Getting Nowhere America’s ‘Anxious Class’ Is Working Harder, Earning Less, Moving Ever Closer To The Edge

Maggie Siegmund did all the right things. She worked hard. She and her husband bought a house, raised two children, and saved for retirement. When she lost one job, she went back to school, earned a master’s degree and got another job.

By all the traditional measures, she should be happy.

So should the rest of America. Broad economic figures say the country is humming along, but anxiety lingers just below the surface. Those figures include people like Siegmund, and she is far from content.

Yes, she has a job, but she makes less than she used to make. Sure, the company she works for makes money, but she worries about being laid off. At 58, she wants to think about retiring, but frets that she’ll have to work until she dies.

She is part of what Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls the Anxious Class. Working harder, longer, but no longer getting ahead. Their paychecks don’t go up much, or even go down, while the cost of kid’s braces and cars and college and retirement goes up and up and up. Their companies make money, but lay off people anyway. They breathe a sigh of relief when spared the latest round of layoffs and corporate downsizing, then worry they might be next.

To be sure, a generation of Americans has it better than their parents - bigger houses, nicer clothes, more televisions. But their parents were able to improve on the generation before them also, and did it largely on one income and with more confidence in the future.

In 1992, that anxiety helped cost President George Bush his job. Today, it continues to simmer and helps explain why President Clinton does not get political credit for what appears to be a broad economic recovery.

“The economy is not proving to be the great ace in the hole for the president,” said political analyst Stuart Rothenberg. “When you look at numbers, it probably should be.”

And it helps explain the surprising success of Republican presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, whose impassioned pleas to help working people draw cheers and applause on the campaign trail. Though he runs his campaign on far less money and a skeleton staff, Buchanan is neck and neck in the polls with the likes of Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, and Gov. Pete Wilson, R-Calif.

“It is probably the great undiscussed issue of the 1990s,” Buchanan said in an interview. “We’re the only ones talking about jobs and economic security for the middle class.”

Others do talk about it, including Clinton. But none make it as central to their campaigns as Buchanan.

“Others say, ‘Look at the Dow,”’ Buchanan said in a recent speech. “I say, look at your country.”

Overall, it is true that the economy has improved since Clinton was elected. In the last two and one-half years, more than seven million Americans have gone back to work as the unemployment rate has dropped from more than 7 percent to less than 6 percent. The stock market has soared, with the Dow Jones Industrial average up more than 40 percent. Corporate profits are up.

While those numbers may be the talk of Wall Street, they mask the talk of Main Street.

Despite a July increase in wages largely driven by summertime pay in restaurants and retail stores, the year-to-year trend for wages has been stagnant. Unlike past economic growth periods, many Americans cannot count on their employers’ rising profits trickling into their own paychecks.

“For most workers, they are facing a situation of declining living standards,” said Dean Baker, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank based in Washington.

That is particularly true among the less educated and less skilled. Over the last six years, men without a high school diploma saw their median hourly wage drop 13.9 percent, after adjusting for inflation. Women without a high school diploma saw their hourly wage drop 6.6 percent.

Men and women who do physical work in factories have less leverage than at any time this century when they seek pay raises. For one thing, they know their bosses could do what others are doing: ship the work overseas where employees earn far less, or have it done by robots.

Another factor: the decline of union strength. Unions represent just 15 percent of American workers, down from a peak of 35 percent in the 1950s.

But the stagnation also has crept up the ladder.

White collar jobs are not immune from anxiety.

As manufacturing jobs declined in the 1980s, college degrees grew even more attractive as the way to financial security. The MBA was the cachet degree to get.

Now, even MBAs and other highly educated workers are nervous. At Chemical Bank and Chase Manhattan Bank, news of a merger might mean profits, but they also mean layoffs for one out of six bank employees. In the computer industry, programmers know that less expensive competitors overseas can do it by modem.

When Siegmund lost her manager’s job in a downsizing at a pharmaceutical plant outside Kansas City, she went back to school and got a master’s degree in hospital administration. She landed a job at an HMO, but makes 30 percent less than she did in her previous job.

“I played by all the rules and it didn’t turn out right,” she said.

Ronald Michalak, a 41-year-old health association executive in Chicago, hoped his good job would allow his wife to stay home to raise their two daughters. Now, he said, “the raises are smaller each year” and his wife is going back to work part-time.

The raises may be disappointing, old cars have to last a year or two longer than expected, vacations limited to a day’s drive, but Michalak, like many others, is happy to have the job. During a recent round of calls to other health industry executives, he was surprised to learn how many had lost their jobs in downsizings.

Most of the other candidates have promised higher wages. Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., on Tuesday will join the ranks of GOP candidates pushing a flat tax as a way to spark economic growth. But most of them have devoted far more rhetorical firepower to other issues that aim only indirectly at anxiety, issues like affirmative action and illegal immigration.

Jesse Jackson, a potential indepen dent presidential candidate, said recently that the GOP candidates are offering up minorities and foreigners as “scapegoats” for loss of wages or jobs.

Holt said candidates focusing on affirmative action and illegal immigration “tend to appeal to the worst in people … to identify enemies, to inspire a blame mentality.”

Asked about the other issues dominating the GOP presidential campaign, Siegmund said she cared about them as well but added: “That’s not going to put bread on my table.”

At their core, elections often hinge on such pocketbook questions as who will help put bread on the table.

Given the simmering anxiety among American workers, the 1996 election could turn on the question of who best offers a way back to growing wages and improving standards of living. Bill Clinton did that in 1992, assuring Americans he felt their pain.

Today, a year before the election, most of the men who want to be president have not yet focused in on that pain. And American voters have not yet decided who they will hire to help their recovery.