Author: Robert Reich
Source: robertreich.org
Publication Date: 7-Mar-14
Link: The Great U Turn
Stephan: I think this is a brilliant essay. It mirrors my own life experience and, if you are over 50, probably yours. I first became aware of that wonderful common agreement that infused society: America was a wonderful optimistic place, where even the bitter racism was beginning to ebb. Truman had integrated the military. There were Black vets going to college.
It happened when at 11, I became a Boy Scout. The boys in my troop came from several neighborhoods, one very modest, one in the middle, and one more affluent. Our scout master, Bill Buhmiller, was about 29, a WWII veteran and Marine sergeant. He and his wife Nancy cared nothing for the patriotic quasi-military aspect that is part of Scouting. They decided very early that since for some boy's families the paraphernalia of Scouting, would be an a meaningful expense, decided we as a troop would just wear the shirts. They were handed down, at some modest cost, from older to younger, and status was to get the shirt of some older boy you had looked up to, just as he had gotten it from someone he admired. Mothers patched them up. We made our own kerchiefs.
What the Buhmillers wanted to do was take boys into the woods, along the forest trails, and lakes, and teach them wood's craft. Backpacking, not a common interest, was their passion. As it became mine.
In the world of the forest your family's status made little difference, and so easy friendships developed that crossed boundaries. I spent a lot of time in the homes of boys from all three neighborhoods. One of my best friends at this time had a father who was a milkman. Like my father his dad was a vet. They lived in a small house, with a nice garden. His mother did not have to work but volunteered at the library. She made wonderful ice tea. Another boy's dad worked in a factory. They owned a house too. And while Smokey and I were friends his dad left his job to start his own machinist business, which prospered, and they moved to a bigger house. Over the five years I was involved with Scouting, I daily moved amongst these worlds and, in reading this essay I was reminded that this optimistic upwardly mobile world has vanished. Like a missing element in the air.
Do you recall a time in America when the income of a single school teacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family?
I remember. My father (who just celebrated his 100th birthday) earned enough for the rest of us to live comfortably. We weren’t rich but never felt poor, and our standard of living rose steadily through the 1950s and 1960s.
That used to be the norm. For three decades after World War II, America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen. During those years the earnings of the typical American worker doubled, just as the size of the American economy doubled. (Over the last thirty years, by contrast, the size of the economy doubled again but the earnings of the typical American went nowhere.)
In that earlier period, more than a third of all workers belonged to a trade union – giving average workers the bargaining power necessary to get a large and growing share of the large and growing economic pie. (Now, fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers are unionized.)
Then, CEO pay then averaged about 20 times the pay of their typical worker (now […]
