CSY Replay #12: Rise Of The Essential Class
America does have a working class. Four years ago we called them "essential".
Source: gundersenhealth.org
(Note: I hadn’t planned on posting another “CSY Replay” so soon, but here we are. This morning, Noahpinion's Noah Smith posted an article titled, “America doesn’t really have a working class.” If there’s anything that the COVID pandemic and shutdown taught us, it’s that we *do* have a working class that’s integral to the functioning of our economy and society — but we refuse to acknowledge them. Remember essential workers?
The article below is something I wrote in the midst of the pandemic back in 2020 (notably, just three days before George Floyd's death sparked protests worldwide). In it, I talk about essential workers as a new working class in America. I saw essential workers as finally getting the recognition they finally deserved, and that the pandemic’s conclusion might see them get their reward. Please check it out. - Pete)
Originally posted: May 22, 2020
I've been struggling to come up with something meaningful to say about the future of cities in the aftermath of this pandemic. Why? Partly because I've been hunkered down like so many of us, trying to reduce my exposure to a deadly illness. It's been particularly tough on my psyche. Also, I'm a firm believer in a quote attributed to Plato: "A wise man speaks because he has something to say. A fool speaks because he has to say something." I've always wanted to be that wise man.
There's a part of me that thinks everything, not just our cities, our politics, our culture and our way of life, has changed. Yet another part of me believe nothing at all has changed. The pandemic is accelerating well-known trends and simply revealing much more about us in the process.
One thing I am clear on -- crises like this pandemic don't develop character; they reveal it. They tell us who we are. Who we want to be is to be determined on the other side of the crisis.
Back to cities. There are some, like Joel Kotkin, who believe the pandemic is a call to move away from dense cities and toward sprawling patterns:
"As of April 22, Los Angeles County, with almost two million more residents than the five boroughs, had 797 Covid-related deaths, compared to over 11,267 in New York City. The key here may be what demographer Wendell Cox has described as “exposure density”. compared to Angelenos, Cox suggests, New Yorkers tend to work in large, crowded workplaces and are far more mass transit-dependent. On a typical workday prior to this outbreak, more than 5 million people jostled onto the city’s subway trains—nearly 40 times as many as ride LA’s subway lines and 15 times as many when the lower capacity light rail lines are added in. The rates of infection and death are far lower in the surrounding, even more dispersed and car-dependent counties of Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino."
Honestly I think it's a false comparison that has nothing to do with density, or development patterns more broadly, and everything to do with how (and when) the virus entered the U.S. My contention from the outset has been that international travel has been the culprit, and our patterns of inequality explains the spread, irrespective of density.
As for this particular pandemic, "density" is a sloppy shorthand explanation for a much more complex phenomenon. International travelers bring the virus into the U.S. The travelers interact with and expose service class workers (wait staff, bartenders, hotel workers, etc.). Service class workers, disproportionately minorities, take the virus home with them. Affluent travelers, and the affluent people they interact with, are able to get treated and recover. Working from home enforced by shutdown orders further reduces the exposure of more affluent people to the virus. However, less affluent service workers, the "essential class" that continues to go to work, expose friends and family members with pre-existing health conditions. The virus' spread is made possible by America's sociological makeup.
History suggests cities will survive the pandemic. There have been multiple epidemics and pandemics that have impacted human history, devastating our communities, yet we've continued to return to cities. It's made possible by our improvements in technology, sanitation and medicine. But it's also driven by our need for human connection.
The fate of our nation, however, in my mind is in doubt. What future generations may remember about this pandemic is how much it reveals our deep divisions and inequality. This crisis makes starkly clear how fragmented our nation truly is.
There is a segment of America, perhaps 20% of the population, that can sit the pandemic out. You can call this group the salary class. We (and I recognize I'm part of this group) can work from home and only venture out when necessary. For the most part we're still being paid but enduring the inconveniences of the shutdowns. We're making it.
There's another segment of America, perhaps 60% of the population, that's directly impacted by the pandemic, in a variety of ways. You can call this group the wage class. They're mostly workers who provide personal or business services, often to people in the salary class. They're small business owners who run barber shops and nail salons that have gone dormant over the last two months. Because of that, many are now unemployed. But they're also the still-working fast food workers, grocery clerks, bus drivers, health care workers and others who continue to go to work every day, because the rest of the nation is dependent on the services they provide. And with each and every day they go to work, they take on greater risk of exposure to a deadly virus.
The remaining 20% of the population is the poor, disconnected and disenfranchised living day to day in the world's richest nation. If you disagree with the size of this segment of America, you need to get out more.
This is an indictment of America's lack of commitment to its middle class.
I am without question a non-essential worker. People don't rely on me or my skills for daily needs. I don't transport food or goods, I'm not a part of a vast global supply chain, I don't cut hair or wait tables, and I certainly don't save lives in hospitals. Yet so much of the growth of our cities over the last 25 years has been predicated on the growth and spread of people working in jobs like mine -- the non-essential class, or knowledge class, or creative class, or whatever you want to call it. And it's been supported at the expense of the essential workers who are our foundation.
