when the minimum wage kept people out of poverty.
I’m happy that the GDP is up and unemployment is down. Yay! But I’m not drinking champagne. In fact, I’m hitting alarm buttons everywhere I can. Our once-solid middle class is in mortal danger—in danger and running out of time. Every one of those happy numbers is used by nearly every economic reporter and pundit and politician, but those numbers paper over the fact that America’s middle class is literally disappearing.
NO MONEY, NO TIME
Gina says she feels lucky to have a job, but she is pretty blunt about what it is like to work at Walmart: she hates it. She’s worked at the local Walmart for nine years now, spending long hours on her feet waiting on customers and wrestling heavy merchandise around the store. But that’s not the part that galls her.
Last year, management told the employees that they would get a significant raise. While driving to work or sorting laundry, Gina thought about how she could spend that extra money. Do some repairs around the house. Or set aside a few dollars in case of an emergency. Or help her sons, because “that’s what moms do.” And just before drifting off to sleep, she’d think about how she hadn’t had any new clothes in years. Maybe, just maybe.
For weeks, she smiled at the notion. She thought about how Walmart was finally going to show some sign of respect for the work she and her coworkers did. She rolled the phrase over in her mind: “significant raise.” She imagined what that might mean. Maybe $2.00 more an hour? Or $2.50? That could add up to $80 a week, even $100. The thought was delicious.
Then the day arrived when she received the letter informing her of the raise: 21 cents an hour. A whopping 21 cents. For a grand total of $1.68 a day, $8.40 a week.
Gina described holding the letter and looking at it and feeling like it was “a spit in the face.” As she talked about the minuscule raise, her voice filled with anger. Anger, tinged with fear. Walmart could dump all over her, but she knew she would take it. She still needed this job. They could treat her like dirt, and she would still have to show up. And that’s exactly what they did.
In 2015, Walmart made $14.69 billion in profits, and Walmart’s investors pocketed $10.4 billion from dividends and share repurchases—and Gina got 21 cents an hour more. This isn’t a story of shared sacrifice. It’s not a story about a company that is struggling to keep its doors open in tough times. This isn’t a small business that can’t afford generous raises. Just the opposite: this is a fabulously wealthy company making big bucks off the Ginas of the world.
There are seven members of the Walton family, Walmart’s major shareholders, on the Forbes list of the country’s four hundred richest people, and together these seven Waltons have as much wealth as about 130 million other Americans. Seven people—not enough to fill the lineup of a softball team—and they have more money than 40 percent of our nation’s population put together. Walmart routinely squeezes its workers, not because it has to, but because it can. The idea that when the company does well, the employees do well, too, clearly doesn’t apply to giants like this one.
Walmart is the largest employer in the
