Down the Up Escalator (10 page)

“Take the fast-food industry,” Mr. Kenny replied. “You go to work in McDonald’s; you apply yourself; you can get into their management program. Big Box hired several fast-food managers as supervisors because they have experience where it’s fast paced,
quick, and very regimented. Those skills are transferable. But first you have to be willing to put on the hairnet and do the work.”

Here’s a man who knows the Evansville labor market. His idea of a career path for a kid like his son starts by putting on the hairnet at McDonald’s with the hope of transferring that discipline to a warehouse management job like the one he started with.

With perseverance and luck or God’s help to say the right things, that young man might move up to the job Mr. Kenny himself holds now—a job where he keeps working longer hours for the same salary. Where, in other words, his hourly wage has been going down. But isn’t each generation of Americans supposed to move up in the world?

His employers hadn’t repaid Chuck Kenny’s loyalty with their own, yet he didn’t have much respect, or at least much hope, for any friend of Michael’s who couldn’t bite the bullet and pursue the only employment opportunities that were really out there: fast food and Big Box.

That doesn’t mean you don’t try to find something better for your own child. After all, “Michael is so bright.” And even if he weren’t, each parent’s job is to help his own particular children to beat the odds.

We went round in circles about what Michael might do till Mr. Kenny took a phone call and returned restless or distressed. It was time for work, and he was headed for a long shift at a place where his staff was under pressure to meet new quotas and he was under personal pressure to leave. Who knew what additional pressure he learned about in that phone call? Chuck Kenny set off on a brilliant fall afternoon and wouldn’t get home until almost five in the morning.

“What Am I Looking at Here in Evansville?”

Our $39 room at the Aztar overlooked the Ohio River. Each morning we’d seen at least one dog walker, but never more than two, on the new downtown promenade. We’d also seen three cyclists using the bike path. With our business just about wrapped up, we decided to check out the redevelopment area.

We strolled the three blocks of Evansville’s newly gentrified Main Street, wondering which empty gourmet coffee shop to patronize. We saw a young woman go into one of them, and Frank caught a glimpse of a union logo on her T-shirt. So we followed and asked her where we could learn a little about the town’s labor history. She directed us to Charles A. Whobrey, president and business manager of Teamster Local 215. A walk farther down Main through the old, somewhat more peopled downtown brought us to the Teamsters headquarters building on Walnut Street.

“What am I looking at here in Evansville?” I asked the lean fifty-year-old as he led us into his cubbyhole of an office. “How could a town have gotten this depressed since Lehman Brothers collapsed?”

“You’re not looking at the effects of just
this
recession,” he asserted. “So many people here survive paycheck to paycheck, obviously living beyond their means, that when something like this hits … well, let me go back.

“I started working for the union in 1981.” Whobrey’s Kentucky hills accent broadened as he got into his story. “I started in March, and not a month later President Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. Permanently fired the strikers. That doesn’t happen much in American history. Killing PATCO [the air traffic controllers’ union]
sent the signal to business—as it was supposed to—that it was okay to get rid of the unions. ‘Uh-oh,’ I said, ‘I have the knack for gettin’ involved right when the wheel’s going into the mud.’ ”

And with unions went wages.

“We used to have plenty of people around Evansville making $15, $21, $25 an hour. Those are people that can survive through a recession.

“Okay, so you take a 15 percent temporary pay cut—like we just gave. Our members could hold out till times got better. But now the middle-class worker starts out in debt. They have nothing to fall back on. So you’re not looking at just this recession, you’re looking at the cumulative effect of at least thirty years that started when I joined the labor movement and Reagan broke PATCO.”

At least Whobrey had recognized a historic turning point when he saw it. I’d covered the PATCO strike as a reporter, and I hadn’t.

