The Sun Magazine
Subscribe here
Not that long ago it was possible, even typical, for someone to support a family on a single income.Most jobs paid the bills, offered health insurance, funded retirement, and gave employees a sense of stability. But many households now depend on multiple incomes — sometimes from three jobs or more — and some people over sixty-five are forced to pick up second careers or gig-economy work instead of retiring. Meanwhile the inequality between top and bottom wage earners is growing. Fewer people can afford to buy homes, and millions are either behind on rent or being forced out of their living spaces due to the pandemic. Student debt is crippling younger generations, and health-care expenses threaten the financial stability of many. These changes have happened so quickly that many Americans are struggling to understand how we got
Free Wall Street Journal HERE
Author and sociologistRuth Milkman traces the root of Americans’ financial problems to the 1970s and 1980s, when the U.S. government took an unapologetic antilabor stance, undoing labor protections put in place by New Deal legislation in the 1930s. One of Milkman’s earliest memories is of a shopping trip with her mother in New York City, where members of theInternational Ladies Garment Workers Union were picketing in front of Macy’s with shopping bags that read, “Don’t Buy Judy Bond Blouses.” The Judy Bond company had shifted most of its manufacturing operations from the New York area to the South, where labor was cheaper. Milkman remembers her mother saying, “We’re not going in there!” Milkman credits her mother’s cultural and political worldview — and her parents’ dinner-table debates about the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and labor unions — with shaping her own political outlook and her academic interests. She grew up hearing her parents’ stories of the Depression, she says. And her mother was “always waiting for the next one. She didn’t live to see [the financial collapse of] 2008, but she predicted it.”
Throughout her career Milkman has studied and written about labor, gender, unionism, and class. Her most recent books include Immigration Matters (coedited with Deepak Bhargava and Penny Lewis), Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat, and On Gender, Labor, and Inequality. She spent twenty-one years as a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and for several of those years she was director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. In 2010 Milkman moved back to New York City. She is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology and History at the City University of New York Graduate Center and chairs the labor-studies department at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. She also served as the 2016 president of the American Sociological Association.
We spoke over a video call, and Milkman gestured to shelves of books behind her when referencing another author’s work. Our conversation ranged from the impact on workers from the COVID-19 pandemic, to women’s entrance into the workforce, to the American dream. We always seemed to circle back to the notion of security, something so many are lacking today, and Milkman reminded me that the passage of time doesn’t necessarily bring progress. “It’s like we’re moving backward,” she says. “The achievements of the New Deal era have basically unraveled.”
RUTH MILKMAN
Kleinmaier: How is class defined in the United States — especially the middle class? Have definitions changed over time?
Milkman: When I was younger, most families would describe themselves as “middle-class” almost regardless of what their actual situation was. We hear the term “working class” or “working people” much more today, which is probably a reflection of widening inequality.