Attack Upon the Middle Class

If you've read even one evening newspaper or watched just one network news broadcast recently, you've likely heard this phrase intoned: "America's middle class is under attack".

Now, I generally don't watch network news (and certainly NOT cable news) but even I know that much hyperbole is used by news readers today.

But, in the case of the above phrase, I must stay that television and newspaper commentators are for once possibly understating the reality here.

Any economic expert will cerify that that two features of our society in the past 50 years most dramactically encouraged the robust growth of a strong middle class:

1. Greatly expanded college enrollments.

2. Union membership.

For any of us with children either currently in college or recently graduated, it is appalling to realize that our "typical" college graduate today is walking away with more than $15,000 of college debt.

Faced with a decade or more of college repayment, fewer and fewer college graduates in their late twenties have the financial capability to raise the downpayment to buy even a starter house.

Why does this matter? Because home ownership has been the foundation of entering the "middle class" in America for all of the post-war period to date.

For young Americans who choose not to attend college, there has been the alternative of well paid factory work, often as part of an union workforce.

As an entrepreneurical coach and member of my local workforce development agency, I have first hand experience of what has been happening in the job market for the past decade or more - no real growth in income for non-union corporate workers.

What I have been observing is a sobering truth - workers not represented by unions have been falling behind economically for years - slowly edging their way out of the bottom end of the middle class.

Now, I'm the first to verify the assertion that some union contracts call for wage and benefit provisions that are no longer sustainable in an America that has lost millions of manufacturing and service jobs to foreign competitors.

And so I favor renegotiation of many union contracts to require greater contribution of union members to their pension and insurance plans, just like the public employees union in Wisconsin has publicly declared their willingness to do.

But, what I do not support is the effective dismantling of the right to collective bargaining.

It is only because of collective bargaining agreements that any worker in the U.S. is seeing any increase in their income.

Let me close by proposing a thought.

Most large corporate CEOs today work under generous and rigorously enforced employment contracts, often negotiated for them by corporate recruiting firms.

If a CEO works under a negotiated employment contract, that is next to impossible to change and got this arrangment via the involvement of an outside negotiator, then one can conceivably describe CEOs as working under "collective bargaining agreements".

But, do you read about any Congressman or woman suggesting that we take this right away from CEOs?