The article I wrote explaining the strikers’ grievance—not money, but hours and stress, the same complaints as today’s air traffic controllers—was killed by the paper that assigned it. In its place the
Village Voice
ran a front-page essay about PATCO in which a hip black journalist reviled those white men (which they almost all were) making $50,000 a year (which they almost all weren’t) who were in a position to tie up the country’s airports (which it turned out they couldn’t).

This was the first time I’d had an article killed. It should have alerted me to how profoundly the entire nation was being lined up against unions. I assumed, instead, that the article wasn’t quite up to my standards. And it wasn’t. For unlike Whobrey, I hadn’t spotted this as the very moment that the wheel went into the mud.

Between then and now, Whobrey’s southern Indiana Teamsters
local declined from five thousand to three thousand members. “And we’re doing better than most,” he said.

“One of our guys out of work got a job driving hazardous material, explosives, I think. Anyway, he’s got a hazmat license, but he got $12 an hour and no benefits. Oh yes, they gave him an IRA, and they’ll match anything he puts in up to 6 percent of his pay. What they don’t say is they won’t pay you enough to put anything in. So they don’t have anything to match, and you don’t have any pension.”

In a Monday morning quarterback kind of way, Whobrey and I wondered what would have happened if stronger airport unions had gone out to defend the amateurish air traffic controllers. Would solidarity at the start have staved off thirty years of decline? That kind of speculation is both useless and endless.

It was after five when Chuck Whobrey let us out of the Teamsters building onto an empty downtown street.

“So what you’re looking at in Evansville,” he said, ending where he started, “it’s not the result of just this recession. It’s the effect of thirty years since the wheel went into the mud for American workers.”

Father and Son Philosophies

Whobrey is right. What I saw on the streets of Evansville was not the result of one deep recession but the cumulative effects of a much longer downturn for American workers. But what started that downturn?

From the end of World War II until the 1970s the United States
enjoyed a quarter of a century of shared prosperity. Corporate profits rose steadily, and so did the wages of a working class that called itself “the middle class.”

Then the sharing petered out. Between 1976 and 2007, 58 percent of every new dollar of income generated went to the top 1 percent of households. Economists suggest many triggers for the Great Reversal. They fall roughly into two categories.

The majority of economists point to specific pressures on profitability like the oil price shock of 1973 and competition from newly rebuilt Germany and Japan. The argument goes that as the sole industrial power to survive World War II intact, the United States had grown complacent about modernizing while Germany and Japan built almost everything brand-new. As soon as profit rates dipped at home, our alert financiers helped expand competition further by moving money abroad, including some to the countries that would soon become known as the Asian Tigers.

Whichever specific pressures to profitability they emphasize, these economists agree that U.S. profits fell (or started to stop growing) in the early to mid-1970s. By the 1980s employers became serious about cutting labor costs.

A smaller group of economists explain the Great Reversal primarily as a political phenomenon. By the mid-1970s, they say, the lessons of the Great Depression had been almost forgotten—except by a few diehards who’d been waiting for the chance to undo the New Deal. By the 1980s this group, buoyed by neoliberal sentiment, was powerful enough to elect politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who weakened unions at home and made it easier to move work abroad. These and subsequent administrations redistributed wealth upward through tax “reform” and, in the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, through
privatization, deregulation, and the end of capital controls. In other words, a political sea change freed capitalists to act as they always would if you remove the restrictions.

To oversimplify the differences only a little: one side says they did it because they
had to
; the other side says they did it because they
could
.

My own view is that real challenges to profitability surfaced in the 1970s. But the balance of political power determined that these many-faceted economic problems would be tackled primarily by cutting labor costs. There would be no more sharing of the ups and downs.

However complex and debatable the causes, it’s clear that starting around the mid-1970s, the wealth gap widened while hourly wages stagnated or declined.

If couples wanted to maintain homes like the ones they were raised in, they borrowed and/or took second jobs. This left many families with both unmanageable children and unmanageable debts.

