Chapter 4: Expanding the base of the middle class

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Expanding the base of the middle class

The middle class was, until the 1970s, largely the province of single-wage-earning married white men and their families. Through the 1960s, following passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, African Americans and other minorities who had previously been shut out of the professions and management positions, and even excluded from most unions, began to find new opportunities as the result of anti-discrimination legislation.

The legalization of the birth control pill in 1961, and the nationwide legalization of birth control in 1965 with the Supreme Court’s Griswold decision, similarly brought a wave of women into the workforce. Women could now delay childbearing and plan for their futures, giving them access to more educational and economic opportunities.

When Sandra Day O’Connor graduated from law school in 1953, number 3 in her class academically, the only job she could find in the private sector was as a legal secretary.[lii] By the 1970s things had begun to change substantially.

In 1960, for example, fully 94 percent of all medical doctors in America were white men. By 2010, that number had dropped to 60 percent, as women and minorities gained admittance to medical school and made their way into careers as physicians.

As researchers from the University of Chicago and Stanford found and laid out in an in-depth paper published in 2019:

“We find that one-fifth of U.S. market GDP growth can be explained by falling labor market barriers, falling human capital barriers, and shifting occupational preferences. Much of the productivity gains come from drawing women and black men into high-skilled occupations.”

In political terms, this has very much been a two-edged sword.

While expanding the number of people who can enter the better-paid parts of the job market has increased the efficiency and fairness of our labor markets — and, thus, the overall efficiency and fairness of our entire society — it’s also provided a ready foil for Republicans to claim conspiracy and victimhood.

As mentioned elsewhere, the American middle class peaked at about two-thirds of us just as Ronald Reagan was taking office and his neoliberal Reaganomics policies were first put into place. Between his war on labor unions, offshoring our factories, and his cutting income tax rates (more on that in a bit), Reagan’s policies — kept in place for over 40 years now — have succeeded in so gutting the middle class that today only 43 percent of Americans qualify as middle class. To make matters worse, today it takes two full-time incomes to achieve the lifestyle a single union job could provide in 1981.[liii]

Most Americans — particularly those old enough to remember the middle class of the 1950s through the 1980s era — know this. They may not know the details, and they certainly don’t know the causes, but they know for a fact they’ve been screwed by government and corporate policies over the past 40-plus years.

But as largely Republican policies (Clinton and Obama both also bought into neoliberalism, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism, but these ideas began with Reagan and the GOP) have cut the number of good jobs available to working class white men, Republican politicians have stepped up to offer those now-impoverished white workers a ready boogeyman, complete with a simplistic explanation for their plight.

They tell their voters with a straight face: “It’s all because Blacks, Hispanics, and women have entered the job market! We need to return to the exclusionary policies of the 1950s!”

In fact, the entry of women and minorities previously excluded from good jobs has increased American productivity and the general prosperity of the nation. That worker-driven productivity, however, has barely kept pace with an expanding economy, as Florida painfully learned in 2023 when Governor Ron DeSantis signed a draconian law heavily criminalizing undocumented immigrants and many fled the state.[liv] When Hurricane Idalia, fueled to super-storm status by global warming, hit the state and destroyed tens of thousands of homes and businesses, the price of labor to rebuild went through the roof — and often there simply were no workers to be found at any price — as a result.[lv]

Decades of Republicans and rightwing media hammering on the argument that the crisis of the American middle class was caused by women and people of color has led to a near-hysteria around US immigration policies, particularly around our southern border.

Conservative talk-show host Lou Dobbs and others relentlessly amplified the message, encouraging Texas Governor Greg Abbott to intensify his war against border crossers. Abbott had the banks of the Rio Grande lined with miles of razor wire and installed a floating barrier in the river, endangering the lives of numerous migrants and asylum seekers. Abbott’s sadistic tactics have been linked to the drowning deaths of several migrants, including children.[lvi] White supremacist militias run “training operations” on the southern border, and white supremacist Republican politicians make regular pilgrimages there to stage photo-ops and press conferences about the supposed “invasion” of brown-skinned people.

While it’s true — and a canard repeated ad infinitum on conservative media — that, for example, new home construction used to be a well-paid job that could lift a white worker into the middle class and that labor is now widely done by Hispanic immigrants, it’s not because of any kind of “invasion.” Instead, it’s because labor unions once prevented non-citizens from entry into their ranks and construction labor — once heavily unionized — was one of the industries hardest hit by Reagan’s war on organized labor.

As Red states, one after the other, adopted so-called “right to work” laws (I call them “right to work for less” laws) contractors and other employers in those states shed their labor unions. With them went good pay and benefits, leaving what are essentially entry-level jobs that only recent immigrants are willing to do for the poor pay and lack of benefits now being offered.