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What Do Working-Class Voters Want?
They Want A Fair Deal
By Steven Greenhouse - July 1, 2008, 8:51AM
Soccer moms step aside. In this year's campaign working-class voters have elbowed you aside as the demographic group that candidates covet most.
As Barack Obama and John McCain seek to outmaneuver each other in wooing John and Jane Punchclock, the question that leaps to the fore is, what do working-class voters want?
Some answers to that question became clear to me when I was interviewing hundreds of workers for my new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. (see www.stevengreenhouse.com) In many ways, working-class voters want what Harry Truman was promising: A Fair Deal, or at least a Fairer Deal.
In talking with workers--be they software engineers or hotel housekeepers, factory workers or freelancers--I often sensed a frustration, even an anger, that unfairness has muscled aside fairness in America in recent decades and especially in recent years, and it goes far beyond stratospheric C.E.O. salaries. Many workers are upset that their families have been sinking economically--median income for working-age households fell $2,375 from 2000 to 2006 (after accounting for inflation). For the typical worker, wages have inched up less than 1 percent since the most recent economic expansion began in November 2001, even as corporate profits have soared and productivity per worker has jumped more than 15 percent. And there's also widespread resentment that while middle-class and low-wage workers have been treading water, average income for the top 1 percent of households, averaging $1.1 million in annual income, has more than tripled over the past quarter century. The top 1 percent of household has more after-tax income than the bottom 40 percent of Americans.
And I hardly need to point out that for the great majority of workers, the pain has grown only worse in recent months as fuel prices, food prices and foreclosures have soared.
As Hillary Clinton shrewdly discerned, workers want someone to battle for them--and for fairness--because they often view themselves as overlooked victims of powerful forces, such as globalization, that are increasing economic insecurity and income inequality. Myra Bronstein, a software engineer, told me that her company just outside Seattle had promised that she would have a job so long as it remained in business, but then one day her company suddenly laid her off along with 17 other engineers. Management told them that if they wanted to receive any severance pay, they had to agree to spend the next four weeks training the workers from India who would be replacing them. Verette Richardson, a Wal-Mart cashier in Kansas City, told me that her supervisors were so stingy about giving bathroom breaks that some cashiers ended up soiling themselves.
In Massachusetts, I interviewed Jean Capobianco, a FedEx Ground driver who was fired soon after she contracted ovarian cancer and requested several months' leave to have chemotherapy. FedEx asserted that she was an independent contractor, not an employee, and was thus not protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. In Jefferson, Wisconsin, 470 meat-packing workers went on strike for 11 months because their employer, Tyson Foods--which was making record profits at the time--insisted on freezing their pensions, quadrupling their out-of-pocket health insurance premiums and cutting the top pay for future workers to $11 an hour from $13.10.
The words of Kathy Saumier, a worker in upstate New York, captured the mood of many workers: "I got tired of being treated like dirt." At the plastic factory where she worked, four of the 190 employees had fingers amputated over a 13-month period.
Many working-class voters are fed up. Why else would 81 percent of those questioned in a recent New York Times-CBS poll say the country has seriously gotten off on the wrong track?
Workers of course recognize there is no magic wand to make unfairness disappear, but my interviews around the country convinced me that workers are nonetheless eager for political leaders to take some serious steps to ease the big squeeze.
Make jobs less stressful--For many Americans, wages are so low that they need to work two jobs, and many women with children under three are working fulltime to help their families make ends meet. As my book explains, all of this is making it devilishly difficult to balance job and family. The United States is the only industrial nation that doesn't guarantee paid sick days, paid maternity leave or even paid vacation to its workers.
The European Union guarantees a minimum of four weeks paid vacation per year for every worker, but a dismaying number of American workers told me that they receive absolutely no paid vacation and no paid sick days. If those workers miss two days' work to care for a flu-stricken child, they miss two days' pay--and as a result they perhaps won't have enough money to put food on the table. Many workers would like Congress to do what California and Connecticut are considering, mandate at least five sick days per year, and what California, New Jersey and Washington State have already done, guarantee paid maternity leave. Those are the type of family-friendly measures that both family-values conservatives and pro-worker progressives can support.
Increase opportunity and mobility--Many Americans who are not in the country club set worry that they won't be able to send their children to college, making it harder for their kids to move up in the world. Each year more than 400,000 high school graduates who are qualified to attend a four-year college do not go because they and their families can't afford it. Pell Grants used to cover 84 percent of the average annual cost at a state university in the 1970s; now they barely cover one third the cost.
The college system is so skewed that at the nation's top 146 colleges, just 10 percent of the students come from the bottom half of households by income, and just 3 percent from the bottom quarter. Many working-class voters view America's promise of equal opportunity as largely an empty promise, and many are eager for government (and college administrators) to do far more to make college accessible and affordable for their children.
Ease the pain caused by globalization--Many workers rail against free-trade agreements because they see that globalization has destroyed many factory jobs and helped hold down wages, and they are searching for something, anything, to blame. While most workers recognize that globalization, offshoring and imports are inescapable facts of modern life, many would love to see the nation's political leaders do some high-visibility jawboning to discourage companies from reflexively moving jobs overseas, just as President John F. Kennedy once did some powerful jawboning to discourage the nation's steelmakers from raising their prices.
Many workers want better life preservers to prevent those hurt by globalization from being pulled under. Retraining programs for those who lose jobs to globalization are often poorly funded and poorly managed--and those programs are available only to laid-off factory workers, not laid-off software engineers and other white-collar workers whose jobs are offshored to India or other countries.
Here's a little-known, but highly disturbing fact--the nation has lost more than one-fifth of its manufacturing jobs since 2000. That's 3.7 million jobs that typically provide middle-class wages and benefits. Many laid-off workers want better retraining programs and stepped-up federal efforts to encourage the creation of good-paying manufacturing jobs, perhaps in future-oriented, green industries like producing hybrid cars.
Strengthen the social safety net--After the Great Depression dragged down millions of Americans, Franklin Roosevelt, Congress, corporate America and organized labor built an impressive safety net of good wages, good health insurance, good pensions and strong job security. But nowadays with job security disappearing and many workers losing health coverage and pensions, the safety net has been falling apart. Many workers complain that it is hugely unfair that they and their children often lose health coverage when they lose their jobs. Little wonder that two-thirds of Americans say they want Washington to enact universal health coverage, even if means increasing taxes.
Workers also voice considerable dismay about what is euphemistically called "the retirement security system." The solid pensions of old that provided monthly benefits after retirement are being replaced by 401(k)s, which often resemble a Swiss-cheese retirement scheme because one-fifth of eligible workers don't participate and many who do empty out their 401(k)'s when they lose a job--they need money to live on. That leaves many workers with far too little savings to retire on.
The retirement savings system is broken and badly needs fixing. In The Big Squeeze, I recommend creating a new universal savings system, like Germany's, that would be built on top of Social Security and would guarantee virtually every worker enough to retire on.
From my interviews across the country, I got the sense that many working-class voters would be delighted if this year's presidential candidates adopted a great Republican's--Teddy Roosevelt's--version of the Fair Deal: "Our aim is to promote prosperity and then to see that prosperity is passed around."