Chuck Kenny accuses himself of trying to keep up with the Joneses. But I don’t think Chuck was trying to keep up with the Joneses next door. He was trying to keep up with the Joneses of a generation earlier. Since his father had deserted the family, Chuck’s image of middle-class life may have come from television. But for most Americans—white Americans, at least—those imaginary TV families of the 1950s were statistically real.

A blue-collar worker like William Bendix in
The Life of Riley
could own a modest home, buy a television (far more costly for its time than a computer today), take his family on camping vacations, and send a boy to college in preparation for a job that would pay better than his father’s and actually existed.

A professional or middle manager like Chuck Kenny could own a ranch home, take more expensive vacations, trade a car in every few years, then send the boy
and
the girl to college. For unless you were incompetent or unlucky, your earnings gradually increased over the course of your working life.

That had already begun to change when Chuck Kenny entered the workforce. But it’s hard for any of us to appreciate how a gradual decline affects us day to day.

Mr. Kenny knows that things haven’t turned out as they were supposed to. Even on two incomes, he and his wife couldn’t put two children through college and then glide into a debt-free retirement. But after 150 years of objectively moving up, we Americans perceive of our country as a land of opportunity. Each couple is bound to think that its personal stagnation rests on personal limitations or mistakes.

Other people bought and sold houses at the right time, Chuck reminded me. And he had opted for the security of a large corporation when he might have stayed with that small business where they wouldn’t get rid of an older worker just to lower the payroll.

Chuck worries that Big Box is after him because he can’t cut the mustard anymore. He’d mentioned to me, almost in a whisper, that he doesn’t take to the computer the way the young people do. He must also have the unavoidable suspicion—this must be difficult to express, even to one’s wife—that he hasn’t achieved all he might have because he’s just not a top-notch individual.

The Kennys may indeed have failed to grasp opportunities that would leapfrog them over others. But their basic economic mistake was to assume that salaries, house prices, and savings would gradually increase over the years. In other words, the Kennys fell behind because they didn’t fully grasp that they
weren’t going to get ahead
.

But adjusting to downward mobility would have required a midlife course correction that’s inimical to Americans of their generation. As I’ve said, down is an un-American direction.

Their son, Michael, on the other hand, was born on the down escalator. Since childhood he’d watched his parents running to stay in place. His mother had recently managed to keep her job when her company merged with another organization and downsized. She now supervises more people and works longer hours for the same money, Michael told me. Both at home and at the staffing agency Michael saw employers raising quotas and beating down wages. It has been going on as long as he can remember.

In this long and one-sided class war, Michael Kenny has declared himself a noncombatant. You won’t catch him struggling to maintain a higher standard of living on a declining wage. And what sort of fool borrows to get things he can’t afford now, when his future income is bound to be the same or lower? Michael won’t flail like his father to maintain a middle-class lifestyle; he’ll go with the flow.

However frustrating it is to his parents, his neo-hippie lifestyle makes sense. “Do your own thing” can be a comforting mantra when you can’t afford matching furniture anyway.

A Different Generation Gap

There’s an obvious generation gap between Chuck and Michael Kenny. They’re father and son, after all. But there’s another kind of generation gap between these Indiana folks and the Pink Slip Clubbers of New York.

When factories started closing or moving abroad in the 1970s and 1980s, we were told not to worry. Yes, some blue-collar workers
might have to be pensioned off. But the rest of us would become “information workers” in the “postindustrial society.” The important thing was to acquire the skills of the future.

The four Pink Slippers prepared themselves appropriately for careers in symbol manipulation. Yet Feldman, the graphics man, worked for many years as an hourly temp. Like teaching French literature by the semester or writing computer code by the line, not only do you take home less as a contingent worker, but you’re outside the company and somehow outside the society.

The other three Pink Slippers did brain work that requires a great deal of initiative and involves too much interaction with people here to be easily outsourced to some other English-speaking country. Still they had seen their real pay stagnate and some benefits, like pensions, fade away.