in almost limitless forms. I have changed how I speak, the clothes I wear, the food I eat, what I do with my free time – I can’t think of any aspect of my life that has been left untouched. Not one. I have rarely been in environments that valued class differences. As kids, we grew up knowing that we were judged as being fundamentally lacking or deficient by wealthier others. We internalized those judgments in different ways, and defended ourselves against them with our own judgments about “people who put on airs” or “who had no common sense.” Class migration brings intense pressure to assimilate into the very cultures that judge poorer people. Consequently, even modest assimilation can feel like a profound betrayal of friends and family. On the other side, no amount of assimilation ever seems to bring real belonging.
My personal experience shaped my research for this book – from the questions I asked, to my ability to be a credible partner in the interviews themselves. My training as a sociologist gave me other resources – an understanding of structural issues, an appreciation of the importance of contexts, and the willingness to approach complete strangers. I know from both experience and training that wealth and poverty are structural issues that cannot be explained by personal characteristics – not by ambition or laziness, not by intelligence or ineptitude, not by substance abuse or mental health. I certainly encountered people with unresolved personal issues while on the road, but no more than I encounter among successful professionals. Personal characteristics contribute to one’s quality of life, but they do not create systemic poverty in a nation.
The Struggling Class
It’s common to hear people use the term “working class” as if it is synonymous with low-wage, unskilled work. But it hasn’t always been that way. Well into the 1970s, the term “working class” designated a kind of labor that required various levels of skill and which was physically demanding – so much so that it often placed workers’ health and well-being at risk. The blue-collar workers who held those jobs earned a middle-income wage that paid for a mortgage, a family car, often a boat or recreational vehicle, and sometimes a vacation home. Those jobs have largely disappeared. Today’s workplace is primarily divided between two kinds of jobs: high-skill, high-wage jobs and low-skill, low-wage jobs.3 Today the term “working class” is most often used as a euphemism for poor people, many of whom work in service sector jobs.
In contrast to working-class jobs, service sector employment is largely characterized by low pay, part-time hours, no benefits and general instability.4 Some people use terms like “the poor” or “the working poor” to describe people who work full-time yet struggle financially. Honestly, I have never met working people who used these terms to describe themselves. My family wasn’t alone in calling ourselves middle class, when we couldn’t even count on having adequate food. But when I was on the road, I heard something different. When I asked people how they saw themselves in terms of class, some declined to say. They told me they just don’t think about class. Many others described themselves as belonging to “the struggling class.” Two things about this term are really important to me: First, this isn’t a label or an understanding imposed on people from the outside. This is how people talked about themselves. Second, the term “the struggling class” addresses economic hardship in ways that I consider to be profound; it encompasses the danger, the dignity and the hope that characterize the lives of people I met. They are not getting ahead, but they have not given up. They struggle. They weigh how long they can go without treating a bad tooth or if they can afford to pay for groceries if they buy shoes for their child. Despite working one or two jobs, they know that a single unexpected event could force them deeper into financial troubles from which they might never emerge. People in the struggling class live paycheck to paycheck, doing the very best they can for themselves, their children, and often their extended families. They live in the hope that one day they will find themselves on a solid economic footing – a hope they hold against all the odds.
The term “the struggling class” seems more accurate than anything I have ever heard used to describe a group of people working hard to keep their heads above water. Belonging to the struggling class isn’t a single kind of experience. There are individual differences, of course, but more importantly class experience varies by race, gender and region. These differences will become apparent by the kinds of experiences people do or don’t encounter. No one featured in this book was asked to speak for anyone but themselves. Yet it is my hope that their voices will help to change how the nation thinks about the struggling class. It is impossible to fully understand the experiences of the struggling class without understanding some of the concepts that are used to identify economic hardship. The concepts may seem a bit technical, but they will help to bring some insight into things that generally don’t make sense: a booming economy that leaves most families living paycheck to paycheck, families who can’t afford basic living expenses but don’t qualify as poor enough for assistance, and the way politicians talk about folks being left behind. The rest of this chapter lays out three key frameworks that are often used when people talk about the economy: work, housing, and poverty.
Framework 1: Work – Unemployment and Underemployment
When we are told good news about unemployment, it can be tempting to personalize poverty: If the economy is good, then there must be something wrong with the people who are struggling to make it. In 2018, unemployment in the US stood at 3.9%.5 Fifty years ago, this figure would have meant that people were employed in jobs that paid well and that fewer families struggled. In the twenty-first century, however, the unemployment rate means something quite different. The US economy now has both low unemployment and high poverty. Nearly half of US workers are underemployed – even though they have jobs, they struggle to make a living.6 Despite full-time work, indeed despite working two or three jobs, many people have trouble making ends meet each month. Since there is more to the unemployment rate than meets the eye, it’s worth taking a moment to wade into the numbers.
When the media and politicians report on unemployment they use what is known as the U-3 rate, developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS surveys 60,000 randomly selected households regarding the employment status of each person in the household who is sixteen or older and gathers information about the number of people drawing unemployment benefits. To be counted in the unemployment rate, not only do you have to be unemployed, you must have actively looked for work in the past four weeks. The survey does not count people who have accepted part-time work but are looking for full-time work, people who are despondent after losing a job and not looking for another one, or people who looked for work and then gave up.
The U-3 rate is used so often that many folks don’t know there is another government measure of unemployment known as the U-6 rate. The U-6 rate is based on surveys that identify workers who have been looking for work in the past year as well as those who are considered to be underemployed because they have a part-time job but would like to work full-time. Economists and many other experts consider the U-6 rate to be a more reliable measure of unemployment. It captures a lot of what the U-3 rate misses. As a result, in December 2018, while the media was using the U-3 rate to tout a record low unemployment figure of 3.9%, the U-6 rate was 7.6%.7
A devil’s advocate might argue that if we always use the U-3 rate then we’re comparing apples to apples every year and so downward trends are always good news. The reality is more complicated. Factory layoffs in one state might be balanced by an increase of service jobs in another state, which will make the unemployment rate look stable even as the workers in both states suffer. Job growth in poorly paid sectors of the economy and a general lack of wage growth in other sectors can devastate people’s daily lives without disturbing the unemployment numbers. Finally, all unemployment rates go down when unemployed people stop looking for work. Increased hopelessness can produce “good” economic figures. The focus on unemployment provides an overly simplistic picture that completely misses important issues, while the government’s narrow definition of underemployment distorts the reality of the economic landscape.
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