Deep down, us non-essential workers feel some sort of way about this. We've gone out of our way to express our gratitude to the essential workforce. We thank all the first responders, the nurses and medical assistants, the cashiers and others for their commitment to service. We continue to implore that businesses that remain closed keep holding on for their sake -- for our sake -- so we can utilize their services once again. In both cases, us non-essential workers recognize that the lifestyle we take for granted rests on the shoulders of the essential class.
Our expression of gratefulness is an admission of guilt.
Sadly, much of what the salary class, the non-essential class, talks about as we consider life after COVID-19 is remaking our economy and cities in our own image. Our 20% segment thinks that what we want is what everyone wants. And since we don't want to let a good crisis lead to a lost opportunity for renewal, many of us are proposing ideas and policies suited to the future we want. Alissa Walker of Curbed.com wrote about this yesterday, calling out urbanists who want a better city, but with little thought given to the 60% of the populace bearing the brunt of the pandemic:
"As the density discourse eventually devolved into a debate about whether New York City was safer than San Francisco, one critical component seems to have been missed. Do you want to know the real reason why San Francisco, a small but dense city, fared better than New York City in the fight against COVID-19? Because San Francisco, where there is one billionaire for approximately every 11,600 residents, had purged most of the people who were most at risk from dying from COVID-19 to its surrounding counties long before the pandemic arrived.
If the coronavirus has made anything clear, it’s that cities cannot be fixed if we do not insist on dismantling the racial, economic, and environmental inequities that have made the pandemic deadlier for low-income and nonwhite residents. Yet many prominent urbanists have simply tweaked the language from their January 2020 tweets and fed them back into the propaganda machine to crank out COVID-tagged content, perpetuating the delusion that all cities need are denser neighborhoods, more parks, and open streets to magically become “fairer.”"
As I've said before, you can't have isolation without insulation. By definition, if someone is on the outside and looking in, someone else is on the inside, oblivious to the exterior.
Our gratitude is not enough.
We're in this position because we made the American middle class poorer and more vulnerable. We've let the paths to the middle class disintegrate. Manufacturing jobs were once the gateway to the middle class and upward mobility. No more. In an effort to keep costs down, jobs that used to pay living wages no longer do. In an effort to bring a return to corporate shareholders, we push people out of the middle class and ask others to do more with less.
If there's anything we learn from the pandemic, it's that the 80% matters as well. Small businesses with razor-thin margins should be given the resources to survive this crisis. People whose work has now been deemed essential to the functioning of American society should be paid like it -- and with more than our gratitude. And we owe it to those who are disaffected and disenfranchised to develop the kind of educational system and safety that gives them an actual shot at upward mobility.
If we don't do that? Well let's just say it's time to prepare for the uprising.
Afterthoughts
Noah is correct that the 20th century stereotypical working class workforce (he says “a unionized auto worker or steelworker or a stereotypical Midwestern guy in a hard hat”) just doesn’t exist like it used to. As a group they don’t exert the same influence on the economy they once did. The gutting of private-sector unionization eliminated that.
However, I’d say that over the last 50 years, the economy has changed faster than our workforce composition has, creating a new working class where one didn’t exist before. See this chart:
Source: U.S. Census Bureau archival data
Conventional wisdom is that the American economy has been more reliant on college-educated workers since the 1990s. However, after an explosion of college graduates in the late 1970s, our nation’s production of college grads dropped dramatically for the next 15 years or so, and has since kept pace with the growth in the population above age 25.
To me, that’s the impact of student loans on the economy. I was fortunate enough to graduate college in 1987, when student loans were just beginning to overtake federal grant programs to pay for college under the Reagan Administration. I was able to afford college with minimal student loans. I was able to attend graduate school on a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development fellowship.
Today, fewer people have a chance to attend college, or perhaps even more precise, complete college, because of student loans. Fewer people have a chance to pursue graduate degrees because of student loans. And that has a direct impact on our economy.
There are a few corrections I’d make in my characterization of the American workforce, but my definition of the essential class as the new working class stays the same. Above, I refer to a workforce split among a salary class (20% of workers), a middle class or wage class (60%), and poor (20%). I think a more accurate depiction might be more like this:
Executive/managerial class: 20%
Professional class: 20%
Clerical/Administrative class: 20%
Service class/essential workers: 20%
Poor/out of the workforce: 20%
We can haggle about the percentages, and the categories can’t be completely described by income (a hair stylist for the stars can make a lot of money; a hair stylist for clerical and administrative types, not so much), but you get the gist of it.
Lastly, I think back in 2020 the nation was open to moving in the direction of recognizing the essential class as the new working class, but the George Floyd protests dramatically changed the discussion. Unlike Noah, however, I don’t see a failure of identity politics. Perhaps a co-opting by progressives and subsequent overreach fueled by the protests, but not a failure.
If there had been no George Floyd killing, we might be closer to actual working class recognition, and better compensation, than we are today.