My mother is the tall one in the plaid dress. Her minimum-wage job at Sears covered our mortgage and put food on the table.
Gina describes life at Walmart as a constant fight to get enough hours to support her family. Walmart deliberately overhires, which then puts workers in competition for shifts. Even though she’s worked at the store for nearly a decade, Gina doesn’t get her work schedule far enough in advance to plan a trip to the dentist. And she doesn’t know how many hours she will get each week or whether her paycheck will be enough to cover the basics.
Gina thinks the crazy Walmart system of scheduling work isn’t just about keeping the store open. She believes it’s about raw power. She talks about her friend named Nicole, who is trying to support herself and her little boy on a Walmart paycheck. “She needs more hours. She was trying to do better, so she was taking classes at the local community college at night,” Gina says. Nicole was available every day and five evenings every week, but “she needed Tuesdays and Thursdays off at night” so she could go to class. “They wouldn’t give them to her.”
Why? Gina says that management wanted to show Nicole that she wasn’t any better than anyone else. “They use [the schedule] as punishment,” Gina says. “They were going to teach her a lesson.”
Once Gina starts talking about her coworkers, the examples tumble out one after the other. There are stories about workers whose schedules are changed without notice. Stories about workers who have anxiety attacks. Stories about workers who burst into tears in the break room because of bullying from higher up the food chain.
Gina has become a sort of anxious den mother. She started a food collection for the coworker living in his car. She sweet-talked one of the store managers into changing the work assignment for an elderly coworker who couldn’t do much heavy lifting after his bout of pneumonia. Gina tries to help her coworkers every chance she gets, but it’s never enough.
Even though she’s worked at Walmart for years now, her position at the company always feels unsteady. Talking to me didn’t help things. I repeatedly promised I wouldn’t use her name or tell anyone how to find her. She was always willing to talk—in fact, she would say, in a near shout, “We need to tell this story!” Then, in a much smaller voice, she would add, “But I really need this job.”
Employers in other industries have invented new models that are every bit as effective as Walmart’s efforts to eliminate guaranteed hours, fixed schedules, minimum wages, and benefits. They classify workers as subcontractors, independent contractors, or gig workers. Today, millions of hardworking people live in a world in which their incomes go up and down, their schedules shift from day to day, and they take whatever work is available. The much-touted virtues of independence and the creativity of the “flexible workforce” are undoubtedly true for some workers under some conditions. But for millions more, the new work economy adds up to little more than another setback in a losing effort to build some economic security in a world that is tilted against working families.
To get a sufficient number of hours, workers need to be available. But that availability comes at a cost. If she can’t go to community college, how will Nicole ever build up her skills and get a better job to support herself and her baby? How will she ever make enough to let go of her rent subsidy or food stamps? How will she ever move to a better neighborhood, one with nice parks and good schools?
It’s not just Nicole. How does the guy in the stockroom sign up for auto-repair classes at a nearby vo-tech school if McDonald’s won’t give him his schedule more than a week in advance? How does the woman working the front office set up a time to take her elderly mother in for checkups and physical therapy if her hours change every three days?
What about the food-service people and office cleaners I speak with in Massachusetts? Working two or three jobs is an economic necessity for them as they try to support their families, but with shifting hours in most places, it’s hard for them to piece together schedules that will let them show up when called. Some say they look for all-night cleaning jobs so they can have their days free to take second and third jobs. Childcare is a nightmare. No wonder that woman I met falls asleep the minute she gets to her mother’s house.
It’s a vicious double crunch: low wages and unpredictable schedules combine to make life an unending struggle for millions of Americans. It all works great for Walmart or the food-service company, but for people like Gina and her friend Nicole, it means they can barely scratch by. And it also means they are likely to keep on scratching by for the rest of their lives.
ANOTHER ONE-TWO PUNCH
I think a lot about the risks families face. Maybe anyone would do the same if she had watched her family go from driving around town in an almost-new station wagon to hearing her mother cry for days at a time as she faced the possibility that the family would be put out on the street. But what strikes me now is how much risk has changed. Long before I was born, people lost jobs and got sick and made bad decisions. My family lived through a very tough time when my daddy had a heart attack, but we recovered. The difference is that today’s families live much closer to the edge of a financial cliff—so close that millions of people can feel the bits of rock slipping under their feet long before big trouble strikes.
I’ve described this change before. I’ve written more than one book about it. I’ve talked about it. Sometimes I’ve even shouted about it. But the problem keeps getting worse.
Families today have been hit by a one-two punch. First, income. The best available apples-to-apples comparison of inflation-adjusted earnings shows what the typical fully employed man earned back in the 1970s and what that same fully employed man earns today. The picture isn’t pretty. As the GDP has doubled and almost doubled again, as corporations have piled up record profits, as the country has gotten wealthier, and as the number of billionaires has exploded, the average man working full-time today earns about what the average man earned back in 1970. Nearly half a century has gone by, and the guy right in the middle of the pack is making about what his granddad did.
The second punch that’s landed on families is expenses. If costs had stayed the same over the past few decades, families would be okay—or, at least, they would be in about the same position as they were thirty-five years ago. Not advancing but not falling behind, either. But that didn’t happen. Total costs are up, way up. True, families have cut back on some kinds of expenses. Today, the average family spends less on food (including eating out), less on clothing, less on appliances, and less on furniture than a comparable family did back in 1971. In other words, families have been pretty careful about their day-to-day spending, but it hasn’t saved them.
The problem is that the other expenses—the big, fixed expenses—have shot through the roof and blown apart the family budget. Adjusted for inflation, families today spend more on transportation, more on housing, and more on health insurance. And for all those families with small children and no one at home during the day, the cost of childcare has doubled, doubled again, and doubled once more. Families have pinched pennies on groceries and clothing, but these big, recurring expenses have blown them right over a financial cliff.
From 1970 to 2015, families cut some expenses and income went up a little, but big, fixed expenses skyrocketed.
This one-two punch—flat incomes and rising expenses—has hit the middle class squarely in the gut.
Beginning in the 1970s, many families responded to the growing financial pressure by sending everyone to work. Before then, it