Bottom Feeding

Middle Class No More.

It’s 5:30 a.m. on a dark, wintry morning and Sally, 67, is standing in the cold waiting for the bus. She lives in a medium-sized Western city with a transit system that is marginal at best. It isn’t easy to get around with no car, but Sally makes the best of it. A supervisor at XYZ Semiconductor, Inc., she oversees the daily doings of about 50 circuit-board assemblers, and is not at all well compensated in proportion to her responsibilities.

“I’m just an old hippie trying to get along,” she says, “And this is the worst-paying job I’ve ever had.” Sally has been in the electronics industry for most of her working life, which has taken her up and down the West Coast of America and through a long and colorful series of adventures, both good and not so good. She lives alone with her cat, having lost a husband and family members over the years. “I’m the last of the Mohicans,” she says, “And I have to save every penny I can. I may live to be a hundred, after all, and there’s no one to take care of me but myself!”

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XYZ Semiconductor occupies a long, low building in a small industrial park in a city poised to become a tech Mecca over the next few years. It has been in business for about twenty years, rising from the ashes of a similar company that didn’t make it. XYZ builds a variety of electronic devices for several different clients. Its products are assembled from parts shipped from places as far-flung as China, and the finished items are then delivered to the customers, some in the same city, others in remote locations.

This facility employs about 150 people — probably thirty or so in the offices and the rest on the production floor or the shipping-and-receiving warehouse. There is a large day shift (7 am to 3:30 pm not including overtime), a smaller swing shift (3:00 pm -midnight), and a very small graveyard crew. (An additional factory overseas employs several hundred more workers.)

XYZ is growing, and constantly on the lookout for fresh bodies. Unlike more prestigious companies, they’ll hire pretty much anyone regardless of age, experience, or national origin. The production work there is not particularly skilled and can be learned in short order by anyone of reasonable intelligence. There is a benefits package that kicks in after three months, and PTO, which accrues fairly quickly, and a 401K that becomes effective after a year, but few employees last that long, because the pay itself is very low. On the other hand, one cannot find a better example of an “equal-opportunity employer” than XYZ. Probably two-thirds of the production staff are immigrants from Latin America or the Philippines. Others come from places as diverse as China, India, Thailand, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East. A few have minor physical disabilities. Ages range from 18 to 70. Some of the younger people are working their way through college — a difficult prospect considering the schedule, which can rise to sixty hours a week during busy times. One steadily increasing group consists of older white native-born Americans, such as Sally, who find themselves here at the end of much more lucrative careers. For one reason or another — a personal reversal of fortune, for example, or a changing industrial landscape — they’ve landed in a job which pays less than they were making thirty or forty years ago. This is where the former middle class is headed. This is where the American Dream has ended. Here are some of their stories.

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Bill, 53, started working at XYZ after quitting a managerial position at a big-box retailer. “I’d finally had enough of the stress and the office politics,” he says. “People were always stabbing each other in the back to get ahead.” At one point a disgruntled former employer came into the store and held Bill and some other managers at gunpoint for several hours, using ammo bought right there on the premises. Bill likes the manufacturing environment at XYZ but is distressed about the low wages. With a wife and young child to support, he finds that his health-insurance deductions take up half his paycheck, and without savings from his previous job, he’d be unable to cover his living expenses. “Basically I can’t afford to get sick,” he says. He believes that he can eventually pull himself out of this situation and hopes one day to start a business building craft products of his own. (Bill left XYZ after six months, having found a better-paying factory job elsewhere.)

Alfred, who recently turned 70, grew up in the Rockies and taught skiing to celebrities before moving West in his early twenties and starting a construction business, which he maintained for 45 years. During that time, he also lived for a while in a hippie commune, traveled around the USA in a bus for a year, worked as a maitre d’ in some of the country’s finest restaurants, and ran a video-production company. Alfred and his wife are building themselves a retirement home out in the woods, and hope to live there full-time as soon as it is finished. In the meantime, he’s assembling at XYZ while his wife works at a nearby retail store. “It was paradise,” he recounts fondly of his early years in the mountains. “But it’s not paradise any more. I’m glad I grew up during the time I did. I feel sorry for the kids coming up now.”

Sam, 55, has spent much of his life in rural areas and likes nothing better than hunting, fishing, and hiking through the forest. He was a union rep and quality-control manager at a steel plant for 35 years until the company closed the facility and moved its administrative operations to the Midwest. He was offered a golden parachute and was enjoying an early retirement until a messy divorce relieved him of a large portion of his savings. When relatives in a neighboring state invited him to come and stay with them for a while, he welcomed the chance to make a fresh start. He was helping them with their real-estate business but needed a steady paycheck and thus fetched up at XYZ. “It was tough re-entering the workforce after three years of retirement,” he says. “I nearly quit several times during the first few weeks.” Sam eventually came to terms with the job but found that he was not a fan of city life. He recently moved to a place out in “the sticks,” which is much quieter, but an hour away from the factory. Affording the gas for the drive may become a problem. He’ll see how long he can stand the commute, but may soon seek work closer to his country home.

Pete’s job involves standing up all day building large devices with screwdrivers. Looking a bit like “Mr. Monopoly” at 60, with his cheerful round face and white moustache, the former airman worked in electronics in a major urban area for many years before moving and taking the job at XYZ. He works every overtime hour offered, even Sundays, as his income supports his wife and her ailing sister, who lives with them in a small house they bought with savings from the old days. Pete hopes to save up enough to take his wife on a Caribbean vacation in the spring. “After work I do some chores, eat dinner and go to bed,” he says. “Too tired to do anything else.”

Louise also worked in a large metropolitan area for many years, moving away after the death of her husband. Now 66, she likes her job at XYZ and would rather be here than staying home, despite the meager pay. Like Pete, she used savings to buy a house with enough room for herself, her two daughters and their families. The daughters both work for a neighboring factory that pays slightly higher but has longer and more inconsistent hours. One of them has severe back problems, exacerbated by her job, which involves standing for twelve hours at a time. She downs handfuls of pills every day to relieve the pain. “It’ll eventually kill her,” says Louise, “But she doesn’t have much choice except to keep working.”

And then there’s my own story. I had an architecture degree, which I didn’t make good use of, but I re-educated myself in computer graphics, eventually landing a stressful but comfortable position as a medical animator. This job worked out reasonably well until the company restructured and dismantled its entire animation team. Since then I’ve attempted to get my own art business going while continuing to look for work at existing graphics companies. (I stay in this town because of family and, frankly, because I like it here.) Unfortunately those organizations never seem to give me a second look, and I suspect that my age (56) has a lot to do with it. They much prefer twenty-somethings, especially when those companies are run by people who are barely thirty themselves. I took the job at XYZ in large part for the health insurance. (Under the incoming Trump administration, that will likely become an issue for many more people.) It’s not what I’d expected to be doing at this point in my life, but it’ll suffice for now. In the meantime, I keep making art when I get time and hope I can eventually parlay it into a sustainable income.

But I’ll have to try very hard and never give up, which is what can be said of all these people I’ve had the honor to work with over the past months. Stories like these are becoming very common. The names and places in this article have been disguised, but every circumstance is true. Many years ago the great Merle Haggard lamented,

“Is the best of the free life behind us now
And are the good times really over for good?”

My colleagues are honest, intelligent, reliable, and have an incredible work ethic, but those no longer seem to be enough to create a good living. Because, as author Benjamin Hardy has said, “The middle class is gone. Either you’re among the select few who are thriving, or you’re like most people who are distracted, overweight, and struggling.”

In a summary of economist Tyler Cowen’s new book, Average is Over, a commentator pointed out, “The global labor market is changing radically thanks to growth at the high end — and the low. About three quarters of the jobs created in the United States since the great recession pay only a bit more than minimum wage. Still, the United States has more millionaires and billionaires than any country ever, and we continue to mint them.” And the conditions that will be created under the new administration will only intensify this situation. Those who can’t claw their way to the top will be stuck at the bottom, perpetually taken advantage of by companies with no incentive to give up any more than they absolutely have to. I intend to pull myself up as best I can and I expect little from anyone else. But in the meantime, I’d urge worthy companies not to dismiss older prospective employees out of hand. Some of us have a lot more to offer than you might think.